Newspaper Page Text
Why the Warlike Nation of To-day Is the Decadent Nation of To-morrow
1 C* T 1 1
l • . r\
J htarr Jordan 1
omts Oi
n Perish and t
he Futu
1 from the W<
eak and
I
* * i«
the [ n fi t
By Dr. David Starr Jordan
Former President of Leland Stanford University.
In *n Address Before the School of Mothercraft
E UGENICS is the science of being well
born, and it i* also the art of being well
born. But It la an art that can he played
»ith only in an indirect way, because it la too
late for ua to go bark and get started. Oliver
Wendell Holmes said that If you would improve
the present generation you must begin with
the education of the grandmother, tiut he over
looked the fact that the education of the grand
mother does not make any difference with
heredity. As soon as one has gone to work to
educate his grandmother he finds that he must
begin with a better grandmother than the first
one We have with eugenics the science and
art of eugenics, which Is ihe science, as Mrs.
Ellen Richards iias called It, of being well
brought up.
Eugenics treata of the original stock, and Is
thn science of the ]*>sslbll!ties, while euthenics
treatr the training of the possibilities to which
one has been exposed. If one starts in life with
certain possibilities, be can develop some of
hose to a great efficiency, or he can lose
part of them by not using them. But an un
used possibility does not disappear in heredity.
We sometimes speak of these things in the
terms of "nature" and "nurture,” and have a
Mspy lively discussion as to which is the most
important. You cannot educate anything into
|t person which is not there normally and
Originally. You cannot, nurture anybody too
twelt.
t We. sometimes say that a flowing stream
surttes itself. The human stream In Its course
lends to shed off those who are mentally and
.morally weak and to purify itself.
i
Every ancestor of every one of us was so
Wrong and energetic and full of character that
tludS- escaped all t,he perils of infancy. The
ttheme of eugenics is heredity. Along with that,
tin human life, must go euthenlc application of
graining in character.
t The law of heredity is the same in all the
“Like the seed Is
plant and anim-al kingdom:
Harvest.” Emerson said that when we are
•born the gates of gifts are closed, but it is
jMosed long before that, when the cells unite
j-.o form a new life. All the possibilities are
Jpntamed in the original package, and all we
?an do is to train them.
I -low We Are Made
sJp from Our Ancestors.
j-. Except in the very lowest formB of life each
,,ndivldual has r double parentage, a mother
,,ind a father. He inherits one-fourth of his
atUer’s peculiarities and one-fourth of his
Another's; one-sixteentli from each of his grand-
tarents, one-sixty-fourth from each greut-granrt-
'fcaient Goethe expressed his heredity in his
Sines:
i
"Stature from father and the mood
Stern views of life compelling;
From mother 1 take the Joyous heart
Ami the love of storytelling.
t
, “Great-grandsire's passion was the fair.
What If I still reveal it?
Greai grand-dam's (romp and gold and
- show.
T And in my bones 1 feel it.”
»
I If father Is a weed and mother a weed the
jhildren can be only a weed. That is the
problem we have with the feeble-minded and
nlher mental and moral defectives and low
made generally. Ir the weeds are selected for
becoming the parents of the succeeding gener
ations there ran he only a posterity of weeds.
Eugenics, from the point of view of the ad
vance men I of any species or race or nation, Is
the choosing of parents with respect to the
future generation's.
By selection Burbank has improved many
forms of plants and flowers and vegetables,
and lias created new ones. He has made the
cactus hear edible fruit. Pot dogs have been
developed from wolves by selecting as par
ents (hose that are gentle and docile In their
traits. If we want race horses we select horses
capable of speed for the ancestry. All these
improvements are the result of selective breed
ing -selecting as parents those that have the
traits which it Is desired their descendants
shall have.
The Reduction in
the Birthrate of the Best.
Then there Is reversed selection, the reduc
tion In Ihe birthrate of the best. In the mid
dle ages many of the best men and women,
those who were able In Intellect and native
ability, and who should have handed An these
valuable trails to their descendants, went Into
the monasleries and cloisters. A premium was
placed upon celibacy. The same thing is hap
pening in our own time and country to a con
siderable extent.
