PEOPLE 33 [photo][photo credit]From the Jacques Louis David painting in the Louvre, by Ewing Galloway [photo caption]RAPE OF THE SABINES Primitive mate selection in the legendary battle between the Romans and the Sabines. tion, the human race would not be even as good as it is today. We can readily imagine that the primitive savage was the first eugenicist. He improved his race by methods which do not fit into our civilization. He killed his weaklings and if he didn't, nature did it for him. We have better methods indeed. Probably certain places in China for all of the age of that nation, are as primitive or even more so than African tribes which we consider to be barbarians. The famines of China are of a sort that truly civilized people can scarcely conceive of. There human life is cheap. The population of China is growing rapidly; some one has figured that if we were to set up a post and then assemble people in China and march them eight abreast past that post, each rank walking lockstep with the one in front, the procession would never end. Under such conditions it is no wonder that human life is cheap. In China girl babies and sickly boy babies are very frequently drowned. Sometimes whole families take hands and jump into a canal together. These are not the least valuable members of Chinese society, moreover. They are often, and one might almost say, usually, families with the most sensitive natures, those which cannot bear to see their own members dying off from hunger. This process, observers tell us, is going on all the time and what is the result? Persons with emotions which are naturally so hard that they can stand such sights are tending to survive. The more brutal natures live, the more sympathetic perish. If the kind of conditions which are prevailing in China continue, then this sort of suicide may be having a eugenic effect. But how much better it would be, when the sum total of human happiness is considered, to have a smaller population, and in consequence, a type possessing greater human sympathy! The ancient Greeks pursued somewhat the same course. The ideal of the Greeks was a great army, men fitted for military duty. Perhaps in accordance with their ideals, infanticide and death to the less useful members of society by exposure, tended to be eugenic, but certainly one would not say it was humane. It would not fit into our civilization. We do not need powerful men for war, rather we are trying to eliminate war, and eugenicists are endeavoring to show the racial consequences of our kind of warfare. Some have said that the hand-to-hand struggle [end]