I hold it to be a crime for any human being to bring into the world an offspring which he knows will be inferior to himself. He owes it to posterity to breed up. The mother is what breeds up. The white man who brands his unborn child a mongrel deserves death at the hands of the rest of his race. Death, because, like the murderer, he is pulling down society. The murderer takes what he cannot restore. But this man does worse—he chains his own child for life to a dead body.
It is a crime because it is the duty of all to breed up—to produce something by well chosen marriage better than themselves. It should be a criminal offense—as it already is a moral one—to bring into the world peoples with maimed heads, maimed souls and yellow bodies. The Greeks were right—it is only through a pure breed that man may reach the stars. The Bible is right—it always is: pedigree counts most.
What a pity all the world does not go into the horse business and study the effects of heredity long enough to learn a little common sense about the breeding of that highest of animals—man! What a pity they cannot get off their little bicycles long enough to get the hump out of their backs and the wheels out of their heads, and learn that like, in man or horse, poet or donkey, produces like or the likeness of an ancestor! Will people never learn that falling in love is often nothing in the world but an accident, and often more fatal than falling down an elevator shaft? Will they never stop to think that they haven’t any more right to afflict their unborn children with the crotches, cranks, whims, crookedness and conceit of their own souls than they have to murder them after they are born? Ye gods, and is it from this that immortality is made?
Some day, for the benefit of humanity, I propose to open a Registration Book. I want to do this because I want to see people take as much interest in their own children as they do in their horses, and as much interest in their own pedigree as they do in their dog’s. Many a man “falls in love” with, and marries, a woman whose qualities, character and pedigree, if wrapped up in a horse’s hide, he wouldn’t be caught trading an old blind mule for; and many a woman, under the same silly pressure, marries some vicious brute “to reform him,” who if turned into a buggy horse, with half the meanness that he had inherited, she wouldn’t risk her poodle dog behind.
And here is the way I would go to registering my people. In all registration there must first be a foundation stock. I would let truthfulness, honesty and work count as “foundation stock.” This would change the present standard radically, and let into life a foundation of good blood that at present is entirely neglected and not allowed to come in at all unless it happens to come in under a dress suit. I would then let accomplishments—the ability to do—from the ability to do poetry to the ability to make two blades of grass grow where one grew before—count as my classes, and it wouldn’t take me long to straighten out old humanity and proceed to breed a race of people fit to live.
Here it is:
Trotwood’s Human Standard.
When white men and women meet the following requirements and are duly registered, they shall be accepted as standard bred and shall be permitted to marry:
1. Any white man who has earned and saved one thousand dollars, provided he is honest, industrious and truthful, and is sound in wind, limb, and mind.
2. Any white woman who can cook a square meal, make her own clothes, keep a house clean and play on some musical instrument, provided always that she is pure, lives under some moral standard and will agree to raise her children under it.