352 THE TREND OF THE RACE 
constituted the great bulk of our population of a couple of decades 
ago. There is little in the achievements of these people either 
here or in their native land to remove this doubt. It is of course 
easy to make excuses for the shortcomings of people of inferior 
educational status. One may argue, as indeed many do, that we 
cannot demonstrate that such people are not of as good mental 
inheritance as the best of the Nordic race. On the other hand 
no one has ever shown that they are. 
There is the further question of how our immigrants compare 
with the general average of people of their native country. Those 
who wander forth to seek their fortune in another land are fre- 
quently spoken of as unusually hardy, physically vigorous, and 
enterprising. Under certain conditions this may be true. But it 
is extremely doubtful if our present immigrants are especially 
selected for their virile qualities. They represent for the most 
part the poorer classes of wage earners from the old world. In 
too many cases they are the failures that seek an escape into a 
new field of opportunity. Thousands are induced to come here 
by the lurid accounts of America’s golden opportunities which 
have been presented to them by the agents of transportation 
companies who have combed Europe for possible passengers. 
Mine and factory owners caring nothing for the racial and social 
effects of their action, but solicitous only for the profits to be 
derived from a plentiful supply of cheap labor, have encouraged 
immigration to the utmost and have exercised their strong 
political influence to lower the standard of admission. 
We forbid the entrance of the feeble-minded, epileptic, insane, 
paupers, criminals, prostitutes and anarchists, but we are far 
from detecting all of these undesirables, and we receive a large 
mass of sodden stupidity, which escapes falling into the lowest 
class of mental defectives. Undoubtedly we would gain much by 
a more rigid scrutiny of our immigrant population. It would be 
especially desirable if mental tests could be applied to all arriving 
aliens so as to exclude at least everybody below the level of a 
high-grade moron. It would also be desirable to have a mental 
rating of foreign peoples to the end of discouraging or preventing 
