an effect of evil and sometimes the milder evil selected out of many worse miseries. In the United States in about 95 per cent. of the cases the rate is higher in the counties in which large cities are situated than in the counties where the population is principally rural; and this in spite of the fact that Catholics gather in cities.

Only of recent years has the prevalence of venereal diseases, and especially gonorrhea, been carefully studied. Even yet the public is not fully aware of the domestic misery caused by these diseases contracted by extra-marital intercourse by men and communicated to innocent wives and children. The records of divorce courts rarely mention the real ground on which good women apply for divorce, and the federal statistics, therefore, must be studied in the light of investigations on which judicial records throw little light.

Now, the social evil is distinctly an urban evil, and so far as it leads to divorce must be charged in great part to the conditions of urban life. The same is true of the use of narcotic poisons and alcohol to which so much domestic ruin can be traced. It is not creditable to many of the scientific men of America that they have underestimated the importance of this factor and some of them have so written that their sentences are used in advertisements of brewers and distillers to blind the eyes of the uneducated.

VI. Some writers have emphasized the value of city life as an agency of social selection; the strong and capable are given a career while the feeble in vitality and character go to ruin and are weeded out. But this kind of social selection is too costly; its lightning strokes kill many of the finest human beings along with the neglected; and not seldom the nursery of deadly germs, physical and moral, is in the homes and streets of the so-called unfit. Those who fall into the doom clutch at the fair and competent and drag them to ruin with themselves.

The incompetent must either be educated to fill a useful place and feel strong for productive labor, or be sent under guard to

die at peace in celibate colonies. That is the only social selection

which is worthy of the name of rational; all the rest is wasteful accident, trusting to chance which plays with loaded dice.

None of the urban plagues which have been mentioned are in the realm of destiny or blind nature; all are products of human choice and conduct; and by human energy, guided by science, they can gradually be diminished or removed; but none will disappear without effort. Even laziness may sometimes be cured by medicine. In Uncle Tom's Cabin Mrs. Stowe put into the mouth of her Yankee woman visiting the South the descriptive words, "Oh heow shiftless!" Now comes Professor Stiles and tells us that "anaemia, malnutrition, marked indisposition for sustained exertion, and resultant social condition, usually described as 'shiftlessness,' which have characterized large numbers of the poorer class of rural whites in the South, are due to a widespread infection with the Uncinaria americana, or hookworm."

It would be a rational ground for hilarity, to make even a Quaker or a Puritan laugh, if some of the worst demons of economic vice could be expelled from the system with a good dose of vermifuge. Who shall set a bound to science?

The form of the topic limits our discussion to description of present facts, and, rigidly interpreted, would not permit us to consider how far these actual evils are remediable nor by what means. Of course the greater and only final human interest lies in the methods of amelioration provided by the sciences of sanitation, public hygiene, and education.

But the detection and description of the adverse factors implies the possession of a standard and the consciousness of the wrong as wrong. This is in itself an important step on the way to betterment.

A multitude of people will, for good reasons, choose rural homes; another multitude will select urban homes; both may be aided to live a rational life with wholesome surroundings; both can, up to the measure of their capacity, live a complete human life; and already men in institutions of learning, on farms, in cities, and in administrative positions are seeking the ways to the best possible life for farmers and residents of cities.

Dr. H. B. Young, N. Y. Medical Journal, November 28, 1908, p. 1028.

The literary and scientific man is tempted to regard the farmer as lacking in intellectual quality because the latter has not expressed his ideas in melodious phrases or buried them in laboratory memoirs.

If we look closely we can discover that farmers have really a vast fund of valuable knowledge-knowledge of vegetables, animals, wounds, diseases, remedies, technical processes, government, law, markets, prices, transportation. The farmer is an experimenter. All he learns he expresses, not in literary form, in articles in books, but in improved land, in selecting according to biological principles the best seeds and the best stock for breeding, in adapting his methods to climate and soil, in building up schools and churches, and in rearing healthy children.

