55° EVOLUTION, GENETICS, AND EUGENICS 



As Karl Pearson has said, "It is man who makes his own environ- 

 ment, and not environment that makes the man." Now while, in the 

 main, this is true, it is not altogether true. The choice of a man's 

 profession is often seemingly a matter of mere accident. I chanced to 

 read a sentence in a book thirty years ago that seems to me was the 

 cause of my devoting my life to the study of heredity. But it was not 

 this sentence nor any sentence that determined whether I should be a 

 success or a failure at the undertaking. Nor was it this sentence nor 

 any sentence that caused me from boyhood to have an overpowering 

 ambition to be a professional scholar of some sort. My parents left 

 me a heredity, an inner urge, to do the best I could in the study of 

 science and in lecturing and writing for my fellow-men. I could not 

 stop this inner urge any more than I could stop Niagara with a pitch- 

 fork. 



Of course people always say, "But don't you think you can take 

 children from the slums and do wonders for them?" Most assuredly. 

 You can do a great deal for them. But you can, as has been shown by 

 experience, take the same number of children from good homes, which 

 have been built by the good heredity of their parents, and do vastly 

 greater wonders for them with the same money, effort and time. 

 Many children from the slums rise by their own heredity and become 

 ornaments to our civilization. This proves that you can put good 

 heredity into bad environment and not wreck the heredity. The 

 trouble is that many people assume that all the children in the slums 

 are bad. You will find many in the slums that are good and many 

 on the avenue that are bad. But you will find a vastly higher percen- 

 tage of poorly endowed, mentally, morally and physically — that is to 

 say, the poor heredity — in the slums than on the avenue. Slums are 

 the product of many injustices in our social and industrial organiza- 

 tions; but if we have slums, it is those with poor heredity who, in the 

 main, fall into them. 



To test this, go if you will, into some small town in a rich farming 

 region. It would surely seem that there opportunity is wide open to 

 all; every tub stands on its own bottom; there is almost no actual 

 want. I was in one town in Iowa where they took up a collection for 

 the poor. But the preacher told me he did not know what to do with 

 the money, as they had no poor. I went into many homes in that town 

 and found some with lace curtains at the front windows and Victrolas 

 in the "settin'-room," and yet their houses were truly the dirtiest, most 

 ill-smelling places I have ever seen. I have scarcely seen such utter 



