Page:The Negro a menace to American civilization.djvu/88

76 vast majority of instances dame Nature blushes to look her growing progeny in the face. Brainless numskulls cross with opium victims; mishapen dwarfs marry measly maids; insane idiots beget babies by besotted bums; in fact, it is all a purely haphazard performance, and done without any regard to giving fine physique, well-trained intellectual powers, and evenly-balanced, well-tempered characters any chance at all in the world. Much of the responsibility lies at the doors of priests and physicians, and they are traitors to the best and highest interests of the race. Upon the whole, the ancient Greeks were made of better stuff than the modern Americans, and the latter, of all the earth, have been the most disregardful of proper race-breeding. In fact, since the old colonial days, we have actually imported all sorts of stuff from all parts of the planet, and taken blood of all shades up into our veins by converting the United States into a kind of a procreation-pen, in which experimentation is going on, apparently with the view of observing how many different kinds of crazy creatures we can turn out ! The crimiinal records in the courts of our large cities show the results ; the grave-yards point to others; the hospitals, penitentiaries, insane-asylums, and no end of " charitable institutions " to scores of others. Still, it is not all bad. Improvements in sanitation, the rapidly growing interest taken in individual improvement in physique, in health culture, in the marvelous spreading of all kinds of knowledge; and many other similar features are all combining to do something; but all combined they are as nothing when compared with what might be accomplished in such directions in a few generations.