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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 . >