There is a tendency among men to marry
later, and so there are fewer descendants to
Hhare their tine traits. Many women with the
finest qualities are unmarried, holding influ
ential positions, doing great public work. These
fine hereditary qualities are not preserved but
become extinct with them. They aro undoubt
edly doing a great service In society, but it
might bo better if those women could be the
mothers and a selection could be made of
women with less desirable hereditary qualities
to do the public work.
War is Hie greatest reversal factor of selec
tion. When nations decree that the best use for
man is to make him "food for powder,” national
glory Is but another name lor national weak
ness. If In war the weakest and poorest
were selected for military service, it might
bo a good selective process for eugenics. But in
war it is not from the weakest and least fit, it
is from the strongest and Ihe most able that
the men are selected to be slaughtered down.
Benjamin Franklin saw (his long ago. He
wrote: “All war Is bad. Some wars are worse
than others. War is not paid tor In war times;
the bill comes later. The seeds of destruction
of any nation lie in the influences by which
the best, men are cut off from the work of
parenthood."
England has boasted of sending to the pres
ent war a half million of her picked men.
Many of these are the university men of that
country. Out of three thousand Oxford men
only eleven hundred came back to the uni
versity this Fall when war was declared. While
these half million picked men went to the front
there remained behind two hundred thousand
who were rejected as unlit, either weak or dis
abled or too old. These rejected, who were left
behind, will be thp lathers of another genera
tion.
Suppose none nf fhest half million should
return, what would England lose in her next
generation? Of those unfit left behind perhaps
five hundred might he made useful by euthe
nics. The slums are made up of the descend
ants of these unfit. The wars of England made
the sons of the slums in Ixtndon in the first
place. No nation would have slums If it had
not had wars. The slums in America are made
up largely of Immigrants who had suffered
through the wars in other countries.
It is the comment of Frenchmen to-day that
France is a decadent nation; that the average
stature of men of France is lower by two inches
than it was a century ago; that among the
common people there is less of physical force.
These are the result of inherited deficiencies.
The wars of the republic and the first empire
look the flower of France, men and boys. The
French nation is reaping the harvest in an
inferior generation of men and women
“Se.nd forth the best ye breed” was the Ro
man war rail. And Rome sent them forth.
It Is calculated that out of every hundred thou
sand strong men eighty thousand were slain in
the wars, and out of every hundred thousand
weaklings from ninety to ninety-five thousand
were left to survive and leave cescendants.
So in Rome real men gave place to mere
human beings. There was plenty of popula
tion, but they were the sons of slaves and
weaklings and cowards. The human harvest
was had, for the best had been withdrawn
from the stream of the nation’s life. The blood
of the nation flows in those who survive. Those
who die without descendants cannot affect the
stream of heredity.
The fall of Rcme was duo to the decline in
the quality of its population. The best had
been selected out, for the wars. After a long
period of continuous war the Roman Empire
found difficulty in refilling the emptied military
ranks with efficient Roman soldiers. Military
selection had taken the strongest and left the
empire without the able-bodied citizen youth
who would have b;en their descendants.
We Have Never
Recovered from the Civil War.
Our own Civil War took a million men, some
of the men with the finest qualities. Many
of them left no descendants. Those who were
unfit wore left belli id. North and South the
nation has suffered by this loss. The new
generation of men and women since the war
has taken the nation's problems into their
(lands, hut these are hands not so strong or
6o able as though the men of to-day stood
shoulder to shoulder with the men that might
have been.
The men who died tn that war had better
stuff In them than the father of the average
man of to-day. Those States which lost most
of their young blood—Virginia and South Car
olina—will not recover for centuries, perhaps
never. We can never know how great our
actual loss has been nor how far the men that
are fall short of the men that might have been.
The warlike nation of to-day is the decadent
nation of to-morrow. The nations that are at
war all are paying the same penalty. Reversed
seleotion in eugenics will handicap every one
of them.
Every individual has twice as many an
cestors as his father or his mother. He has
four times as many as any one of his grand
parents and sixteen times as many as any one
of his great-grandparents. What is obviously
true is obviously false. According to the pre
vious statement parents multiply geometrically
Wy
backward This is false, because we use some
ancestors twice as our common ancestors.
