Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 76.djvu/62

58 some extent, superior, being compelled, even in our army, to reach a good standard of physique, and in the case of officers of mentality as well. In vital struggles such as our own civil war, that appeal rightly or wrongly to principle or idealistic feeling, the ethical selection within the group, is appalling. The stagnation from which the southern states are now only just awakening after so many years is but the natural consequence of the wholesale destruction of superior men in the last generation, and much of the governmental progress of the Australasian colonies is probably due to their freedom from war under British allegiance.

Since war now means, therefore, the destruction of the young, the strong and often the mentally superior, and the survival for reproduction of those whom war can not use, it has clearly lost whatever eugenic value it once possessed, becoming on the contrary a dangerous agent of deterioration. Since to this biological cost must be added also the terrible social waste that war entails, the setting back of the hands of progress in ethics, economics and social organization, the present movement toward universal peace by arbitration must be counted as a factor tending to accelerate, rather than retard, the course of human evolution.

The old necessity for physical conflict will doubtless soon disappear as a declining birth rate removes the old cause for the seizing of territory. Indirect selection, moreover, is taking the place of war in eliminating many of the inferior peoples through an unequal struggle with disease, unfriendly nature or the complexities of civilization. Resulting largely from the superior hygienic and medical status of an economically successful people, it is now a factor of preeminent importance in the replacement of inferior races, as in North America and Australia. As advancing ethics does away with the military factor, it would be well for us to take full advantage of this indirect mode of selection, by the discouragement of miscegenation between markedly unequal races such as our whites and the negroes; it may even be desirable to prohibit, as far as possible, such marriage and cohabitation. It appears that the Aryan blood of India has been preserved effectually by the caste system, though here the racial advantage may have been outweighed by the social cost of such interference with the individual.

Immigration offers a wide and legitimate field for the application of eugenic principles. As every one knows, the old migration to our shores of such kindred stocks as the Irish, Germans and Scandinavians has gradually given way to an influx of inferior peoples from southern and central Europe, and more recently to the great stream of Asiatic and eastern European folk that are now beating, some of them ineffectually, at our doors. Shall we continue and extend the policy already inaugurated of excluding undesirable stocks? Shall illiteracy be made the test of suitability, or some deeper qualification? Or, on