V. L. Kellogg. Sociology and Eugenics.221
and Wales for the quinquennial periods 1861-1865 and 1905-1909, shows
that the death rate of children under one year of age was but 23 per cent,
less in the second or present-day period than in the early one, while there
was a difference of 48 per cent, in the mortality in the second year of life,
of 59 per cent, in the third, and of 61 per cent, in the fourth. That is, if
children can really start living we can now give them a good chance to go
on. If, however, they are born actually inadequate to live, no degree
of progress in that branch of medicine known as the “ care and health of
children ” can have much interest for them. What they demand, if not
for themselves, because it is too late, but for those who are to come, is
some radical progress in the care and condition of parents.
But perhaps worse than death to the child, and certainly worse to the
race, are those horrible ills of congenital idiocy, pronounced diathesis of
disease, inevitable deafmutism and all the rest that the modern study of
heredity has shown to be the unescapable fate of the child born of defective
parents. So that figures of infant mortality due to pre-natal influences pale
into insignificance for the eugenist in the face of the figures of the living
doomed to suffering and incapacity and to be a drag on the race. Hence
it is that the attention of the eugenist is bound to be attracted to any
institution in present human life which may seem to contribute either to the
advantage or disadvantage of the eugenic ideal, the well-born child. Any
human institution that may increase or decrease that peril in child life,
which we may call the peril of parentage, is legitimate field of our interest
and study. Such a human institution of great age, great development and
great prestige is war.
What would seem logically to be the inevitable consequence of the
human selection exercised by war in its actual removal from a given
population of an undue proportion of sturdy men by death from wounds
and disease, and in its removal in both war and peace times of still larger
numbers of its stronger young men from their normal and needed function
of race perpetuation, has been pointed out by a few writers from the times
of the Greeks to the present. Perhaps the logic of the matter has been
more clearly and strongly stated by two philosophical biologists than by
most of the others. Herbert Spencer, thirty years ago, and David Starr
Jordan, in the very present days, enunciate and emphasize the thesis that
the removal by war of the strongest and the leaving at home of the weakest
men to propagate the race is bound to have as result a physical deterioration
of the population concerned. It is, these men claim, a simple, easily
understood phenomenon of artificial selection.
President Jordan has for the last five years made veritable propaganda
of this thesis, and thereby drawn to it a fresh and more considerable
attention than it has ever before had. Yet during the whole of the last
oentury the thesis has been supported by a succession of men, as Tenon,
Dufau, Foissac, Tschouriloff, de Lapouge, Richet and others in France;