Taken literally, it would mean that a child of
to-day of English ancestry would have had at
the time of William the Conqueror, thirty gen
erations ago, some 8,598,094,&92 ancestors.
At the time of Alfred the Great he would
have had 870,672,000,000 ancestors, and so would
every other child of English ancestry. As the
total of the English population in Alfred's time
was but a small fraction of these numbers,
most of these ancestors have been repeated
many times in the calculation. Somebody has
taken the trouble to look up the ancestry of
various families in America, and he finds that
numbers of them are related to each other, and
several of them can be traced back to Jonathan
Edwards. If w-e go back far enough, probably
all of us are related. And the lines
of our ancestry converge, not only
in Charlemagne, hut In Jock the
Plowman.
Now what would have happened
to any of us if any one of these
ancestors had fallen out? We
should not be here. What has war
done? It has eliminated many pos
sibilities of human beings. Who
can tell what possibil
ities it has eliminated
of artists and poets
and scholars and
leaders?
Another factor in re
versal is feeble-minded
ness. Considerable study
o f feeble-mindedness
and its heredity has
been made in this coun
try by Dr. Davenport,
assisted by Mrs. Harri-
man. One of the first
studies in the heredity
of mental and moral
traits tn such families
was made in Sullivan
-County in New York
State many years ago.
A group of degenerates there, called by the
fictitious name of the Jukes, were found to be
descendants of a common ancestor, a feeble
minded woman known as 'Margaret, the mother
of criminals." This family has contributed hun
dreds of mental and moral degenerates to the
community, and has cost the State many hun
dreds of thousands of dollars for their care as
paupers and criminals, besides their depreda
tions upon property and life.
Another family whose history has been re
cently published is the so-called Kallikak fam
ily. A young man of good family and a fee
ble-minded girl had an illegitimate child. Later
the young man married a young woman of fine
family. The history of these two strains has
been traced through several generations. The
descendants of the feeble-minded mother were
chiefly degenerates, a burden to themselves and
to the community. Those of the mother of
good family were normal and useful citizens.
Feeblemindedness
Can Be Bred Out.
llow is fecble-mindedness to be bred out?
The way cretinism has disappeared In the val
ley of the Aosta in Northern Italy will Illus
trate. Cretinism is a form of idiocy which is
associated with goitre. When I visited Aosta
in 1897 there were hundreds of these miserable
creatures, with less intelligence than a goose
and with less decency than a pig. They
swarmed along the highways, begging for alms;
Dr. David Starr Jordan, Chancellor of the Leland Stanford,
Education Association and Formerly President ol
they filled the charitable institutions.
The severe military selection which ruled
that district for many generations took the
strongest and healthiest of the peasants to the
war and left the idiot and the goitrous at home
to carry on the affairs of life. Those who were
afflicted with goitre were exempt from military
service.
What Legislation Can Do
to Weed Out Undesirables.
In 1910 I again visited Aosta. 1 did not see a
single cretin along the highways, and it was
some time before I found any one who knew
the meaning of the word. The children in the
orphan asylums were bright and alert, with
out goitre or cretinism. 1 inquired into the
matter and found that about twenty years ear
lier Aosta had built an asylum for the aged
poor. Into this asylum had been gathered the
cretins and goitrous. The men were segregat
ed from the women in this asylum, and Ihe
inmates were not allowed to marry. The only
cretin left was one old woman. I inquired
about the cretin children, and the mother su
perior said, "They don’t come any more.” In
the same way feeble-mindedness could be done
away with.
The weeding out of these undesirable and
degenerate traits in the human harvest is the
part of negative eugenics. The cultivation of
desirable traits and qualities is positive euge
nics. We need to proceed slowly with any
Jr., University, President of the National
the Leiand Stanford University.
legislation. Some legislation which has been
the result of partial knowledge on the part of
enthusiasts has been the cause of opprobrium
to eugenics. There is no possibility that any
group of scientific men or legislators could
exercise artificial control over the selection of
mates for standardized qualities of beauty or
strength or genius.
