2 The Science of Eugenics
itself in climates where frost does not cut it off, will revert to its ancestral stock? It is a long way back from the magnificent Arabian courser almost human in its intelligence to his forebear, the wild, shaggy, fierce horse of the plains. Our flocks and herds are unrecognizable specimens of shaggy, scrawny brutes raised to perfection by the inbreeder's art, skillful and elimination.
As has been said, we can not exterminate incompetents, but we can suppress their production.
Nobody but a fool will mix tares with his good grain. On the contrary, every man makes perfect marriage between the soil and the seed he sows, else, as he well knows, his harvest will be poor, small, perhaps nil, and fit only for the furnace with the chaff of the threshing floor.
Good Seed Planted in Bad Soil
Nor does the intelligent husbandsman plant good seed in a poor soil; and if the soil be good and the seed poor the result will be degeneracy of crop and an unmarketable harvest. This is the crux of the whole human situation; the present conditions that tend to reversion to scrub, degenerate stock, and the work of centuries to be done over again.
Out of this situation has arisen the science of "eugenics" or more properly, "eugeny."
Practically, "eugenics" means a good race, or nobility or birth, and it is now applied especially, to the development and improvement of the human race.
We can not fully comprehend the summary or collective law of nature impressed by God upon the original particles of all things, so as to make them attack each other and come together, and by their repetition and multiplication produce all the variety in the universe, but the faint notions we have lead us to adopt regulation of this collective law as a necessary protection to men in their social relations.