252 The Journal 
allowing the school to develop into a 
separate institution apart from the life 
of the community. But now that the 
schools have assumed responsibility for 
the children, the parents do not want to 
take them back. Summer schools and 
all-year schools are now coming into 
vogue. Why should people be bothered 
with children for two or three months in 
the summer when somebody can be 
hired to take care of them? 
Obviously this whole urban attitude 
toward children is not eugenic, but 
dysgenic. The truth is that urbanized 
people do not want to have children, and 
do not want to take care of them after 
they are born. They may be willing to 
feed or clothe them, but to look after 
them and have them about is too much 
of a responsibility, involves too much 
wear and tear on the overwrought pa- 
rental nerves. This does not mean that 
urban parents are more wicked or un- 
natural than country parents, but only 
that the urban conditions are unfavor- 
able for raising children, a fact that 
is generally admitted, though seldom 
taken into account as a basis of action. 
CITY POPULATIONS SUPERIOR 
Instead of being composed of natu- 
rally inferior stocks, city populations are 
probably superior to the residual popu- 
lation of the rural districts. The gen- 
eral tendency in each generation is for 
the best of the rural population, the 
most energetic and capable, to be drawn 
to the city. If city populations average 
better in some respects, as statisticians 
have claimed, this does not prove that 
the city is a better place to live, but 
only shows the more definitely that the 
drain of the city is a menace to the race 
in sterilizing and destroying the superior 
elements of the population. The aggre- 
gate losses are probably much more 
serious than those caused by war, be- 
cause more general and continuous. 
If the time has really come for the 
consideration of practical eugenic meas- 
ures, here is a place to begin, a subject 
worthy of the most careful study—how 
to rearrange our social and economic 
system so that more of the superior 
members of our race will stay on the 
land and raise families, instead of 
of Heredity 
moving to the city and remaining un- 
married or childless, or allowing their 
children to grow up in unfavorable 
urban environments that mean deterio- 
ration and extinction. 
Until recently cities have been dis- 
tinctly in advance of any of the rural 
districts, not only in holding out greater 
inducements in the way of income, but 
in many other ways. Not only schools 
for the children, but many other 
conveniences, luxuries, pastimes, and 
amusements are supplied in cities much 
more easily and abundantly than in the 
country. But it must not be taken for 
granted that all of these things are as 
desirable or as necessary as they seem 
to be to people who have become ac- 
customed to city life. Comfort should 
not be confused with civilization, as 
Disraeli pointed out. Living easily is 
not necessarily living well, or in a way 
that will give the most satisfaction to 
the individual or contribute most to the 
progress of the race. Most of the people 
who really want to live want to live in 
the country. Those who are intent 
upon some special pursuit of wealth or 
pleasure or freedom from responsibility 
must hold to the city as the only place 
to follow the courses they have chosen. 
But these professional urbanites are 
attempting to grasp a small part of life 
without feeling the need or accepting the 
resposibility of a complete existence. 
Certainly they do not represent the per- 
manent nucleus or germ plasm of the 
race, the seed of the future that should 
demand the primary consideration of 
the eugenist. 
EUGENISTS MUST GIVE HEED 
That the general public, and even the 
scientific public does not recognize this 
intimate and essential relation of eu- 
genics to agricultural habits of life, 
makes it all the more necessary that 
professed eugenists should recognize it, 
and should develop a constructive inte- 
rest in the solution of the problems of 
agricultural existence. 
No doubt it is possible to have a much 
greater share of the comforts, conveni- 
ences, social contacts, and educational 
opportunities that are associated in our 
minds with the life of the town, but it 
