ne tenths of the
crime, insanity and sickness of the present generation in our land.
Asylums, prisons and hospitals would decrease, and the problems of the
unemployed, the indigent old, and the hopelessly degenerate would
cease to trouble civilization."

And yet probably for years to come those mental states and conditions
of servitude graciously termed "conservatism" will continue to insure
an undiminished horde of these unfortunates. The situation here is
interestingly analogous to that in connection with certain of the
infectious diseases. Concerning the eradication of typhoid fever, to
mention a single concrete example, competent authorities declare that
we now possess all of the information necessary to make typhoid fever
as obsolete in civilized communities as is cholera or smallpox. "The
average third-year medical student knows enough about typhoid fever to
be able to stamp it out if he were endowed with absolute power."
"Typhoid fever has passed beyond the catalogue of diseases; it is a
crime." Our knowledge of the causes of many of the conditions leading
to gross physical and mental defect and criminality has progressed
already to such a point that we could if we would eradicate them in
large proportion from our civilization. The great horde of defectives,
once in the world, have the right to live and to enjoy as best they
may whatever freedom is compatible with the lives and freedom of the
other members of society. They have not the right to produce and
reproduce more of their kind for a too generous and too blindly
"charitable" society to contend against. The greater crime consists
in allowing the hereditary criminal to be born.

A well-known British alienist, Tredgold, after pointing out that the
duty of medical science is to fight and relieve disease in every shape
and form, adds: "That if social science does not keep pace with
medical science in this matter the end will be national disaster. In
other words, I would lay it down as a general principle that as soon
as a nation reaches that stage of civilization in which medical
knowledge and humanitarian sentiment operate to prolong the existence
of the unfit, then it becomes imperative upon that nation to devise
such social laws as will insure that these unfit do not propagate
their kind.

"For, mark you, it is not as if these degenerates mated solely amongst
themselves. Were that so, it is possible that, even in spite of the
physician, the accumulated m