Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 84.djvu/400

396 a self-satisfied snobbishness that will make the discouraged plow horse stop in the middle of the furrow. In the same way, registered human pedigrees will inhibit the common stock from making its contribution.

The eugenists have a good deal to say about immigrants. Among the Polish immigrants in America we have a great disproportion of criminals. In the Cook County jail in Chicago they are altogether out of proportion to any other nationality, and the same thing is true in the Detroit House of Correction. The Bohemians, who belong to the same race stock and live in adjoining territory in Europe, have very few criminals, and in Austria there are fourteen cases of litigation among Poles to one among Bohemians. The Polish immigrants are 31.6 per cent, illiterate, and the Bohemians, 3 per cent. The Poles are probably the most devoted to the church and the Bohemians the most rabid freethinkers of all our immigrants. The social problems arising from these facts have nothing whatever to do with biological inheritance.

Now let us consider the classic example of bad heredity, the Jukes family. Almost everything that is said about the Negro can also be said about them. They lived in New York in the nineteenth century, but they were not a part of it. They were socially ostracized, and built up mores among themselves that had no part in the current civilization. It is barely possible that they averaged mentally inferior to their more socialized neighbors, but the sociologist does not need the inheritance of base characteristics to explain their criminality, prostitution and poverty.

If eugenics succeeds in establishing in the popular mind the tremendous social value of heredity that it is trying to establish, it will overthrow a mass of valuable work of the last decade which has been pointing the way to a fundamental solution of many of our social problems. What if certain people do stand higher on the Binet tests than others; it is yet to be proved that that indicates elemental social value. Psycho-physical parallelism may prevail, but that does not necessarily include psycho-physico-social parallelism.

The position of women has been created in much the same way as races and classes. Alfred Russel Wallace in his last book, "Social Environment and Moral Progress," puts the cart in this eugenic matter where it belongs. He says that when social justice shall have been established and women are free to choose their mates without the artificial conditions that now prevail, then natural selection will take care of itself. I myself am convinced that as a move for race improvement, the equal suffrage of women, with the eventual consequent assumption of intellectual and moral responsibility and economic independence, would be infinitely more valuable than all the eugenic laboratories in the world.

We should use all the forces of science in dealing with pathological conditions, but an attempt at artificial selection of mental and moral characteristics is aiming in the wrong direction.