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PROCEEDINGS
OF THE
First National Conference on
Race Betterment
January 8, 9, 10, 11. 12, 1914
BATTLE CREEK, MICHIGAN
PUBUSHED BY THE RACE BETTERMENT FOUNDATION
EDITED BY THE SECRETARY
r"To be a good animal is the first requisite to]
success in life, and to be a Nation of good animals I
success in life, and to be a Nation of good animals (
prosperity."
Herbert Spencer.
\ is the first condition of national prosperity." |
CONTENTS
Purpose of the Conference xi
OflBcers xi
Central Committee
xu
A Partial List of Organizations Represented xiii
Local Cooperating- Organizations xvi
Addresses of Welcome—
Dr. J. H. Kellogg 1
Hon. John W. Bailey 3
PRESIDENT'S ADDRESS
The Basic Principles of Race Betterment
President Stephen Smith, M.D 5-22
STATISTICAL STUDIES
The Significance of a Declining Death Rate
Frederick L. Hoffman 23-66
The Causes of the Declining Birth Rate
Prof. J. McKeen Cattell 67-72
The Need of Thorough Birth Registration for Race Bettennent
Dr. Cressy L. Wilbur 72-78
Differential Fecundity
Prof. Walter F. Willeox 79-89
GENERAL INDIVIDUAL HYGIENE
The Importance of Frequent and Thorough Medical Examinations
of the Well
Dr. Victor C. Vaughan 90-96
Euthenics and Its Founder
Mrs. Melvil Dewey 96-104
The Relation of Physical Education to Race Bettennent (Abstract
of address)
Dr. D. A. Sargent 104-106
Apparent Irierease m Degenerative Diseases
Elmer E. Rittenhouse 106-113
Discussion
Prof. Maynard M. Metcalf (Race Degeneration) 113
Some Suggestions for a More Rational Solution of the Tuberculosis
Problem in the United States
Dr. S. Adolphus Knopf ..,.:. 113-136
V
vi KlKiST NATTOXAIi CONPERKNCE ON RiVCE BETTKRMBNT
Discussion
Prof. Robert James Sprague (Wonieu's Work in the Opeii
Air) 136
The Prevention of Arteriosclerosis
Dr. Louis Faus:eres Bishop 137-139
Hookworm Disease
Dr. Lillian South 139-142
Disease and Its Prevention
Dr. Guilford H. Sumner 142-167
Function of the Dentist in Race Bettennent
C. N. Johnson, D.D.S 157-160
Unbiological Habits
Dean William W. Hasting-s 161-166
The Increase of Insanity
Dr. James T. Searcy 167-169
Discussion
Prof. Walter P. Willcox 169-170
Deterioration of The Civilized Woman
Dr. Richai-d Root Smith 170-175
Old Age
President Smith 176-170
Service
Acting Chairman Rev. Charles C. Creegan 179-lSO
ALCOHOL AND TOBACCO
The Effect of Alcohol on Longevity
Arthur Hunter 181-192
Alcohol— What Shall We Do About It?
Dr. Henry Smith Williams 192-197
Discussion
Dr. Amanda D. Holcomb (The Sacrifice of Boys and Girls) 197
Daniel A. Poling (The Worst Diy Town vs. The Best Wet
Town) 198-200
JPres. E. G. Lancaster (Proportionate State Consumption of
* Alcohol) 200
Edward Bunnell Phelps (Caution in Use of Statistics) 200-201
Dr. Charles G. Pease (Expedients in Violation of Principle) 201-202
Dr. Heni-y Smith Williams (The Rising Tide of Alcohol
Consumption) 202-203
Prof. Robert James Sprague (Licensing Light Drinlcs) .... 203-205
' Mrs. J. L. Higgins (The "Booze Special") 205-206
George B. Peak (The Saloon and the Tax-Payer) 207-208
Mrs. Maud Glassner (A "High Class" Saloon) 208-209
Melvil Dewey (A League of Publishers) 210
Dr. Edith B. Lowry (Soothing Synips and Alcohol Crav-
ing) 211
Dr. James T. Searcy (Prohibition and Dnig Consumjjtion ) . 211-213
Frederick L. Hoffman (International Committee on Liquor) 213
Mrs. Charles Kimball and Elizabeth Hewes Tilton (Alcohol
Posters) 213-222
Tobacco A Race Poison
Dr. Daniel Lichty 222-232
