Toombs : Parenthood 



37 



descendants were : Robert Treat Paine, 

 signer of the Declaration of Indepen- 

 dence ; the Fairbanks brothers, manu- 

 facturers of scales and hardware at 

 St. Johnsbury. Vermont ; the Mar- 

 chioness of Donegal ; Morrison R. 

 Waite, Chief Justice of the United 

 States; Melville M. Bigelow; Marvin 

 Richardson Vincent, professor of Sa- 

 cred Literature at Columbia Univer- 

 sity; the Marchioness of Apesteguia of 

 Cuba ; Ulysses S. Grant, and Grover 

 Cleveland, presidents of the United 

 States." So the germplasm which 

 Elizabeth Tuttle received from her 

 forbears was handed down to enrich 

 every department of government, of 

 learning and culture throughout the 

 history of this nation. 



Turning now to the family of "Ada 

 Jukes," who is also known to students 

 of eugenics as "Margaret, the mother 

 of criminals," her actual family name 

 being concealed for reasons which can 

 readily be appreciated, we find that she 

 was of Dutch ancestry, living some 

 time after the year 1800. She was one 

 of six sisters, and her progeny and 

 those of two of these sisters have been 

 exhaustively studied, first by R. S. 

 Dugdale. and again in 191 5 by A. H. 

 Estabrook, of the Carnegie Founda- 

 tion. 



"We find among the males (of Ada 

 Jukes' descendants) twelve criminals, 

 one licentious, five paupers, one alco- 

 holic and one unknown ; none was a 

 normal citizen. Among the females, 

 eight were harlots, one a pauper, one a 

 vagrant and one unknown ; none was 

 known to be reputable." 



Altogether it has been estimated that 

 the progeny of Ada and her sisters 

 have cost the State of New York over 

 a quarter of a million dollars up to the 

 year 1877, and although the family has 

 now disappeared from Ulster County, 

 where they long had their habitat, and 

 are scattered all over the country, their 

 anti-social traits are still being perpet- 

 uated, though better matings have 

 occasionally helped to produce better 

 individual members. Popenoe remarks 



in a footnote that "while such mar- 

 riages may be good for the Jukes fam- 

 ily, they are bad for the nation as a 

 whole, because they tend to scatter 

 antisocial traits." 



The consideration of such family 

 histories as the two just given natu- 

 rally leads us to ask : How can "good 

 blood" be perpetuated and encouraged 

 to increase ? And also : Is there any 

 way by which the breeding of paupers, 

 criminals and mental deficients can be 

 stopped or diminished? 



The Chief Aim of Eugenics 



The elimination, or at least the dim- 

 inution of the unfit has come to be gen- 

 erally regarded as the chief aim of 

 eugenics. This is a mistake. The em- 

 phasis should be laid rather on the de- 

 sirability, more than that the vital 

 necessity, of increasing the numbers 

 of the fit ; in other words, it is of more 

 importance to breed abundantly from 

 the good stock than it is to decrease 

 the breeding of defective stock. We 

 can mournfully reckon in dollars and 

 cents what it has cost a certain state 

 to maintain a race of paupers and crim- 

 inals up to the number of twelve hun- 

 dred or more, but who can reckon the 

 money value which such as the Ed- 

 wards family has added to our entire 

 country? It lies within the power of 

 every right-minded man and woman to 

 help along the improvement of the race. 

 Those who are not themselves fitt8d 

 to add to its stock of fine specimens 

 can aid those who are so fitted to mate 

 properly and reproduce abundantly. 

 George Ade has spoken somewhere of 

 the girl who preferred "to shop around 

 for a husband." If more opportunities 

 were given to all young people to "shop 

 around" and more than that to follow 

 the Christmas slogan to "shop early," 

 we would have better stock to breed 

 from for more reasons than I have 

 time to enumerate. 



A few weeks ago the Fifth Avenue 

 Coach Company, a corporation operat- 

 ing the motor buses in New York City, 

 printed and distributed a pamphlet 



