THE PURPOSIVE IMPROVEMENT OF THE HUMAN RACE 579 



bums or thugs and useful members of society, this alleged 

 difficulty of deciding between the better and the worse 

 appears to be a purely academic matter. Of course eugenicists 

 should avoid indiscriminate condemnation of whole races 

 or classes; real eugenics is as democratic as the Mendelian 

 law and recognizes good qualities wherever they occur. 

 Of course eugenicists should manifest the good-will which 

 Morgan commends, but they would be recreant to duty 

 and false to truth if they should affirm that "all men are 

 born equal" in respect of bodily efficiency, intellectual 

 capacity, or social value and that either west or "east of 

 Suez the best is fike the worst. " 



Most of these criticisms have been aimed at extravagant 

 statements of propagandists and not at the fundamental 

 principles of eugenics proposed by Galton and his followers, 

 but Pearl (1927, 1928) has recently attacked the fundamental 

 principle "that superior people will have, in the main, 

 superior children, inferior or defective ones, inferior or 

 defective children, and therefore that the former should be 

 encouraged to have large families, the latter small ones or 

 none at all." By an examination of all biographies that 

 occupy at least one full page in the Encyclopedia Britannica, 

 he finds that of the 214 greatest philosophers, poets and 

 scientists who have ever lived, only ten had superior or 

 distinguished parents and that 95 per cent came of mediocre 

 or inferior stock. "Ordinary people," he says, "have pro- 

 duced nineteen times as many of the greatest human beings 

 • • • as have people in some degree distinguished." These 

 results, he admits, are objectively much the same as Galton's in 

 that in his investigation of the English judges, the latter ( 1 892) 

 found that about nine times as many distinguished men were 

 produced by mediocre people as were produced by eminent 

 people. But while Galton concluded that the incidence of 

 distinction was proportionally far greater in distinguished 

 families than in the whole population, and indeed that 

 the chances that a distinguished man would have a distin- 

 guished son were at least five hundred times greater than that 

 an unknown man would have such a son. Pearl maintains 

 this conclusion is not true biologically since it was based upon 

 Galton's so-called "law of ancestral inheritance," which 



