THE MENACE OF THE HALF-MAN 
SetH Kk. HUMPHREY 
Boston, Mass. 
HO marries earliest and breeds 
fastest? Anyone gifted with 
eyesight and a fair habit of ob- 
servation knows that, in nine cases out 
of ten, it is those least capable of pro- 
viding their offspring with either a 
heritage of brains or a decent bringing 
up. The one big fact in the reproduc- 
tive habits of civilized man is that, in 
a very general way, the energetic, the 
brainy, the foreseeing—those who 
emerge from the commonplace to the 
level of achievement—have the fewest 
children, while the improvident and de- 
generate take as instinctively to repro- 
duction as a duck takes to water, and 
have altogether too many. 
We are populating the earth from 
the wrong kind of stock. A high 
English authority asserts that more 
than half of England’s children are 
produced by the lowest one-sixth of the 
population; and certainly we in Amer- 
ica are doing no better. 
Now there is not an _ intelligent 
reader of this page who does not know 
that such a scheme of selection would 
wreck the quality of any other species 
of animal or plant. But the mystic 
teaching of the ages, and our own 
colossal self-esteem, set us up as a 
creation just outside the Big Plan. 
Most of us miss the eternal fact that 
man is a species, dependent like any 
other on what he inherits for the 
qualities which he develops. Mean- 
while, Dame Nature is dealing us just 
the kind of humans that we ought to 
expect from our manner of producing 
the most children from the poorer 
stocks. 
THESE FUTURE CITIZENS IN THE 
SCHOOLS 
Suppose we begin at the beginning 
and follow the output of this system. 
First, the children appear at the public 
schools. The public schools used to 
function badly—they do now in many 
respects, but they functioned worse 
before the authorities awoke to the drag 
imposed on the normal pupils by the 
growing numbers of the weakminded. 
So they hit upon the clever scheme of 
gathering these feebleminded into 
special classes; experimentally at first, 
but soon the special class developed 
into a regular feature of public school 
work. Now, every sizeable city in the 
land has its rooms for dullards, in great 
numbers and _ rapidly multiplying. 
Boston alone has seventy-seven rooms 
in her public schools devoted exclu- 
sively to the backward. 
We complacently accept the special 
room as a beneficent device, simply 
because it permits the schools to run 
more smoothly. But the special room 
is mere camouflage thrown over a des- 
perate situation. What sort of citizens 
can we hope to make of these incompe- 
tents? 
It seems a harsh thing to say of 
innocent little boys and girls, but to a 
very great extent these are society's 
future jailbirds and prostitutes. Does 
this jar? An ugly truth usually jars 
when it crowds against a soothing 
popular misconception. Proof is to be 
had, many times over, in the investi- 
gations carried on in prisons, reforma- 
tories and rescue homes—every one of 
which has shown from forty to sixty 
per cent of the inmates to be mentally 
subnormal. There is a very direct 
connection between children who can- 
not develop and grown-ups who cannot 
behave. This connection is now being 
brought home with increasing force to 
every charitable organization which has 
substituted scientific inquiry for emo- 
tional philanthropy. 
THE ‘‘BORDERLINERS’ ESCAPE DETEC- 
TION 
But the special room is a very small 
measure of the total number of weak- 
minded children in the public schools. 
