394 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



The same is true of the use of narcotics. With the exception of the 

 few diseased who need special care, drunkenness is the product of group 

 mores. The most drunken people in the world are undoubtedly the 

 husky Eussian peasants. 



When it comes to lying by preference, I fear that none of us would 

 escape, though most of us have painfully learned another way, while our 

 yellow newspaper reporters still remain. 



And as for running away from home and school, we might say that 

 every normal boy has the tendency, and there are excessive cases like 

 that of Mr. S. S. McClure, who tells us in his autobiography that he 

 barely escaped being a tramp, in spite of which fact he has done some 

 things for race improvement. 



We need no germ plasm to explain the difference between " the first 

 families of Virginia" and the poor white trash. That is exactly the 

 sort of thing that mores explain. 



But there are much more fundamental obstacles to race progress 

 than these, and I can see no way in which eugenics can help them. 

 Such forces as social classes, race prejudice, industrial strife, the social 

 and economic position of women, are psychological problems of funda- 

 mental importance. 



Social classes are not born, they are made. In this connection 

 Lester F. Ward, the leading American sociologist, said : 



A certain kind of inferiority of the lower classes to the upper is admitted. 

 There is a physical inferiority and there is inferiority in intelligence. This last 

 is not the same as intellectual inferiority. Their physical inferiority is due en- 

 tirely to the conditions of existence. As a subject race, as slaves, as overworked 

 laborers or artisans, as an indigent and underfed class, their physical develop- 

 ment has been arrested and their bodies stunted. . . . Their unequal intelligence 

 has nothing to do with their capacity for intelligence. Intelligence consists in 

 that capacity together with the supply of information for it to expend itself 

 upon. We see, therefore, that both kinds of inferiority of the lower classes are 

 extraneous and artificial, not inherent and natural." 



And again in this same connection, showing the intimate relation of 

 classes to improvement, he says that what we need is not more ability, 

 but more opportunity, and he estimates that if the opportunity could 

 be made for existing ability by the abolition of social classes, the in- 

 crease in the efficiency of mankind would be at least a hundredfold. 



It is hardly conceivable that the breeding of the race-horse type of 

 man will accomplish such a multiplication. We have ability enough; 

 we only need to pry loose what we have. 



Eace prejudice belongs in the same category as social classes. The 

 existence of a race is primarily caused by accidental signs which serve 

 for identification plus the prevailing attitude towards the people bear- 

 ing the signs. As Professor Eoss says : 



is Publications of the American Sociological Society, pp. 7, 8. 



