352 THE TREND OF THE RACE 



constituted the great bulk of our population of a couple of decades 

 ago. There is little in the achievements of these people either 

 here or in their native land to remove this doubt. It is of course 

 easy to make excuses for the shortcomings of people of inferior 

 educational status. One may argue, as indeed many do, that we 

 cannot demonstrate that such people are not of as good mental 

 inheritance as the best of the Nordic race. On the other hand 

 no one has ever shown that they are. 



There is the further question of how our immigrants compare 

 with the general average of people of their native country. Those 

 who wander forth to seek their fortune in another land are fre- 

 quently spoken of as unusually hardy, physically vigorous, and 

 enterprising. Under certain conditions this may be true. But it 

 is extremely doubtful if our present immigrants are especially 

 selected for their virile qualities. They represent for the most 

 part the poorer classes of wage earners from the old world. In 

 too many cases they are the failures that seek an escape into a 

 new field of opportunity. Thousands are induced to come here 

 by the lurid accounts of America's golden opportunities which 

 have been presented to them by the agents of transportation 

 companies who have combed Europe for possible passengers. 

 Mine and factory owners caring nothing for the racial and social 

 effects of their action, but solicitous only for the profits to be 

 derived from a plentiful supply of cheap labor, have encouraged 

 immigration to the utmost and have exercised their strong 

 political influence to lower the standard of admission. 



We forbid the entrance of the feeble-minded, epileptic, insane, 

 paupers, criminals, prostitutes and anarchists, but we are far 

 from detecting all of these undesirables, and we receive a large 

 mass of sodden stupidity, which escapes falling into the lowest 

 class of mental defectives. Undoubtedly we would gain much by 

 a more rigid scrutiny of our immigrant population. It would be 

 especially desirable if mental tests could be applied to all arriving 

 aliens so as to exclude at least everybody below the level of a 

 high-grade moron. It would also be desirable to have a mental 

 rating of foreign peoples to the end of discouraging or preventing 



