THE NEW DECALOGUE OF SCIENCE c| ----- ALBERT EDWARD WIGGAM Division HQ. 7 51 Section .W65 4 THE NEW DECALOGUE OP SCIENCE Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2019 with funding from Princeton Theological Seminary Library https://archive.org/details/newdecalogueofscOOwigg THE NEW DECALOGUE OF SCIENCE I: " s ALBERT EDWARD WIGGAM INDIANAPOLIS THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY PUBLISHERS Copyright, 1922 , 1923 By The Bobbs-Merrill Company Printed in the United States of America PRESS OF BRAUNWORTH & CO BOOK MANUFACTURERS BROOKLYN, N. Y. TO MY WIFE Whose extensive readings in the lit¬ erature of biology, psychology, genetics and heredity have alone made this book possible, and whose eyes have for many years largely taken the place of my own, this effort to think about things, instead of fictions, wish-fancies and symbols of things, is affectionately dedicated. \ > PREFACE I am indebted in many ways to many men either through their books or public lectures or through personal letters, stray remarks and casual observa¬ tions, or else through long continued table talks, sometimes extended into gray morning hours, those priceless hours when men think in each other’s presence aloud. In some or all these respects I am indebted to Frederick Adams Woods, Professor Edward L. Thorndike, Everett Dean Martin, Pro¬ fessor John Dewey, James Harvey Robinson, Doc¬ tor Irwin Edman, Professor Thomas Hunt Morgan, Doctor Charles B. Davenport, Doctor Raymond Pearl, Professor E. M. East, Professor G. T. W. Patrick, Professor F. C. S. Schiller, Alleyne Ireland, Judge Harry Olson, Professor Franklin H. Bid¬ dings, Professor William MacDougall, Professor Karl Pearson, Doctor J. McKeen Cattell and Pro¬ fessor Lewis M, Terman, Deeper, however, than to any one else, perhaps, is my debt to my boyhood teacher in ethics and philosophy, the late Doctor Daniel W. Fisher, Presi¬ dent of Hanover College, whom, although his im¬ mense scholarship was largely that of a past age of thought, I still regard with reverence as having been one of the great teachers of the world. Doctor Glenn Frank, whose career, in my judg¬ ment, will be one of the world-events of the coming generation, and who in his genius, scholarship, poise and insight represents the new type of statesman, of whom I have endeavored to write, has kindly read PREFACE the manuscript twice and made many invaluable suggestions. Thanks are due the Century Magazine for per¬ mission to reprint the brief essay entitled “The New Decalogue of Science, ” which appeared in the issue of March, 1922, and which forms the basic outline of the present volume. Also to the Pictorial Review for permission to reprint from its issue of June, 1923, the chapter on Preferential Reproduc¬ tion. A. E. W. New York City, October 8, 1923. CONTENTS THE ETHICAL CHALLENGE Page The New Biology and the Old Statesmanship .... 15 THE FIVE WARNINGS 1 That the Advanced Races Are Going Backward ... 25 2 That Heredity Is the Chief Maker of Men.42 3 That the Golden Rule without Science Will Wreck the Race that Tries It.54 4 That Medicine, Hygiene and Sanitation Will Weaken the Human Race.6.1 5 That Morals, Education, Art and Religion Will Not Improve the Human Race.69 THE ETHICAL TRANSITION The New Mount Sinai—The Laboratory.79 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS OF SCIENCE 1 The Duty of Eugenics.99 2 The Duty of Scientific Research.112 3 The Duty of the Socialization of Science.121 4 The Duty of Measuring Men.135 CONTENTS —Continued r Page o The Duty of Humanizing Industry.153 6 The Duty of Preferential Reproduction ..171 7 The Duty of Trusting Intelligence.186 8 The Duty of Art..205 9 The Duty of Internationalism.. 217 10 The Duty of Philosophical Reconstruction.233 10 The Duty of Philosophical Reconstruction—Continued 247 10 The Duty of Philosophical Reconstruction—Concluded 254 THE ETHICAL OUTLOOK The Mental Habits for a New Approach.273 Index .291 THE ETHICAL CHALLENGE THE NEW DECALOGUE OF SCIENCE The New Biology and the Old Statesmanship to his excellency, the statesman executive mansion Sir: Biology, as Your Excellency I fear is only vaguely aware, is the science of life. It is what we know of living things. Statesmanship, as you are fully aware, is the art —and we hope may some day be the science—of the control of life. Now, you control life upon a vaster scale than any other human being. In every field of adminis¬ tration of those affairs which lie beyond individual control, whether in business, industry, education, religion or politics proper, you are the cliiefest ar¬ biter of the destiny of the race. More than any other member of the community you determine who shall secure food, and who shall starve; who shall secure clothing and shelter, and who shall freeze; who shall obtain life’s opportunities—its education, its social and economic rewards, and who, in these respects, shall fail; in short, who shall survive and who shall perish in the struggle for existence. In a 15 THE NEW DECALOGUE OF SCIENCE real sense you determine the very trend of human evolution. What you think, therefore, and say and do about life is the most important thing in the whole world. Yet, Your Excellency, I venture to address you personally in these pages, because there are now on the shelves of our libraries at least five or six thousand volumes and special investigations deal¬ ing with this subject of life of which, I regret to say, it seems you have never even heard. They represent the experiments upon life and the best thinking of many of the world’s greatest minds and noblest spirits for the past one hundred years. Since your own task is so extremely difficult and since you are dealing with precisely the same problem as are these men, it would seem that you could be of mutual service. You could immensely aid the biologist, and he believes that, after a hundred years of toil, he is now able to aid you. Every act of yours is freighted with such incalculable human destiny that it would seem, in ordinary humanness, of which your heart is so full, that you, your colleagues, your cabinets, chancellories, legislators, would all be waiting with bated breath for every one of these great new in¬ sights into nature and human nature, these new solutions of your own most pressing problems to pour from the laboratory. Above all, when you witness daily the marvelous benefits in comfort, food, clothing, shelter, transpor¬ tation, wealth, health and longevity, which science in all its forms has brought to you and to your com 16 THE NEW DECALOGUE OF SCIENCE stituents, it would seem that you would seek earn¬ estly to adopt for your own work at least the spirit and method, the life and view-point by which all these blessings have been achieved. Their danger lies in that they may increase the speed of life but not its tide and volume, its movement but not its cubic content, its swiftness but not its momentum. If you do not gather this new spirit and method, if you do not then apply it with decision and in¬ telligence not only to wealth but to life, science, instead of bringing Utopia, will surely bring chaos. All this sense of progress will be merely a biological joy-ride with hell at the next turn. If I am mistaken in saying that you have never even heard of these numerous volumes about life, I am not mistaken, I think, in saying that they have had singularly slight influence upon your policy and action. Your public utterances, but not your political, economic or social structure and procedure, reveal however that you are familiar with some Ten Com¬ mandments which God wrote on tables of stone and gave to one of your predecessors as the true chart of statesmanship. He later added two supple¬ ments known as the Golden Rule and the Sermon on the Mount. Though you know them well, you have failed conspicuously to put these nourishing principles into practise; but what I think will sur¬ prise Your Excellency is to learn that God is still doing the same thing. However, in our day, instead of using tables of stone, burning bushes, prophecies and dreams to reveal His will, He has given men the 17 THE NEW DECALOGUE OF SCIENCE microscope, the spectroscope, the telescope, the chemist’s test tube and the statistician’s curve in order to enable men to make their own revelations. These instruments of divine revelation have not only added an enormous range of new command¬ ments—an entirely new Decalogue—to man’s moral codes, but they have supplied him with the tech¬ nique for putting the old ones into effect. Men have never been really righteous because they did not know how. They could not obey God’s will because they had no way of finding out what it was. The spirit of the old commandment to love thy neighbor as thyself was right, but how could a man love his neighbor intelligently when he did not know what was good for him? The Good Samaritan bound up his fellow traveler’s wounds, but doubt¬ less left them full of microbes and thus probably killed him. The Good Samaritan on the Hoad to Jericho and the Good Samaritan on Broadway live in two different moral worlds. “Give a cup of cold water to your neighbor” was a precious admonition, but modern science sternly asks, “Are there any colon bacilli in it?” “Multiply and replenish the earth” was a counsel of perfection when there were only eight people on the globe, but when there are two thousand millions it gives even the rhapsodist pause. Especially, the biologist would like to know wliat sort of stock the earth is to be replenished with. He has found that many who multiply the most have not sufficient intelligence to add. And so one could run through all the great new cate- 18 THE