How fertile defective types may be is shown by a passage in one of Doctor Wilmarth’s papers which runs as follows: “One feeble-minded woman, now removed from this state, had by different men eighteen children in nineteen years, she alleges.” In a letter Doctor Wilmarth tells me that the birth of the twenty-third child of this woman has just been announced! In one English workhouse Potts reports sixteen feeble-minded women who have produced one hundred sixteen mentally defective children, and Branthwaite ninety-two female habitual drunkards who have had eight hundred fifty babies. If we include the two million individuals cared for annually in various institutional homes, hospitals and dispensaries as dependents, the estimated total of insane, feeble-minded, epileptic, deaf and dumb, criminals, juvenile delinquents, paupers and other dependents in the United States in 1910 was approximately three million, or one in every thirty of our population! With the higher fertility of certain of these classes and with only a small percentage under custodial care where will it all end? Is it not time for us to waken from our lethargy and stem this tide of national deterioration?
Natural Elimination of Defectives Done Away With.—With our improved methods of sanitation and care of the sick, the pauper and the defective, these classes have been freed from the stress of an environment that under natural conditions would have resulted in their premature death and consequent infertility. Or in the terminology of the biologist, we have done away with the factor of natural selection, the factor which in state of nature keeps all races purged of the unfit, the ill-adapted. With this restraining, and purifying influence removed, however, the weakling, the defective, may arrive at maturity and commingle his blood with that of the strong, with the inevitable result that the general vigor of the progeny from generation to generation is sapped and progressively undermined. Thus we are confronted by the stubborn fact that through present humanitarian methods we are driving the race toward decadence.
Why Not Prevent Our Social Maladies?—Now there is no reasonable person, I think, who will not admit that the motives underlying our modern altruistic practises are the noblest fruitage of our slow upward struggle from the brute to man. As humane beings, we can not cast aside these principles and return to the painful and pitiless method of nature which would leave the sick and the defective alone to perish miserably; the sacrifice would be too great.
Is there then no escape from this dilemma? To this query the modern student of heredity answers yes; let us but add more wisdom to our charity and the enigma is solved. We need no sacrifice of pity but rather an expansion of it. Let us but extend our vision from immediate suffering to the prospective suffering of the countless unborn descendants of our present unfit and ask ourselves the question, why should they be born? Why not prevent our social maladies instead of waiting to cure them? This is the province of eugenics.
Eugenics Defined.—The term Eugenics was coined in 1883 by Francis Galton in his book entitled Inquiries Into Human Faculties, and we may therefore look to him for a satisfactory definition. He says, “Eugenics is the study of the agencies under social control, that may improve or impair the racial qualities of future generations, either physically or mentally.” And again, “I take Eugenics very seriously, feeling that its principles ought to become one of the dominant motives in a civilized nation, much as if they were one of its religious tenets.... Man is gifted with pity and other kindly feelings, but he also has the power of preventing many kinds of suffering. I conceive it to fall well within his province to replace natural selection by other processes that are more merciful and not less effective. This is precisely the aim of Eugenics. Its first object is to check the birth-rate of the unfit instead of allowing them to come into being, though doomed in large numbers to perish prematurely. The second object is the improvement of the race by furthering the productivity of the fit, by early marriages and the healthful rearing of their children.”
Improved Environment Alone Will Not Cure Racial Degeneracy.—While many an enthusiastic humanitarian is laboring under the assumption that if we can improve external conditions human deficiencies will disappear, the student of heredity realizes that this is in large part a delusion unless we can secure an accompanying improvement in intrinsic qualities of the human species itself through the suitable mating of individuals. Just as the intelligent farmer to-day demands selected seed as well as good soil and proper cultivation, so one with the facts of heredity at hand would, as he views social problems, urge the fundamental importance of having selected stock with which to start. No shifts or shapings of environment will ever enable men to “gather grapes of thorns or figs of thistles.”
Heredity and Environment.—To wrangle over the question of which is the more important, heredity or environment, is about as idle a proceeding as to argue which is the more important, the stomach or something to put in the stomach. Man would soon come to grief without either. So, too, the question of human development is not one of heredity alone nor of environment alone; both are necessary and must work hand in hand. Dormant capacities must have proper environment to call them forth, but on the other hand no kind of environment can evoke responses if some degree of aptitude is not present.
Professor Thorndike undertook experiments with groups of school children of high and of low initial ability respectively to determine whether equal opportunity or equal special training would produce an equalizing effect in easily alterable traits such as rapidity in addition and the like. Without exception he found that at the end of such experiments, although both groups had improved, the superior individuals were farther ahead than ever, that equality of opportunity and training had widened rather than narrowed the gap between the two classes. Others who have made special studies on the causes of individual differences have come to the same conclusion; namely, that individuals differ widely by original nature and that similarity in conditions of nurture and training will not avail in deleting these differences.
Galton and others, from extensive studies based on English sources, have shown that notable achievements have run in certain families to a degree that is inexplicable on the basis of opportunity alone; it can be fully accounted for only by attributing much to superior inborn capacity. Doctor Woods has shown much the same thing for certain families in America. Schuster and Elderton have proved that there is a high degree of similarity in scholastic standing between fathers and sons in Oxford. Professor Pearson’s measurements of mental characters in brothers and sisters while at school show a high degree of innate resemblance in many cases and certain cases of decided contrast. Where contrasts exist in certain families they remain unreduced in spite of the similarity of environment, thus proving that environment is less operative in the final intellectual establishment of such individuals than are their inborn aptitudes. Even in twins, as both Galton and Thorndike have shown, there is no tendency for similar education, home life and the like to render those originally different any more similar with advancing years.
Professor Karl Pearson has done more perhaps than any other individual toward attempting actually to measure the relative strength of heredity and environment. Numerous statistical measurements lead him to conclude that it is a conservative estimate to regard heredity as at least five or ten times as important as environment in the development of the individual. A vigorous defense by him of this position will be found in Biometrika for April, 1914.