And as still further offsetting the possibilities of decay of the human legs, which certain physicians predict, more constructive medical men have discovered that automobiling is becoming a factor in one phase of eugenics. It may not receive endorsement as a benefit in all eugenics as long as the charge can be made that since the use of the motor car the birthrate in Kansas has decreased, the discoverer accounting for this alleged fact on the theory that the expense of keeping an automobile discourages Kansans from assuming the expense of large families, but in one direction it is attempted to prove that the breed of certain Americans is being improved by the automobile, and in this way:
In certain parts of the country, particularly the Southeastern states close intermarriage is said to have been, in part, due to the inferior facilities for transportation, before the automobile came into use. Young men, it is said, courted and married their sweethearts, in the days when the buggy was king of local communication, within an average radius of five to ten miles, which accounted for people in those sections being cousins or otherwise related to one another.
Now that the automobile makes a thirty-mile or fifty-mile radius the equivalent of the five-mile or ten-mile buggy radius, the swains are seeking mates further afield, thus getting away from alliances with relatives, and there is a consequent decrease in the mixing of blood strains.
If this is true, tally one more in the score of benefits for the automobile, for it is the verdict of science that intermarriage between those of the same blood does not produce the best types, any more than does the interbreeding of other animals.
But in enumerating the benefits of the automobile its economic value easily comes next in importance to its service in imparting knowledge. Its health value may be a matter of difference of opinion, and its social benefits are comparative, but there can be no dispute about its educational value, and still less about its economic worth.
The factor time has taken on a new meaning and significance with the automobile’s accomplishments in speed. Time is a vital element in the affairs of life. If the automobile’s educational value can be expressed by the adage, “Seeing is believing”, its economic value can be similarly expressed by the adage, “Time is money”.
Part Played in Economics.
Time is likewise life under some circumstances, and because of this fact, the professional men who were first to make practical use of the automobile were physicians, commandeering it in behalf of life itself. How many lives have been saved by the automobile, which would have been lost through the slow going gig or phaeton, it is not possible to say, because there is, of course, no exact record, but the number is large. The mortality of today among people is greatly reduced from that of twenty years ago. The advance of science has, of course, brought this about, but the automobile is an important instrument of medical science, just as are the X-ray, the stethoscope and the pulmotor.
And the same cause—the element of time—which operated in the adoption of the automobile by the physician to the human body, has forced the veterinarian to use the automobile. This is irony—for the horse—and another nail in the equine coffin, but it is at the same time another demonstration of the automobile’s superiority in efficiency over that animal.
The farmer demands that the veterinarian shall come in an auto to attend his sick horses or cattle, because he will not take the chance of death through delay. And this is scarcely gratitude—by the farmer to the horse—but it is economic pressure.