NEW DECALOGUE OF SCIENCE gories of modern conduct. Your own imagination will suggest that the range of ancient moralities for a tribe can not suffice for the ethics of a planet. Not only that, the biologist has discovered that often ap¬ parently the noblest ethics for the born, work dis¬ aster to the unborn. It is not a personal nor tribal nor immediate morality, but a planetary, cosmic, generational, protoplasmic ethics that alone will make men really righteous. It is, therefore, no extravagant assumption but the surest deduction from science itself that science only can supply mankind with the true technology of the will of God. If His will is ever to be done on earth as it is in Heaven, it will have to be done through the instrumentalities of science, that is through the use of intelligence. Conscience will have to look through the microscope if it ever sees its duty aright. The most earnest sense of duty will not supply men with the true objectives of that duty. The “spirit of Christ,” which we are glibly told will suffice for salvation, is majestic in its im¬ pulse and in its objective, but sadly lacking in any technique for connecting the two. It points truly the “steep and thorny path to Heaven,” but it sup¬ plies no engineering details for making the ascent. In fact man is either on his way to new scenes and changes, new varieties of untried being or else he is in fearful danger of falling into naught. For as old Cato cried from his prison walls, “If there be a power above us, and that there is, all nature cries aloud through all her works, He 19 THE NEW DECALOGUE OF SCIENCE must delight in virtue. And what He delights in must be happy.’’ But again he cries, 4 ‘When or where?” Science answers, “Here and now, or no* where and never.’’ This world was not, as Cato said, “made for Caesar.” It was made for the common man. Indeed, so far as science knows, this world was not made for anything. It simply is. It is simply here for this organic creature man, himself, who is the outcome of its multitudinous but friendly forces, to make it a congenial decent home to live in, love in, marry in, rear his children in, and die in. So far, except in limited areas and for brief moments for a few people it has never been fit for any of these things. For most people it has been merely a place to fight and freeze and starve in, with a snatch now and then of wine and poetry and song. It may always be so. It may be that man’s only hope is to “grunt and sweat under a weary load of life” on the bare hazard that another world will right the ills of this. But science is lighting the world with a different faith, a belief founded on knowledge, that this world, too, can be made clean and sane and happy. If man can not clean up this world with the stupendous cosmic engine of science now in his hands he does not deserve another. He will have to receive it as a pittance because some¬ body else “atoned” for his foolishness. But the scientist can not be daunted with the failure of one generation or even one age. He looks to the long results of time. His old geology has taught him patience. But he believes that man will 20 THE NEW DECALOGUE OF SCIENCE cease looking solely to the hills which the Psalmist intimated was his only source of help, and look closer about him and within him into his own psychology and biology in order to aid whatever help may come from on high. This does not mean necessarily that what lies upon and beyond those hills has ceased to stretch a friendly hand to the heart that trusts them. The scientist knows that beyond them are many things not within his ken. He knows, as the mystic can not know, that beyond them lie nobler mysteries and finer adventures of the spirit than the mystic has ever dreamed. But the things that lie beyond he believes are as friendly as those he has found on this side. Consequently without troubling he trusts them. He believes they are on the side of intelli¬ gence. Instead of believing that religion is merely “morality touched with emotion,” and that such a religion will furnish a ready made science of society, he believes that intelligence touched with emotion is the only guide to morality. That kind of moral¬ ity touched with emotion is religion. And that kind of religion and only that kind will induce men to clean up this world, instead of letting its filth accu¬ mulate in the belief that man’s stay here below is too short for it to be worth while to make the place decent. Men have been dominated by this belief for ages with the obvious result that religion and mor¬ ality have scarcely progressed beyond the Stone Age. We are still in the Stone Age of ethics. As John Dewey in substance asks, where is our science of society—our moral adjustments of men to 21 THE NEW DECALOGUE OF SCIENCE one another—comparable to onr progress in chem¬ istry or physics? There simply is no such progress, there is no science of society, because men have not known how to behave toward one another—have not known until this age of science how to be righteous. But at last, Your Excellency, men do know how to be good. Science has supplied them with a true technique of righteousness. The time has ar¬ rived for a new Decalogue, a new Sermon on the Mount, a new Golden Rule. These new codes of conduct have none of the absolutism of the old. They are fluid as evolution, flexible as human nature. Yet the new dispensation is just as divine, as sacred, as inspired as the old. It is filled with warnings of wrath, both present and to come, for the biological ungodly, as well as with alluring promises for them w T ho do His scientific will. These warnings should first make you tremble; they should, secondly, make you pray; they should, thirdly, fill you with the militant faith of a new evangel. THE FIVE WARNINGS THE FIEST WARNING That the Advanced Races Are Going Backward The first warning which biology gives to states¬ manship is that the advanced races of mankind are going backward; that the civilized races of the world are, biologically, plunging downward; that civilization, as you have so far administered it, is self-destructive; that civilization always destroys the man that builds it; that your vast efforts to im¬ prove man’s lot instead of improving man are ha¬ stening the hour of his destruction; that the brain of man is not growing; that man as a breed of organic beings is not advancing; that microbial diseases are chiefly the by-products of our civilizations; that these microbial diseases are apparently decreasing, while at the same time man’s incapacity to resist them is probably increasing; that the great physio¬ logical diseases of man’s body—heart disease, Bright’s disease, diabetes, cancer, degenerative dis¬ eases of the arteries, liver and central organs—are increasing; that the functional neuroses, the dis¬ eases that affect man’s mind and behavior—neuras¬ thenia, hysteria, epilepsy, insanity and the multi¬ form minor mental and nervous derangements of function—are probably all increasing; that weak¬ lings, paupers, hoboes and imbeciles are increasing; 25 THE NEW DECALOGUE OF SCIENCE that leadership and genius—great men and first- class workmen—are decreasing. Lest Your Excellency may gain the impression that I merely wish to alarm you, let me urge you to glance at the chart of your own national biology. You recently called the picked youth of your nation to the colors and found that practically one-third of them were physically unfit to defend their coun¬ try. Some of their defects could be remedied by surgery or hygiene, but Dr. Eugene Lyman Fisk, Medical Director of the Life Extension Institute of New York, after extended statistical analysis concludes that “the total rejection rate for physical reasons would lie between thirty and forty per cent., and this at the most favorable age group,” that is, from age twenty-one to thirty-one. In the most extensive analytical survey ever made of our national physical assets, one conducted bv Doctor Fisk, in collaboration with the American Engineering Societies, and at the suggestion of Sec¬ retary of Commerce, Mr. Herbert Hoover, just pub¬ lished under the title Health Building and Life Ex¬ tension, this conclusion is expressed: “So far from the draft records giving an exaggerated impression of the degree of physical deficiency that prevails in the general population, it is clear that they con¬ vey an under-estimation of the true conditions. So far as they go they may well arouse concern as to the physical state of civilized man, but much must be added for defects unrecorded (by the draft) which may in later life impair efficiency and lower resistance to disease.” 