Control of Heredity: Eugenics 285 



Immigration. — It is race mixture which makes the problem 

 of immigration so serious. Generally immigration is regarded 

 merely as an economic and political problem, but these aspects of 

 it are temporary and insignificant as compared with its biologi- 

 cal consequences. In welcoming the immigrant to our shores we 

 not only share our country with him but we take him into our 

 families and give to him our children or our children's children 

 in marriage. Whatever the present antipathies may be to such 

 racial mixtures we may rest assured that in a few hundred years 

 these persons of foreign race and blood will be incorporated in 

 our race and we in theirs. From the amalgamation of good races 

 good results may be expected; but fusion with inferior races, 

 while it may help to raise the lower race, is very apt to pull the 

 higher race down. How insignificant are considerations of cheap 

 labor and rapid development of natural resources when compared 

 with these biological consequences ! 



2. Negative Eugenical Measures. Late and Early Marriages. 

 ■ — Galton said nothing about sterilization or elimination from re- 

 production of less valuable lines in his "Inquiries into Human 

 Faculty" which was first published in 1883. He proposed no 

 radical policy but rather one which he thought would be practical 

 and might meet with general favor. He suggested a social pol- 

 icy which would delay the age of marriage among the weak and 

 hasten it among the vigorous, whereas present social agencies act 

 in the opposite direction. He showed by statistics that, on the aver- 

 age, marriage at the age of 22 would produce at the end of one 

 century four times as many offspring as marriage at 33 and at 

 the end of two centuries ten times as many. He particularly em- 

 phasized the great harm which would be done by an application 

 of the theory of Malthus among the better classes. For the pru- 

 dent to put off marriage and to limit offspring while the impru- 

 dent continue to reproduce at the present rate would be to give 

 the world to the imprudent within a few centuries at most. 



Segregation and Sterilization. — His suggestions, which were at 

 first received with indifference or ridicule, were much less radical 



