492 READINGS IN EVOLUTION, GENETICS, AND EUGENICS 



characterized by a low standard of living, and yet the child mortality 

 among them is very high somewhere around 400 per 1,000 in cases 

 where a parent died young. If poverty is responsible in the one case, 

 it must be in the other which is absurd. Or else the logical absurdity 

 is involved of inventing one cause to explain an effect today and a 

 wholly different cause to explain the same effect tomorrow. This is 

 unjustifiable in any case, and it is particularly so when the single cause 

 that explains both cases is so evident. If weak heredity causes high 

 mortality in the royal families, why, similarly, cannot weak heredity 

 cause high infant mortality in the industrial communities? We 

 believe it does account for much of it, and that the inadequate income 

 and low standard of living are largely the consequence of inferior 

 heredity, mental as well as physical. The parents in the Genealogical 

 Record Office files had, many of them, inadequate incomes and low 

 standards of living under frontier conditions, but their children grew 

 up while those of the royal families were dying in spite of every 

 attention that wealth could command and science could furnish. 



If the infant mortality problem is to be solved on the basis of 

 knowledge and reason, it must be recognized that sanitation and 

 hygiene cannot take the place of eugenics any more than eugenics 

 can dispense with sanitation and hygiene. It must be recognized that 

 the death-rate in childhood is largely selected, and that the most 

 effective way to cut it down is to endow the children with better 

 constitutions. This cannot be done solely by any euthenic cam- 

 paign ; it cannot be done by swatting the fly, abolishing the mid- wife, 

 sterilizing the milk, nor by any of the other panaceas sometimes 

 proposed. 



But, it may be objected, this discussion ignores the actual facts. 

 Statistics show that infant mortality campaigns have consistently 

 produced reductions in the death-rate. The figures for New York, 

 which could be matched in dozens of other cities, show that the num- 

 ber of deaths per 1,000 births, in the first year of life, has steadily 

 declined since a determined campaign to "Save the Babies" was 

 started: 



