230 
look after the worthy unfortunate, but 
now, nine-tenths of their effort is with 
born incompetents. And that is why 
something like eight-tenths of their 
effort is practically futile, so far as any 
permanent reconstruction of these in- 
dividuals is concerned. With im- 
possible human beings, nothing is 
possible. Social workers habitually 
wonder at the proverty of results; if 
they knew the fundamentals of hered- 
ity they would cease to wonder. 
THE DETERMINING FORCE OF HEREDITY 
All this environmental work, and all 
education and training of youth, essen- 
tial as they are, do next to nothing 
toward eliminating hereditary defects. 
It is all development work—trimmings, 
as it were, with which we bedeck the 
individual for his journey through 
life—and the trimmings die with him. 
They do not affect our biological 
makeup. Education doesn’t get into 
the blood. 
The only thing that descends through 
the generations is the capacity to 
respond to education and _ training. 
Heredity furnishes the mechanism— 
determines the physical and mental. 
quality of the human material with 
which we have to work. Upon the 
inherited quality of the child depends 
the quality of the man we can make of 
him. A carpenter cannot make a 
mahogany table out of pine boards; 
and if we breed in greater numbers 
from the mentally inferior types, we 
“are going to have an ever increasing 
proportion of children incapable of 
being developed into upstanding men 
and women. 
How have we come so far on the way 
to racial degeneracy without any vis- 
ible attempt to check ourselves? 
Mainly because of a pious horror of 
any action that looks like interference 
with the right of parenthood. It is a 
hangover sentiment from the ages of 
ignorance and superstition which we 
cannot shake off, in spite of our pres- 
ent clear knowledge that a vicious 
parenthood is flooding us with a 
vicious progeny. 
The Journal of Heredity 
THE UNGUARDED SOURCE OF HUMAN 
MISFITS 
Our impotence in this respect looks 
the more ridiculous when we consider 
how keen we are to prevent any ill- 
favored specimens among our plants, 
pigs and cattle from reproducing their 
kind. We are up to the minute in 
guarding the heredity of every other 
useful species, and back with the Phar- 
aohs in protecting our own. 
So we sit helplessly by, with full 
knowledge of what is happening to us, 
while any two people not in jail or the 
lunatic asylum bring children into the 
world regardless of consequences. 
If their children prove to be hopeless 
misfits, we guide them through the 
special room, and perhaps to the re- 
formatory. But do we look back to 
their source with a view to preventing 
more of their kind? Not at all. We 
supinely await the further product of 
their usually worthless parents. Or 
do we make the slightest attempt, 
later on, to restrain the fecundity of 
these children themselves? About one 
in ten, helplessly imbecile, are segre- 
gated in feebleminded institutions; the 
other nine-tenths are free—except for 
the periods spent in jails and prisons— 
to exercise the one sturdy function 
with which nature seems to have en- 
dowed them. 
BURDEN OF CORRECTIVE MACHINERY 
Of all the relics from the past, this 
superstitious notion of the inviolability 
of parenthood is the most expensive— 
in money, in human misery, in social 
maladjustments which we must for- 
ever be combating. Is the burden of 
corrective and philanthropic enter- 
prises becoming heavy? It will grow 
vastly heavier with each succeeding 
generation. Special rooms, reforma- 
tories, asylums, prisons and the pres- 
ent swarm of charities will increase by 
leaps and bounds, because the sort of 
humans who cannot be taken care of 
in any other way is increasing by leaps 
and bounds. 
