Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 76.djvu/57

Rh physical world, they may at last be harnessed to the service of reasonable man, the future is largely in our hands.

Man early utilized the forces of heredity in the culture of plants and animals, and his achievements in this direction, from the prehistoric domestication of animals to the great successes of our modern breeders, have been amazing. It is natural, therefore, that philosophers should have begun their eugenic activity by recommending the direct control of heredity by thoroughgoing artificial selection, and from Plato onward we have had various projects for the deliberate improving of the human stock. Such modifications admit of accomplishment in two ways, by the prevention of breeding from the worst and by very extensive breeding from the best.

Little can be hoped from this latter method in connection with making superior women the ancestresses of the race, for at best a mother can bear and do justice to but few children. Accordingly, some polygynous device must needs be resorted to in order to utilize fully the men of best type as fathers. Such suggestions vary from free love or crude polygamy, involving as it does greater parenthood for the economically successful, to Noyes's "stirpiculture," as practised in the Oneida community, whereby a few picked men were the authorized fathers of all the children, or to G. Bernard Shaw's licensing of supermen for extra-matrimonial relations. The directness and sensational character of these projects has given them, to be sure, great notoriety, and it is perhaps to be regretted that the Oneida experiment, at least, was not allowed to work itself out as an attempt at artificial selection for the light it would have thrown on the subject.

Here, however, we must bear in mind that we are seeking social, as well as biological progress. No wholesale plan can ever prevail which denies to the majority the right of parenthood, and the family, notwithstanding the aspersions of Mr. Shaw and others, has proved too valuable a social institution to be lightly discarded. Moreover, from the viewpoint of heredity alone, any of these schemes might tend to perpetuate instincts generally considered undesirable, by breeding most extensively from those who voluntarily embraced polygynous relations.

We must have far more light from investigation and experiment before such plans as the foregoing can be profitably adjudged, and, as they are obviously out of immediate consideration, their discussion does little more than arouse prejudice and postpone real progress.

We reach solid ground for the first time when we consider the prevention of breeding from the very worst. A definite beginning of such prevention has already been made in our prisons and institutions of public charity, and the only difference of opinion can be as to just what class of inferior men and women should be cut off altogether from parenthood, and as to what methods can be employed that will not endanger social progress.