340 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 19 3 5 



available to them, they would still go on breeding. There are but 

 three ways, all somewhat imperfect, of dealing with them; they 

 must be segregated, or sterilized, or denied any aid in the struggle for 

 existence and thus allowed and encouraged to perish because too unfit 

 biologically to make livings for themselves with their own unaided 

 resources. 



One final point and I shall have done with this phase of our sub- 

 ject. It is a curious fact that at every stage of man's history from 

 at least the time of Plato, and indeed of Theognis of Megara, a, 

 century before, there have been those who have been just as certain 

 as some present-day eugenists are, and just as deeply grieved, that 

 mankind was going rapidly to the dogs because the right kind of 

 people were not breeding enough and the wrong kind of people were 

 breeding too much. Perhaps men are nearer the dogs now than they 

 were in the Alexandrian age; but I venture to doubt it. The evi- 

 dence seems to me overwhelming that mankind is, on an average, 

 mentally, morally, and physically much superior today to what it 

 was when Socrates was abated as a public nuisance. 



So much for birth control and the eugenic objections to its alleged 

 consequences. We turn now to the most ineffective, cruel, and alto- 

 gether foolish large-scale method by which society tries periodically 

 to ameliorate the consequences of the biological urge to reproduction, 

 namely war. If this characterization is reasonably in accord with 

 reality, why do we go on having wars? The reason has been stated 

 with precision by a clear-thinking human biologist, C. C. Walker, in 

 the following words : 



The natural striving after security by one people, that is to say, its natural 

 endeavors to exist must affect the security of other peoples. Because when a 

 people endeavors to ensure its existence, by reason of its automatic reactions to 

 the problems connected with food supply, security, and social stability, its 

 endeavors will conflict with the strivings of other peoples who are also subject 

 to the same environmental problems. Each people is only ti-ying to exist. 

 When a people considers that its existence is threatened by a particular en- 

 vironment, ♦ * • to such an extent that no adaptation to the environment 

 will sufl3ce, it is forced to attempt to alter that environment. But other people 

 may consider that any alteration of that environment affects its own existence. 

 The result is war. 



Is there any reason to suppose that this biologically natural process, 

 with its characteristic of almost rhythmic recurrence, will ever come 

 to an end ? It seems to me there can be such a hope only in the long 

 — very, very long — run. And the only reason I can see for even this 

 deferred hope is the already great and raj^idly increasing ease, speed, 

 and cheapness of transportation and communication between all parts 

 of the world. The slow but steady and sure biological effect of easy 

 getting about will inevitably be more and more interbreeding, with 

 a gradual lesseninor of the racial and national differences between 



