Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 86.djvu/475

Rh of the stock of the people. Under modern social conditions improvement in the human stock can come only through securing an approximation to the selective birth-rate, since our traditions are uncompromisingly opposed to the cruelty of the selective death-rate. Therefore we ought to get into our mores the idea that the children of the present generation must be born of physically healthy and mentally capable parents, the idea that the propagation of the weak and defective human stocks must be stopped by humane but firm methods. If this can be done, then we shall have overcome most of the bad consequences which have resulted from our interference with the extinction of unfit members of the human race on the grounds of sympathy, mercy and pity. An approximation to the selective birth-rate is all that is practicable under the present democratic constitution of society. But since natural selection still exterminates the grossest cases of unfitness (imbeciles die before thirty years of age, consumptives die early, children of mothers and fathers who die young generally die before leaving the normal quota of offspring), the establishment of an approximately selective birthrate will effectively limit the procreation of the other undesirable classes. In this way the cruelty of ruthless natural selection will be avoided and yet the perpetuation of the better stock secured.

Modern states have already embarked on programs of social legislation which aim at checking the multiplication of the unfit. In some states, health certificates must precede the granting of marriage licenses. In other states there are laws which require the sterilization of congenital criminals. Massachusetts is at present endeavoring to secure the segregation of feeble-minded persons during the reproductive period. In all of these ways we are endeavoring to secure an approximately selective birth-rate. What is required if this notion of the selective birthrate is to become a widely recognized standard, is to get the idea of better parentage into the mores of the masses as the necessary complement of humanitarian, democratic. Christian and medical ideas already traditionalized. When this has been done we shall have secured a guaranty of continuous and abiding moral progress. Already the word "eugenics" has been taken up by popular periodicals and newspapers. Life pokes fun at the idea and the press has learned to use the word. Realizing that the concept of better parentage may be gotten into the popular mind by extensive educational propaganda, the Galton Laboratory for National Eugenics of the University of London, and the Eugenics Record Office of the Carnegie Station for Experimental Evolution at Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island, have embarked on programs of popular as well as scientific education in this matter.