We need not be too industrious in making out differences between rural and urban populations. The differences in homes, habits, and satisfactions on which comic cartoonists and some social philosophers lay emphasis either do not exist, except in imagination, or are merely superficial. The broad hat, rough boots, wild beard, and exposed suspenders of the caricatured "hayseed" have little meaning in respect to the essentials of human character. The city dweller judges by what he sees and he does not see much of the real farmer. Many of the railroad kings, whom our British ambassador praises as the ablest men of our nation, are the children of "clod-hoppers" and may retain a little of the ancestral trick of getting over rough ground to their destination. We need to be on our guard against hasty, unfair, and misleading generalizations, and the prejudices of our Brahmin caste. Many of our rich men, under expert medical advice, are living a rural life several months of each year for physical and mental health. They are wise who return periodically to the conditions of life which have thus far helped to maintain the vitality of our nation at the highest point. The aristocracy of England, and their imitators, are ambitious to own and occupy country seats. This will lengthen the life of this group-not always with eugenic consequences.

But what of the poor in our cities, whose crowded rooms are pestilential in winter and purgatorial in summer? Is the best

we can do for these to send them to the country for a week, or give dying babes a charity ride in a floating hospital? Are even the small park and playground, the miniature reminder of real country, the horizon of our vision? We have already adopted in our building ordinances a minimum standard of cubic atmosphere and square feet of window space for actinic rays; but as yet we have not come in sight of a standard of outdoor space per man, woman and child. We are merely making unscientific guesses and leaving the real control of sky and grass room to individualism and commercial motives, that is, to the besotted and the blind. In many cases suburban manufacturing villages, built to escape the rule of trade-unions, soon develop unsanitary conditions of smoke, dust, unwholesome housing, and bad drainage and water supply, without securing any of the advantages of moral surroundings.

A more comprehensive system of social control is required in order to promote social selection economically and effectively. What direction must this control take?

1. It has been proposed that we try to educate the prosperous and healthy to produce more children. In the first Report of the Committee on Eugenics of the American Breeders' Association it was urged:

It is a pressing problem to know what to do to increase the birth-rate of the superior stocks and keep proportionate at least the contribution of the inferior stocks. One of the most promising influences is the eugenic movement started in England by Galton and Pearson to make proper procreation a part of religion and ethics, rather than a matter of whim only. .... Our appeal should .... be directed to men of average ability to have families which will bring at least two children to maturity and parenthood and especially to men of superior ability to have larger families.

With this conclusion and with this appeal there can be no reasonable ground for controversy. Unquestionably something can be gained by persuading people to consider procreation from the point of view of racial interest and patriotism. The Roman Catholic church has certainly succeeded in Canada and the United States by urging its members to outpopulate the Protestants; whether always with eugenic results must be a matter for

further investigation. At any rate the universal and persistent teaching and counsel in the confessional secures results; general freedom from divorce and from childless marriages. If this mighty religious influence could be made scientific and eugenic— and why not?-it would be an immense help toward improving our American stock.

But there is a limit to the willingness and the duty of persons of ability and health. If they should really try to run a race with the thriftless, the reckless, the dwarfs, the neurotic, the vicious, the criminal, the insane, the feeble-minded, what would be the outlook? Can we seriously urge this policy without further measures? The effort might be too costly, might even lead to the exhaustion and degeneration of a large number of conscientious and morally earnest mothers. Society has no right to ask of such persons unreasonable sacrifices in a hopeless competition with the unrestrained appetites of the unfit and undesirable.

2. There is a way by which society can secure a better stock in one or two generations, and that is by the use of legal powers which it already exercises without raising any ethical or constitutional questions. It is not necessary to reproduce in a brief report the mass of facts collected and presented with almost passionate earnestness by Dr. Rentoul. We have at hand the celibate colonies of insane, feeble-minded, and epileptics. The policy of segregation nowhere raises doubt or general opposition. It is clearly and distinctly the right of a commonwealth, when called upon to support a large number of the obviously unfit, to deprive them of liberty and so prevent their propagation of defects and thus the perpetuation of their misery in their offspring.

But the policy of segregation has one disadvantage, which Dr. Rentoul has made prominent: the insane are discharged when cured, and yet become parents of degenerates; and the feebleminded and epileptic cannot always be guarded so as to prevent propagation. Therefore the policy of painless asexualization is offered.

3. But no social policy of segregation or of asexualization can

Race Culture or Race Suicide.