The Eugenic Marriage, Volume I. | Page 7

honest investigation. The critic and the wit have deliberately misinterpreted its principles, and have almost succeeded in masking its supreme function in the garb of folly.
The writer has yet to meet a conscientious mother who fails to evince a reasonable degree of enthusiastic interest in eugenics when properly informed of its fundamental principles.
The eugenic ideal is a worthy race--a race of men and women physically and mentally capable of self-support. The eugenist, therefore, demands that every child born shall be a worthy child--a child born of healthy, selected parents.
No one can successfully assail the ethics of this appeal. It is morally a just contention to strive for a healthy race. It is also an economic necessity as we shall see.
The history of the world informs us that there have been many civilizations which, in some respects, equalled our own. These races of people have all achieved a certain success, and have then passed entirely out of existence. Why? And are we destined to extinction in the same way? We know that the cause of the decline and ultimate extinction of all past civilizations was due primarily to the moral decadence of their people. Disease and vice gradually sapped their vitality, and their continuance was impossible. [xx] It would seem to be the destiny of a race to achieve material prosperity at the expense of its morality. When conditions render possible the fulfilment of every human desire, the race exhausts its vitality in a surfeitment of caprice. The animal instincts predominate, and the potential vigor of the people is exhausted in contributing to its own amusement. Each succeeding civilization has reached this epochal period, and has fallen, victim of the rapacity of stronger and younger invading antagonists, themselves to succumb to the same insidious process.
The present civilization has reached this epochal--this transition--period. In one hundred years from now we shall either have accomplished what no previous civilization accomplished, or we shall have ceased to exist as a race. Our success depends on the response of the people to the eugenic appeal. Few appreciate the responsibility involved.
It is not necessary, however, to combat or deplore the evils of the past. Civilization has failed in the task of race-maintenance; it failed, however, in ignorance. We cannot plead the same excuse. We are face to face with conditions that we must solve quickly or our destiny will be decreed before we apply the remedy.
A function of the eugenist is to gather and attest statistics, and to establish conclusions based on these statistics. It has been conclusively demonstrated that, if the race continues to progress as it exists now--that is, if conditions remain the same, and our standard of enlightenment, so far as racial evolution is concerned, does not prompt us to adopt new constructive measures--every second child born in this country, in fifty years, will be unfit; and, in one hundred years, the American race will have ceased to exist. We mean by this that every second child born will be born to die in infancy, or, if it lives, will be incapable of self-support during its life, because either of mental degeneracy or physical inefficiency. This appalling situation immediately becomes a problem of civilization. No state can exist under these conditions. If these statistics are reliable--and we know they are true and capable of verification by any individual who will go to the trouble of [xxi] investigating them--it is self-evident that a radical change must immediately be instituted to obviate the logical consequences that must follow as a sequence. The eugenic demand, that "every child born shall be a worthy child," is, therefore, the solution of the problem.
This does not imply, however, that the eugenist must solve the elementary problem of how the state will ensure its own salvation by guaranteeing worthy children. Worthy children can come only from fit and worthy (clean and healthy) parents. It becomes the imperative function of the state--the function on which the very life of the state depends--to see that every applicant for marriage is possessed of the qualities that will ensure healthy, worthy children. We must, therefore, sooner or later devise a system of scientific regulation of marriage, and it is at this point we stumble against the problem that has prompted the ebullitions of the wit and the sarcasm of the critic. A casual reference to the science immediately suggests to the layman an impossible or quixotic system of marriage by force. Even the word "eugenics" is associated in the minds of many otherwise estimable old ladies, and others who should know better, with a species of malodorous free love, and their hands go up in holy horror at the intimation of a scientific regulation of this ancient function.
Unfortunately, the popular mind has received the impression that this incident constitutes the sum total of the