Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 76.djvu/74

70 Not until tradition has played its part, however, can the schemes for eugenic reform become actual. As Professor Kellar reminds us, the folkways and customs of the race must be deeply affected before mere education and legislation can exercise an appreciable influence upon action, and such a change at best is slow, though permanent.

The immediate mission of eugenics becomes, then, the advocacy of all measures tending to race improvement and not involving heavy social cost, the examination of all proposed reforms from both the biological and the social points of view, and, perhaps most important of all, the creation of a new standard of ethics with regard to marriage and the family. It is time for American men and women to leave the vital subject of race progress no longer to social iconoclasm on the one hand and fatalist superstition on the other, but to consider it seriously and religiously, aided by the best resources of modern science, and then to give their support to such measures as may seem to them best, freed alike from flippancy, conventionality and sensationalism.