26 THE NEW DECALOGUE OF SCIENCE The British Military Committee, as quoted by Doctor Fisk, summed up its conclusions on British vitality as follows: ‘ ‘ Of every nine men of military age in Great Britain on the average three were per¬ fectly fit and healthy; two were on a definitely in¬ firm plane of health and strength; three could al¬ most with justice be described as physical wrecks; and the remaining man as a chronic invalid.” Doc¬ tor Fisk further states it as “the thesis of his book” that there has already shown up an increas¬ ing death rate for men and women who have reached the age of forty and even of thirty-five. Examination of large, apparently healthy groups of men and women in both industrial and com¬ mercial life by the Life Extension Institute dis¬ closes at least fifty per cent, in need of medical or surgical attention. Mr. E. E. Bittenhouse, actuary of a prominent life insurance company, states that “diseases of the heart, circulation and kidneys have apparently increased in our registration states more than one hundred per cent, since 1880.” Mr. J. K. Gore, in 1916, at that time president of the Actuarial Society of America, stated as his conclu¬ sion that “the death rate is increasing at the higher age periods and that the death rate from diseases of the circulation and kidneys had increased within this generation by fifty per cent.” While on the other hand the most extreme conservative, Freder¬ ick I. Hoffman, a distinguished statistician, believes this increased mortality rate is not yet a national menace, yet he states, as quoted by Doctor Fisk, 27 ' THE NEW DECALOGUE OF SCIENCE “that affections of the circulatory and urinary or¬ gans are decidedly more common in a fatal form in early old age than would seem necessary’’ in the light of modern preventive measures. You also examined by the latest psychological methods nearly two million of these picked young men for the army to ascertain their mental alertness or proficiency. You have also within the past few months examined by much more highly refined and careful methods, through your educators, some two million school children. While just what phases of the physio-psychological make-up of human beings these tests do measure is still under dispute by those most competent to carry on such a contro¬ versy, yet the results of testing these two great co¬ horts of individuals are in the main mutually har¬ monious and supporting. The majority opinion of these competent students seems at this date safely to be that they did to an encouraging degree sepa¬ rate the natural quicks from the natural slows— those who had the inborn ability to learn slowly or quickly, at least in the two fields of mentality, namely, abstract and mechanical thinking. Prof. Edward L. Thorndike, of Columbia Uni¬ versity, one of the wisest of living men and a leader in this field, suggests that the human mind is made up of three fairly distinct intelligences, the mechan¬ ical, abstract and social. One might think also of adding two others, the musical and artistic. While they all overlap, yet there are marked differences among individuals, in the relative prominence of the 28 THE NEW DECALOGUE OF SCIENCE three types of intelligence. The abstract and mechani¬ cal intelligences were probably much better evalu¬ ated by these tests in the army than was the social intelligence. The general moral qualities, such as determination, docility, cooperativeness, doggedness and what Prof. June Downey, a pioneer in experi¬ mental measures of the emotions, calls the “will-tem¬ perament complex,’’ were not accurately measured in the soldiers, although they were somewhat more accurately delineated among the school children. However the proof first furnished in 1906 by Frederick Adams Woods, the American biologist, that mental and moral qualities are strongly knit together in man’s hereditary constitution, has been followed by abundant proof that all good qualities tend to be associated in mortal make-up. Conse¬ quently the mentally alert were beyond question on the average the morally sound. The executives and moral leaders were not found among the C minus, D and E classes in mental quickness. As a result the most exhaustive measurement will prob¬ ably never very radically change the general curve obtained by the army measurements. No one has ever claimed, as wrongly inferred by some hasty journalists, that these tests measure intelligence un¬ influenced by environment or education. However, the most competent students believe that the largest element measured was native intelligence and that this intelligence is very little subject to increase by education although proficiency in using it is enor¬ mously increased. 29 THE NEW DECALOGUE OF SCIENCE Intelligence appears to me to be the thing that enables a man to get along without education. Edu¬ cation appears to be probably the thing that enables a man to get along without the use of his intelli¬ gence. Once a new situation is comprehended by the intelligence it is thereafter largely carried on by the education developed from the experience. Many other definitions could be given of the word intelli¬ gence, but if here we limit it to the inborn capacity of a man to meet a new situation, education likely has little influence in increasing it. It is doubtless an inherited character the same as any physical character, as abundant evidence has been collected to prove. I regret lack of space for continuing this discus¬ sion in detail, but keeping these qualifications in mind, the novel situations presented by these mental tests or mental alertness tests, aid us to tell which individuals possess intelligence and, for most prac¬ tical purposes, how much intelligence they possess as compared with their fellows. No one knows how much a watt of electricity is nor how much a pound of steam, but engineers know what each will do, and can compare their relative power. Conse¬ quently in comparing men with each other as to what they can do and will do, the tests are a most effective and satisfactory instrument even in their present undeveloped state. Thus, after making all possible allowances a biologist gains a strong impression from modern mental testing that one of the outstanding re- 30 THE NEW DECALOGUE OF SCIENCE suits of civilization is that it has made the world safe for stupidity. A very significant proportion of these adult men could not decide such momentous problems as the following, which are but two out of a large series put to them, and to all of which three ready made answers were suggested by the exam¬ iners: 44 Why are cats useful? (1), Because they catch mice; (2), because they are gentle; (3), be¬ cause they are afraid of dogs.” Another question was: “Is it wiser to put some money aside and not spend it all so that you may; (1), prepare for old age or sickness; (2), collect all the different kinds of money; (3), gamble when you wish.” Many men gave wrong answers and many were compelled to acknowledge their inability to decide such important matters. Since you have thousands of such men and women, each casting a vote upon the most complex national and international problems and each vote equal in weight to those of the editors of the Army Report, and since you consider the voice of these thousands to be the voice of God, it calls into serious question the mental alertness of the latter. The most conservative interpretation I am able to find is that of Col. Robert M. Yerkes, one of the chief promoters of these tests and an editor of the Army Report—the famous Memoir XV. He con¬ cludes that at least fifty million people in this coun¬ try have not sufficient brains to get through our cer¬ tified high schools. This would probably indicate that fifteen or twenty million can not go beyond the fourth or fifth grade and the other thirty million of 31 THE NEW DECALOGUE OF SCIENCE your less intelligent moiety are scattered along be¬ tween this point and high-school graduation. Prob¬ ably eighty-five million, Colonel Yerkes seems to think, will be compelled to stop their cultural educa¬ tion with their high-school diplomas from lack of that type of intelligence which from all available evi¬ dence seems to be the best for general citizenship. It seems likely from Colonel Yerkes’ conclusions that the next ten million can make only moderate college records, and that only the top four million or five million can graduate with any degree of brilliancy and go on into fields of independent, abstract and creative thinking. It is highly probable, if these estimates be even approximately correct, that fifty or sixty voters out of every one hundred who are constantly clamoring for “more democracy’’—which to the unintelligent means more power and not more wisdom—could not possibly understand the theory and workings of democracy if getting into Heaven depended on it. Of course there is a vast deal of personal good¬ ness and of sound character all along the line, but I am not speaking of the qualifications which will ad¬ mit a man to the kingdom of Heaven but of those that will keep us out of a hell on earth. But all these facts of intelligence and physique need not in themselves greatly alarm you. What¬ ever our intelligence and physique may be it is all we have. I am not at this moment concerned pri¬ marily with whether our intelligence is high or low but with its prospective, indeed by your present 32 THE NEW DECALOGUE OF SCIENCE methods, its certain decline. The danger to this country is not from its seventy or eighty or ninety millions who may have little or no brains, but from its five or ten millions who have. It may be that to-morrow some necromancy of education or some ectoplasmic injection will transform our twenty or thirty or forty per cent, of social and political dunces into geniuses. But pending that possibility, the psychologist has spread here before you the main materials of democracy. If our estimate of these materials be too high or too low it does not greatly matter. No nation was ever overthrown by its imbeciles. Nature abhors a vacuum and for that reason weeds out the heads of fools. The signifi¬ cant thing is that the fools are increasing and those responsible for their welfare are decreasing. For you defy nature with your civilization. As President Stanley Hall has said: “Man has not yet demonstrated that he can remain permanently civ¬ ilized.” Or as Sir E. Ray Lankester, the British biologist, has warned you, you have taken evolution out of the mighty hand of nature into your own feeble one. And unless you have the courage and intelligence to go on and complete the task, nature will periodically hurl you back into savagery—the red sea of natural selection—where as