492 READINGS IN EVOLUTION, GENETICS, AND EUGENICS 
characterized by a low standard of living, and yet the child mortality 
among them is very high—somewhere around 4oo per 1,000 in cases 
where a parent died young. If poverty is responsible in the one case, 
it must be in the other—which is absurd. Or else the logical absurdity 
is involved of inventing one cause to explain an effect today and a 
wholly different cause to explain the same effect tomorrow. This is 
unjustifiable in any case, and it is particularly so when the single cause 
that explains both cases is so evident. If weak heredity causes high 
mortality in the royal families, why, similarly, cannot weak heredity 
cause high infant mortality in the industrial communities? We 
believe it does account for much of it, and that the inadequate income 
and low standard of living are largely the consequence of inferior 
heredity, mental as well as physical. The parents in the Genealogical 
Record Office files had, many of them, inadequate incomes and low 
standards of living under frontier conditions, but their children grew 
up while those of the royal families were dying in spite of every 
attention that wealth could command and science could furnish. 
If the infant mortality problem is to be solved on the basis of 
knowledge and reason, it must be recognized that sanitation and 
hygiene cannot take the place of eugenics any more than eugenics 
can dispense with sanitation and hygiene. It must be recognized that 
the death-rate in childhood is largely selected, and that the most 
effective way to cut it down is to endow the children with better 
constitutions. This cannot be done solely by any euthenic cam- 
paign; it cannot be done by swatting the fly, abolishing the mid-wife, 
sterilizing the milk, nor by any of the other panaceas sometimes 
proposed. 
But, it may be objected, this discussion ignores the actual facts. 
Statistics show that infant mortality campaigns have consistently 
produced reductions in the death-rate. The figures for New York, 
which could be matched in dozens of other cities, show that the num- 
ber of deaths per 1,000 births, in the first year of life, has steadily 
declined since a determined campaign to “Save the Babies” was 
started: 
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LOS arcs Mave coerce 159 LOUD sug assnacntervaddonunend 105 
TICS ss ameenreae 153 TOES wvevinaseisien a estaecsners 102 
LOOP eaeaidnary i Saisiexs 144 LOUTAS co sssenshvavatenosiey sy 95 
