283 Heredity and Environment 



of some enthusiasts for changes in racial fashions has served to 

 bring this whole subject of eugenics into disrepute among 

 thoughtful men. 



Hereditary Classes. To a considerable extent ideals re- 

 garding individuals and society have differed among different 

 races in the past, but with the closer communications which have 

 been established between all parts of the earth in modern times 

 there has developed a greater uniformity of ideal. In a complex 

 society all types of service are needed and different types of in- 

 dividuals are socially useful. If the social good were the su- 

 preme end, as it is in a colony of ants or bees, the greatest dif- 

 ferentiation of individuals for particular kinds of service would 

 be desirable. There should be an hereditary class of laborers, of 

 business men, of scholars, of artists, etc., and for the improve- 

 ment of each class there should be inbreeding in that class. Such 

 methods are now used by breeders of various races of domestic 

 animals and cultivated plants with the best of results. No breeder 

 would think of trying to improve draft horses by crossing with 

 race horses, nor of improving milk cows by crossing with beef 

 cattle. In other countries and ages the development of heredi- 

 tary classes and castes in human society has been tried, and sur- 

 vivals of it persist to this day, but they are only vestigial rem- 

 nants of an old order which is everywhere being replaced by a 

 new ideal in which the good of the individual as well as .that of 

 society is the end desired. 



The whole development of modern society is in the direction of 

 racial solidarity and away from hereditary classes. Government, 

 education and religion; socialism, syndicalism, bolshevism all re- 

 flect the movement for individual liberty, fraternity and equality. 

 The modern ideal individual is not the highly specialized unit 

 in the social organism, as in the case of social insects, but rather 

 the most general all-round type of individual, the man who can 

 when conditions demand it combine within himself the functions 

 of the laborer, business man, soldier and scholar. For such a gen- 

 eralized type the methods of inbreeding or close breeding used by 



