PRACTICAL LAWS OF LIFE 



343 



and woman. We are now just beginning to learn facts in 

 this field which may save our present civilization from the 

 decays that have overtaken those of the past. Whatever a 

 man may claim for personal liberty, no one can claim any 

 right to even risk mental or physical impairment of his 

 own offspring or to impose the care of defectives upon the 

 community. Alcohol is being barred from athletics, from 

 the army and navy, from public service, and from all busi- 

 ness, public and private, where strength, endurance, and 

 dependability are required, and the evidence given above 



FIG. 168. Recessive character of feeble-mindedness and effects of alcoholism 



Small black circles indicate stillbirths ; d, died ; d. inf., died in infancy : T, tuber- 

 cular; u, unknown. For other symbols see Fig. 167. After Goddard 



would seem not only to give society the right but to impose 

 upon it the duty of banishing alcohol from any possible 

 contact with the supreme business of evolving the race. 

 " You can't be strong and well unless you live right?"* 

 These words of Jess Willard are life-wide in their applica- 

 tion. We are just beginning to learn from the new view- 

 point of eugenics. Drugs like morphine and opium, cocaine 

 and heroin, must be studied with special reference to their in- 

 fluence upon the germ plasm. The same is true of nicotine, 

 and it may be that we shall have to set the age at which 

 indulgence in tobacco may safely be begun at fifty-five 

 years instead of at the usual sixteen or twenty-one. Any 



