The subject of Vital Resources opens up a very wide field for investigation and discussion. Various subjects in the group have been discussed and others will be, by specialists who have given their particular subject years of conscientious and close study. So when only last week I was urged to make this address instead of discussing a minor phase of the subject, there was nothing left for me but a general discussion of the subject of Human Efficiency.
Man, after all, is the biggest thing on this planet. The farm people are always bigger than the farm. No matter how rich by nature the farm may be, it will lose fertility if the farmer is not big enough. The first-class farmer will take an inferior piece of land and in time bring it up to his own measure. If the farmer does not fit the farm, it will in time come up to or decline to his measure. The average production of the soil is the expression of nature’s opinion of the fitness of the man who tills it for a term of years. The most severe condemnation of the American farmer is the fact that, with some of the richest soils in the world, he has so wasted its fertility that he is crying out for commercial fertilizers; while the “heathen Chinee” has farmed for at least forty centuries, and has maintained his soil fertility without the use of commercial fertilizers.
If any great business has attracted attention by its success, one always asks: Who’s the man or men behind it? The greatness of this nation is measured not by its soil, its mines, its forests, its water powers, but by the efficiency of its people. This is true of all nations. The cynical Bismark, who always cast covetous eyes on Holland, is said once to have remarked that the way to redeem Ireland was to transport the Dutch to the Emerald Isle and transport the Irish to Holland; that the Dutch would make Ireland an earthly Paradise, while the Irish would not keep up the dikes except with the help of the Germans, who would in that case soon have a seaport.
The only way by which you can restore the wasted fertility of the soil and the waste of our forests and develop properly our mineral resources; the only way in which we can as a nation take the place to which we are entitled—that of leader in the world’s trade and commerce—is by increasing to the utmost limit human efficiency, physical, mental and moral. These three are ineradicably linked together, because they are integral parts of every human being. We can not develop fine human beings physically without the development of the intellect and the soul; nor can we develop either the intellectual or the moral to the limit without taking care of the body.
If we are to have the maximum of efficiency in the man, the child must be well born, must be free from incurable diseases, mental, moral or physical. To every generation of human beings is given by an allwise Ruler the power to foreordain the character and quality of the generation to come. The coming generation is as helpless in our hands as clay in the hands of the potter. By marriage parents decree the personality of their children. By “personality” I mean the inherent tendencies—physical, mental and moral—which, when developed wisely or unwisely, make or mar the character. In that little pink lump of humanity—the pride of the father and the joy of the mother—are bound up in various combinations the incidents, passions and capacities of the parents. It is this which gives its awful sacredness and tremendous possibilities to marriage.
The State by the extent to which it discourages and represses vice and crime, by the extent to which it prevents and controls disease, by the extent to which it encourages the marriage of the fit and prevents the marriage of the unfit, foreordains the character of the next generation. I know that I am approaching ground but little trodden, in which many fear to tread, and to tread on which is by many deemed sacrilege. But if we are to be a virile nation, strong in body, in intellect and in morals, the truth must be told fearlessly; and there is no more fitting place to tell it than where the people of this Congress are making a study of our vital resources.
To put the matter with brutal frankness: The State must soon determine whether the hardened criminal shall be allowed to take an active part in foreordaining the character of future generations; whether the manifest degenerate, whether that degeneracy be the result of being badly born or of vice or crime, shall be allowed to breed degenerates; whether those afflicted with incurable and transmissible disease shall be allowed to transmit them to a helpless posterity.
In order that the State may act wisely, it is time for a most thorough and searching investigation of existing conditions, material and moral, which lead to crime; the extent to which criminal tendencies are transmissible—criminal tendencies, mark you, for crime itself is not transmissible; what proportion of our crimes are due to intemperance, and to what extent the unbalanced state of mind which makes self-control impossible, and leads to crime, is due to inheritance. It will no longer do to say as some do: that intemperance, by killing off the unbalanced and weakling, rids society of an encumbrance; nor that nameless diseases weed out of the race those unable to maintain self-control. While all this is in a certain sense true, it furnishes no argument for abating zeal in repressing these crimes against humanity. That terrible saying of Anne of Austria: “God does not pay at the end of every week, but at last He pays,” finds striking illustration in the fate that sooner or later befalls the intemperate and the impure.
On one subject there is no need of any investigation. We must either adopt such measures as will insure as far as possible that the coming generation shall be well born, or we will compel our posterity to pay the price, as we are paying it now. We stand before the world today convicted of having more murders, more suicides and far more lynchings in proportion to our population, than any other civilized nation on the face of the globe; and also with having, speaking generally, by far the most corrupt city governments. Is it not time for us to investigate and see why we thus stand condemned in the eyes of the nations, and to what extent we are breeding crime, the crime that is our disgrace? For be assured that we must in all cases pay the price, not in cold cash alone, but in blasted lives and ruined homes and a lower degree of human efficiency. If we are to be a great nation, worthy of our blood inheritance and worthy of our material resources, our children must be well-born.
If we are to secure that measure of human efficiency that will enable us to make full use of our inheritance, whether of blood or material resources, we should see to it that the coming generation is not merely well born, but well fed. The farmer is wise in that he takes special care of the young things that come on his farm. He builds a lamb creep, that the young lamb may get feed denied its dam. He sorts his pigs into convenient sizes, and shuts them out of the feeding places until the feed is properly placed, and then lets them all in at once, so that they may all have equal opportunity. He does not allow the weanling colt to take its chance with the selfish and unprincipled horses in the stalk field. He protects his colts and gives them food “convenient” for them. If an unruly beast in his stock yard tyrannizes the young and robs them of their food, he does the sensible thing. He dehorns the unruly. He will tolerate no oppression about his farm. In this he is wise; wise, because he knows that if he fails to do this, the red flag of the sheriff will sooner or later stand above his door, and the farm will be sold to some man who will handle it more wisely.