This is the view taken by O. F. Cook,[174] when he writes: "Statistically speaking cities are centers of population, but biologically or eugenically speaking they are centers of depopulation. They are like sink-holes or siguanas, as the Indians of Guatemala call the places where the streams of their country drop into subterranean channels and disappear. It never happens that cities develop large populations that go out and occupy the surrounding country. The movement of population is always toward the city. The currents of humanity pass into the urban siguanas and are gone."
"If the time has really come for the consideration of practical eugenic measures, here is a place to begin, a subject worthy of the most careful study—how to rearrange our social and economic system so that more of the superior members of our race will stay on the land and raise families, instead of moving to the city and remaining unmarried or childless, or allowing their children to grow up in unfavorable urban environments that mean deterioration and extinction."
"The cities represent an eliminating agency of enormous efficiency, a present condition that sterilizes and exterminates individuals and lines of descent rapidly enough for all but the most sanguinary reformer. All that is needed for a practical solution of the eugenic problem is to reverse the present tendency for the better families to be drawn into the city and facilitate the drafting of others for urban duty.... The most practical eugenists of our age are the men who are solving the problems of living in the country and thus keeping more and better people under rural conditions where their families will survive."
"To recognize the relation of eugenics to agriculture," Mr. Cook concludes, "does not solve the problems of our race, but it indicates the basis on which the problems need to be solved, and the danger of wasting too much time and effort in attempting to salvage the derelict populations of the cities. However important the problems of urban society may be, they do not have fundamental significance from the standpoint of eugenics, because urban populations are essentially transient. The city performs the function of elimination, while agriculture represents the constructive eugenic condition which must be maintained and improved if the development of the race is to continue."
On the other hand, city life does select those who are adapted to it. It is said to favor the Mediterranean race in competition with the Nordic, so that mixed city populations tend to become more brunette, the Nordic strains dying out. How well this claim has been established statistically is open to question; but there can be no doubt that the Jewish race is an example of urban selection. It has withstood centuries of city life, usually under the most severe conditions, in ghettoes, and has survived and maintained a high average of mentality.
Until recently it has been impossible, because of the defective registration of vital statistics in the United States, to get figures which show the extent of the problem of urban sterilization. But Dr. Gillette has obtained evidence along several indirect lines, and is convinced that his figures are not far from the truth.[175] They show the difference to be very large and its eugenic significance of corresponding importance.
"When it is noted," Dr. Gillette says, "that the rural rate is almost twice the urban rate for the nation as a whole, that in only one division does the latter exceed the former, and that in some divisions the rural rate is three times the urban rate, it can scarcely be doubted that the factor of urbanization is the most important cause of lowered increase rates. Urban birth-rates are lower than rural birth-rates, and its death-rates are higher than those of the latter."
Considering the United States in nine geographical divisions, Dr. Gillette secured the following results:
| Rate of Net Annual Increase | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Division | Rural | Urban | Average |
| New England | 5.0 | 7.3 | 6.8 |
| Middle Atlantic | 10.7 | 9.6 | 10.4 |
| East North Central | 12.4 | 10.8 | 11.6 |
| West North Central | 18.1 | 10.1 | 15.8 |
| South Atlantic | 18.9 | 6.00 | 16.0 |
| East South Central | 19.7 | 7.4 | 17.8 |
| West South Central | 23.9 | 10.2 | 21.6 |
| Mountain | 21.1 | 10.5 | 17.6 |
| Pacific | 12.6 | 6.6 | 9.8 |
| —— | —— | —— | |
| Average | 16.9 | 8.8 | 13.65 |