EVOLUTION OF MAN AND ITS CONTROL 69 



natural, selection. Sexual selection, though operating somewhat more 

 beneficially as civilization progresses, is still far from ideal, and needs 

 to be placed upon a basis of ethics and judgment rather than caprice 

 and convention. Fecundal selection is in a still more unsatisfactory- 

 condition owing to the steady diminishing of families among the better 

 stocks and the consequent propagation of the race by inferiors. Though 

 certain social devices would be of some advantage, our main hope again 

 must be in raising the ethical standard, by placing child production as 

 a goal of manhood and womanhood. 



G v 



Chapter VII. The Mission of Eugenics 

 It has been shown that, while improvement of the race in innate 

 quality is almost a sine qua non for permanent social advancement, the 

 factors which make for it frequently fail to coincide with the influences 

 tending toward social progress. Pearson says : 



Consciously or unconsciously, we have suspended the racial purgation 

 maintained in less developed communities by natural selection. We return our 

 criminals after penance, our insane and tuberculous after " recovery " to their 

 old lives, and we leave the mentally defective flotsam on the flood tide of 

 primordial passions. We disregard on every side these two great principles: 

 (a) the inheritance of variations, and (6) the correlation in heredity of unlike 

 imperfections. 



The eugenicist urges, therefore, scientific investigation as prelimin- 

 ary to action. He proposes, first, that the registration laws of both 

 federal and state governments be so amended as to make vital statistics 

 reliable and comprehensive, and, second, that the students of biological 

 and sociological laboratories be encouraged to wider and more accurate 

 study of the laws of human heredity according to the methods of Gal- 

 ton and Pearson. 



Like all contributions to the sum of social ideas, eugenics must 

 work by the successive steps of invention, generalization and tradition, 

 corresponding to the biological processes of variation, survival of the 

 fittest and heredity. Invention, or discovery of the laws of eugenics, 

 is here the part of the laboratory specialist, and should loom high in 

 the attention of the sociologists of this generation. 



We must not wait, however, for full knowledge before proceeding to 

 the next step, for full knowledge can never be attained. The exact con- 

 contribution of the parents or degree of inheritableness need not be 

 ascertained before we begin work, for we know already a certain num- 

 ber of characteristics possessing a high degree of inheritability. Though 

 cattle breeders know little quantitatively of the inheritance of milk pro- 

 duction, they have acted upon this little for many years with marvelous 

 results ; if, on the contrary, they had waited for elaborate statistical in- 

 vestigation and experimentation, we should now be using goats for milk 

 instead of cows. 



