EUGENICS AND AGRICULTURE 
City Life Sterilizing Best Lines of Descent on a Large Scale—Population Must 
be Held on the Farm if the Race is to Improve—Proper Appreciation 
of Rural Life the Greatest Influence for Eugenics 
Ou: Cogm 
Bureau of Plant Industry, U. S. Department of Agriculture, Washington, D. C. 
OBODY questions seriously the 
N desirability of eugenics, of taking 
ets thought for the preservation and 
improvement of the human race. 
But many doubt the advantage of 
measures that are being proposed under 
the guise of eugenics. Too much hen- 
roost and barnyard tends to disgust, 
rather than to convince the public of 
the utility of eugenic effort. To mate 
for eye-color, or to sterilize a few crimi- 
nals, or to scare the responsible part of 
the community from marriage because 
of some trifling ancestral defect, do not 
strike reasonable people as very im- 
portant steps toward the attainment of 
the constructive ideals of eugenics. 
From a really constructive point of 
view we would see that much more im- 
portant issues need our attention, that 
the preservation of the best is much 
more vital than the elimination of the 
worst. Galton and others of the more 
profound students of the subject have 
perceived this clearly but they have 
stopped with suggestions of subsidies 
for desirable marriages, or bounties for 
large families of desirable children, 
measures that are not likely to appeal 
very strongly to the desirable people. 
To set one’s self up and claim a sub- 
sidy, or to be set upon and subsidized, 
would be almost as annoying to a really 
desirable citizen as to be cast out and 
persecuted, which is one way to drive 
reformations forward. Socrates and 
Jesus were not only condemned but 
executed as undesirables. The Greeks 
did not follow up their persecution as 
efficiently as the Jews, and the disciples 
of Socrates were not fused into a religious 
community like the early Christians. 
Obviously we are not yet competent to 
undertake the responsibility of fostering 
special classes or varieties of the human 
race, of separating the tares from the 
wheat. There are many kinds of wheat, 
and many of tares. Some of the wheat 
is weak and sterile and some of the tares 
may become valuable. Man shall not 
live by wheat alone. 
THE IMPORTANCE OF AGRICULTURE 
Vastly more important than any of 
the premature and doubtful issues com- 
monly discussed as eugenics, is the rela- 
tion of agriculture to the well-being of 
the race. A wholesale elimination of 
choice lines of descent is going on 1n our 
cities, a loss of good blood that must be 
stayed or we are undone as surely as the 
Greeks and Romans. Theancient proph- 
ecies of the destruction of Babylon, 
Ninevah and Tyre apply equally well to 
London and Paris and New York, and 
to all other places where men try to live 
away from the land. Man is a land 
animal, as the preacher of urban social- 
ism has said, but he is also an air animal 
and a daylight animal, and an animal 
that needs to be raised in a separate 
family group, instead of in an urban 
incubator. 
That one people after another, one 
civilization after another has culmi- 
nated and decayed need be ascribed to 
no mysterious decrees of fate or jealousy 
of gods fearful of being displaced by a 
more perfected human race. The reason 
is obvious and thoroughly well known, 
if not adequately recognized. Each 
people in turn became urbanized, lost 
its connection with the soil and departed 
out of its natural environment, so that its 
members no longer generally attained 
their full development of physical 
strength, mental energy and social effici- 
ency. Eugenics represents an effort on 
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