380 THE TREND OF THE RACE 
differential fecundity it now helps to maintain is mainly in favor 
of elements which, for the most part, have not demonstrated a 
superior inheritance. The manifold racial effects of industrial 
development are in many respects bad. Industry may intensify 
the action of natural selection in eliminating persons whose 
physique and intelligence are below the general level, but, on the 
other hand, its influence on differential fecundity may more than 
counteract its tendency to racial improvement. Its effect in 
encouraging celibacy in increasing numbers of capable and self- 
reliant women who qualify themselves for an economically inde- 
pendent career promises to be a serious racial danger. Education 
itself, the basis of so much of our advancement, has proven, up to 
the present, a dysgenic agency. Its devotees commonly fail to 
reproduce themselves, and since education is becoming extended 
to more and more of those who are capable of acquiring it the 
racial damage thus caused is correspondingly increased. 
The effect of our modern life upon the trend of germinal varia- 
bility, is as we have pointed out before, a subject about which 
we know little. Alcoholism while helping to dispose of a number 
of undesirables, is open to grave suspicion as a cause of defective 
inheritance. The same suspicion may reasonably be entertained 
concerning a number of other unfavorable influences which now 
affect a large proportion of humanity, in so far as these involve 
the toxic action of drugs, diseases or bad air. 
When we attempt to gain a comprehensive view of the forces 
which are changing human inheritance it becomes apparent that 
those forces which have been called into action as a result of the 
development of our culture are in large part racially destructive. 
We cannot say that they are entirely so because there are counter 
tendencies which sometimes arise. All those agencies which bring 
about the present well-marked correlation between sterility and 
success in life tend to rob the race of its best inheritance. It is 
chiefly the primitive evolutionary factors which operate among 
the lower animals that are making for racial improvement in man. 
Civilization brings in its train so many factors that undermine 
its own biological foundations that, from the racial standpoint 
