Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 71.djvu/413

Rh nurture, over which he had no control, have made him the being he is, good or evil. But here science steps in, crying:

Let the reprieve be accepted, but next remind the social conscience of its duty to the race. No nation can preserve its efficiency unless dominant fertility be associated with the mentally and physically fitter stocks. The reprieve is granted, but let there be no heritage if you would build up and preserve a virile and efficient people.

Here, I hold, we reach the kernel of the truth which the science of eugenics has at present revealed. The biological factors are dominant in the evolution of mankind; these, and these alone, can throw light on the rise and fall of nations, on racial progress and national degeneracy. In highly civilized states, the growth of the communal feeling—upon which indeed these states depend for their very existence—has not kept step with our knowledge of the laws which govern race development. Consciously or unconsciously we have suspended the racial purgation maintained in less developed communities by natural selection. We return our criminals after penance, our insane and tuberculous after "recovery," to their old lives; we leave the mentally defective flotsam on the flood-tide of primordial passions. We disregard on every side these two great principles: (a) the inheritance of variations, and (b) the correlation in heredity of unlike imperfections. The statesman, as usual, is inert, waiting for the growth of popular opinion. Doctors, we are told, do not believe in heredity. If that be so, they have small idea of the most plentiful harvest yet reaped by modern science. The philanthropist looks to hygiene, to education, to general environment, for the preservation of the race. It is the easy path, but it can not achieve the desired result. These things are needful tools to the efficient, and passable crutches to the halt; but at least on one point Mendelian and biometrician are in agreement—there is no hope of racial purification in any environment which does not mean selection of the germ.

If I speak strongly, it is because I feel strongly; and the strength of my feeling does not depend on the few facts I have brought before you to-day. It would be possible to paint a lurid picture—and label it race-suicide. That is feasible to any one who has seen, even from afar, the nine circles of that dread region which stretches from slum to reformatory, from casual ward and stew to prison, from hospital and