Chapter XXIV 



THE PURPOSIVE IMPROVEMENT OF THE 



HUMAN RACE 



Edwin Grant Conklin 



THAT the human race is physically, mentally and 

 socially far from perfect and that there is great need 

 for improvement in each of these regards is universally 

 admitted. The armies of defective and delinquent persons 

 in every nation and race, the crowded hospitals, asylums. 

 Jails and penitentiaries in almost every country, the enor- 

 mous cost of caring for this human wreckage and wastage, 

 all testify to the fact that there is urgent need for improve- 

 ment. Indeed it is merely a question of how long civilization 

 can continue to carry this ever-increasing burden of the 

 bungled and botched, of paupers, feebleminded and insane, 

 of bums, thugs and criminals. In the United States it is 

 said that the cost of maintaining public custodial institutions 

 for these social parasites is from one-third to one-seventh of 

 all the public revenues of the several states, while the direct 

 and indirect cost of crime in this country has been estimated 

 from three and one-half billion dollars each year at the 

 lowest figure to twenty billions at the highest (Prentiss, 

 1927). There is no doubt that the human race, in America as 

 well as in other countries, stands in the utmost need of 

 improvement, if civilization is to endure and progress. 



But is there any possibility of checking this tide of 

 degeneracy and of turning it in the direction of racial 

 improvement? Is it one of the inevitable results of civilization 

 that progress for the few means degeneration for the many, 

 and that in the end the weeds must necessarily choke out the 

 wheat? The histories of many great civilizations of the 

 past would seem to confirm the opinion, sometimes expressed, 

 that civilization itself is a disease which ends in suicide. 

 But on the other hand our greater knowledge of nature 

 and of man places in our hands the power to combat the 

 evils which have overthrown former civilizations and to 



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