he says, she “will wreak upon you the vengeance which she al¬ ways has in store for the half-hearted meddler in great affairs.” Man dare not be a half-hearted meddler in this great affair of his own evolution. He has egotistically taken it into his own hands, and 33 THE NEW DECALOGUE OF SCIENCE yet so far has used scarcely more intelligence than would a babe who had had placed in his tiny fingers the cosmic engine that guides the stars. Evolution is a bloody business, but civilization tries to make it a pink tea. Barbarism is the only process by which man has ever organically prog¬ ressed, and civilization is the only process by which he has ever organically declined. Civilization is the most dangerous enterprise upon which man ever set out. For when you take man out of the bloody, brutal but beneficent hand of natural selec¬ tion you place him at once in the soft, perfumed, daintily gloved but far more dangerous hand of ar¬ tificial selection. And, unless you call science to your aid and make this artificial selection as effi¬ cient as the rude methods of nature, you bungle the whole task. And you are doing this on a colossal scale in industrial America. For your five or ten millions are decreasing, while your eighty or ninety millions are increasing. I wonder if Your Excellency has ever heard of a dif¬ ferential birth rate. I have searched through the utterances of the executives of this and other lands for any intelligent pronouncement upon the subject. All I have been able to unearth are a few letters written by our executives to congratulate the twen- ty-dollar-a-week parents of a dozen or more twen- ty-dollar-a week children. As Huxley pointed out, the character of the birth rate is the prime original basic problem of all poli¬ tics. Nations have often perished because of a dif- 34 i THE NEW DECALOGUE OF SCIENCE ferential birth rate. A difference in the total birth force of one class of the population over another of even one-tenth of a baby per family will in a short time alter the whole character and destiny of a people. You have established a difference of approx¬ imately a whole baby and a half between your five or ten millions and your eighty or ninety millions. In addition to this ominous phenomenon you have deliberately introduced within the past two decades, at least two million oppressed peoples of other lands, of lower intellectual ability than your ten million or more negroes already on hand. Prof. Carl Brigham of Princeton, in a book about life which I commend to your immediate attention, en¬ titled A Study of American Intelligence , a brilliant interpretation of the mental tests of the army, gives ample evidence that especially the Nordic elements of our population are being forced out by other races whose representatives in this country are of dis¬ tinctly lower average mental alertness and of less social coherence and political capacity. This race has contributed a vast share of all political wisdom and scientific discovery to the modern world. It is probably the one race on earth wdiich has steadily advanced in these respects for the past several thousand years. Had we invited to our country better representatives of these other races the whole problem would present a different aspect. It would still, however, present many grave difficulties, since mixed races are a menace in the operation of popu¬ lar government. 35 THE NEW DECALOGUE OF SCIENCE Moreover, all modern liberal statesmanship— autocratic statesmanship never makes such an error —has rested its case upon two great sentimental nebulosities, first, that all men are created equal, especially in political wisdom, and, second, that God will raise up leaders unto the people. Well, all men are created unequal in all respects and lead¬ ers come not by prayer but by germ cells. Greece has been calling for her galaxy of greatness to re¬ turn, for two thousand years, but it has not come. The poet Browning thought that if only the ancient Greek language and literature could be taught to her people again they would with loud acclaim enter once more into the spirit of her beauty and the intellectual capacity to reproduce her glory. But, either God has seen fit to chastise her, or, what is more probable, the heredity, the blood, the germ cells from which her leaders sprang have been bur¬ ied in her enchanting ruins. Spain has been calling for three hundred years for her lost world influence, but I think Frederick Adams Woods has mathematically demonstrated that her real glory was buried with the blood of her great kings. Evolution is a stern taskmaster that knows no compromise and grants no reprieve. And the biologist can not avoid the apprehension that you are plunging our nation into the same great his¬ toric slough of biological despond. True, even with our present intellectual capacity, social progress is far, far from being at an end. Even a whole race can live upon borrowed social, 36 THE NEW DECALOGUE OF SCIENCE though not borrowed biological capital. The ideals of Greece have enriched every social order of the world. The mist of every people’s dreams bequeaths a more potent air for men to breathe long after their ambitious marbles have crumbled into dust. Nations have gone through a renaissance and climbed to national excellence without the slightest increase in the mental capacities of the people. But I urge you to reflect that this has taken place only when two things were present, first, those social and economic conditions, customs and ideals which re¬ sulted in a high birth rate among the abler stocks, and, second, when their leaders have thought freely and bravely upon both practical affairs and the con¬ cerns of the spirit. Without the first being present continuously, the second phenomenon soon runs its course. The final test of democracy is its capacity to breed leaders. Nearly all changes in history have been brought about by babies. Up to a genera¬ tion ago the outstanding biological feature of our national life was that its abler ten millions produced more babies than its less able ninety millions. I commend to you a brilliant study of this problem by Mr. John Corbin in his significant book, The,Re¬ turn of the Middle Class. So long as our sounder middle class breed freely, the tide of any nation’s genius will run to the full. But what have you—the average man in power —actually accomplished with your naive meddling with evolution? Mr. Alleyne Ireland, the publicist, in his Democracy and the Human Equation —an- 37 THE NEW DECALOGUE OF SCIENCE other valuable book about life for statesmen to pon¬ der—has reached a remarkable conclusion from the researches of Havelock Ellis and Frederick Adams Woods. He states that throughout all English his¬ tory down to the opening of the period of mass democracy, about 1800, approximately one out of nine national leaders sprang from the laboring classes. During the next twenty-five years this pro¬ portion had sunk to practically one out of fifteen. By 1850, when mass democracy had run only the first half-century of its career, this proportion had dropped to well-nigh one out of twenty-two! It is likely now scarcely one in forty or fifty, though nothing but inferential impressions are available. Cattell has shown that in America not a single day laborer’s son has become a man of scientific dis¬ tinction. The wholesale rise of the masses to power may be the death knell of their biological progress. Like a bottle of old wine, which, when uncorked, for a time sparkles and fumes with life but soon becomes inert and stale, so it seems that men, when freed from oppression for a time bubble with genius. But ambition is sterilized by its own success. Indeed without biology as the basis of social processes, success spells failure and achievement brings decay. Like caged animals, those who rise cease to breed. And soon the masses are left in the direst poverty known to man, the poverty of natural leadership. Lincoln thought that the Lord must love common people or He would not have made so many of them. A biologist 38 THE NEW DECALOGUE OF SCIENCE is bound to suspect that you had some hand in the process. You will perhaps pardon a biologist if for the moment your supreme political gesture in this di¬ rection during the past seventy-five years in America should touch his sense both of humor and pathos. You have proclaimed that men are born equal in social and political wisdom, and rendered the Con¬ stitution largely obsolete in order to develop the machinery to make your faith effective. But you have done this in the name of our fathers, who founded an aristo-republic for carrying on an aristo-democracy and who placed in your hands a Constitution especially designed to frustrate any such ghastly possibility. They had no faith in the people as a mass, and tried by elaborate, even gro¬ tesque checks and balances to counteract their pas¬ sions and nullify their obvious lack of political gen¬ ius. You have reversed the whole beneficent process with probably profound biological consequences. Yet, true to your habit of assuming Elijah’s mantel to cloak your lack of political inspiration, you have done it in the name of the fathers who thought they had put such fantastic projects under lock and key. The simple fact is that “the most unequal thing in the world is the equal treatment of unequals.” Your difficulty is not that men are too unequal, but they are not unequal enough. “There is one point in which all men are exactly alike and that is they are all different.” The more you equalize oppor¬ tunity, the more you unequalize men. Indeed the 39 THE NEW DECALOGUE OF SCIENCE whole aim in making opportunity equal is to make men