We cannot expect people to mate for certain
measurements of height or weight, and it would
he unfortunate if they did. Romantic love and
personal Initiative are reasons for marrying.
These are eugenic qualities, also, which it is
most important to preserve.
We need to extend eugenics education. We
want the essential facts of engenlcs to be
known by every one. Like the seed is the
harvest. If two families hhve the same weak
ness in the strains, these are likely to be re
peated in the descendants if members of those
two families marry. If two families have the
same good qualities; this, too, is likely to be
av i :•> :heir descendants. Cousins may
marry when the same weaknesses are not
found In both families.
Eugenics education will lead men and women
to see the Importance of cutting off the weak
strains, as the cretins, the feeble-minded, the
degenerate. It will lead them to see the folly
of war which cjits off hosts of the best, whose
descendants would have been among the
strong and great, and whose loss can never be
replaced.
4
Why Good Stories Are Often Spoiled by Great Authors
ir
By G. K. C.
P NDER ihe title "Good Stories Spoilt by
Great Authors,'' a considerable essay
p might be written. In fact, it shall be
(^Written. It shall be written now. The mere
h'act that some fable lias passed through a
naster mind does not imply by any means
hat it must have been improved. Eminent
ftnen have misappropriated public stories, as
^hey have supposed (apparently! that any one
jvlio borrows from the original brotherhood of
)J$en is not bound to pay back.
f It is supposed that if Shakespeare took the
jjegend of Lear, or Goethe the legend of Faust,
Wagner the legend of Tannhauser, they must
ju’avB been very right, and the legends ought to
, M grateful to them. My own impression is
hat they were sometimes very wrong, ami that
'he legends might sue them for slander.
I>| Briefly, It is always assumed that the poem
tijhat somebody made is vastly superior to Ihe
lallad that everybody made. For my part 1
j wke the other view. 1 prefer the gossip of the
hany to the scandal of the few. 1 distrust the
'(arrow individualism of the artist, trusting
Sther the natural communism of (he crafts-
nen. 1 think there is one thing more import
ant than Ihe man of genius -and that is the
genius of man.
Lot me promptly, in a parenthetical para
graph, confess that I cannot get Shakespeare
into this theory of mine. As far as I can see,
Shakespeare made all his stories better; and
as far as I can see, he could hardly have made
thorn worse. He seems to have specialized
in making good plays out of bad novels. If
Shakespeare were alive now I suppose he
would make a sweet springtime comedy out of
a sporting anecdote. But as Shakespeare does
not support my argument I propose to leave
him out of my article.
In the instance of Milton, however, I think
my case can he stoutly maintained; only that
Milton's story being scriptural is not perhaps
so safe to dogmatise about. In one sense Mil-
ton spoiled Eden as much as the snake did.
He made a magnificent poem, and yet he missed
the poetical point. For in "Paradise IaDst” (if
I remember riglitl Milton substitutes for the
primal appetite for a strange fruit an elaborate
psychological and. sentimental motive. He
makes Adam eat the fruit deliberately, “not
deceived." with the object of sharing Eve’s
misfortune. In other words, he makes all hu
man wickedness originate in an act of essential
goodness, or, at the worst, of very excusable
romanticism.
Now all our meannesses did not begin tu
magnanimity; if we are cads and blackguards
(as we are! it is not because our first ancestor
behaved like a husband and a gentleman. The
story, as It stands in the Bible, is infinitely
more sublime and delicate. There all evil Is
traced to that ultimate unreasoning insolence
which will not accept even the kindest condi
tions; (hat profoundly inartistic anarchy that
objects to a limit as such. It is not indicated
that the fruit was of attractive hue or taste;
its attraction was that it was forbidden. In
Eden there was a maximum of liberty and a
minimum of veto; but some veto is essential
even to the enjoyment of liberty.
The finest thing about a free meadow is the
hedge at the end of it. The moment the hedge
is abolislled it is no longer a meadow, but a
waste, as Eden w as after its one limitation was
lost. This Bible idea that all sins and sorrows
spring from a certain fever of pride, which
cannot enjoy unless It controls, is a much
deeper and more piercing truth than Milton’s
mere suggestion that a gentleman got en
tangled by his chivalry to a lady. Genesis, with
sounder common sense, makes Adam after the
Fail lose his chivalry in a rather marked and
startling manner.
