Key: Better American Families . 359 
at the existence of all government 
whatsoever.” 
Yet at this time there were parts of 
the country where order and sobriety 
were the rule. New England, in its 
more thickly settled portions, was 
thrifty and industrious, New York and 
Pennsylvania had their prosperous, 
well-cultivated valleys, and farther 
south, worthy elements of the popula- 
tion gradually gained ascendency over 
the drinking law-denouncing settlers. 
In the pioneers who took up the farms 
abandoned by the first haters of civili- 
zation, we find representatives of our 
best colonial and old-world stock, who 
speedily displaced the improvidence 
and dissipation by piety, enterprise and 
thrift; also, they founded colleges and 
academies—off-shoots of the half- 
dozen which had held their own 
through a century in the East, 
where educated and devout men car- 
ried a lamp of learning and an inspira- 
tion to right living. 
GENETIC FACTORS IN AMERICANIZATION 
In previous papers we have sought 
a genetic interpretation of the process 
of Americanization. We have found 
its essence to consist in an ever greater 
approximation to standards and ideals 
set by certain regnant personalities. 
The completeness of the approxima- 
tion is of necessity dependent on the 
native bent of the lesser families, thus 
having its foundation in the genetic 
constitution of the strains to which 
these families belong. These strains 
have not necessarily been derived from 
colonial stock. In the hordes of immi- 
grants which the steerage disgorged on 
our shores annually through a dozen 
decades, there have been those as surely 
predestined to become ‘‘good Ameri- 
cans’’ as ever were fore-ordained to an 
apostolic succession. There have been 
Italians and Germans, Scandinavians, 
Jews and Serbians born in-the American 
spirit and unquestioningly giving al- 
legiance to the best in American life. 
Added to these were others, less reso- 
lutely American, but who might never- 
theless have become so by contact with 
the best instead of the worst in our 
institutions. 
We have found, then, as a necessary 
fundamental in Americanization, cer- 
tain genetic factors conditioned through 
right marriages which insure the basis 
for the educative process. We have 
seen how social selection has brought 
together the fittest representatives of 
mixed strains through their migrations 
for a common purpose, and by their 
mating produced endowment above 
the average. In similar fashion the 
less able, left behind in the old environ- 
ment have all too often, mated and 
given rise to a variety of defective and 
degenerate conditions. 
In certain families which have been 
intensively studied, this process is seen 
extending over six and seven genera- 
tions, resulting in well-defined socially 
fit and socially unfit lines, and we are 
justified in holding that almost any 
family whose history is scrutinized for 
a number of generations will show a 
like breaking up into lines of varying 
social efficiency. 
While the need of cutting off defec- 
tive and degenerate lines is becoming 
widely recognized and is being met by 
legislative enactment, there is as yet 
little organized effort to direct the 
evolution of lines among our mediate 
and superior classes. In this vaster 
attempt, the enlightened individual 
conscience must be appealed to. The 
heightening of our sense of social re- 
sponsibility in marriage should be one 
of the beneficient effects of the world- 
war. The knowledge that a faulty 
heritage due to unwise matings played 
a major réle in the production of the 
war-neuroses, thereby rendering the 
individual a liability rather than an 
asset in time of national stress, should 
bring home, as never before, individual 
responsibility to the state in the choice 
of marriage mates. Further, to see how 
a superior heritage due to fortunate al- 
liances has meant a finer endowment, 
which in the favoring environment of 
the better lines has flowered into vari- 
ous forms of pre-eminence, should give 
an incentive to increase social worth 
