overcome the sentiment against destruction of the lowest-grade imbeciles, at least operations should be required that will prevent the reproduction of their vicious germ plasm.

Second, the old idea that there is in society any class that is superior to any other class should be abandoned. It is the characteristics of the germ plasm and not individuals as a whole that are favorable or prejudicial to human society. The way to improve the race is first to get facts as to the inheritance of different characteristics and then by acquainting people with the facts lead them to make for themselves suitable matings. The only rule, a very general one, that can be given at present is that a person should select as consort one who is strong in those desirable characters in which he is himself weak, but may be weak where he is strong. Such a marriage will not necessarily lead to a reduction in the children of the strong characters, certainly not to a permanent reduction in subsequent generations, and it will probably lead to a functional disappearance of the weak condition. By appropriate selection of consorts in subsequent generations the weak condition may not reappear for a long time, if at all. Thus two parents, deaf from different causes, will have only hearing children, because each parent contributes the factor that the other lacked, and if the children marry into stock with normal audition the ancestral defect will probably not reappear. But if cousins with the same hidden defects marry, there is one chance in four of two germ cells with the same defect meeting and reproducing the defect. Herein lies the danger of consanguinous marriages. For there is hardly a person born with every desirable characteristic present in the germ plasm and relatives are apt to have the same defects and so are especially apt to have defective children. Outcrossings, marriages between unrelated persons, diminish the chances for a similar combination from both sides. The mating of dissimilars favors a combination in the offspring of the strongest characteristics of both parents and fits them the better for human society.

In what I have said I have repeatedly approached, and very likely at times passed beyond, the borderland of science. I would not be satisfied to leave you with the false idea that our knowledge of heredity is now complete. Rather would I urge that perhaps the greatest need of the day for the progress of social science is additional precise data as to the unit characteristics of man and their methods of inheritance.

RACE IMPROVEMENT BY CONTROL OF DEFECTIVES

(NEGATIVE EUGENICS)

BY ALEXANDER JOHNSON,

General Secretary, National Conference of Charities and Correction, Fort Wayne, Indiana.

For ten years and a half I had charge of a large school for imbeciles, where I had passing through my hands in that time more than 2,000 feeble-minded people of various ages from 5 years to 45, so what I shall say about defectives is not theoretical, but is founded on personal observation and first-hand knowledge.

It is quite possible to over-estimate the effects of heredity. We must admit, with Weismann and others, as well as with Darwin in his later life, that acquired traits are not transmissible. But it is also clear that traits which originate by variation are transmitted, and we can prove that environment is at least one of the important factors in variation.

When we are considering heredity from the viewpoint of the sociologist I think we may reasonably give it a slightly wider scope than belongs to it in the strictly physiological sense. As sociologists we may consider the effects on the child, not only of the strict physiologic heredity, which is complete at the moment of conception, but also of the influences which act during gestation and in the earliest period of infancy. Strictly speaking, these influences are part of the environment, but they so closely resemble hereditary influences that sociologically we may consider them as practically inseparable from them.

We find many families in which a vicious taint may be seen coming down from generation to generation, modified in given instances by environment. It varies in its form of expression which is sometimes like that in the parent and often different. It differs in different members of the same family, brothers and sisters. Children of epileptics may be idiotic or insane, or have one of a dozen different neuroses. Sometimes the taint appears to skip one generation, reappearing in the next. If in mating degenerates were restricted to degenerates the degenerative tendency would probably die out with the decadent family. But unfortunately the

defective blood is continuously reinforced by strong, if vicious, blood from outside its own ranks. Probably if the idiotic, insane, epileptic and feeble-minded could be deported and placed together on an island in the Pacific and left to themselves, the degenerate race would die out in two or three generations. The mothers of most of the next generation of feeble-minded and idiotic are such themselves; but most of the fathers are strong-minded. This is the most powerful argument that I know of, for the protection of the feeble-minded from the passions of vicious men and from the effects of their own weakness.

I do not present to you anything in the nature of an academic discussion. I desire to offer an exceedingly practical proposition. There is a certain positive piece of state business to be done by the American people with regard to the degenerate classes. I believe it is well within the power of the people of each state to do that state's share. I admit that it is a tremendous piece of work, but we are not afraid of large undertakings.

This is an era of big things being done. We take a few miles of sand dunes by the lake side and transform them in a year or two into a city of 100,000 people surrounding a steel plant which manufactures many million dollars' worth of steel annually. We have no doubt of our ability to do any big thing that ought to be done.