Discussion
Miss Lucy Page Gaston (The Cigarette) 232-234
Dr. Amanda D. Holeomb (The Cigarette-Smoking Hero of
Fiction) 23;'3
S. S. McClure (Magazine Advertising of Tobacco) 235
Melvil Dewey (A League of Employers) 236-238
Dr. Charles G. Pease (The Non-Smokers' Protective League
of America) 238-240
CHILD LIFE
The Bad Boy
Hon. Jacob A. Riis 241-250
The. Delinquent Child
Judge Ben B. Lindsey 250-202
The Dependent Child
Dr. Gerti-ude E. Hall 262-265
Education for Parenthood
Dr. Lydia A . DeVilbiss 265-272
Better Babies
Robbins Gilnian 272-278
Discussion
Edward Bminell Phelps (Baby Saving) 278-279
Dr. E. G. Lancaster (Adolescence) 279-280
Dr. Miller (The American Institute of Child Life) 280-282
SEX QUESTIONS
Public Repression of the Social Evil
Graham Taylor 283-288
Discussion
Dr. S. Adolphus Knopf (Scattering Prostitution) 288-289
Graham Taylor (Vice and Mental Defect) 289
Dr. James T. Searcy (Race Degenerates) 290
Dr. S, Adolphus Knopf ("Waverly House") 290
Dr. Charles G. Pease (The Florence Crittenton Mission) . . 291
Miss Lucy Page Gaston (Prostitution and the Cigarette) . . 291-292
Dr. Luther H. Gulick (The Girl Who Goes Right) 292-294
Vlll FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
Prof. Samuel Dickie (The Single Standard) 294-295
Dr. Amanda D. Holcomb (The Boy's Temptations) 295-29G
Dr. Luther H. Gulick (Real Moanini-- of the Doiil^le Stand-
ard) 296-297
Mrs. D. W. Haydock (Educating- the Child) 297-29S
Mrs. F. F. Lawrence (The Americixn Mother) 29S
Prof. Robert James Sprague (Vocational Education) 298-300
H. A. Burgess (Use of Newspapers) 300
The Social Evil (A special address to women)
Dr. J. H. Kellogg 300-304
Venereal Disease (A special address to men)
F. O. Clements 304-311
A Man's Problem (A special address to women)
Dr. J. N. Hurty 311-318
A Woman's Problem (A special address to women)
Dr. Carolyn Geisel 318-323
The Relation of Education in Sex to Race Betterment
Dr. Winfield Scott Hall 324-334
SCHOOL AND INDUSTRIAL HYGIENE
Some Changing Conceptions of School Hygiene
Dr. Ernest Biyant Hoag 335-342
The Race Bettennent Movement in Women's Colleges
Dr. Carolyn Geisel .'^ 342-349
Discussion
Mrs. Melvil Dewey (College Courses in Euthenics) 340
Faetoiy Degeneration
Rev. Newell Dwight Hillis 350-355
Industrial Welfare
■ F. 0. Clements 356-364
CITY, STATE AND NATIONAL HYGIENE
Function of Individual, City, State and Nation in Race Bettennent
Sir Horace Plunkett . .V. 365-366
Miss M. E. Bingeman 366-367
Community Hygiene, with Special Reference to Meat Inspection
Rev. Caroline Bartlett Crane 367-376
The National Department of Health
President Stephen Smith (Introductory Remarks) 376-379
D?. Henry Baird Favill " 379-385
What the United States Public Health Service is Doing for Race
• .Betterment
,,Dr. H. W. Austin .385-390
CONTENTS IX
The Cost of High Living as a Factor in Race Degeneracj' and
Limitation of Families
Dr. J. N. Hurty 390-392
Government
S. S. McClure 393-400
Discission
Prof. Richard T. Ely (The Goveniment of a German City) 401
Byron W. Holt (High Cost of Living) 401-403
SeRTegation
^Hastings H. Hart , 403-410
The Negro Race
Booker T. Washington 410-420
Discussion
Hasting-s H. Hart (Sanitary Kitchens) 420-421
The Social Progi'am
Dr. Luther H. Gulick 422-425
Mrs. Luther H. Gulick 425-428
Dr. Luther H. Gulick 428-430
EUGENICS AND IMMIGRATION
Needed— A New Human Race
Dr. J. H. Kellogg 431-450
The Importance to the State of Eugenic Investigation
Dr. C. B. Davenport 450-45(i
