The low birth rate of the superior stocks is due to several factors: (1) The lengthening period of education and of professional training calls for the postponement of marriage. (2) The desire to give children the best advantages limits the birth rate. (3) The increasing spirit of independence on the part of women causes a postponement of marriage and a limitation of the number of children. These and other causes have produced a differential birth rate in favor of the inferior strains. Eugenic thought urges that the differential be reversed in favor of the superior strains. This conclusion implies that the dysgenic classes must be prevented from producing children, that the poor must be raised to higher educational and economic levels and taught to limit the birth rate, and that the eugenically superior be taught to increase the birth rate.
Eugenics pronounces war to be both dysgenic and eugenic.[XIX-11] (1) It is dysgenic in that the bravest and the physically best are killed first. In the case of a long war only the weakest men physically and mentally are left alive to propagate the race. (2) War is dysgenic in that it produces a large number of hurried marriages. Rational choices of mates are supplanted by sudden emotional reactions. (3) War is dysgenic in that sex immorality greatly increases. Prostitution flourishes in the neighborhood of military encampments, unless rigid means of control are established. (4) Again, the dysgenic effect of war is seen in the period of socio-mental unrest which always follows war, and which among other things undermines rational sexual selection.
The chief eugenic effect of war is manifested during the period of training. This preparation period accents the importance of a strong physique and health measures. An insipid, stoop-shouldered population of city young men may be transformed into an army of fit soldiers. However, the conclusions are obvious that the dysgenic effects of war are far more potent than the eugenic gains, and that the eugenic advantages may he acquired in other ways than by promulgating war.
Eugenics looks askance at the feminism movement. Feminism once meant the development of the womanly traits of the sex. It now refers to the elimination as far as possible of sex differences. It would make women as nearly as possible like men. Eugenics objects to this trend, since it underestimates the importance of the fact that women physically are built to be mothers. To the extent that women enter into all the occupations, they will become men-like; and their efficiency as mothers of the race will decrease, and the race will suffer.
The economic equality of the sexes is a satisfactory doctrine to the eugenist if the doctrine is extended to make motherhood a salaried occupation, like mill work or stenography.[XIX-12] “Child-bearing should be recognized as being as worthy of remuneration as any occupation which men enter, and should be paid for (by the state) on the same basis.”[XIX-13]
Eugenics would throw every possible safeguard around motherhood, especially in the period immediately before and after the birth of the child. The mother, even the expectant mother, “is doing our business, indispensable and exacting business, and we must take care of her accordingly. She is not only a worker but the foremost of all workers.”[XIX-14]
Eugenic thought as represented in the writings of C. W. Saleeby has denominated alcohol, venereal disease, and tuberculosis as “racial poisons.” While there is some doubt regarding the eugenic effects of taking small amounts of alcohol into the human body, eugenists are agreed that alcohol, when taken in excess quantities, affects the germ-plasm and produces a neurotic taint. It appears that alcoholism may be a cause in producing defective children. The verdicts of hygiene and economics that alcoholism is injurious to the race is supported by eugenics.
Venereal disease, another so-called racial poison, produces toxins which apparently affect the germ-plasm indirectly if not directly. It lowers the physical and moral tone and causes unfavorable racial tendencies. Venereal disease tends to destroy the generative organs and to cut off the birth rate entirely. It is a result of sex immorality which in itself tends to produce children under such abnormal conditions of vice that it becomes an anti-social, if not a dysgenic factor, in society. To the extent of course, that venereal disease kills off the racially useless, it may be considered eugenic.[XIX-15] Such a point of view, however, fails to rate properly the invasions which venereal disease is continually making upon normal and superior types of germ-plasm.
Tuberculosis weakens the membranous tissues and probably leads in a few generations to an unusual degree of susceptibility to the invasion of tubercle bacilli. It is still a question, however, to what extent tuberculosis may be counted a racial poison. Professor Hobhouse has argued that, by the development of scientific hygiene, it will be possible to center attention not upon eliminating a tubercular stock but upon eliminating the tubercle bacilli.[XIX-16]
In regard to race questions the social anthropologist and the eugenist represent different poles of thought. As was indicated in the preceding chapter, the social anthropologists, such as Boas and Thomas, support the theory of potential race equality. The eugenist, on the other hand, contends that there are inherently superior and inferior racial stocks, and that the marriages of representatives of inferior stocks with representatives of superior stocks will produce children of a stock distinctly lower than that of the superior stocks. The eugenists in the United States hold that the immigration of the southern and eastern peoples of Europe will not only supplant through a higher birth rate the native stock of Nordic origin but, where marriages between natives and southern and eastern European immigrants occur, it will lower the racial quality of the population. While eugenic thought in this matter deserves a complete and respectful hearing, it must be considered along with the findings of social anthropology.