FACTORS IN EUGENICS IN RURAL STATE 185 



with skill and energy by the Committee on Rural Libraries. Funds have 

 been secured for a two year experiment and a woman of superior training, 

 experience and charm of personality is now taking her book truck from 

 village to village, aiding librarians and studying their special problems. In 

 good time she and her committee will have some practical ideas to put where 

 they will do the most good. Some of the struggling back-room-in-a-private- 

 house-libraries will be persuaded to combine for greater service and modern 

 books will be put on the shelves and circulated. Some of them will be 

 about Eugenics and its background. 



Another group which refused to disband is the one on Adult Education 

 and that also helps the spread of Eugenical knowledge. The original com- 

 mittee has been augmented and reorganized with a council and now deter- 

 mines to make its service irresistably attractive to all sorts of existing clubs 

 and to groups of people young or old who want, or can be persuaded to get 

 together for something more lastingly stimulating to the mind than bridge. 

 These groups will be in the market for speakers, and, judging from the de- 

 mands of recent years, eugenics is not likely to be neglected in the choice of 

 topics. 



These are samples of the direct and immediate results of the work of the 

 Country Life Commission. The indirect results are far more numerous and 

 perhaps more significant. 



In order to study heredity, we all recognize that full account must be taken 

 of environment. Just how far each of these two factors enters into the 

 molding of an individual will perhaps never be ascertained, but the better 

 one understands and appreciates the environmental helps and hindrances 

 surrounding the subjects of his study, the better can one evaluate the in- 

 fluences of hereditary trends in their development and fate. In the studies 

 of low-grade families, early in the work of the Vermont Survey, the staff 

 were continually running against the question, "If these folks had had any 

 sort of a chance in childhood, might they not have pulled out of the de- 

 plorable state in which a lot of them lived?" Organized charity, law en- 

 forcement leagues, supervised dances and such urban stimuli to good be- 

 havior and social welfare are scarce articles in the hamlets and open country. 

 There is more chance of certain sorts of depravity going unchallenged in a 

 rural section than in a populous one. At least many cases of deficiency, 

 defectiveness and delinquency seemed to be more persistent through a suc- 

 cession of generations if the people were rural than if they were urban. Prej- 

 udices die harder out in the country than they do in towns — prejudices 

 against hospitals and institutions. Out there the people are more indi- 

 vidualistic. The man of subnormal mind sends his nine children to the rural 



