578 HUMAN BIOLOGY 



incarceration of all their relatives if the character is suspected 

 of being recessive." In view of the fact that East (191 7) has 

 estimated that feeblemindedness is carried as a recessive in one 

 person out of fourteen in the entire population of the United 

 States, this hesitancy on Morgan's part is more than justified. 



As contrasted with some of the extravagant proposals 

 of propagandists, against which these scientists have pro- 

 tested, should be cited the actual proposals of legislation 

 regarding sterihzation which have been made by the Ameri- 

 can Eugenics Society: "State authorization by approved 

 physicans to sterilize a person who is insane, feebleminded, 

 epileptic, one with inherited blindness or deafness or other 

 very serious inherited defect, when desired by such persons 

 or guardians. The approval of such proposed operation 

 and operator by a deputy appointed by the State Board of 

 Health for such purpose is required." Can any serious 

 objection be urged against such a law? 



Many students of heredity have criticised the condem- 

 nation of a whole race or class as being genetically inferior 

 and have insisted upon the democratic principle that persons 

 should be measured by their own worth. Morgan (1925) 

 very truly says: "If it is unjust to condemn a whole people, 

 meaning thereby a political group, how much more hazardous 

 is it, as some sensational writers have not hesitated to 

 do, to pass judgment as to the relative genetic inferiority 

 or superiority of different races ... A little good-will „ 



might seem more fitting in treating these complicated * 



questions than the attitude adopted by some of the modern 

 race-propagandists. " 



While these criticisms of the more extreme advocates 

 of race superiority or of the "human thoroughbred" are 

 fully justified, they do not properly apply to the more 

 sober and scientific advocates of eugenics. Admittedly 

 it is difficult to decide which human traits and stocks are 

 best, especially when one considers the needs of a distant 

 and unknown future, but it is much easier to decide which 

 are better and which worse. To anyone who has first-hand 

 knowledge of the many forms of inherited human defects, of 

 the great differences between the feebleminded and the 

 highly intelligent, between the insane and the sane, between 