unequal—to draw out and utilize each man’s individual capacities, emotions and powers. And you have failed beyond all calculation to make op¬ portunity equal in anything except the privilege to vote upon measures so complex that genius can only partly comprehend them. For, when you give the born hod-carrier, the born poet, the born philoso¬ pher and the born statesman similar training and education, similar social and political privileges and obligations, and hold before them similar economic rewards, you have not given unequal men equal op¬ portunity. You have given unequal men the same opportunity. You have tried to make the poet a machinist and the astronomer a tinsmith. You have failed utterly in the supreme objective of po¬ litical mechanics—the equalizing of opportunity. Instead, you have fatuously tried to equalize men. As a grand net result of this ungodly equal- itarianism you have multiplied economic injustice on the one hand and absolutely enforced biological injustice on the other. And these two forms of in¬ justice have set up economic, social, educational, and even moral and religious forces which are rapidly forcing your best blood to the biological wall. These forces are rapidly selecting out the priceless germ cells of your ten million superiors from the national blood stream. From this ten million always have and always will come nearly ninety per cent, of your real intellectual leaders. And once the germ cells of your ten millions are lost nothing is left except 40 THE NEW DECALOGUE OF SCIENCE the stern but effective discipline of barbarism until, finally, out of a sea of blood, natural selection can again lift your leaders. In that distant day your ideals, your institutions, your very bones, will be only material to puzzle and delight the mind of the historian and the paleontologist. THE SECOND WAENING That Heredity Is the Chief Maker of Mek The second warning of biology to statesmanship is brief and simple: that heredity and not environ¬ ment is the chief maker of men; that it is essentially the man, who in the long run makes his environment, much more than it is the environment w T hich makes the man; that man is not a pawn on the chess-board of environment, the football of circumstance and the puppet of chance and change; that he is not a will- o’-the-wisp of fortune, a marionette whose wires are pulled by the hidden hand of doom; that he is not, as the glib reformer has taught you to believe, the helpless victim of the passing education, phi¬ losophy and theories of pedagogy of his time; but that, in the germ cell, from which every man is bom, there are resident those powerful personal forces by which he can rise in well-nigh any environment and, within the limits of human freedom, exclaim: “I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul.” The social and political import of this warning is that nearly all the happiness and nearly all the misery of the world are due, not to environment, but to heredity; that the differences among men are, in the main, due to the differences in the germ cells 42 THE NEW DECALOGUE OF SCIENCE from which they are born; that social classes, there¬ fore, which you seek to abolish by law, are ordained by nature; that it is, in the large statistical run of things, not the slums which make slum people, but slum people who make the slums; that primarily it is not the Church which makes people good, but good people who make the church; that godly peo¬ ple are largely born and not made; that if you want church members you will have to give nature a chance to produce them; that if you want artists, poets, philosophers, skilled workmen and great statesmen you will also have to give nature a chance to breed them. You are opposed to this belief. You believe you can make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, get blood out of turnips, find Lincolns in every log cabin by looking hard enough, and get genius out of fools. You believe that the reason one man starts at the bottom of the ladder and climbs up while another starts at the top and slides down is due to the lad¬ der being wrong end up. Science knows it is due, chiefly, to the inborn differences between the climb¬ er and the slider. Your environmental remedy is to kick the ladder from under both and put them on the same level. You thus deprive each of any means of rapid and easy transportation to his natural destination. Your childlike democratic faith that genius is ubiquitous and leadership potential under the most empty pate, waiting only to be called forth by God or a majority vote, dominates three-fourths of your 43 THE NEW DECALOGUE OF SCIENCE legislative gestures. The “cult - of the incompe¬ tent/ J the belief that incompetency is merely re¬ pressed genius, constitutes your credo. Lester F. Ward, perhaps the most dominant sociologist of the past generation, speaks frankly your basic biologi¬ cal naivete. After informing us, with elaborate de¬ scriptive—not analytical—statistics that ‘ 4 genius follows the law of supply and demand,” that ‘‘genius is everywhere, waiting only to be called forth by economic conditions,” (as though your present cha¬ otic economic conditions were not at this moment calling for this “unlimited supply” of genius to come forth and assume its power) Professor Ward, as follows, voices your political biology: “The only consolation, the only hope, lies in the truth that, so far as native capacity, the potential quality, the ‘promise and potency’ of a higher life are concerned, those swarming, spawning millions, the bottom layers of society, the proletariat, the working classes, the ‘hewers of wood and drawers of water/ nay, even the denizens of the slums—that all these are by nature the peers of the boasted ‘aristocracy of brains’ that now dominates society and looks down upon them and the equals, in all but privilege, of the most enlightened teachers of eugenics.” No responsible sociologist nor psychologist to-day believes anything of the kind. No biologist ever did believe it. If it is true then we do not know any¬ thing. So astute an observer as Jesus evidently did not believe it when He pointed out that some men 44 THE NEW DECALOGUE OF SCIENCE have one talent, some two and others five. He also recognized its tremendous practical consequences when He made the five talent man ruler over many cities and dismissed the man of one tal¬ ent brains and one talent morals from five talent social responsibility. But notwithstanding this great example, you still frequently elect the one tal¬ ent man to office, and prefer the two talent average to the expert with five. This same Teacher added upon this occasion one of the most manifest rubrics of statesmanship, when He said, “Unto him that hath shall be given.” In proof that the Master here spoke one of the profoundest, most far-reaching statements of true biology, and therefore of true statesmanship, may I relate to Your Excellency, a simple experiment? Prof. Edward L. Thorndike selected a group of people who could solve a certain number of simple problems in arithmetic in fifteen minutes. He then selected a second group who could solve twice as many similar problems in the same time. Following this he gave both groups an equal amount of prac¬ tise. The result contradicts all your faith in the equal “promise and potency” of men. The slow group advanced a little, the fast group advanced greatly. In the end, as the direct result of equalizing oppor¬ tunity, the fast group was further ahead than ever! No society can be called civilized that does not give all men equal rights and equal opportunities. But it can not give men equal brains. Every man 45 THE NEW DECALOGUE OF SCIENCE should be educated and given a chance, but you can only give him his chance—the chance of his inborn powers. No system of education can put brains into empty skulls. It can only develop what is there. Even college, as George Horace Lorimer has said, 44 does not make fools, it develops them.” All men come up by education, but 4 4 the brighter they are the quicker they come” and the farther they go. Dull people learn slowly and advance slowly to low positions. Brilliant people learn rapidly and advance rapidly to high positions—so long as you do not, as you often do, put a premium upon stu¬ pidity. You fill many of your offices with 4 4 hon¬ est” but stupid Johns and 44 faithful Joes” shining with incompetency. But, barring this, the benefit of a rich and varied environment is that everybody, both dull and bright, can advance to much higher positions. It is no paradox to say that environment is all-important and heredity is, likewise, all-im¬ portant. Both are absolute. But, barring your in¬ terference, no social order or economic system can very much change the relative positions of men. The bright will always be ahead and the dull will always be behind. Since nearly three-fourths of your efforts are directed toward reversing this natural order of things, may I ask Your Excellency a few random questions! Why is it that of two brothers under my observation in the same environment, one entered the United States Senate, while the other all his life has conducted a fourth class, small town restau- 46 THE NEW DECALOGUE OF SCIENCE rant? Why has one of our greatest publicists an imbecile brother and a wayward sister! Why, of two brothers, reared under the same roof, with the same parental influence, does one become a village loafer and the other a philosopher? Why, out of the first fifty-one names in the Hall of Fame, are ten of them the sons and daughters of preachers? Why is one out of twelve of all the names in Who’s Who, our most democratic roster of fame, the child