y Relation of Eugenics and Euthenics to Race Betterment
Prof. Maynard M. Metcalf 45(i-4C)4
The Psychological Limit of Eugenics
Prof. Herbert Adolphus Miller 464-471
Discussion
Dr. G. B. Davenport (Relative Effects of Heredity and '
Environment) 471-472
The Impoi*tance of Hygiene for Eugenics
Prof. Ii-ving Fisher 472-470
The Methods of Race Regeneration
. Dr. C. W. Saleeby 476-477
4 Calculations on the Working Out of a Proposed Program of Steri-
lization
H. H. Laughlin 478-494
The Relation of Philanthropy and Medicine to Race Betterment
Prof. Leon J. Cole 494-50.S
The Health Certificate— A Safeguard Against Yicious Selection in
Marriage
The Very Reverend Walter Taylor Sumner 509-513
Discussion
Mrs. Maud Glassner (Health Certificates in :\Iicliigan ) .... 51 3-515
X FlUST NATIONAL CONKEKENCE ON KACE BETTERMENT
MaxTiage Selection
Prof. Roswell II. Johnson 515-532
Some Eilicient Causes of Crime
Prof. R. B. von KleinSmid 532-542
Kat^ Betterment and Our Immigration Laws
Prof. Robert DeC. Ward , 542-546
Race Bettennent and America's Oriental Problem
Prof. Sidney L. Gulick 546-551
Discussion
Prof. Herbert Adulphus Miller (Immigranl < 'ia.ssitication
by Mother-Tongue) 551-552
Prof. Maynard M. Metealf (Immigration) 552-553
Dr. Lulher H. Gulick (The Socially Assiuiilnied ) 553
Constnietive Su^u^gestions for Race Betterment— Suunnarized 554-589
Elesolutions 590-593
Report of the Secretaiy 594-599
Exhibits and Moving Pictures
Through a Child's Eyes
Dr. Anna Louise Strong 6CK)-603
Physical and Mental Perfection Contests
I. School Children
Report of Contest
Dean Wm. W. Hastings 694-619
Award of Prizes *
Mayor Bailey 619-620
II. Babies
Report of Contest
Dr. Walter F. Martin 620-624
Award of Prizes
Mayor Bailey 624-625
THE PURPOSE OF THE CONFERENCE
To assemble evidence as to the extent to which degenerative tend-
encies are actively at work in America, and to promote agencies for
Race Betterment.
OFFICERS
President
Stephen Smith^ A. M., LL.D., M.D., Vice-Pi-esident State Board of Chari-
ties, New York, N. Y.
Honorary Presidents
Judge Ben B. Lindsey^ LL.D., Juvenile Court, Denver, Colorado.
Hon. Woodbridge N. Ferris. LL.D., Governor of Michigan, Lansing, Mich.
Right Hon. Sir Horace Plunkett, K.C.Y.O., F.R.S., Ex-Minister of Agri-
culture for Ireland, Dublin, Ireland.
Vice-Presidents
Irving Fisher, Ph.D., Professor of Political Economy, Yale University,
New Haven. Conn.
Rev. Newell Dwight Hillis, A.M.. D.D., L.H.D., Pastor Plymouth Church,
Brooklyn, N. Y.
J. N. Hurty, M.D., Commissioner of Health, State of Indiana, Indianapolis,
Indiana.
Hon. Robert L. Owen, A.M., LL.D., U. S. Senator fi-om Oklahoma, Wash-
ington, D. C.
Executive Committee
Irving Fisher, Ph.D., Professor of Political Economy, Yale Univei-sity,
New Haven, Conn.
Rev. Newell Dwight Hillis, A.M., D.D., L.H.D., Pastor Plymouth Church,
Brooklyn, N. Y.
J. H. Kjxlogg, LL.D., M.D., Supt. Battle Creek Sanitarium, Member Michi-
gan State Board of Health, Battle Creek, Mich.
Right Hon. Sir Horace Plunkett, K.C.V.O., F.R.S., Ex-Minist«r of AgTi-
culture for Ireland, Dublin, Ireland.
Jacob A. Riis, Henry Street Settlement, New York
Acting Chairman
Reverend Charles C. Creegan, D.D., President Fargo College, Fargo, N. D.
Secretary
Miss Emily F. Robbins, New York, N. Y,
Xii KIRST XATIOXAT, COXFKRKNCK ON RACE BETTER:MKXT
Central Committee
C. B. Day FA- PORT. A.j\I.. I'li.!).. Director of the ("iinio.iiic Station for Ex-
perimental Evolution, Cold Spriiii;' Harbor, N. Y.
