our
hospitals and Homes, our 80,000 prisoners and the thousands of
criminals that are not in prison, and our 100,000 paupers in
almshouses and out.

"This three or four per cent of our population is a fearful drag on
our civilization. Shall we as an intelligent people, proud of our
control of nature in other respects, do nothing but vote more taxes or
be satisfied with the great gifts and bequests that philanthropists
have made for the support of the delinquent, defective, and dependent
classes? Shall we not rather take the steps that scientific study
dictates as necessary to dry up the springs that feed the torrent of
defective and degenerate protoplasm?

"Greater tasks than those contemplated in the broadest scheme of the
Eugenics committee have been carried out in this country. If only one
half of one per cent of the 30 million dollars annually spent on
hospitals, 20 millions on insane asylums, 20 millions for almshouses,
13 millions on prisons, and 5 millions on the feeble-minded, deaf and
blind were spent on the study of the bad germ plasm that makes
necessary the annual expenditure of nearly 100 millions in the care of
its produce we might hope to learn just how it is being reproduced and
the best way to diminish its further spread. A _new_ plague that
rendered four per cent of our population, chiefly at the most
productive age, not only incompetent, but a burden costing 100
million dollars yearly to support, would instantly attract universal
attention, and millions would be forthcoming for its study as they
have been for the study of cancer. But we have become so used to
crime, disease and degeneracy that we take them as necessary evils.
That they were, in the world's ignorance, is granted. That they must
remain so, is denied."

Of course one should not jump from this to the conclusion that the
fact of heredity is responsible for all of this defect. Disease is so
often the result of infections to which none is immune, and defect is
frequently the result of such disease. Warbasse has recently stated
that "At least one fourth of our public institutions for caring for
defectives is made necessary by venereal disease." Doubtless an
appreciable share of this fourth is the result of hereditary
tendencies, the expression of which gives the opportunity for such
infection. Here as elsewhere no single factor accounts for all of the
facts, although when, as the result of the increase of knowledge, we
shall become able