The feeble-minded, idiotic and insane, or certain classes of them, are certainly vitiating and lowering the average standard of ' the race. The total number of them is not so large as we sometimes fear. Of the epileptics we have a pretty accurate estimate. About one in 500 of the population in Europe, and in America the number is very nearly the same, or one-fifth of one per cent of the population, are epileptics. The feeble-minded we have not so accurately estimated, but I think the number is about the same, perhaps not quite so many. Many of the epileptic are also feeble-minded. Many are strong-minded. Julius Cæsar, Mahomet, Napoleon Bonaparte were supposed to be, and perhaps were, epileptic.

Of the insane the number is not far different. I think if we could count the insane, the epileptic and the feeble-minded we should find the total to be not more than one-half or two-thirds of one per cent of the total population, surely not a number to inspire terror in the strong-minded remainder.

Add to this number the weak, shiftless people always on the verge of pauperism and continually falling over into it, especially the numerous mothers of illegitimate children, women so nearly feeble-minded that you are not quite certain whether or not they should be detained in custody, who, under our wretched pauper system, or want of system, are continually in and out of the almshouses, coming in pregnant, bearing a child, going out leaving the child behind, and coming back soon again in the same condition, clearly degenerate, evidently hopeless, the mothers of the Jukes and their like.

Still, with all these added, the total would not be so tremendous, not more than we can handle, and we do something with them now. Our present inefficient semi-neglect of them is costly. For their own sake and that of the body politic we ought to take some positive method to control the whole class and to make their reproduction impossible. For it seems certain that, unhindered, their natural increase, since it is not affected by the restraints of prudence and self-control, is more rapid than that of the general body of normal citizens.

Four remedies have been offered for the increase of the degen

erates:

First, restrictive marriage laws. A few states restrict the marriages of insane and idiots. I know only one which goes so far as to control the feeble-minded and epileptic. That is Connecticut. But the laws are not heeded to any great extent. I think if the laws in regard to idiocy were carried out further, and if the general public could be educated up to the point of view of those who have studied the subject, as to the exceeding horror and odiousness of such a marriage, they might have some effect. But restrictive marriage laws have never been largely successful. The typical instances have been those of Austria and Sweden, each of which countries tried to diminish poverty by such laws. The net results were a great increase in immorality and in the number of illegitimate births. In this country, as elsewhere, many of the degenerates are born outside the marriage bond.

. McKim in his book on "Heredity and Social Progress" declares we must eliminate the degenerate by a humane and painless death-have same pleasant lethal chamber into which they may be introduced, lie down to happy dreams and never waken. It is not

worth while discussing that, not even as an academic discussion, it is so tremendously far away. What the results would be I do not like to contemplate. What horrible degradation would ensue; what desperate changes in human character would result; how far down we would go toward or below the morals of Greece and Rome when the citizen was nothing and the state everything. I do not propose to argue that question before you.

The next plan is of the same kind, but differs in degree,— sterilization. I do not care to discuss that either. It also would be nothing but an academic discussion. Those who propose it, propose it for the people from whom there is or should be the least danger, the incorrigible criminals, who certainly should be retained in custody for life, and the hopeless idiot. In my own state, Indiana, I am ashamed to say, an ingenious method of sterilization has been introduced which would seem to foster and encourage sensuality by promising immunity from some of the dangers which usually attend it. I consider it a most serious and dangerous attack on public morals. It has been introduced by people who are entirely well-meaning and who would not wittingly do anything against religion and ethics. I regret that it is becoming popular and that people in other states desire to copy it. When I talk against it I feel like the voice of one crying in the wilderness, or like that Wisdom which, we are told, cries aloud on the streets and no man regardeth her.

I think these plans are futile. I think neither restrictive marriage laws, elimination by a painless death, nor wholesale sterilization can be applied, at any rate within the next generation or two, so as to have any serious effect in the reduction of the number of the degenerate classes. But I think a process can be applied, and is now being applied, partially, in many states, with remarkable success, that is entirely within our power to apply thoroughly. I think that the whole class of the feeble-minded and the epileptic, say two-fifths of one per cent of the whole population, may be at once segregated and taken into permanent, maternal care by the good Mother State. I think that such care can be exercised upon them as will not only make their miserable lives much less miserable than they are, but make most of them positively happy. It is quite possible and practicable to establish, in every state in the Union, orderly celibate communities, segregated from the body politic;