212 HEREDITY IN RELATION TO EUGENICS 



minded, the ne'er-do-weel. I know intimately several such 

 localities and have seen in one family after another, how 

 the ambitious youth leave the parental roof-tree to try their 

 fortunes in the city while the weakest young men stay be- 

 hind, supported by their parents, or earning only enough to 

 buy the liquor their defective natures crave, and are finally 

 often forced to marry a weak girl and father her imbecile off- 

 spring. Such villages, depleted of the best, tend to become 

 cradles of degeneracy and crime. Thus our great cities lure 

 to themselves the best of the rural protoplasm, surround it 

 with conditions that discourage reproduction, either by 

 creating a disinchnation to marriage or making it incon- 

 venient and expensive to have children. So our great cities 

 act anti-eugenically, sterilizing the best and leaving the 

 worst to reproduce their like. 



3. Recent Immigration to America 



We have seen that the early immigrants to America were 

 men of courage, independence, and love of liberty; and many 

 of them were scholars or social leaders. Are these the charac- 

 teristics of the immigrants at this later day? Let us examine 

 the matter of immigration to America during the past hun- 

 dred years. We shall find great differences from the immigra- 

 tion of the 17th and 18th centuries. Thus where the annual 

 immigration was formerly a few thousand it is now hundreds 

 of thousands. The wave of immigration is shown in Plate 

 II. From 1820 to 1824, inclusive, the annual immigration 

 was less than 10,000 but it has never fallen below that limit 

 since. From 1825 to 1844 (with one exception) it has re- 

 mained below 100,000, but in 1845 it passed that number and 

 (excepting for 1862, in the depth of our Civil War) it has 

 not since fallen below that limit. In 1905 it passed the 

 1,000,000 mark. The general population meanwhile rose 

 from over 9,000,000 to 90,000,000, or only one-tenth as fast. 