Vu'TOR ('. Yauchan. LL.D,. M.D., Pi-es. Elect American Medical Association,
President Michigan State Board of Health, Ann Arbor, Mich.
J. N. McCoRMACK, LL.T)., M.D., Secretary State Board of Health, Bowling
Green, Ky.
Charles TY. Eliot, A.M., LL.D.. Ph.D., President Emeritus. Hansard Uni-
versity. Cambridge, Mass.
GiFPORD PiNCHOT, A.M., LL.D., Consei-vationist, Washington, D. C.
Harvey W. Wiley, LL.D., M.D., Director Bui-eau of Foods, Sanitation and
Health, ''Good Housekeeping" Magazine," Washington, D. C.
Hon. Jacob A. Ens, Heniy Street Settlement, New York, N. Y.
S. Adolphus Knopf. M.B., Professor Phthisio-Therapy, Post Graduate Medi-
cal School and Hospital, New York, N. Y.
W. A. Evans, M.S., LL.D., M.D., D.P.H., Medical Editor Chicago "Tribune,"
Professor of Hygiene, Northwestern University Medical School, Chicago,
Illinois.
D. A. Sargent, A.M., M.D., S..D, Director of Hemenway Gymnasium, Har-
vard University, Cambridge, Mass.
Very Reverend Walter Taylor Sumner, D.D., Dean of the Episcopal
Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul, Chicago, Illinois.
Hon. Charles E. Townsend, L'nited States Senator from Michigan, Wash-
ington, D. C.
Hon. Morris Sheppard, LL.B., LL.M.. United States Senator from Texas,
Wa.shin^on, D. C.
Oscar H. Rogers, M.D.. Medical Director New York Life Insurance Com-
pany. New York, N. Y.
Winfield S. Hall, M.S., A.M., Ph.D.. M.D., Professor of Physiology, North-
western Univereity Medical School, Chicago, 111.
R. L. Dixon, M.D., Secretary Michigan State Board of Health, Lansing, Mich.
Mrs. Melvil Dewey. Honorary Chairaian, Institution Economics. American
Home Economics Association, Lake Placid, N. Y'.
Mrs. Ella Flagg Young. LL.D.. Ph.D., Superintendent of Schools. Chicago.
Illinois.
Rev. Caroline Bartlett Crane, A.M., Kalamazoo, Mich.
R. Tait McKenzie, A.M., M.D., Professor Physical Education, University of
Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pa.
John M. Coulter, A.M., Ph.D.. Professor Botany, University of Chicago,
Chicago, 111.
S. S. McClure, A.m., L.H.D.. President. The McClure Company, New Y'ork.
Ernest B. Hoag, A.M.. j\I.D., Leland Stanford University, California.
Frank E. Bruner, Ph.D.. j\LD., Board of Education, Chicago, lU,
Henry Smith Williams, LL.D.. M.D., Writer, New York, N. Y.
Graha^i Taylor. President Chicaizo School of Civics and Philanthropy,
Chicago. 111.
Hon. John W. Bailey, LL.B.. Mayoi, Battle Creek, Mich.
J. H. Kellogg, LL.D., M.D., Supt. Battle Creek Sanitarium. Member Michi-
gan State Board of Health, Battle Creek, Mich.
Reverend Charles C. Creegan, D.D.. President Fargo College, Fargo,- N. ,1).
IN-STITUTIONS AND ORGANIZATIONS REPRESENTED
A PARTIAL LIST OF REPRESENTATIVES OF INSTITUTIONS AND
ORGANIZATIONS PARTICIPATING IN THE CONFERENCE
Physicians
Austin, Dr. H. W., Representative U. S. Health Service, Detroit, Mich.
Bishop, Dr. Louis F., Fordham University.
Bemstein, Dr. Charles, Custodial Asylum, Rome, N. Y.
Carbaugh, Dr. Harriett M., Health Officer Orange Township, Portland, Mich.
Carstens, Dr. J. H., Chief Gyneologists, Harper Hospital, Detroit, Mich.
Davenport, Dr. C. B., Director Carnegie Station for Experimental Evolution,
Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island, N. Y.
DeVilbiss, Dr. Lydia Allen, Woman's Home Companion, New York, N. Y.
Dewey, Melvil, President Lake Placid Club, Lake Placid, N. Y.
Emeriek, Dr. E. J.. Supt. Institution for Feeble-Minded, Columbus, Ohio.
