Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 76.djvu/61

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idiots, and after a careful examination of the bulletins concerning them, this author has proved that there exist two annual maximum points for the conception of idiots (calculated by going back nine months before the day of birth). These are the seasons of the carnival and the vintage, in which there is the most drinking. Now, in the wine-growing cantons, the maximum formed by the season of the vintage is enormous and stands almost alone, while it scarcely appears in the others. Furthermore, these two maxima fall precisely at the annual period when the curve of conception for the rest of the population is at its minimum. The maximum of normal conceptions is in the beginning of the summer.

The bearing of these facts upon the regulation of intoxicating liquors need not be pointed out.

Though spread of knowledge and ethical training must be the ultimate reliance in dealing with these deleterious influences in the environment, yet they work but slowly, and legislative methods must be resorted to where feasible. In the whole great field of environmental betterment, eugenics is at one with social reform. The time has gone by when the cry of "paternalism" could block the path of protective legislation, for, even though the individualist may still claim the right to destroy himself, society must restrain him from dragging with him unborn generations to suffering and degeneracy.

As natural selection is most often represented as a struggle for existence, or war between individuals or races, lethal selection of the direct group variety, by which a weaker tribe is exterminated or subjugated by a stronger, has been made much of by historians.

War, however, is losing its place as a factor in group selection, as has been graphically shown by David Starr Jordan, in "The Human Harvest." In former days, every able-bodied man was a soldier, victory depended upon personal prowess and generalship, and thus the tribe of inferior warriors was not unfrequently exterminated. At present the army is not the whole tribe, but merely a professional class, so that its personal might is no necessary criterion of the fitness of the nation. A modern victory depends on such a complex of circumstances, commerce, finances, organization and alliances, that any fitness indicated by military survival, while perhaps a very important attribute of the social organism as such, has no direct relation to the inheritable qualities of the race. Even when defeated, moreover, a modern tribe stands little chance of extermination, and may even lose fewer men than its conqueror.

When we consider selection within the race, on the other hand, war becomes a definite influence toward degeneration. The modern military system involves a selection among the adult males as to who shall be the soldiers and thus be subjected to a high death rate from disease as well as battle. Those selected as marks for bullets and fever are always, to