Page:The Negro a menace to American civilization.djvu/86

74 Having now reviewed some of the better known principles or the laws of interbreeding in animals in general, we are in a position to apply these to the case of man. And, in the first place, it is well to note that every known biological or natural law having anything to do with organic evolution in its very widest sense, is just as applicable to man as it is to any other animal. This not only applies to normal growth, change and development, but to similar abnormal conditions, and to disease. It has been, and is distinctly now, the overlooking of this fact that has been the cause of any amount of misery, crime, disease, and the production of highly undesirable individuals in the human race the world over. Men and women can be bred by scientific, judicious selection and crossing with just as much care and quite as much advantage as are pigeons, chickens, dogs or horses, or indeed, as I say, any animal, ferine or domestic. Give me the proper material in the way of men and women, the absolute control of it, the time and the conditions, and with all the other necessary means to carry out the ends in view, and I can breed the stock to produce any kind of a man or any kind of a woman, within the laws of variability, heredity, and development. No single person could do this, for the reason that the time required would take all the way from three or four generations to a thousand, or even several thousand years, but nature cares nothing for time, and the same is true of artificial selection, breeding with the view of attaining a certain result. There may be simply hundreds upon hundreds of different kinds of the latter. We may breed men and women for giants or for dwarfs; for any colored hair,