482 READINGS IN EVOLUTION, GENETICS, AND EUGENICS 
David Starr Jordan has presented the matter very clearly. He 
points out that the ‘man with a hoe” among the European peasantry 
is not the result of centuries of oppression, as he has been pictured, but 
rather the dull progeny resulting from generations of the unfit who 
were left behind when the fit went off to war never to return. 
Benjamin Franklin, with characteristic wisdom, sums up the 
situation in the following epigram: “Wars are not paid for in war 
time; the bill comes later.” 
2. Social Hindrances—There are many conditions of modern 
society which act non-eugenically. 
For instance, the increasing demands of professional life prolong 
the period necessary for preparation, which, with the “cost of high 
living,”’ tends toward late marriage. In this way much of the best 
germplasm is very often withheld from circulation until it is too late 
to be effective in providing for the succeeding generation. 
Certain occupations such as school-téaching and nursing by 
women are filled by the best blood obtainable, yet this blood is denied 
a direct part in molding posterity, since marriage is either forbidden or 
regarded as a serious handicap in such lines of work. Advertisements 
concerning ‘‘unincumbered help” and “childless apartments” tell 
their own deplorable tale. 
One of the darkest features of the dark ages from a eugenic stand- 
point was the enforced celibacy of the priesthood, since this resulted, 
as a rule, in withdrawing into monasteries and nunneries much of the 
best blood of the times, and this uneugenic custom still obtains in 
many quarters today. 
6. WHO SHALL SIT IN JUDGMENT? 
In the practical application of a program of eugenics there are 
many difficulties, for who is qualified to sit in judgment and separate 
the fit from the unfit ? 
There are certain strongly marked characteristics in mankind 
which are plainly good or bad, but the principle of the independence 
of unit characters demonstrates that no person is wholly good or 
wholly bad. Shall we then throw away the whole bundle of sticks 
because it contains a few poor or crooked ones ? 
The list of weakling babies, for instance, who were apparently 
physically unfit and hardly worth raising upon first judgment, but who 
afterwards became powerful factors in the world’s progress, is a notable 
one and includes the names of Calvin, Newton, Heine, Voltaire, 
Herbert Spencer, and Robert Louis Stevenson. 