Favill, Dr. Heniy B.. Prof. Clinical Medicine, Rusch Medical College. Chicago,
Illinois.
Green, Dr. Frederick R., Secretan' American Medical Association, Chicago,
Illinois.
Geisel. Dr. Carolyn, Shorter College, Rome, Ga.
Guliek, Dr. Luther H., Pres. Camp Fire Girls, New York, N. Y.
Gulick, Dr. Sidney L., Author, Missionary, Kyoto, Japan.
Hall, Dr. Gertnide E., State Board of Charities, Albany, N. Y.
Hall, Dr. Winfield S., Noi'thwestern University Medical School, Chicago, 111.
Hurty, Dr. J. N., Commissioner of Health, Indianapolis, Ind.
Knopf, Dr. S. Adolphus, New York Post-Graduate Medical School and
Hospital, NeAV York, N. Y.
Kennedy, Dr. J. B., Detroit, Mich.
Lichty, Dr. Daniel, City Hospital, Roekford, 111.
Noi-thrup, Dr. "Wm., Anti-Tuberculosis Society, Grand Rapids, Mich.
Paulson, Dr. and Mrs. David, Hinsdale Sanitarium, Hinsdale, 111.
Robinson, Dr. Wm. J., Chief Visiting Surgeon, Bronx Hospital, New York,
N. Y.'
Sargent, Dr. D. A., Director, Hemeuway Gymnasium, Harvard University,
Cambridge, Mass.
Searcy, Dr. J. T., Superintendent, Alabama Insane Hospital, Tuscaloosa, Ala.
Shennan, Dr. G. H., Mich. St. and Wayne Co. Medical Societies, Detroit,
Michigan.
Smith, Dr. Stephen, Vice-President State Board of Charities, New York^ N. Y.
Smith, Dr. Richard Root, Surgeon, Buttei-woi-th Hospital, Grand Rapids,
Michigan.
Strong, Dr. Anna Louise, National Child Welfare Exhibition Com., New
York, N. Y.
Sumner, Dr. Guilford H., State Board of Health, Des Moines, la.
South, Dr. Lillian B., State Bacteriologist of Kentucky, Bowling Green, Ky.
Vaughan, Dr. Victor C, President American Medical Association and of State
Board of Health, Ann Ai'bor, Mich.
Warthin, Dr. Aldred Scott, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Mich.
Weeks, Dr. David Fairchild, Skillman, N. J.
XIV VIEIST XATIOXAl, ( OX FlOKKXl 'K OX HACK ItKTTKRl^rENT
College Representatives
Cole. Prof. Leon J., rnivcrsity of Wisconsin, Madison, Wis.
Coulter, Prof. John INI., I'niversity of Chieajio, Chicago, 111.
Creegan, Rev. C. C, President, Fargo University, Fargo, N. D.
Dickie. Sam'l, LL.D., Pi-esident, Albion College, A11)ion, Mich.
Ely, Prof. Richard T., University of Wisconsin. Madison, Wis.
Giibei-t. Prof. Arthwell W., ComeW University. Ithaca, N. Y.
Grover. Prof. Frederick ().. Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio.
Johnson, Prof. Roswell Hill. University of Pittsburgh. Pa.
Johnson, Alexander. Director, Training School, Vineland, N. J.
Lancaster, E. G., President Olivet College, Olivet, Mich.
Keoier. Prof. Fred L.. Superintendent, T)e]>t. of Public Instruction. Lansing,
Michigan.
MacDonald, Miss Gertrude L., Supt. Maine Industrial School for Girls, Hollo-
well, Maine.
Metcalf, Prof. Maynard M.. Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio.
Miller. Prof. Herbert A.. Olivet College, Olivet. Mich.
Reigliard, Prof. Jacob, I"'niversity of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Mich.
Ritchie. Prof. John W.. College of William and Mary, Williamsbui-gh, Va.
Stagg, Prof. A.A., Ph.D., University of Chicago, Chicago. 111.
Washington, Prof. Booker T.. Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute,
Tuskegee. Alabama.
Willcox. Prof. Walter F., Cornell University. Ithaca, N. Y.
Social Workers
BussoU. Reulali. Anti-Tuberculosis Society. Grand Ra]iids. Mich.
Bussell. Nellie Eileen. Sec. Anti-Tuberculosis Society, Grand Rapids, Mich.
Dilley. Cora B., Chicago Boys Club Farm, Paw Paw. Mich.
Gaston, Lucy Page, Anti-Cigarette League. Chicago, 111.
