EE a POSLIVIZE OUR 
NEGATIVE EUGENICS 
A. E. Hamitton, New York, N.Y. 
port of the people for programs of 
segregating and colonizing our hered- 
itary defectives in a really large way, 
we will have to present a program that 
is alive with the spirit of ““something to 
do.”’ Merely caging people who are a 
nuisance doesn’t arouse much genuine 
human interest, or at best this interest 
is academic. But tell a man that you 
can take a lot of human damaged goods 
and make it into a useful constructive 
factor in our national life, and he will 
sit up and listen. 
Charles Bernstein, Sancrarendent of 
the Rome State Custodial Asylum, at 
Rome, New York, has given negative 
eugenics a golden text that shines. 
He turned twenty-five of his higher 
grade inmate boys into Boy Scouts (all 
I: WE are going to get the moral sup- 
of them passed the tenderfoot require- 
ments), uniformed them and sent them 
up into the Adirondacks for a month 
of summer camping last October. He 
asked Governor Whitman if these boys 
couldn’t be used in reforesting work. 
They had plenty of time, they loved to 
work out-of-doors, they were well super- 
intended by George Kuehn, a nature- 
loving Scout Master who could get that 
gang of state wards to do anything 
within reach of their possibilities, and 
do it happily and well. Governor Whit- 
man was willing, but some small-minded 
political parasites found a_ technical 
objection to State employment of such 
labor and threw sand in the bearings of 
theenterprise. But Bernstein persisted. 
The boys were sent up to camp, and 
incidentally a carload of seedling spruce 
THIS BARE HILL WILL BECOME A FOREST 
And the change will be due to a bunch of boys who now represent only waste human material, 
in most places. The feebleminded are not able to compete on equal terms with the normal, 
in the struggle of the world’s work, but they are abundantly able to do many kinds of work, 
and do it well, if they have proper direction. 
They might be made an asset of the State, 
instead of the liability they are at present, if more people had a sympathetic understanding 
of their possibilities. (Fig. 10.) 
309 
