S30 EVOLUTION, GENETICS, AND EUGENICS 



David Starr Jordan has presented the matter very clearly. He 

 points out that the "man with a hoe" among the European peasantry 

 is not the result of centuries of oppression, as he has been pictured, but 

 rather the dull progeny resulting from generations of the unfit who 

 were left behind when the fit went off to war never to return. 



Benjamin Franklin, with characteristic wisdom, sums up the 

 situation in the following epigram: "Wars are not paid for in war 

 time; the bill comes later." 



2. Social hindrances. — There are many conditions of modern 

 society which act non-eugenically. 



For instance, the increasing demands of professional life prolong 

 the period necessary for preparation, which, with the "cost of high 

 living," tends toward late marriage. In this way much of the best 

 germplasm is very often withheld from circulation until it is too late 

 to be effective in providing for the succeeding generation. 



Certain occupations such as school-teaching and nursing by 

 women are filled by the best blood obtainable, yet this blood is denied 

 a direct part in molding posterity, since marriage is either forbidden or 

 regarded as a serious handicap in such lines of work. Advertisements 

 concerning "unincumbered help" and "childless apartments" tell 

 their own deplorable tale. 



One of the darkest features of the dark ages from a eugenic stand- 

 point was the enforced celibacy of the priesthood, since this resulted, 

 as a rule, in withdrawing into monasteries and nunneries much of the 

 best blood of the times, and this uneugenic custom still obtains in 

 many quarters today. 



6. WHO SHALL SIT IN JUDGMENT? 



In the practical application of a program of eugenics there are 

 many difficulties, for who is qualified to sit in judgment and separate 

 the fit from the unfit ? 



There are certain strongly marked characteristics in mankind 

 which are plainly good or bad, but the principle of the independence 

 of unit characters demonstrates that no person is wholly good or 

 wholly bad. Shall we then throw away the whole bundle of sticks 

 because it contains a few poor or crooked ones ? 



The list of weakling babies, for instance, who were apparently 

 physically unfit and hardly worth raising upon first judgment, but who 

 afterwards became powerful factors in the world's progress, is a notable 

 one and includes the names of Calvin, Newton, Heine, Voltaire, 

 Herbert Spencer, and Robert Louis Stevenson. 