Oilman. Robbins. Head Worker, I'^niversitv Settlement Society. New York
City.
Hart, Hastings H., LL.D.. Kus.sell Sage Foundation. New York City.
Holt, Byron W., Committee of 100 on National Health, New York City.
Kimball. Mrs., Alcohol Poster Committee, Boston, Mass.
Laughlin, H. H., Superintendent Eugenics Record Office, Cold Spring Har-
bor, N. Y.
Lindsey, Judge Ben B., Juvenile Court, Denver, Colo.
McDowell, Miss. University Settlement, Chicago, 111.
MeCullock, Gen. J. E., Southern Sociological Congress, Nashville, Tenn.
Riis. Jacob. Henry Street Settlement, New York City.
Taylor. Graham. Presid(>nt Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy,
Chicago.
Van Hartzveldt, Miss, Anti-Tuberculosis Society, Grand Rapids, Mich.
Von KleinSmid, Prof. R. B., Indiana Reformatory, Jeffersonville. Ind.
Walton, Miss Carol F., Secretaiy Michigan State Association, Prevention and
Relief of Tuberculosis, Ann Arbor, Mich,
Witter, John H., Supt. Boys Club, Chicago.
INSTITUTIONS AND ORGANIZATIONS REPRESKNTKD XV
Women's Clubs
Glassner. Mrs. Maud, State Federation Women's Clubs. Nashville, Mich.
Haydoek, Mi-s. D. W., Missouri Federation of Women's Clubs. St. Louis, Mo.
Roenigh, Marion Chase, Michigan State Federation of Women's Clubs, Green-
ville, Mich.
Y. M. C. A.
Rowe, C. L., Traveling Secretary Y. M. C. A., Jackson, Michigan.
Publicists
Cattell. Prof. J. McK.. Editor Popular Science Monthly, Ganison. N. Y.
Dingley. Edward M.. Editor ProgTessive Herald. Kalamazoo, Mich.
Evans, Dr. W. A., Health Editor Chicago Tribune, Chicago, 111.
Johnson, Dr. C. M., Editor Dental Review, Chicago, 111.
MeClure. S. S., McClure's Magazine, New York City.
Popenoe, Paul B., Editor. Journal of Heredity-, Washington, D. C.
Spencer, George B., The Outlook. New York.
Henry Smith Williams, Author, New York City.
Phelps, Edward Bunnell, Editor, American Underwriter, New York City.
Payne, Kenneth W., Newspaper Enterprise Association, Chicago, 111.
Ministers
Beardslee, Rev. John W., Holland, Mich.
Bishop, Rev. Edwin W., Pastor Park Churcli. Grand Rapids, Mich.
Crane, Rev. Carolyn Bartlett. Crane Building, Kalamazoo. Mich.
Glass. Rev. D. H., Oavosso, Mich.
Hillis, Rev. Newell Dwight. Pastor Plymouth Church, Brooklyn, N. Y.
Sumner, The Veiy Reverend Walter Taylor, Dean, Episcopal Cathedra! of
Saints Peter and Paul, Chicago, 111.
Hinzman, Rev. W. T., Tipton, Mich.
Siebert, Rev. John A.. Adrian. Mich.
Insurance
Hunter. Arthur W., New York Life Insurance Co., New York City.
Hoffman, Frederick L., Statistician Prudential Life Ins. Co., Newark, N. Y.
W. C. T. U.
Leiter, Frances Waite, National W. C. T. U., Health Dept., Mansfield, 0.
Miscellaneous
Bigelow, M. Edna. Representative American Medical Association, Chicago, 111.
Bingemann, Miss M. E., Board of Education, Rochester, N. Y.
Pathe Freres Representative, Wm. J. Helm, Jr., 1 CongTess St., Jersey City,
New Jei-sey.
Ritchie, John W., Williamsburg, Va.
Sprague, Prof. Robert J.. Massachusetts Agricultural College, Amhei-st, Mass.
Thome, Hazel, Eugenics Field Worker, Lapeer, Mich.
Wilbur, Dr. Cressy L., Chief Statistician, Dept. of Commerce, Bureau of
Cetisus, Washington, D. C.
XVI FlliST XATlOXAh COX FKKKNCK ON RACK IJKTTKRAI KNT
Ixyaii, Desalcf, School Supi'i'visur, Battle (Jreek, Mich.
Cobuni, W. G., Principal Battle Creek Schools, Battle Creek, Mich.
Clements, F. O., Representative National Cash Register Co., Dayton, Ohio.
