18 Eugenics [large photo, woman with children] [photo credit]By staff photographer [photo caption]Dysgenic Reproduction A possibly not yet completed family of low grade parents shown at the door of the hovel where they live. "Carefully assembled data seem to demonstrate that the well-born are not holding their own with the less favorably born..." [text] propositions would seem to be indicated: 1. That the program of Jesus for capacity self-fulfillment for the individual and for the race, and the program of the Christian Church, following after Him, can hardly be accomplished without more knowledge and practice of simply eugenic laws. 2. That social gains will avail little if there is at the same time eugenic loss. Education can do nothing for an idiot, next to nothing for an imbecile, and only little for a moron. Hygiene may lengthen the span of life thirteen years, but if the life is of lowest quality, what avail? Charity may step in and attempt to negative the great and on the whole beneficent law of the survival of the fittest, but again what of permanent avail? Even religion may preach an easy and unworthy doctrine of forgiveness to the detriment of wholesome biologic truth. Environmental gain will become permanent only when stabilized on a eugenic foundation. 3. That more thought should be given to eugenic mating as the opportunity par excellence of improving human stock. It is not chance that shows twelve admirals to have been in Commodore Perry's line, and twenty-nine notable musicians to have been in the line of Sebastian Bach. When a Jonathan Edwards marries a Sarah Pierpont succeeding generations of the well-born will bless the land, while a libertine Max Jukes marrying an Ada the Harlot will project vice and crime through several generations and cost the State of New York several millions of dollars. The Dwights, the Lowells, the Adamses in their family histories illustrate quite clearly the advantages of being well-born; the Hill folk and the Tribe of Ishmael illustrate the manifest disadvantages of being ill-born. Are we advocating that romanticism and all the tender sentiments which young people of the opposite sexes feel toward each other should be replaced by the coldly scientific approach of biological committee? Not at all. But we do main- [end]