"There are rows of little gas stoves over which prospective wives conduct culinary chemical experiments. There are courses in biology, something of physiology and hygiene, the art of interior decoration and the science of washing clothes. There is text-book sociology and sometimes lectures on heredity or eugenics. But the smile of incredulity as to my seriousness when I asked a Professor in the Margaret Morrison Carnegie School

Perhaps the time is not so far distant when babies will be considered an integral part of a girl's curriculum. If educators begin systematically to educate the emotions as well as the intellect, they will have taken a long step toward increasing the birth-rate of the superior. The next step will be to correlate income more truly with ability in such a way as to make it possible for superior young parents to afford children earlier. The child ought, if eugenically desirable, to be made an asset rather than a liability; if this can not be done, the parents should at least not be penalized for having children. In this chapter, emphasis has been laid on the need for a change in public opinion; in future chapters some economic and social reforms will be suggested, which it is believed would tend to make superior parents feel willing to have more children.

The education of public opinion which, acting through the many agencies named, will gradually bring about an increase in the birth-rate of superior people, will not be speedy; but it has begun. The writers, therefore, feel justified in thinking, not solely as a matter of optimistic affirmation, but because of the evidence available, that the race suicide now taking place in the old American stock will soon reach its lowest limit, and that thereafter the birth-rate in that particular stock will slowly rise. If it does, and if, as seems probable, the birth-rate in some inferior sections of the American population at the same time falls from its present level, a change in the racial composition of the nation will take place, which, judged by past history, is bound to be of great eugenic value.

CHAPTER XIV

THE COLOR LINE

"A young white woman, a graduate of a great university of the far North, where Negroes are seldom seen, resented it most indignantly when she was threatened with social ostracism in a city farther South with a large Negro population because she insisted upon receiving upon terms of social equality a Negro man who had been her classmate.[128]"

The incident seems trivial. But the phenomenon back of it, the "color line," is so far-reaching that it deserves careful examination.

As the incident suggests, the color line is not a universal phenomenon. The Germans appear to have little aversion to receiving Negroes—in Germany—on terms of equality. These same Germans, when brought face to face with the question in their colonies, or in the southern United States, quickly change their attitude. Similarly a Negro in Great Britain labors under much less disadvantage than he does among the British inhabitants of Australia or South Africa.

The color line therefore exists only as the result of race experience. This fact alone is sufficient to suggest that one should not dismiss it lightly as the outgrowth of bigotry. Is is not perhaps a social adaptation with survival value?