Gillette, C. P., Director State Agi-icultui-al College, Ft. Collins, Colo.
Reid, Dr. Chas. E., Surgeon, Culver Military Academy, Culver, Ind.
Local Co-operating Organizations
Battle Creek Ministers' Association.
Calhoun County Medical Society.
Battle Creek Dental Society.
Battle Creek Chamber of Commerce.
Battle Creek Board of Education.
Nonnal School of Physical Education
Battle Creek Sanitarium and Hospital Training School.
Nurses' Alumni Association of the Battle Creek Sanitarium and Ho.si)ital
Traming- School.
Battle Creek Sanitarium School of Home Economics.
Young Men's Christian Association.
Young Women's Christian Association.
Charitable Union.
Woman's Club.
Woman's League
The Ladies' Aid Societies of Nine Churches of Battle Creek.
Woman's Society of the Congregational Church.
Dorcas Society.
Women's Christian Temperance Union.
Sanitanum Women's Christian Temperance L'nion.
ADDRESS OF WELCOME TO THE CONFERENCE
J. H. Kellogg, LL.D., M.D., Superintendent of the Battle Creek Sanitarium,
Battle Creek, Michigan.
I feel it an honor, as well as a great privilege, to extend to you in
behalf of the Board of Trustees of this Institution a most cordial wel-
come to this Conference, the first of its kind to be held. And I wish
to tell you that if you esteem it a privilege to gather here for the dis-
cussion of great questions which concern the w^elfare of the race, you
are most of all indebted to our greatly esteemed friend, the eminent
Doctor Hillis, of Plymouth Church, for it was he w^ho last summer
suggested to me and to other members of the Central Committee the
idea of this Conference. I said to him in reply, "But, is it possible to
bring to this small town the busy men who are giving serious thought
to altruistic questions of this sort?"
"Certainly it is," said he, "and I'll help do it."
Professor Irving Fisher happened to be here at the time, and when
consulted, he said, "By all means, let us have the Conference," and
he also promised to help. Both of these men, who are individually
doing such splendid things for the uplift of their fellows, have helped
so efficiently that the program which is in your hands has been ar-
ranged and the Race Betterment Conference is launched.
It is not expected that this Conference will be great in numbers.
Those who attend come by special invitation, and as indicated by the
names of speakers shown on the program, are representative thinkers
and leaders in various lines of work which have for their aim the ad-
vancement of human welfare.
From the start it has been most gratifying to note the unanimous
interest shown in the great purposes of this Conference. Practically
every person who has been asked to take part in the program has
readily consented to do so unless prevented by some previous engage-
ment. The questions which will be discussed here are the greatest
problems which face the world today. They are not merely questions
of sect or section, finance or politics : they are race questions, biologic
questions, whose roots run back to the very childhood of the race
and whose branches cast their shadow over eyery phase of human
life.
The real purpose of the Conference is not to formulate conclusions
nor to propagate doctrines, but simply to raise in a more definite way
certain questions of world-wide significance which have in recent years
been more or less casually discussed, and to set in operation methods
(2) 1
2 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
of iiuiuiry which it is lioped may lead to a disrlosurc of facts of tre-
mendous importance. If the race is deg-enerating. it is highly impor-
tant that the world should know it and that such agencies should be
set in operation as will save the race of man from the common fate of
all other living forms as told and foretold by the geologic records of
the earth's crust.
The Conference is to be congratulated in having for its Central
Committee and Executive Officers a body of men eminently qualified to
^ve expert guidance to the studies and discussions which may be
opened up, and to protect us and the public from the evils of sensa-
tionalism on the one hand, and the dangers of preconceived opinions
and conventional blindness on the other.
We are all to be congratulated that we have with us as the Presi-
dent of this first Conference on Race Betterment, our young and
greatly beloved and honored friend, Dr. Stephen Smith, whose whole
life has been devoted to the very objects of this Conference, and who
at the age of ninety-two years — thanks to Eugenics and Euthenics — is
still one of the most active men engaged in the service of the ^eat
State of New York.
After seventy years of public service, fifty years as State Commis-
sioner of Charities, Doctor Smith is still active as ever. As President
of the Tree Planting Association he is transforming the desert wastes
of New York City into pleasant groves and parks. After waiting
two average life-times for Doctor Smith to show some symptoms of
old age, the people of New York have finally become convinced that
he is endowed with eternal youth, and possesses the vitality of his
beloved elms and oaks, and so have recently commissioned him for
another six years' term as Vice-President of the State Board of
Charities, a Board which carries a heavier load of responsibility for
human life and happiness than any other like body of men on earth.
