There is a fallacy. . . in the notion that because on the whole plants and animals have advanced in perfection of organization by means of the struggle for existence, and the consequent survival of the fittest, therefore, men in society, men as ethical beings, must look to the same process to help them towards perfection. . . . Social progress means a checking of the cosmic process at every step and the substitution for it of another, which may be called the ethical process; the end of which is not the survival of those who may happen to be the fittest (in the respect of the whole of the conditions which obtain), but of those who are ethically best.[1]
The eugenist would say that he is in full agreement with that statement, but he seems to think that the inheritance of these ethical qualities follows the same laws as the inheritance of biological qualities. Man may be bred for qualities just as the race horse is bred, but he may not then fit social conditions any better than a race horse fits plowing. It is of interest and biological value to discover the verification of Mendel's law in the inheritance of eye color and stature, but it has no more social significance than whether Mendel's giant or late peas tasted the better. Many of the other data collected belongs in the same class. They belong to the world of description, while good and bad belong to the world of appreciation and value and are subject to entirely different laws. This is the idea which no one seemed to understand, offered by Dr. Richard C. Cabot last fall at the meeting of the Society of Sanitary and Moral Prophylaxis, when he insisted that there is no necessary relation between "the rules of sanitation and the commands of morality."[2]
For purposes of argument I am willing to grant that imbecility and some diseases are sufficiently pathological to justify some eugenic measures, though some brief could be made for even the feeble minded, but every other one of Dr. Davenport's catalogue I will not grant. Consider some of them: "poverty, sexually immoral, criminalistic, those who can not control the use of narcotics, liars, and those who run away from home and school, good manners, high culture." A few of these may be related to imbeciles, but so far as they constitute social problems only a very small per cent, of them are the result of biological abnormality, and yet they represent conditions that seriously handicap race improvement.
Please keep this list in mind while we turn to another consideration. There are two technical terms in sociology which are gaining increased significance. They are social control and mores. The latter is one of the methods of the former. Mores was the word used by the late Professor Sumner, of Yale, to indicate the mental and moral environment into which a child is born and which he accepts as ultimate intellectual and moral authority. The widest variety of racial and social expressions must be explained by means of this post-natal psychological in-
