EUGENICS AND EUTHENICS 263 



Just as certain adult persons show ancestral organs that 

 most of us have lost — such as a heavy coat of hair, an elon- 

 gated coccyx (tail), an unusually large appendix, a third set 

 of teeth, — so some adult persons retain certain ancestral 

 mental traits that the rest of us have got rid of. And just 

 as the heavy coat of body hair can be traced back generation 

 after generation until we cannot avoid the conclusion that 

 these hairy people represent a human strain that has never 

 gained the naked skin of most people, so imbecility and 

 "criminaUstic" tendency can be traced back to the dark- 

 ness of remote generations in a way that forces us to con- 

 clude that these traits have come to us directly from our 

 animal ancestry and have never been got rid of. 



The question how these traits ever came to be so rare in 

 mankind is one with the question of human evolution and on 

 this subject there is no historical evidence. It is clear, how- 

 ever, that after the new traits became estabhshed and con- 

 stituted the basis for the new society, those persons who had 

 the old traits stood a good chance of being killed off and 

 many a defective line was ended by their death. We are | 

 horrified by the 223 capital offenses in England less than a 

 centm'y ago, but though capital punishment is a crude / 

 method of grappUng with the difficulty it is infinitely superior / 

 to that of training the feeble-minded and criminalistic and' 

 then letting them loose upon society and permitting them to 

 perpetuate in their offspring these animal traits. Our present 

 practices are said to be dictated by emotion untempered by 

 reason; if this is so, then emotion untempered by reason is 

 social suicide. If we are to build up in America a society 

 worthy of the species man then we must take such steps as 

 will prevent the increase or even the perpetuation of animal- 

 istic strains. 



