58 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



some extent, superior, being compelled, even in our army, to reach a 

 good standard of physique, and in the case of officers of mentality as 

 well. In vital struggles such as our own civil war, that appeal rightly 

 or wrongly to principle or idealistic feeling, the ethical selection within 

 the group, is appalling. The stagnation from which the southern states 

 are now only just awakening after so many years is but the natural 

 consequence of the wholesale destruction of superior men in the last 

 generation, and much of the governmental progress of the Australasian 

 colonies is probably due to their freedom from war under British al- 

 legiance. 



Since war now means, therefore, the destruction of the young, the 

 strong and often the mentally superior, and the survival for reproduc- 

 tion of those whom war can not use, it has clearly lost whatever eugenic 

 value it once possessed, becoming on the contrary a dangerous agent of 

 deterioration. Since to this biological cost must be added also the ter- 

 rible social waste that war entails, the setting back of the hands of 

 progress in ethics, economics and social organization, the present move- 

 ment toward universal peace by arbitration must be counted as a factor 

 tending to accelerate, rather than retard, the course of human evolution. 



The old necessity for physical conflict will doubtless soon disappear 

 as a declining birth rate removes the old cause for the seizing of terri- 

 tory. Indirect selection, moreover, is taking the place of war in elimi- 

 nating many of the inferior peoples through an unequal struggle with 

 disease, unfriendly nature or the complexities of civilization. Ee- 

 sulting largely from the superior hygienic and medical status of an 

 economically successful people, it is now a factor of preeminent im- 

 portance in the replacement of inferior races, as in North America and 

 Australia. As advancing ethics does away with the military factor, it 

 would be well for us to take full advantage of this indirect mode of 

 selection, by the discouragement of miscegenation between markedly 

 unequal races such as our whites and the negroes; it may even be 

 desirable to prohibit, as far as possible, such marriage and cohabitation. 

 It appears that the Aryan blood of India has been preserved effectually 

 by the caste system, though here the racial advantage may have been 

 outweighed by the social cost of such interference with the individual. 



Immigration offers a wide and legitimate field for the application 

 of eugenic principles. As every one knows, the old migration to our 

 shores of such kindred stocks as the Irish, Germans and Scandinavians 

 has gradually given way to an influx of inferior peoples from south- 

 ern and central Europe, and more recently to the great stream of 

 Asiatic and eastern European folk that are now beating, some of them 

 ineffectually, at our doors. Shall we continue and extend the policy 

 already inaugurated of excluding undesirable stocks? Shall illiteracy 

 be made the test of suitability, or some deeper qualification? Or, on 



