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6 Law. & Banker & S. Bench & B. Rev. 143 (1913)
Rational Eugenics

handle is hein.journals/lbancelj6 and id is 159 raw text is: Rational Eugenics By HON. HENRY WELLINGTON WACK, of the New York Bar. Gradually two cases are forming themselves, instead of informing themselves, about this expanding subject-those who scoff and scout, and those who rant and shout. Between them lies the field of rational eugenics for the betterment of the race-physically, mentally and morally. No form of life within the care and dominion of civilization is so neg- ligent, so involved in an unreasoning maze of self-esteem and blind belief of predestined perfection, as the human family in its function of self-per- petuation. We would not propagate vegetables with the same indifference to science and selection, environment and culture, which obtains in pro- ducing the greatest of all entities, the human individual. Society, the State, our national efficiency, the moral and the intellectual plane of the people, can rise no higher than the average virtue of the greatest number. And this is founded solely upon the inherent integrities of the individual. If he remains deficient, the family, the group and the State will rot from the top down. It is a fallacious and an indolent assumption that the level of any attained state in the life of a people or in that of the plant can be in- definitely maintained. All matter, all plant and animal life, is either in a state of ascending development, or it is decaying and passing out of exist- ence. Nothing remains beyond its span, whether that be the seasonal cir- cle of the life of a flower, the campaign glory of the thoroughbred horse, or the agitated career of man. It is all a movement toward, and decline from, the prime of life. Nothing is permanently arrested. We breed cattle with the utmost care, skill and pride. Science is the midwife of the cattle ranch of modern times. Governmental departments and large private fortunes are devoted to the perfection of breeds. In the poultry world strong men grow garrulous and women have brain storms over the angles and tail lines of the Plymouth Rock hen. I know a poultry breeder who receives a dollar each for eggs ($15 a setting), and whose undefeated Leghorn cock is valued at $4,000. He is an artist, a scientist and a fanatic in his feathered sphere. What was an ordinary, cackling hen twenty years ago has, under his system of selection, become a wonderful egg-laying machine. He ought to write an encyclopmdia and tell us how he has achieved the success which causes the Japanese government to pay him $5,000 a year for pullets for that nation's purpose of teaching the Jap to eat meat and thereby-as it hopes-to raise his stature as a soldier! But this enthusiast of the poultry pen who is up and doing at four o'clock every morning, and who would not permit a defective hen to sur- vive the broiler or the boiling pot, manifests no interest whatever in the fact that the half-witted, the criminal, the diseased and other defectives in his neighborhood may and do, of their own wanton and unrestricted choice, and impelled by the caprice of abnormal passions, people the earth with herds of undesirable, defective, burdensome and unfit children to tax this and future generations with their increasing blight. It is a strange, an

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