MIGRATIONS AND THEIR SIGNIFICANCE 211 



and many of the young women also leave the farm for the 

 office, shop and factory. 



Now all of these migrations have a profound eugenic signifi- 

 cance. The most active, ambitious and courageous blood 

 migrates. It migrated to America and has made her what 

 she has become; in America another selection took place in 

 the western migrations and what this best blood — this creme 

 de la creme — did in the west all the world knows. Great 

 cities Hke Chicago, with its motto ''I will," arose in a genera- 

 tion or two to the front rank of world metropolises, and New 

 England, the early home of the sewing machine and the cot- 

 ton gin, has yielded the palm to the central west, the home of 

 the harvesting machine and the' aeroplane. 



And when the best and strongest migrated, the weaker 

 minds were left behind to breed in the old homestead. A 

 recent British Committee on Physical Deterioration^ contains 

 the testimony of Dr. C. R. Browne about conditions in the 

 west of Ireland. He says: ''The sound and the healthy — the 

 young men and young women — from the rural districts emi- 

 grate to America in tremendous numbers, and it is only the 

 more enterprising and the more active that go, as a rule." 

 And Dr. Kelly, the Roman Catholic Bishop of Ross testified: 

 ''For a considerable number of years it has been only the 

 strong and vigorous that go — the old people and the weak- 

 lings remain behind in Ireland." And even in New England 

 we see signs of decadence of the old stock and men speak of 

 racial deterioration. But the race as a whole has not deteri- 

 orated but only the New England representatives — the 

 "left-behinds" of the grand old families, whose stronger 

 members went west. Likewise in the rural and semi-rural 

 population within a hundred miles of our great cities we find 

 a disproportion of the indolent, the alcoholic, the feeble- 



^ Inter-departmental Committee on Physical Deterioration, Vol. I, p. 37, 

 1904. 



