The Foundations of Culture 
215 
Shall we continue to accept the hereditary endowment of the 
child as the gift of God, and in consequence feel ourselves absolved 
from any further responsibility? 
The past half century has seen a very fundamental change in 
the human attitude toward many similar questions. Not many 
years ago, when pestilence stalked through the land, it was 
generally accepted as a divine punishment for sin and the nation 
was bowed down in abject humility and repentance. Today we 
likewise recognize the penalty for sin; but our repentance comes 
to expression in the form of active sanitary precautions. We 
drain our swamps, screen from mosquitos and flies, vaccinate our 
children and safeguard the purity of our milk and water supplies. 
But how slow we are to learn from any experience but our own . 
In the smiling valley which lies before us, we persist for more than 
fifty years in fouling the sources of our water supply with sewage. 
Must we wait until we too suffer the inevitable epidemic of 
typhoid fever before we profit by other towns’ experiences in 
exactly similar cases and build our sanitary sewer? 
The future of our race is in God’s hand; but he has entrusted 
to us as a community a very large part in working out our destiny, 
just as he has placed a large measure of responsibility for individ- 
ual culture in your hand and mine. The experience of the race 
has shown that the advance of culture in every civilized country 
is accompanied by a very grave peril. 
The transfer of the evolutionary process from the biological 
to the social plane, from the process of the elimination of the 
physically unfit by natural selection to the process of the preser- 
vation of all individuals under the guidance of the few members 
of the community who are preeminently fit to be social and moral 
leaders — this change in the evolutionary process opens the way 
for grave abuses. Those who are intellectually preeminently fit 
and morally unfit become a positive menace. And the whole 
process of socialization of racial ideals tends toward the weakening 
of the physical stamina of the individual. These problems have 
not been solved, but enough has been done to show that the solu- 
tion lies within our grasp. 
In France the birth rate has actually fallen below the death 
rate and in the other most highly cultured portions of Europe 
and America the trend is in the same direction. Nevertheless, 
since 1880 the American death rate per 1000 population has been 
