into factories and shops on day-shift and night-shift; that children,
frail carriers of the torch of life, are put to work at an early
age; that society at large is breeding an ever-increasing army of
under-sized, stunted and dehumanized slaves; that the vicious circle of
mental and physical defect, delinquency and beggary is encouraged,
by the unseeing and unthinking sentimentality of our age, to populate
asylum, hospital and prison.

All these things the Eugenists sees and points out with a courage
entirely admirable. But as a positive program of redemption, orthodox
Eugenics can offer nothing more "constructive" than a renewed "cradle
competition" between the "fit" and the "unfit." It sees that the
most responsible and most intelligent members of society are the less
fertile; that the feeble-minded are the more fertile. Herein lies the
unbalance, the great biological menace to the future of civilization.
Are we heading to biological destruction, toward the gradual but certain
attack upon the stocks of intelligence and racial health by the sinister
forces of the hordes of irresponsibility and imbecility? This is not
such a remote danger as the optimistic Eugenist might suppose. The
mating of the moron with a person of sound stock may, as Dr. Tredgold
points out, gradually disseminate this trait far and wide until it
undermines the vigor and efficiency of an entire nation and an entire
race. This is no idle fancy. We must take it into account if we wish to
escape the fate that has befallen so many civilizations in the past.

"It is, indeed, more than likely that the presence of this impairment
in a mitigated form is responsible for no little of the defective
character, the diminution of mental and moral fiber at the present day,"
states Dr. Tredgold.(2) Such populations, this distinguished authority
might have added, form the veritable "cultures" not only for contagious