380 THE TREND OF THE RACE 



differential fecundity it now helps to maintain is mainly in favor 

 of elements which, for the most part, have not demonstrated a 

 superior inheritance. The manifold racial effects of industrial 

 development are in many respects bad. Industry may intensify 

 the action of natural selection in eliminating persons whose 

 physique and intelligence are below the general level, but, on the 

 other hand, its influence on differential fecundity may more than 

 counteract its tendency to racial improvement. Its effect in 

 encouraging celibacy in increasing numbers of capable and self- 

 reliant women who qualify themselves for an economically inde- 

 pendent career promises to be a serious racial danger. Education 

 itself, the basis of so much of our advancement, has proven, up to 

 the present, a dysgenic agency. Its devotees commonly fail to 

 reproduce themselves, and since education is becoming extended 

 to more and more of those who are capable of acquiring it the 

 racial damage thus caused is correspondingly increased. 



The effect of our modern life upon the trend of germinal varia- 

 bility, is as we have pointed out before, a subject about which 

 we know little. Alcoholism while helping to dispose of a number 

 of undesirables, is open to grave suspicion as a cause of defective 

 inheritance. The same suspicion may reasonably be entertained 

 concerning a number of other unfavorable influences which now 

 affect a large proportion of humanity, in so far as these involve 

 the toxic action of drugs, diseases or bad air. 



When we attempt to gain a comprehensive view of the forces 

 which are changing human inheritance it becomes apparent that 

 those forces which have been called into action as a result of the 

 development of our culture are in large part racially destructive. 

 We cannot say that they are entirely so because there are counter 

 tendencies which sometimes arise. All those agencies which bring 

 about the present well-marked correlation between sterility and 

 success in life tend to rob the race of its best inheritance. It is 

 chiefly the primitive evolutionary factors which operate among 

 the lower animals that are making for racial improvement in man. 

 Civilization brings in its train so many factors that undermine 

 its own biological foundations that, from the racial standpoint 



