Cook: Eugenics and Agriculture 
is a mistake to suppose that rural life is 
to be improved only in the direction of 
making it more like the life of the city. 
To carry this tendency too far would be 
to lose advantages of the country and 
bring people all the faster to the city. 
Many of the supposed limitations of 
the country are only fancied, and are 
commonly accepted as necessary only 
because the urban tendencies of our 
civilization have been so strong as to call 
most of the more intelligent and pro- 
gressive people away to the cities. The 
general rule is that as soon as people get 
to the place where they might become 
constructively interested in the life and 
progress of the rual community they 
move to the city. To cure this folly a 
broader understanding is needed, a bio- 
logical interest in life, not merely a 
financial or social interest. . The most 
practical eugenists of our age are the 
men who are solving the problems of 
living in the country and thus keeping 
more and better people under rural con- 
ditions where their families will survive. 
We must learn how to establish our- 
selves and our families in our true places, 
as members of our race, nation and 
community, instead of allowing some 
shallow motive of gain or pleasure to lure 
us to the destruction of a sterile exist- 
ence. Most of the people who are de- 
stroying themselves in cities have little 
more reason for it than the insects that 
dash themselves into the electric lights. 
MUST REVERSE MIGRATION 
The cities represent an eliminating 
agency of enormous efficiency, a present 
condition that sterilizes and extermi- 
nates individuals and lines of descent 
rapidly enough for all but the most 
sanguinary reformer. All that is needed 
for a practical solution of the eugenic 
problem is to reverse the present tend- 
ency for the better families to be drawn 
to the city and facilitate the drafting of 
the others for urban duty. It is not 
necessary that anybody be sterilized or 
otherwise coerced, compelled or bribed 
by eugenic regulations. The sanitary 
precautions now prescribed by some of 
our states may be sufficient for their 
purposes, which are hygienic, but not 
eugenic. To protect against disease and 
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deformity is a work of mercy, and of 
economy for the tax-payer, but not 
necessarily a measure of progress for 
the race, if the effect is to preserve unde- 
sirable lines of descent that fhe natural 
agencies would eliminate. 
Anybody who chooses to live in the 
city should be allowed to do so. « But 
everybody should make the choice for 
himself and not be deprived of agricul- 
tural contacts or access to the land. 
Raising children in cities is taking a 
responsibility that nobody is warranted 
in assuming. It infringes the birth- 
right of a normal existence and ought 
to be reckoned in the same general class 
of crimes as child-labor in factories or 
the starving or maiming of children by 
professional beggars to make them ob- 
jects of pity, or the other kinds of con- 
scious and unconscious cruelty that keep 
the child from a normal development. 
To reach such a basis of freedom of 
choice of a normal existence would re- 
quire many changes of our social and 
economic structure, and this is a part of 
the problem of constructive eugenics, 
with an enlightened interest in human 
welfare, to find the course by which 
changes may be made, so as really to 
improve the conditions of existence and 
not merely to ameliorate and make a 
little more tolerable the evil courses 
which our civilization has taken. 
Socialism, the single tax and many 
other schemes of economic reform have 
been proposed in the last century, but 
mostly from a narrowly urban point of 
view. They represent efforts to improve 
urban conditions by a more equable dis- 
tribution of wealth. The sense of justice 
is violated when some riot in palaces 
and others fester in slums. Urban re- 
formers urge a readjustment, so that 
all may live in equal comfort in second- 
class hotels. And in order to do 
this they would not hesitate to de- 
stroy the very basis of rural civilization. 
They do not understand that the farm 
represents a kind of life essential to the 
well-being of the race, but look upon 
agriculture merely as one of the arts, a 
means of production of food commodi- 
ties for the support of city populations. 
Economic reforms are needed, no 
doubt, but it is much more important 
