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XI

EUGENICS AND ECONOMICS

MORTON A. ALDRICH, PH.D.

PROFESSOR OF ECONOMICS AND SOCIOLOGY AND PROFESSOR OF INDUSTRIAL HYGIENE IN TULANE UNIVERSITY OF LOUISIANA.

My shortcomings as a lecturer on eugenics are obvious to you all. The well-equipped eugenist must be at once a biologist and a sociologist, and if I were to pose as a biologist, you would know that I was speaking under false pretences. At least, however, I can lay claim to a genuine and earnest sense of the profound importance of the teachings of eugenics. Three years ago, when I had the honour of an invitation to deliver the annual oration before the Louisiana State Medical Society, I chose as my subject the science and art of eugenics because of what seemed to me their overwhelming importance to human welfare and human progress.

The object of my present talk is to picture to you in a comprehensive way the subject and the purpose of eugenics and to arouse in your minds a just sense of its practical significance; and I may add that the study of eugenics is so interesting and so fascinating that it is wholly my fault if I do not succeed. Some of the problems of eugenics are highly controversial, but the most helpful attitude of mind is not usually that of the attorney for the prosecution or for the defence, and I shall try to speak about the character and aims of

eugenics, not in the form of one-sided argument, but of impartial exposition.

Every one is interested in eugenics because it deals with race progress and with parenthood which is the central fact in race progress. If we are all alert to the importance of the conservation of our natural resources, we are bound to be still more alert to the importance of the conservation of our people and of our race.

You are interested in eugenics, too, because you are interested in children. The word eugenics comes from the Greek word meaning well-born; and if sciences had mottoes, the motto of eugenics would be: For the Children's Sake. As young men who, I hope, are going to marry and have children before long, you have no deeper wish than that your children may be, both in mind and body, well-born. And what you want for your own children you want for all children. Out of this desire and this high sense of responsibility, as good parents, for your own sons and daughters grows your interest as good citizens in the well-bornness of all the children of the race.

The formal definitions of the science will mean more to you, perhaps, if I first ask you to consider for a moment a curious paradox. At the same time that we have been accustomed, as a matter of course, to look to heredity for the explanation of improvements in the breed of our domestic animals, we have been equally accustomed to look chiefly to the influence of environment and education for the improvement of our race of men. When you say, for example, that our domestic animals are far superior to those of by gone times, you mean that in their in-born qualities they are su

perior at birth, but when you speak of the progress of the human race, most people have something quite different in mind. They think of this progress as a matter, not of heredity, but of better surroundings and better training. In other words, we have been neglecting the possibility of the improvement of the human race by better inheritance as well as by better environment. It is this neglect which has made possible the assertion that the infant of to-day is neither physi cally nor mentally superior to the infant of centuries ago.

Eugenics asks why we do not give at least as much consideration to the parentage of human beings as we give to that of our horses and our cows. Sir Francis Galton, who coined the word, defined eugenics as "the study of agencies under social control that may improve or impair the racial qualities of future generations, either physically or mentally." More simply, eugenics is "the science which deals with all influences that improve the inborn qualities of a race." It is the study of human and racial welfare in so far as this welfare depends on the inborn qualities of men and it leads to the "systematic endeavour to improve the nature of man." Dr. Futcher defined eugenics the other day as "the science of the improvement of the human race by better breeding," and Professor Keller calls it "the science of rearing human thoroughbreds."

Eugenics, then, deals with human progress. This progress is many-sided, and it may help us to place the science and the art of eugenics in their relation to other arts and sciences concerned with the progress of man if, before coming to closer quarters with our subject,

we pause for a moment to divide students of human progress into two groups, the biological and the social. On the one hand is the group of thinkers, like the biologists and the psychologists, who are devoting their lives to a study of the laws which explain the physical and mental development of individual human beings. On the other hand there is the group of thinkers,— students of morals and of religion, philosophers, jurists, historians, economists, sociologists, educators, which looks to the first group for its data as to men biologically, and concerns itself with the inter-relation and inter-action and inter-dependence between men in society. The task of the biological group will not be achieved until all men and women have sound minds in sound bodies. The task of the sociological group will not be achieved until it has established right relations among men. As a pure science, eugenics lies wholly within the first group; but as an applied science or art in its applications to human progress - it calls on the sociologist as well as the biologist. In this address I shall discuss separately the science and the proposed art of eugenics.

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The investigators in this so-called new sciencethere is some question as to how far it is really neware, then, a group of biologists engaged in the study of man and his progress from the same standpoint as that from which Darwin and his followers studied the lower species. At the same time, they are earnestly hoping to use their knowledge for the promotion of human welfare, and they offer some far-reaching advice which I shall discuss a little later. But, as investigators, they

are nothing more or less than biologists whose subject matter is the racial character of man.

They fully realise that their first effort must be to amass facts. The official statement of the Francis Galton Laboratory for National Eugenics, at the University of London, reads:

"It is the intention of the founder that the Laboratory shall

serve

1. As a storehouse of statistical material bearing on the mental and physical conditions in man, and the relation of these conditions to inheritance and environment;

2. As a centre for the publication or other form of distribution of information concerning national eugenics;

3. As a school for training and assisting research workers in special problems of eugenics."

The research workers of the Galton Laboratory have already published, among other papers, studies on "The Inheritance of Ability," "The Inheritance of Psychical Characters," "The Inheritance of the Insane," and an interesting memoir entitled "The Promise of Youth and the Performance of Manhood," which undertakes to trace the relation between success in the examinations for the B.A. Degree at Oxford and subsequent success in professional life. A "Treasury of Human Inheritance," containing pedigrees of various types of intellectual ability, of tuberculous stocks, of epilepsy, physical depravity, and so on, has also been. published; and the Director of the Galton Laboratory, Professor Karl Pearson, is also directing a series of "Studies in National Deterioration." These publica

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