iversity of London and of the biometric
laboratory in University College, have retained the age-old point
of view of "Nature vs. Nurture" and have attempted to show the
predominating influence of Heredity AS OPPOSED TO Environment. This
may be true; but demonstrated and repeated in investigation after
investigation, it nevertheless remains fruitless and unprofitable from
the practical point of view.

We should not minimize the great outstanding service of Eugenics for
critical and diagnostic investigations. It demonstrates, not in terms of
glittering generalization but in statistical studies of investigations
reduced to measurement and number, that uncontrolled fertility is
universally correlated with disease, poverty, overcrowding and the
transmission of hereditable taints. Professor Pearson and his associates
show us that "if fertility be correlated with anti-social hereditary
characters, a population will inevitably degenerate."

This degeneration has already begun. Eugenists demonstrate that
two-thirds of our manhood of military age are physically too unfit
to shoulder a rifle; that the feeble-minded, the syphilitic, the
irresponsible and the defective breed unhindered; that women are driven
into factories and shops on day-shift and night-shift; that children,
frail carriers of the torch of life, are put to work at an early
age; that society at large is breeding an ever-increasing army of
under-sized, stunted and dehumanized slaves; that the vicious circle of
mental and physical defect, delinquency and beggary is encouraged,
by the unseeing and unthinking sentimentality of our age, to populate
asylum, hospital and prison.

All these things the Eugenists sees and points out with a courage
entirely admirable. But as a positive program of redemption, orthodox
Eugenics can offer nothing more "constructive" than a renewed "cradle
competition" between the "fit" and the "unfit." It sees that the
most responsible and most intelligent members of society are the less
fertile; that the feeble-minded are the more fertile. Herein lies the
unbalance, the great biological menace to the future of civilization.
Are we heading to biological destruction, toward the gradual but certain
attack upon the stocks of intelligence and racial health by the sinister
forces of the hordes of irresponsibility and imbecility? This is not
such a remote danger as the optimistic Eugenist might suppose. The
mating of the moron with a person of sound