of a minister? Is it necessary for me to present proof to you that ministers are on the average men of character and intelligence ? Why out of the first forty-six names in the Hall of Fame, have twenty- six of them from one to three relatives of national renown? Does it not argue that they probably be¬ long to great breeds, truly noble strains of blood? Why is it, that if you are born from certain strains of blood you have one chance in five of having a celebrated relative, and if from other strains your chance in this respect is hardly one in a thousand? Why has the Edwards family, living in thirty-three different countries, under differing environments, out of one thousand four hundred members given us one thousand four hundred social servants, many of world distinction, while the Ishmael family, studied by Estabrook, out of approximately fifteen thousand members has given us nearly fifteen thousand social scourges ? We saw it stated but yesterday by one of the foremost political organs of the nation, one which stands for genuine progress, that “ there is no 47 THE NEW DECALOGUE OF SCIENCE evidence of the inheritance of intelligence. ’ 9 Onr bio¬ logical libraries are filled with this evidence. Eith¬ er yon must admit that you have builded such a gro¬ tesque social order that intelligence is no use to a man; or else intelligence, as evidenced by achieve¬ ment, is inherited. I can not present the highly tech¬ nical proof, but every biologist knows that intelli¬ gence is inherited, energy is inherited, insanity is inherited, emotional possibilities are inherited, a man’s inner character is inherited. Environment is important, education is important, moral suasion is important just because intelligence, energy and character are inherited, and for no other reason. Your fear is that this is not optimistic but pessimistic. Science is not concerned with such words. Its business is to find out how the universe works, in the hope that you will adjust your phi¬ losophy to a universe that is, instead of one that is not. But is it optimistic to believe that your fundamental character and intelligence are due to the mere chance that you had a good teacher, read a good book, heard a good sermon or were born in a good town! If so then all the people born in good towns, with good books, sermons and teachers ought to be good. Does your observation confirm this be¬ lief? Those bom in bad towns and in the slums should all be bad. But do you not constantly see genius and character rising from the mire and folly and degeneracy flourishing in high places? As Hans Christian Andersen said, “It matters not if you were born in a duck pond, provided that you 48 THE NEW DECALOGUE OF SCIENCE were born from a swan egg.” Again, as Sir Thom¬ as Brown said, 4 ‘Lift not np thy hands and give thanks to heaven that thou wert born in Athens, but that integrity, nobility and honor lay in the same egg and came into the world with thee.” If a man’s character is due to his surroundings then should he happen to fall among thieves, he has precisely the same chance as they of committing mur¬ der and getting hung within a week. Moreover, one could not form the slightest idea what sort of a man he may be ten years hence, for he may find him¬ self amid totally different surroundings. War may disrupt the world. But so long as the sound hered¬ ity of the race is not destroyed the people will rise from its ashes and build a civilization of polish and grandeur again. I could cite volumes of evidence, but I urge you to examine at your leisure three lines of proof: first, the Royal Families of Europe, second, the studies made of twins, and, third, the conduct of our Pilgrim forefathers. It is not necessary to compare the Royal Fam¬ ilies of Europe with mankind in general, but Fred¬ erick Adams Woods in a noble research has com¬ pared them with one another. I commend this study to every student of statecraft. Over a period of five centuries, he finds the geniuses are nearly all grouped together by the bond of close blood rela¬ tionship; the imbeciles and degenerates are linked by the same invisible bond, while mediocrity, mor¬ ality, and other striking mental traits occur in the 49 THE NEW DECALOGUE OF SCIENCE blood groups as expected. In fact this cautious student concludes that it is perfectly startling how “herdity explains nearly ninety per cent, of the rough outlines of the character and intelligence’ ’ exhibited by these privileged persons. Professor Thorndike and others have by elabor¬ ate methods studied the heredity of twins. As you may have observed some of these remarkable be¬ ings are almost identical, while others resemble each other very little. When placed under similar environment their likenesses do not increase nor their divergences come closer together. And vice versa under dissimilar conditions those which are born nearly identical remain nearly identical and the divergences among them do not appreciably increase. Professor Thorndike sums up his ex¬ tensive treatment in these words which should con¬ vey a solemn meaning to statesmen: “The facts then are easily, simply and completely explained by one simple hypothesis: namely, that the natures of the germ cells—the conditions of conception— cause whatever similarities and differences exist in the original natures of men, that these conditions influence body and mind equally, and that in life, the differences in modification of body and mind which are produced by such differences as obtain between the environments of present-day New York City public school children are slight.’’ If you are a resident of New York City I think you will agree without argument, that the differences in environment between the children of Fifth Avenue 50 THE NEW DECALOGUE OF SCIENCE and those of the lower east side are as great as could well be brought about by any other form of economic anarchy. Lastly will you contemplate with me the conduct of our Pilgrim forefathers and contrast it with one or two other large scale exhibitions of the original natures of men? The Pilgrims landed in a wilder¬ ness and immediately felled trees and from the logs built an academy for training the intellect and spirit. Their descendants have furnished many times as many leaders to the nation as their numbers justify. A startling number of your immigrants of the past generation have devoted themselves to putting bombs under these institutions although their en¬ vironment was a thousand times better. Another contrast is furnished by the convicts which England sent to a new country at Sidney, Australia. They had as good a “chance’’ as the Pilgrims, yet they have in one hundred and fifty years succeeded only in building the largest slums in the world. I have, this moment, had laid on my table by the postman the report of a body of social workers sup¬ ported by public money. They are devoted to the care, and unwittingly to the propagation, of found¬ lings. They state with actual hurrahs that heredity doesn’t count. They prove this by citing children of unknown ancestry who have turned out well! This is a fair sample of the statistics—God save the word—-by which you have always at¬ tempted to prove that heredity—man’s inner nat¬ ure, his natural endowments of intelligence and 51 THE NEW DECALOGUE OF SCIENCE character—are of no importance in the affairs of men. The Army Mental Tests hardly gave us faith in the “unlimited promise and potency” of the C minus, D and D minus men. For defending your country at least, these were the chief things they lacked. And the thing, astounding to you, but an old story to the biologist, was that they were main¬ ly the sons of C minus, D and D minus fathers and mothers. “Promise and potency,” Your Excellency, are the only hope of a nation, and they are handed down with unerring certainty from father to son. So long as you fill the land with children who possess them, you need have little concern that environment will be neglected. Inner promise and inborn potency are the two things that create a promising and po¬ tential environment, and nothing else will. Nations are made and unmade at the marriage altar. No nation can live by heredity alone, nor by environ¬ ment alone. Both are important, but you have pro¬ ceeded as though heredity mattered not at all. Environment is important, but rich or poor en¬ vironment is but the outward mark of the wealth or poverty of either individual or national blood. There are two kinds of poverty, economic poverty and bio¬ logical poverty. You can not rid the world of either by attending solely to one. So far you have done this. Your educators and sociologists are sweeping far ahead of you. You should follow them. But, heredity is primary and basic to all else. Every statesman who forgets this will perish and carry 5 ? THE NEW DECALOGUE OF SCIENCE his state down with him. But when the statesman makes the clay out of which his people are made, their physical and mental heredity, the first object of his solicitude his nation will weather all the vicis¬ situdes of time. Only such a nation will or can transform its petty patriotisms for national ag¬ grandizement into a passion for national character. Such a true biological patriotism will give opu¬ lence to a nation’s culture, vitality to its ethics and permanence to its spiritual dominion, because its end and aim will be constantly to elevate the level of its human blood stream and keep its currents rich, regnant and alive. THE THIRD WARNING That the Golden Rule without Science Will Wreck the Race That Tries It The third warning of biology is that charity and philanthropy and your noble-hearted but often soft-headed schemes for ameliorating the