BIRTH SELECTION VERSUS BIRTH CONTROL 



HENRY FAIRFIELD OSBORN 



Honorary Vice President, Third International Congress of Eugenics 



This International Congress is singularly opportune. It is not merely 

 an academic problem we are met to discuss, or a problem of the future. It 

 is not a theory but a condition which confronts us. It is a problem of the 

 immediate present, and, like all sociological problems, the more fascinating 

 because of its very complications. Man does not rise to his best endeavor 

 in face of small problems; it is in the genius of modern humanity to meet 

 and attempt to solve the most difficult. Eugenics is not a human invention 

 by Francis Galton or any of his predecessors or successors. It is a long- 

 known and universal natural law, namely, the survival of the fittest and 

 the elimination of the unfittest. 



It has always required a cataclysm to force a natural law upon the atten- 

 tion of man. Cataclysmic plagues of malaria, of typhus, of yellow fever, 

 of tuberculosis, of cancer, forced upon human genius the imminent crisis of 

 discovery, of palliation, of prevention, of cure. So in this world cataclysm 

 of over-population, of over-multiplication of the unfit and unintelligent, of 

 the reign of terror of the criminal, of the tragedy of unemployment, eu- 

 genics ceases to be the cult of the few pioneers like Galton and Leonard 

 Darwin; it is forced upon our attention. Once more man is humbled 

 because he is suffering from prolonged ignorance or actual defiance of and 

 transgression of the most central and fundamental of all natural laws. 



Prisons, reformatories, asylums, great public financial offerings, great 

 national and local appropriations, great tides of human kindness and gen- 

 erosity, are merely palliatives and temporary expedients. They may for a 

 time gloss over the cataclysm; they can not permanently cure it or avoid 

 its recurrence. The only permanent remedy is the improvement and uplift 

 of the character of the human race through prolonged and intelligent and humane 

 birth selection aided by humane birth control. This is the burden of my 

 address; it is the keynote of our third congress. 



I by no means profess to be an expert eugenist. I think, I write, I speak, 

 rather as a trained and experienced observer of animal and of human evolu- 

 tion, and I bring to bear upon this problem my own original researches and 

 observations on the intelligence and behavior of man. Altogether, and 



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