396 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



a self-satisfied snobbishness that will make the discouraged plow horse 

 stop in the middle of the furrow. In the same way, registered human 

 pedigrees will inhibit the common stock from making its contribution. 



The eugenists have a good deal to say about immigrants. Among 

 the Polish immigrants in America we have a great disproportion of 

 criminals. In the Cook County jail in Chicago they are altogether out 

 of proportion to any other nationality, and the same thing is true in 

 the Detroit House of Correction. The Bohemians, who belong to the 

 same race stock and live in adjoining territory in Europe, have very few 

 criminals, and in Austria there are fourteen cases of litigation among 

 Poles to one among Bohemians. The Polish immigrants are 31.6 per 

 cent, illiterate, and the Bohemians, 3 per cent. The Poles are probably 

 the most devoted to the church and the Bohemians the most rabid free- 

 thinkers of all our immigrants. The social problems arising from these 

 facts have nothing whatever to do with biological inheritance. 



Now let us consider the classic example of bad heredity, the Jukes 

 family. Almost everything that is said about the Negro can also be 

 said about them. They lived in New York in the nineteenth century, 

 but they were not a part of it. They were socially ostracized, and built 

 up mores among themselves that had no part in the current civili- 

 zation. It is barely possible that they averaged mentally inferior to 

 their more socialized neighbors, but the sociologist does not need the 

 inheritance of base characteristics to explain their criminality, prosti- 

 tution and poverty. 



If eugenics succeeds in establishing in the popular mind the tre- 

 mendous social value of heredity that it is trying to establish, it will 

 overthrow a mass of valuable work of the last decade which has been 

 pointing the way to a fundamental solution of many of our social prob- 

 lems. What if certain people do stand higher on the Binet tests than 

 others ; it is yet to be proved that that indicates elemental social value. 

 Psycho-physical parallelism may prevail, but that does not necessarily 

 include psycho-physico-social parallelism. 



The position of women has been created in much the same way as 

 races and classes. Alfred Eussel Wallace in his last book, " Social En- 

 vironment and Moral Progress," puts the cart in this eugenic matter 

 where it belongs. He says that when social justice shall have been es- 

 tablished and women are free to choose their mates without the artificial 

 conditions that now prevail, then natural selection will take care of 

 itself. I myself am convinced that as a move for race improvement, the 

 equal suffrage of women, with the eventual consequent assumption of 

 intellectual and moral responsibility and economic independence, would 

 be infinitely more valuable than all the eugenic laboratories in the world. 



We should use all the forces of science in dealing with pathological 

 conditions, but an attempt at artificial selection of mental and moral 

 characteristics is aiming in the wrong direction. 