conditions of life without at the same time improving the quality of life have failed and will fail to improve the human breed and are, in fact, hastening its de¬ terioration. You are the best hearted man, Your Excellency, that I know. You have a positive passion for do¬ ing good. The milk of human kindness actually oozes from your pores. You are willing at a mo¬ ment’s notice to vote any amount of money to re¬ lieve the homeless, fatherless and distressed. You gain an enormous number of votes because you are in reality “the poor man’s friend.” You mean to be his real friend. I am never concerned with what is in your heart, but only with what is in your head. You would like to do well. But hell is paved with similar pious intentions. You should first pave this world with intelligence and light it with wisdom. This is not a task for goodness of heart only, but also for soundness of head. You should look beyond the next election to the 54 THE NEW DECALOGUE OF SCIENCE next generation. It is there that many of your * measures will have their greatest effects. You fondly imagine you can speed up evolution with cakes and cream for the unfit. But nature has pro¬ gressed by letting the devil take the hindmost. Your method is to increase the number of the hindmost. Nature slaughters the innocents, but you merely throw more innocents into her ravenous maw. Your very mercy often only adds to nature’s brutality. If there really were enough money to pay skilled people to take care of less efficient people, to care for still less efficient ones, to care for those still lower in the scale and so on ad infinitum your scheme would be ideal. Thackerav said there was «/ “no Irishman so poor but that he had a still poorer Irishman living off of him.” Your scheme is, in¬ deed, ideal in every point except one—that it won’t work. Perpetual motion machines have the same minor defect. They run for a time and are perfect in everything except perpetuity. Gravitation finally takes its toll. So in time will nature take her utter¬ most farthing from your plan for regenerating the world by coddling the incompetent. You think your cakes and cream will hasten the millennium. But a millennium for the unfit would be a biological hell for the fit. There are three inherent biological difficulties with your method. First, that mental, moral and physical qualities are all strongly inherited. All through nature, like begets like. “Like father, like son” is older than Eden. Pauperism is as distinctly 55 THE NEW DECALOGUE OF SCIENCE inherited as the capacity to create wealth, I know one family in which in a hundred and fifty years not a single member has saved up five hundred dol¬ lars. They lived all that time among associates who created and saved thousands, even millions. The second difficulty is that such people reproduce as freely as their more highly endowed neighbors. And third, there is no correlation between fertility and intelligence or any other feature of spiritual excellence. By this I mean that stupid people beget children as freely as bright people. The latter take care of their children better and rear more to ma¬ turity. For that reason, if you let things alone, the superiors will, in the long run, outbreed the infer¬ iors. But there is always enough of the latter left to make a serious problem. A problem which you “ solve ” by merely making it greater and more dif¬ ficult. It is said that Daniel Webster, when called upon to pay a bill, would give a promissory note for it with the satisfying remark, “Well, thank God! that bill’s paid.” You are following the same plan of circular finance. You are trying to pay your over¬ due bills to evolution with promissory notes. Any man who intelligently examines his tax sched¬ ule and discovers that in many states from one- fourth to one-third of it goes to take care of de¬ fectives and the socially inadequate must realize that these promissory notes are rapidly falling due. Dr, Harry H. Laughlin, of the Eugenics Record Office of the Carnegie Institution, in an admirable 56 THE NEW DECALOGUE OF SCIENCE memoir to Congress has shown that for a genera¬ tion you have been bringing immigrants into your land “to develop its natural resources” who fur¬ nish from two to three times the quota of your old native stocks to fill your eleemosynary institutions. This takes no account of the enormous number not confined, but breeding further potential inmates with undiminished vigor. Can you develop your natural resources by polluting at its source your greatest natural resource, the blood of your people ? You think that this applies the Golden Rule. It is a flattering unction and gains you many votes. But the Golden Rule, as thus falsely conceived, will wreck the race that tries it. As I ride over the country in its marvelous trains, created not by the masses to whom you have given power, but by a few unique and wonderful minds from whom in the main you have withheld power, I see from every car window the results of your perverted version of the Golden Rule. I see it filling jails, penitentiaries, reforma¬ tories, rescue homes, and asylums—mute monu¬ ments to your belated efforts to dam the ever-swell¬ ing tide of degeneracy which this kind of Golden Rule has largely created. They are merely catch¬ alls for the products of your impertinent meddling with evolution. Scarcely a dollar of this vast ex¬ penditure for cure have you spent for real preven¬ tion. You provide orphan homes for the abandoned and fatherless. This has a heart-breaking appeal and to satisfy it you can easily secure millions, But 57 THE NEW DECALOGUE OF SCIENCE the next election is too close for you to see what will happen to the next generation. You have spent only a few paltry pennies, at the plea of wiser men, to find out why children are left fatherless, and why they had no uncles, aunts, cous¬ ins or relatives competent to provide them with homes. Part of the reason is plainly had environ¬ ment, bad economic conditions, bad laws, bad dis¬ tribution of wealth, lack of education. Every biolo¬ gist knows this without, as one of your enthusiasts writes me, “laughing and crying” through reports of rescued children who turned out well. They ought to turn out well since most of them are pretty good children and all worth saving. But their stock was not quite good enough to provide homes for them and consequently you have to do it at the ex¬ pense of other people who have all the children of their own they can possibly properly care for. The biologist knows without any laughing or crying that an enormous portion of bad economic conditions and lack of education are themselves due solely to bad heredity, poverty of biological endow¬ ment, feeble self-control, neurotic, ill-balanced make-up. All these render the parents either unable to make a living or unable to live together, or cause them to get drunk or run away or murder each oth¬ er. High temper, uncontrollable fits of anger, feebleness of will, inability to hold a social ideal permanently in the mind, lack of ambition to pro¬ vide as good homes as their neighbors, lack of men¬ tal “drive”—all of those things which often end in poverty, crime, marital desertion and social inade- 58 THE NEW DECALOGUE OF SCIENCE quacy—the biologist has demonstrated are strongly inherited. High temper, for instance, he believes from present evidence is a pure “dominant.” in¬ herited thing, running in families, like brown eyes or like curly hair. He can thus predict something, at least, as to the probable character of the children of such marriages. Biologists wish merely to coop¬ erate with you in bringing about those economic con¬ ditions and social customs and ideals which will, to a large extent, make such unions of incompetency im¬ possible, and thus this kind of children will largely disappear from the world. In your combined goodness of heart and ignor¬ ance of biology, the thing that deceives you is the gratifying and often amazing results of education and good environment. Anybody knows that wash¬ ing a hog or a human being improves the morals and manners of both. But your prime difficulty is that you stop there. You seem to believe that rescue homes and orphanages are ends in themselves. On the contrary they are merely stop gaps in the great stream of human misery. Charity will no more stop that stream than a dam half-way across will stop a river. Even if you build it clean across it only in¬ creases the river’s weight and power. If you con¬ tinue to think you have finished your task when you have found a home for every unfortunate child, and fed every beggar on the streets, the impulses behind your method will be nobler than those which brought the downfall of other civilizations, the re¬ sult will be the same. But you have thrown all your energy into this 59 THE NEW DECALOGUE OF SCIENCE program, You have gained the idea that the meek and lowly should inherit the earth, and have well- nigh completed arrangements for their doing it. They already absorb nearly one-half of the time, money and energy of civilization. Little is left for art, culture and adventure. You fail to ob¬ serve that the meek and lowly you care for are mostly the grandchildren of the very same meek and lowly which your grandfather took care of, only they are far more numerous, while those who care for them are relatively less numerous. For instance, it is reported that in Indiana nearly all the crime committed by native born citizens within the past generation has been committed by about one hun¬ dred families! No doubt in every state and nation you are supporting asylums, penitentiaries and reformatories mainly to take care of a few blood lines. Why continue to breed such people on the face of the earth when entirely merciful meth¬ ods are known to science by which it can be pre¬ vented? “Unwise charity,” said a very wise man, “ creates half the misery of the world, and charity can never relieve one-half of the misery which it creates.’’ Brute nature slays its thousands, but in the end your hand-to-mouth charity will slay its tens of thousands. And unless your Golden Rule is soon established upon a sound biological basis, as some of your more thoughtful social workers are becoming aware, you will reap the whirlwind of your well-intentioned but socially disastrous folly. 60 THE FOURTH WARNING That Medicine, Hygiene and Sanitation Will Weaken the Human Race The fourth warning of biology to statesmanship is that medicine, hygiene and sanitation, together with your frantic efforts to call mental and physical soundness out of the vacuum of nowhere are weak¬ ening and will further weaken the human breed un¬ less at the same time we upbuild by selection the boundless health, energy and sanity that are already present in the stream of human protoplasm. When you play with heredity and life, Your Ex¬ cellency, you are precisely in the position of a man tossing lighted matches into gunpowder, trusting to heaven that it will not explode. Without realizing it, you are to-day playing with life and with heredity in this careless manner upon a perfectly stupendous scale. You appropriate vast sums of money to stamp out tuberculosis, to care for the cripple and deformed. You build great institutions to screen insanity from public view until their in¬ mates are “cured’* and returned to society—and to reproduction . You establish hospitals in eveiy ward and county to prolong the life of the weak, the rheumatic, the diabetic, and those to whom nature gave a shackly constitution. You raise great milk 61 THE NEW DECALOGUE OF SCIENCE funds first, for feeding babies born to lives of feebleness, second, born from mothers too weak by nature to suckle their own offspring, and third, from parents one or both of whom are too feeble men¬ tally to provide food for their children. You fur¬ nish special hospital wards for bringing charity babes into the world from parents too incompetent to earn the money to pay even for their birth, let alone their subsequent rearing. The skill of your surgeons is so great that an enormous number of babes now come into the world through extensive surgical interference, until one of your greatest authorities in this field predicts we may soon have a race of women incapable of bearing children by natural processes. I think I can do no better than quote for your consideration from a recent Cavendish lecture to the British medical profession, by Prof. Karl Pear¬ son, the English biological mathematician. Speak¬ ing with great earnestness, Professor Pearson said: “Gentlemen: . . . You are enabling the deformed to live, the blind to see, the weakling to survive— and it is partly due to the social provision made for these weaklings—the feeble-minded woman goes to the workhouse for her fourth or fifth illegitimate child, while the insane man, overcome by the strain of modem life, is fed up and restored for a time to his family and paternity. In our institutions we provide for the deaf-mute, the blind, the cripple, and render it relatively easy for the degenerate to mate and leave their like. 62 THE NEW DECALOGUE OF SCIENCE “In the old days, without these medical benefits, and without these special provisions, the hand of nature fell heavily on the unfit. Such were num¬ bered as they are largely numbered now, among the unemployables; but there were no doctors to enable them to limp through life; no charities to take their offspring or provide for their necessities. A petty theft meant the gallows, unemployment meant star¬ vation, feeble-mindedness meant persecution and social expulsion; insanity meant confinement with no attempt at treatment. To the honor of the medi¬ cal profession, to the credit of our social instincts we have largely stopped all this, but at the same time we have to a large extent suspended the auto¬ matic action whereby a race progressed physically and mentally. . . . What will happen, if, by in¬ creased medical skill and by increased state support and private charity, we enable the weaklings to sur¬ vive and propagate their kind ? Why, undoubtedly, we shall have a weaker race. ’ ’ It is a disconcerting reflection, yet we must face the fact, you, above all others, must face it, that the highest triumphs of science are mainly enlisted on the side of race deterioration. And the whole sentiment of the people goes with it because they can not see beyond their present sym¬ pathy or to-mori'ow’s bread and butter. On the one hand you have used the blessings of science to cre¬ ate strange and monstrous engines of war which murder whole populations. And they are growing stranger and more monstrous every day. While on 63 THE NEW DECALOGUE OF SCIENCE the other hand, the richest genius of the race and the tenderest emotions of the heart carry the starv¬ ing, the feeble and incompetent through to the hour when they can find no adventure except reproduc¬ ing their kind. You even pass great legislative decrees—not laws, for laws, as Faguet, the French philosopher, has shown, are due solely to the slow growth of hu¬ man custom buttressed by the sanctions of human nature—decrees by which you do to some extent make men legally good. You think that you have thereby automatically made them morally good. You seem to imagine that a more numerous and more highly trained squad of police could guide men into the Kingdom of Heaven. Men must learn that the Kingdom of Heaven is not at the State Capital but within themselves. Everywhere we turn we see that science has created a world where wishes are horses and beggars do ride, but it tends to create a race which can only survive in a moral and physical nursery. Dr. Raymond Pearl, Director of the Department of Vital Statistics and Biometrics of The Johns Hopkins University, and our highest American authority, has recently uttered to the public and to the medical profession warnings in full sympathy with those just quoted from Professor Pearson. We are appropriating large sums of money to re¬ duce the infant death rate, to prolong life without reference to its natural vigor, which is the only sort of vigor that can be transmitted to the descendants; 64 THE NEW DECALOGUE OF SCIENCE we are enlisting money and effort on a tremendous scale under the plea that we are ridding the race of tuberculosis. But as Doctor Pearl urges, the time has come when mathematical biology must render an accounting of the real results of money and effort. The accounting is not comforting. Professor Pearson, by the most elaborate mathematical meth¬ ods, in which many of your medical profession and tuberculosis cure promoters are woefully defi¬ cient, has shown that the death rate from tubercu¬ losis was falling faster before you began these great campaigns than it has been since . In 1911 he pre¬ dicted that tuberculosis, in spite of all your so-called preventive measures, would very soon show a rise. By 1918 he was able to show that in England this rise had taken place. He was not able to separate the factor of the war from the result and, therefore, determine just what part it may have played in this increase. But the rise had manifested itself, and there is every reason for believing that without the war some increase would have been shown. The large scale investigations now going on by Doctor Pearl and his staff at The Johns Hopkins Univer¬ sity upon all the factors concerned in the causation of tuberculosis, have not yet reached definite con¬ clusions, but it seems, so far, that all Doctor Pearl’s published evidence and his personal opinions based on his evidence, tend toward an agreement with the conclusions of Professor Pearson. There can be little doubt in the mind of a biologist that you are so far, by all your vast health campaigns in this 65 THE NEW DECALOGUE OF SCIENCE "direction, merely setting the stage for a rapid in¬ crease in tuberculosis all over the world. Fresh air, outdoor living and a climate free from the tuberculosis microbe, will not have the slightest influence in making the race immune. Indeed, these may make it more susceptible to the tubercular infec¬ tion. This is abundantly proved by the fact that the American Indian had never known tuberculosis un¬ til he came into contact "with the white man who car¬ ried the disease. Yet, immediately the Indians went down with tuberculosis like a squadron in the open before a machine-gun. They likewise went down in the same way with smallpox, venereal disease, measles, malaria, and all those microbic infections, which the English student, Carr-Saunders, and others have shown are largely the product of so- called civilization. The Tasmanians, one of the fin¬ est of all races physically, melted like a glacier under a tropic sun before the onslaught of measles given to them along with your Golden Rule. The last man of this noble race perished scarcely half a dozen years ago. Is it not possible that such a disgraceful denouement awaits our race if we neglect to listen to the voice of the biologist before it is too late? The same sad and astonishing spectacle greets us with reference to your noble efforts to reduce the death rate among infants. You have done this with a result positively thrilling in its extent and grandeur. But we meet the astounding fact that by saving millions of infants who are inherently too weak to survive the further strains of life, we have 66 THE NEW DECALOGUE OF SCIENCE