The same theory of deterioration might he
urged in the case of Goethe and the Faust le
gend. 1 do not speak, of course, of the poetry-
in detail, which is above criticism. 1 speak of
the outline of Goethe's “Faust”—or rather, of
the outline of the first part; the second part
has no outline, like Mr. Mantalinis Countesses.
Now the actual story of Faust, Mephigtopheles,
and Margaret seems to me infinitely less ex
alted and beautiful than the old story of Faust.
Mephlstoplieles, and Helen.
In the mediaeval play, Faust is damned for
doing a great sin: swearing loyalty to eternal
evil that he may possess Helen of Troy, the
supreme bodily beauty. The old Faust is
damned for doing a great sin; but the new
Faust is saved for doing a small sin—a mean
sin.' Goethe's Faust is not intoxicated and
swept away by the intolerable sweetness of
some supernatural lady. Goethe's Faust, so
soon as he is made a young man, promptly and
really becomes a young rascal.
He gets at once into a local intrigue—I will
not say into a local entanglement because (as
in most similar cases) only the woman is en
tangled. But surely there is something of the
had side of Germany, there is something of
the vulgar sentimentalist, in this hotch-potch
of seduction and salvation! The man ruins the
woman; the woman, therefore, saves the man;
and that is the moral, die ewige Weiblichkeit.
Somebody who has had the pleasure shall be
purified because somebody else has had the
pain: and so his cruelty shall finally be the
tame as kindness. Personally, I prefer the pup
pet play: where Faust is finally torn by black
devils and dragged down to hell. I find it less
depressing.
Again, the same principle, as far as I can
make out, marks Wagner's version of ''Tann
hauser'’—or rather, his perversion of “Tann
hauser." This great legend of the early Middle
Ages, plainly and properly told, Is one of the
most tremendous things in human history or
fable. Tannhauser, a great knight, committed
a terrible transcendental sin, that cut him off
from all the fellowship of sinners. He be
came the lover of Venus hereelf, the incarna
tion of pagan sensuality.
Coming out of those evil caverns to the sun,
he strayed to Rome and asked the Pope if such
as he could repent and he saved. The Pope
answered in substance that there are limits to
everything. A man so cut off from Christian
sanity (he said) could no more repent than
the Pope's stick cut from a tree could grow
leaves again. Tannhauser went away in
despair, and descended again into the caverns
of eternal death, only, after he had gone, the
Pope looked at his stick one fine morning and
saw that it was sprouting leaves. To me that
tale is one terrijic crash of Agnosticism and
Catholicism. Wagner, I believe, made Tann
hauser return repentant for the second time,
if that is not spoiling a stor>, I do not know
what is. ,
Lastly (to take a much smaller case), I have
noticed all over Europe discussions about the
morals of the play of "Salome,” which Wilde
could not get acted in English and afterward
rewrote in French. I do not see anything very
practically immoral about the play, though
much is morbid and turgid. What strikes me
most about Wilde’s “Salome" is that it is
startlingly inartistic. It spoils the whole point
of a particularly artistic incident.
The brilliant bitterness of the old Bible story
consists in the complete Innocence and ln-
d: .Terence of the dancing girl. A subtle despot
was plotting a statesmanlike clemency; a se
cretive queen was plotting savage vengeance.
A dancer (a mere child, I always fancied) was
the daughter of the vengeful queen and danced
before the diplomatic despot, in riotous re
laxation he asked the little girl to name any
present she liked.
Bewildered with such fairy-tale benevolence,
the girl ran to ask her mother what she should
choose; the patient and pitiless queen saw her
chance, and asked for the death of her enemy.
In place of this strong. Ironic tale of a butter
fly used as a hornet, “Salome" has some Bickly
and vulgar business of the dancer being in love
with the Prophet. I am not sure about its
being bad morality, for its morality is its ef
fect on mankind. But I know- it is bad.arJ' ‘Ivt
its art is its effect on me.
f
t v
* ✓
• ' , M
'S A *
* ^ r
■i
' m
• , ' H . >