Southard: Eugenics vs. Cacogenics 



411 



docs not remain alongside the present- 

 day lamb; but there is no accounting 

 for the lions and lambs of a future age. 

 Even the demand for horses — at all 

 events good horses — is said to have 

 risen since the advent of the automobile. 



With the perfection of civilization 

 there is no reason to suppose that the 

 very terms of those problems will not 

 themselves change. In all these social 

 equations the unknown X, of improve- 

 ment in inborn race quality, may come 

 to the rescue of the solver. 



In this way — that of the ethics of 

 development, in accordance with which 

 the terms of equations and the equations 

 themselves vary in the course of time — 

 I try to solve for myself the at first sight 

 perplexing problem of the conflicts of 

 eugenic ideals among races of a given 

 day and generation. I am thus loth 

 to admit that the eugenics of the one 

 race is the cacogenics of the other. To 

 state this is to commit oneself to a kind 

 of utilitarianism which is not far 

 removed from the egoistic kind; for it 

 makes one's nation as it were one's self, 

 and devil take the rest. Whereas a 

 part of the eugenic program should be 

 to produce people insusceptible to 

 prejudice, even of that pleasurable 

 type known as race-prejudice. 



EUGENICS vs. CACOGENICS. 



The essential relativity of the several 

 eugenic ideals — is not this the dis- 

 appointing result of the present train 

 of thought? Is not the eugenics of one 

 race the cacogenics of the other? Must 

 we not choose arbitrarily, though as 

 wisely as knowledge permits, the partic- 

 ular eugenic ideal and work therefor? 

 That, we must! But let us not forget 

 that the material changes under our 

 hands and that continual revision will 

 be necessary. 



I gather that anim_al breeders have 

 hardly revised their genetic ideals for 

 many years and that new breeds are 

 now seldom developed. The plant 

 breeders on the other hand are stated 

 to be in process of producing new and 

 valuable breeds at a greater rate. But 

 both these genetic fields are far more 



under the control of the race than the 

 eugenesis of the race itself. 



I am disposed to deny that cvlgenics 

 and cacogenics are purely comple- 

 mentary terms. I am disposed rather 

 to conceive that the relation between 

 the two is a relation such as obtains 

 between health and disease. No one 

 can choose between health and disease 

 as one may choose breeding for milk and 

 breeding for beef ; breeding for speed and 

 breeding for endurance; breeding for 

 proteid and breeding for starch; etc. 

 It is clear that fast horses are no better 

 than hardy horses except for given 

 purposes, and the choice in breeding is 

 made on economic rather than ethical 

 grounds. 



But breeding plants or animals which 

 shall be innately immune to certain 

 parasites is a process approaching, on a 

 low level, an ethical process. In this 

 case we save something (on other 

 grounds considered worth saving) from 

 parasites which would otherwise ter- 

 minate the existence of the things worth 

 saving. The economic or low-level 

 moral judgment involved in the decision 

 '^ worth saving" is as relative as you 

 please to various economic or higher 

 aims, and of course the decision has a 

 bearing on the parasite's worth. 



But all this relativity of the data on 

 which we decide to save has nothing to 

 do with the morbidity and mortality of 

 the species attacked. There are morbid 

 processes leading to species-destruction. 

 Hereditary factors of susceptibility and 

 of lowered resistance may possibly be in 

 play. 



These hereditary factors of morbidity' 

 and mortality which come into play in 

 a given species are in so far cacogenic 

 factors. They lead to deterioration, 

 or destruction, not merely of the 

 individual, but of the race. 



Eugenic rearrangements of germ- 

 plasm, eugenic networks of descent, 

 could conceivably still occur in a golden 

 age in which cacogenic factors would 

 be absent, just as hygiene might still 

 have various tasks to perform in a 

 golden age without disease. Such mil- 

 lennial eugenics would consist in more 

 or less good genetic arrangements, with 



