70 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



Not until tradition has played its part, however, can the schemes for 

 eugenic reform become actual. As Professor Kellar reminds us, the 

 folkways and customs of the race must be deeply affected before mere 

 education and legislation can exercise an appreciable influence upon ac- 

 tion, and such a change at best is slow, though permanent. 



The immediate mission of eugenics becomes, then, the advocacy of 

 all measures tending to race improvement and not involving heavy 

 social cost, the examination of all proposed reforms from both the 

 biological and the social points of view, and, perhaps most important of 

 all, the creation of a new standard of ethics with regard to marriage 

 and the family. It is time for American men and women to leave the 

 vital subject of race progress no longer to social iconoclasm on the one 

 hand and fatalist superstition on the other, but to consider it seriously 

 and religiously, aided by the best resources of modern science, and then 

 to give their support to such measures as may seem to them best, freed 

 alike from flippancy, conventionality and sensationalism. 



