THE HUMAN PLANT 363 



It is quite useless to have practiced the most 

 rigid selection among plants for any number of 

 generations, and thereby to have produced varie- 

 ties of the most splendid possibilities unless the 

 plants of the newest generation are given proper 

 soil and nourishment and sunshine they will come 

 to nothing. 



And so it is with the human plant. Despite 

 the good heredity of generations of ancestors 

 bred, let us say, from the old pioneer stock in 

 New England or Virginia or from the trans- 

 planted cions of that stock in the Middle or Far 

 West, the coming generations will be dwarfed 

 and perverted representatives of their race if 

 they are denied a normal environment, particu- 

 larly in childhood. 



So one of the great problems that confronts 

 the humanitarian of to-day is the problem of 

 providing a proper environment for the human 

 plant. 



In the decade covered by recent census returns 

 (1911-1920) the total population of the United 

 States increased by 14.9 per cent. But the rural 

 population increased by only 3.1 per cent and the 

 city population by 28.6 per cent. There are 

 entire States in which the rural population did 

 not increase at all, and these were precisely those 

 Middle Western farming districts that supply 



