392 TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



There is a fallacy ... in the notion that because on the whole plants and 

 animals have advanced in perfection of organization by means of the struggle 

 for existence, and the consequent survival of the fittest, therefore, men in so- 

 ciety, men as ethical beings, must look to the same process to help them towards 

 perfection. . . . Social progress means a checking of the cosmic process at every 

 step and the substitution for it of another, which may be called the ethical proc- 

 ess; the end of which is not the survival of those who may happen to be the 

 fittest (in the respect of the whole of the conditions which obtain), but of those 

 who are ethically best.s 



The eugenist would say that he is in full agreement with that state- 

 ment, but he seems to think that the inheritance of these ethical quali- 

 ties follows the same laws as the inheritance of biological qualities. Man 

 may be bred for qualities just as the race horse is bred, but he may not 

 then fit social conditions any better than a race horse fits plowing. It 

 is of interest and biological value to discover the verification of Mendel's 

 law in the inheritance of eye color and stature, but it has no more social 

 significance than whether Mendel's giant or late peas tasted the better. 

 Many of the other data collected belongs in the same class. They be- 

 long to the world of description, while good and bad belong to the world 

 of appreciation and value and are subject to entirely different laws. 

 This is the idea which no one seemed to understand, offered by Dr. 

 Richard C. Cabot last fall at the meeting of the Society of Sanitary and 

 Moral Prophylaxis, when he insisted that there is no necessary relation 

 between " the rules of sanitation and the commands of morality." 9 



For purposes of argument I am willing to grant that imbecility and 

 some diseases are sufficiently pathological to justify some eugenic meas- 

 ures, though some brief could be made for even the feeble minded, 

 but every other one of Dr. Davenport's catalogue I will not grant. 

 Consider some of them : " poverty, sexually immoral, criminalistic, those 

 who can not control the use of narcotics, liars, and those who run away 

 from home and school, good manners, high culture." A few of these 

 may be related to imbeciles, but so far as they constitute social problems 

 only a very small per cent, of them are the result of biological abnormal- 

 ity, and yet they represent conditions that seriously handicap race im- 

 provement. 



Please keep this list in mind while we turn to another consideration. 

 There are two technical terms in sociology which are gaining increased 

 significance. They are social control and mores. The latter is one of 

 the methods of the former. Mores was the word used by the late Pro- 

 fessor Sumner, of Yale, to indicate the mental and moral environment 

 into which a child is born and which he accepts as ultimate intellectual 

 and moral authority. The widest variety of racial and social expres- 

 sions must be explained by means of this post-natal psychological in- 



8 D. Appleton and Company, pp. 80, 81. 

 » See The Survey, October 25, 1913. 



