The Biologists' Responsibility. "Such ascent, it seems to me, is the greatest responsibility with which we biologists and eugenists are charged today. "To begin at home, 'not more but better Americans,' which raises the question, What is an American? recently debated in [small caps]The New York Times[end small caps] (Jan. 17, 1932) with a number of my distinguished compatriots. The substance of my contention in this symposium was that the 'Simon-pure' American is not hyphenated. He has all the strong and all the weak points of the ancestral Nordic as well as of the more recent Alpine and Mediterranean stocks. He is possessed of certain qualities which make him far inferior to men of other races, an inferiority which he should freely admit and, as far as possible, rectify by education. "He is now suffering severely from birth limitation which is seriously threatening the best strains of old American stock. He therefore needs to thoroughly understand the principles of birth selection rather than the principles of birth control. For him the Third Congress of Eugenics has a particular significance, but since the Congress is international it should carry an equally clear and distinctive message to each of the nations represented as well as to each of the primary races of mankind. The slogan 'not more but better Americans' should have its counterpart in every country in the world in which the rising spirit of nationalism and of an entirely natural and reasonable pride should be accompanied by the consciousness that quality rather than quantity is the essential element of progress in every country and in every race. "With such principles in mind, and with the picture of the world suffering acutely from dysgenic reproduction, from the multiplication of the incompetent, and the alarming increase in the power of the criminal class before me. I cannot refrain from expressing my deep conviction that, of all remedial and restorative agencies, the well-understood and well-applied principles of birth selection advocated by Galton, with birth control as a subsidiary principle, stand in the very front rank of progressive civilization." Disputes Dublin on Population. From his recent voyage around the world and observations in many lands, Professor Osborn continued, he has reached the conclusion that overpopulation and unemployment may be regarded as twin sisters. From this point he finds that the United States is overpopulated at the present time. In this he takes issue with Dr. Louis I. Dublin, third vice-president of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, who found that "our exports exceed our imports" and that we are "quite able to feed and house our present population and many more that may be born or come in from abroad in later years." "I do not agree with Dr. Dublin," Professor Osborn said, "as to the population in the United States, for I think the present unemployment figures represent a condition likely to be in part permanent. "A recent unemployment estimate, revised by Dr. Dublin on July 30, is as follows: [columnar mtl]Germany . . .5,500,000 France . . .1,000,000 United States . . .10,000,000 England . . .4,000,000 [score for total] Total . . .20,500,000 [end columnar mtl] "While some highly competent people are unemployed, the mass of unemployment is among the less competent, because in every activity it is the less competent who are first selected for suspension while the few highly competent people are retained because they are still indispensable. In nature these less-fitted individuals would gradually disappear, but in civilization we are keeping them in the community in hopes that in brighter days they may all find employment. This is only another instance of human civilization going directly against the order of nature and encouraging the survival of the unfittest." Cataclysm Forces Attention. In addition to the six general conditions of overproduction, overpopulation, &c., which Professor Osborn found, he discovered, "in many but not in all countries, overspeculation and a consequent overcapitalization, which places and intolerable burden of debt on individuals and communities which at the present outlook there are few means to repay." "Every port I visited," he continued, "revealed overpopulation, overproduction, and unemployment - whether in the South Seas or in the great cities of Europe and America. Everywhere ports were full of empty vessels. Everywhere the number of employees in all grades was being cut down, and everywhere the world's staples, even rice, stood about in quantities far exceeding the world's demand. "It has always required a cataclysm to force a natural law upon the attention of man. Cataclysmic plagues of malaria, of typhus, of yellow fever, of tuberculosis, of cancer, forced upon human genius the imminent crisis of discovery, of palliation, of prevention, of cure. So in this world cataclysm of overpopulation, of overmultiplication of the unfit and unintelligent, of the reign of terror of the criminal, of the tragedy of unemployment, eugenics ceases to be the cult of the few pioneers like Galton and Leonard Darwin; it is forced upon our attention. Once more man is humbled because he is suffering from prolonged ignorance or actual defiance of and transgression of the most central and fundamental of all natural laws." Sterilization of Defectives. Sir Bernard Mallet, K. C. B., of London, in a paper on "The Reduction of the Secundity[sic] of the Socially Inadequate," stated that "apart from segregation, which is clearly the best method, it is only to sterilization that we can look to limit the fertility of mental defectives and of those families which are our problem; an increase in their family, after the first two or three, is looked upon by the parents as a misfortune, and there is reason to believe that advantage would be willingly taken by married women of facilities for sterilization if offered." "It is for this reason," Sir Bernard said, "that two years ago the Eugenics Society undertook to advocate the application of sterilization to mental defectives and to persons afflicted with hereditary defects seriously impairing physical or mental health of efficiency; and as it appeared doubtful whether eugenic sterilization was legal in Great Britain, we promoted the introduction of a bill in Parliament to allow voluntary sterilization under certain safeguards. It must, unfortunately be recognized that little progress has yet been made in the solution of the problem of the reduction in the fertility of the undesirable elements in our population. It is, on the contrary, a commonplace that birth control has so far acted dysgenically, by reducing the fertility of the better-endowed strains, while leaving relatively unchanged the birth-rate of those who are less fit for parentage." The eugenist, Sir Bernard added, is sometimes apt to create class prejudice by an unqualified assumption that the poor are necessarily less well endowed from a racial point of view than the well-to-do. Dr. E. S. Gosney of Pasdena, in a discussion of Sir Bernard's paper, said that a recent estimate from Germany was that at least 100,000 women were sterilized there in private practice each year and it seemed likely that the number sterilized in private practice in the United States was greater. Mental Disease Widespread. "The number of socially inadequate people in the United States is appalling," it was asserted in a paper by Dr. J. H. Landman of New York. "The total number of patients with mental disease resident in State hospitals has increased from 31, 973 in 1880 to 272,527 in 1929. There were 427,125 patients in all the hospital for nervous and mental patients in 1931. "The number of feeble-minded and epileptics under institutional care in 1929 were 64,253. On April 1, 1930, there were 57,084 deaf-mutes and 63,489 blind in our country. The State and Federal prisoners had increased to 116,626 prisoners on Jan. 1, 1929. Prisoners committed during 1931 reached the large figure of 70, 966. Paupers in almshouses numbered 78,090 on Jan. 1, 1923. "If the present rate continues, and there is no apparent reason for thinking it will not, by 1934, we will have more than 500,000 people in our nervous and mental institutions alone. One out of every 160 people in the United States during 1930 was a patient in an institution for nervous and mental disorders. Families that send a child to an institution for feeble-mindedness average twice as many as those who send a child to the university. "In 1928 it was estimated there were 10,000,000 people at large who were socially inadequate. They would include the mentally defective, the criminal, the blind, the deaf, the crippled, the germ-diseased, the degenerative-diseased, and all other dependents. The estimate of the number of insane and mentally defective, according to the Human Betterment Foundation, exceeds 18,000,000 people in the United States. "Deep-seated changes are taking place in the quality and quantity of our people. Some of these changes are beneficial; others are detrimental. Statesmen must take heed of these changes and tendencies. Much of it is fraught with danger to the fabric of our country." Dr. Jan Sanders of Rotterdam, Holland, in a paper on "Measures to Encourage the Fertility of the Gifted," said that it was impossible to select all gifted persons by intelligence tests. In separating gifted persons from less gifted it is necessary, he said, to take groups of the population in which a relatively large number of able people are found. The declining birth-rate noticeable in so many parts of the world, Dr. Sanders declared, it not so much a biological as it is a moral and cultural phenomenon. He suggested several measures that may be helpful in preventing further decline of the birth-rate. [end]