HUMAN CONSERVATION 



It is not enough to lift the eyelid of a prospective 

 parent of American citizens to discover whether he has 

 some kind of an eye-disease or to count the contents of 

 his purse to see if he can pay his own way. The offi- 

 cial ought to know if eye-disease runs in the immi- 

 grant's family and whether he comes from a race of 

 people which, through chronic shiftlessness or lack of 

 initiative, have always carried light purses. 



In selecting horses for a stock-farm an expert horse- 

 man might rely to a considerable extent upon his 

 judgment of horseflesh based upon inspection alone, but 

 the wise breeder does more than take the chances of 

 an ordinary horse-trader. He wants to be assured of 

 the pedigree of his prospective stock. It is to be 

 hoped that the time will come when we, as a nation, 

 will rise above the hazardous methods of the horse 

 trader in selecting from the foreign applicants who 

 knock at our portals, and that we will exercise a more 

 fundamental discrimination than such a haphazard 

 method affords, by demanding a knowledge of the germ- 

 plasm of these candidates for citizenship, as displayed 

 in their pedigrees. 



This may possibly be accomplished by having trained 

 inspectors located abroad in the communities from 

 which our immigrants come, whose duty it shall be to 

 look up the ancestry of prospective applicants and to 

 stamp desirable ones with approval. 



This should be done by our own government and not 

 by labor contractors or steamship companies 'who are 

 not actuated by any eugenic considerations. More- 

 over, any immigration law requiring certificates from 



