RESPONSE TO THE PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS 



CORRADO GINI 



Rome, Italy 

 [English translation] 



It is a great honor for me to take part in the Third International Congress 

 of Eugenics as head of the delegation sent by the Italian Government, and 

 as representative of the Italian Society of Genetics and Eugenics, the Italian 

 Committee for the study of Population Problems, and the Central Institute 

 of Statistics. It is also a great honor to have been invited by the Organizing 

 Committee to address the General Assembly. I presume it is the wish of 

 the Organizing Committee that I express my own personal point of view, 

 and that of the scientific bodies I represent, on the Congress we have just 

 opened and on the program of our science. 



The adherence and the contribution I have given to the two previous 

 International Congresses of Eugenics held at London and New York, my 

 initiative in favor of the two Italian Congresses of Eugenics in 1924 and 

 1929, whose success was made more complete by the participation of emi- 

 nent representatives of the foreign Eugenic Societies and of their Inter- 

 national Federation, the prominent part I assigned to Eugenics at the 

 International Population Congress of Rome (September 1931) show the 

 importance I attach to international meetings of the followers of our science. 

 Indeed, they afford an opportunity to sum up what has been done and what 

 we should do, and they also enable us to become personally acquainted and 

 to exchange our own ideas with those of men of theory and men of practice, 

 who in very different fields of science and of life take an interest in the 

 problems of heredity and the improvement of the human races. 



The interest taken by eugenists of many countries in the recent Inter- 

 national Population Congress of Rome, and the official participation at this 

 New York Congress of the Italian Committee for the study of Population 

 Problems, afford, I believe, a further recognition of the truth that in the 

 matter of population, as in other fields, the problems of quantity and quality 

 are indissolubly connected. As I see it, they are indissolubly connected 

 not only because in practice it is difficult to think of a measure affecting the 

 number of inhabitants which does not also affect their qualitative distribu- 

 tion, or of a measure hindering or encouraging the reproduction of certain 



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