Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 84.djvu/397

Rh. Professor Ames, of Chicago, indicates something of the process of its acquirement:

The old-time evolutionist and the modern eugenist alike make little of social control in their effort to make clear the biological control of social processes. To them environment is merely external.

Let us now turn briefly to the list quoted from Davenport: Poverty is a problem, but we may ask in the words of Professor Cooley, of Michigan:

The subject of sexual immorality is absorbing our attention these days. Flexner says that it

If this kind of immorality were inherent we should, according to their own confessions, begin with the elimination of the greatest moral teacher of the early church, St. Augustine, and the greatest stimulator of modern social ideals, Count Tolstoy. The sex mores of Russia today are very different from those of America, and from those of Tolstoy's youth, and from what they will be a generation hence, all without the slightest help from eugenics, solely by the psychic force of social control. To be sure a part of the prostitutes are feeble minded, but even they are prostitutes largely as a result of the mores of their group and the commercial demand for their services.

As to the criminalistic, Lombroso with great pains made an anthropological description of the criminalistic type, but scarcely a criminologist in Europe or America to-day accepts his conclusions, and the modern science of penology is based on the system of social control.