i6 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



EUTHENICS AND EUGENICS 



By Db. C. B. davenport 

 cold sprino habbor, l. i. 



OP late years the reading, thinking public has been awakened to a 

 realization that sickness, poverty and crime are great and 

 perhaps growing evils. It does not seem right that there should always 

 be about 3 per cent, of our population on the sick list, that our alms 

 houses should support over 80,000 paupers, not to mention the hun- 

 dreds of thousands that receive outdoor relief or are barely able to earn 

 a living; and that there should be 80,000 persons in prison. It ought 

 not to be* that the nation should have to support half a million insane, 

 feeble-minded, deaf and blind and that a hundred million dollars should 

 be spent annually by institutions in this country for the care of the 

 sick, degenerate, defective and delinquent. It is a hopeful sign of the 

 times that people are asking : " What can we do about it ? What is the 

 cause and what the remedy for this state of things ? " 



The answers to this inquiry take two general trends. One set of 

 reformers urges that the socially unfit are the product of bad conditions 

 and that they will disappear with the establishment of some modern 

 Utopia. The other set of reformers urges that the trouble lies deeper — 

 in the blood — and is the outcome of bad breeding; the trouble will 

 disappear if marriage matings are made more wisely. 



The point of view of the first set of reformers may be made clear 

 by some quotations from their works. Thus Henry George, Jr., in 

 his book, "The Menace of Privilege," after stating that there is an 

 increase of insanity, suicides and crime asks : " From what does all this 

 proceed ? " and he replied : " Poverty. It means privation . . . insanity, 

 suicide, crime." Mrs. Ellen H. Richards has stated the position of 

 these reformers so well that I am constrained to make numerous quota- 

 tions from her valuable book entitled " Euthenics "— a name that may 

 well be applied to the point of view that is contrasted with eugenics. 

 She says: "Of all our dangers that of uncleanliness leads" (p. 19). 

 "The necessity of judicious, wholesome food is paramount" (p. 22). 

 " Mr. Robert Hunter says : * Perhaps more than any other condition of 

 life it [food supply] lies at the door of the social and mental inequal- 

 ities among men'" (p. 23). "A strong, well man, wliose work is 

 muscular and carried on in the open air, as is that of the farmer and 

 of the fisherman, will have the power to assimilate almost anything" 

 (p. 24). "Just as soon as the individual fully realizes that he him- 

 self is to blame for his suffering or his poverty in human energy, he 



