PEOPLE 41 against the widespread instruction in contraception by physicians to their married patients, the upper classes of the population who have the initative and resources to evade the law and receive contraceptive instruction from their private phsycians, practice contraception generally. On the other hand, the lower classes have the initiative nor the resources effectively to evade the law, and physicians will not risk their professional standing by unlawfully giving such instruction to charitable patients in public clinics. The result, it was said, is that we are rapidly breeding from the bottom. It was most interesting how the opponents of the Gillett bill attempted to use the work of Drs. Dublin and Kuczynski to prove their points from a population point of view. Every population authority in this country has perhaps studied the works of Drs. Dublin and Kuczynski more than any opponent at the hearings of the Gillett bill, yet I think it can be safely said that there is not a recognized population authority in this country that now opposes the Gillett bill. Nowhere is a little knowledge more misleading than in the field of population problems. The problems of war and the differential birth rate are perhaps the most vital population problems that face humanity, and in both of these problems it is evident that a wider spread of contraception among the general adult married population is necessary rather than attempts to stimulate a cradle competition between the upper and lower classes by prohibiting contraceptive instruction. [centered hairline score] MENDEL IN COURT Mendel's law, in its relation to eye color, has been cited in two court proceedings in Chicago. In the first there is said to be an inheritance of a million dollars at stake, and in the second the custody of a four year old child. George Adair Longley claims in the first that although his eyes are brown, he is the son of George W. Longley and his first wife. Mr. Longley senior left a large estate and it is in an attempt to enlarge his share in it that the younger Longley is said to make his claims. Drs. Charles B. Davenport of the Carnegie Institution of Washington and H. H. Newman of the University of Chicago are among the geneticists who have testified. In the second case an estranged husband and wife are in dispute over the custody of the child Maxine. Edward Entringer of Dell Rapids, North Dakota, has brown eyes; his wife, living in Chicago with the child, has blue eyes. The child's eyes are blue. The mother claims the child was born to her by a previous blue-eyed husband. Entringer claims she is his daughter by Mrs. Entringer. It is generally recognized that parents whose eyes are pure blue cannot produce children with brown eyes. But pure blue eyes are very rare, most blue eyes having brown pigment or tinges of gray, hazel, or green. Therefore it is possible for parents whose eyes seem pure blue but really are not, to have children whose eyes are slightly more pronounced in the non-blue shades. "Fit Men For The Future" Dr. Glenn Frank, president of the University of Wisconsin, and one of the most influential of leaders of progressive thought in America is a believer in eugenics. In a recent editorial called "Fit Men for the Future", one of a series widely syndicated in daily newspapers and copyrighted by the McClure Newspaper Syndicate, Dr. Frank said: "In the days ahead when we shall be busy with the delicate and difficult business of piloting our industrial system through its transition period from the old regime of pioneering expansion to the new regime of statesmanlike adjustment, we shall need, more than we have ever needed them, the fittest possible men. "At this point the biologist enters the picture to offer his counsel to the statesman. "As I have suggested many times before, the biologist is disturbed by what seems to him the tendency of America to reproduce its population from its less and least fit rather than from its better and best human stocks. "The birth-rate of the less desirable seems to him to be outstripping the birth-rate of the desirable. "Family limitation among the kind of folk America need most! "Prodigal fecundity among the kind of folk America needs least! "This cannot by mean, the biologist thinks, a dangerous dilution of the quality of the American people just as we enter a phase of our national development when we shall need an adequate supply of superior men. "The biologist is convinced that the stability of the American future requires the consistent rearing of larger families by the more desirable, and smaller families by the less desirable. "He does not want us to go back to barbarism and let natural selection weed out our weaklings, but he insists upon the necessity of setting motion forces of enlightenment and of using every legitimate means of preventing the unfit and the unfortunate from outbreeding the fit and fortunate. "And this, he thinks, will prove, in the long run merciful to the unfit, for the present relative birth-rate of the fit and the unfit will bring America to a time when there will not be enough fit to take care of the unfit. "The biologist does not think it is merciful to bring into the world children biologically too weak to stand the strain that modern life imposes upon men. "To breed such offspring is to send them with chained feet into the race of life. "The biologist is not out to plead for race suicide; he wants race improvement; he wants to ensure an adequate supply of men and women built of sound stuff. "Since the days ahead will call for the best we can muster of mind and morals, it would not be a bad idea for the statesman to listen a bit to the biologist." California The February meeting of the Southern California Branch of the American Eugenics Society was held February 9. R. W. Poindexter, Jr., secretary, informs us that Dr. M. J. Vincent, associate professor of sociology at the University of Southern California spoke on the subject, "Shall Every Married Woman Lose her Job," in connection with the present condition of unemployment. Rev. Oliver M. Butterfield read a paper which the branch outlines as follows: "California is one of a dozen states [photo of Margaret Sanger][photo credit]Underwood and Underwood [photo caption]MRS. SANGER Ready to testify at Washington [end]