We hope he will unfold to us and to the world the secret of his per-
ennial youth land vitality. His example and his presence here are a
proof and promise of the possibility of race betterment.
ADDRESS OF WELCOME
Hon. John W. Bailey, LL.B., Mayor of Battle Creek, Michigan.
After this exceedingly appropriate address and welcome by Doctor
Kellogg, it is somewhat embarrassing and quite unnecessary for me to
make any remarks of the nature in which the Doctor has indicated, but
I assure you that even though it may seem unnecessary, it is a great
pleasure for me — in behalf of the thirty thousand citizens of Battle
Creek — ^to welcome to our city these honored guests, ladies and
gentlemen, who have left their work and their homes and their fields
of usefulness to come here to take part in this first great Conference
on Race Betterment. We are very glad indeed to welcome this Con-
ference to the best town in Michigan, and, when I say that, I may
welcome you to the best town in the best state in the best country on
earth. Nature has done a great deal for our city, located as it is in
the fertile valley of two streams, surrounded by beautiful lakes and
having a beautiful climate. Everything that vegetation and foliage can
do for it has been done. The citizens have done much to improve the
natural advantages which they found here. We have many great fac-
tories of which we are all very proud. We are very proud of our school
system, very proud of our churches, of our societies and of our people.
It is our claim here that we have the most cosmopolitan people in the
whole world. We are not very poor, not very rich, but we are all able
to make a living and enjoy ourselves. We have one thing which above
all others we are the most proud of, and that is this great Sanitarium.
This institution and its managers have for the last forty or fifty years
been laboring day and night, in order that they may do good to their
fellow-men ; in order that this race, our brothers and sisters, may be
improved. And we who live here know well how successfully they have
labored. We are exceedingly proud that this institution has been able
to bring to Battle Creek the distinction of having the very first Race
Betterment Conference.
If I understand it correctly, it is the object of this Conference to
work together, exchange ideas in order that there may be some
definite understanding as to what is best for the great mass of
the people of this world, and to give those ideas to the great masses
of people who cannot possibly be here and who cannot possibly
know very much about these things, and thus to inaugurate re-
forms. Many people in the past have been at work exerting their
great energies to the betterment of the trees and flowers, and to
4 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
the bettoriiient of animals, but there has not l)eeii that j^reat eoneerted
effort for the bettennent of the huiiiau race that we iiiid in other
fiekls. It is to these honored gentlemen who come here for this Con-
ference that we must look for a start in this most practical and most
important of all subjects. I sincerely hope that the work of this
Conference may be such as to lay the foundation for future Confer-
ences, so that this work may go onward and upward for all genera-
tions, in order that the boy and girl of the distant future may look
back upon a father and upon a mother and upon a pedigree reaching
back into many generations, every line of which represents good, strong-
men and good, strong women, well-educated men and well-educated
women — men and women who have used their bodies and their minds
for the best interests of the race in order that their descendants may
properly represent the image of their Creator.
We wish for this Conference every possible success. I know we
shall all be proud of its results. It is not necessary for me to say a
word in introducing the President of this Conference. Doctor Kellogg
has said briefly and better than I could possibly say it all that is neces-
sary. I will simply say this, that from the appearance of Doctor
Smith, he represents the idea that he is bringing to us. He comes of a
long-lived family, a family whose ancestry has given to him the in-
heritance which has enabled him to do the great work which he has
done, and to come here at the age of ninety-two, full of life, full of
strength, full of hope and full of a desire to lift up and glorify the
human race.
I take great pleasure in introducing to this Conference, Dr. Stephen
•Smith, its President.
PRESIDENT'S ADDRESS
THE BASIC PRINCIPLES OF RACE BETTERMENT
Stephen Smith, M.D., LL.D., President of the Conference; Vice-President
New York State Board of Charities, NeAV York City.
Mr. Mayor, Members of the Conference, Ladies and Gentlemen : —
An ancient symbol of the genius of Medicine represented a female
figure sitting with downcast eyes and a finger on her closed lips,
signifying that the proper position of the physician is one of silence
and meditation. That symbol illustrates the mental attitude which I
should prefer to assume in this Conference. But, as with many of
the more responsible duties in my experience, it was not for me to
determine the position I was to occupy in the Conference, and I have
humbly accepted the decision of the Central Committee, only too
thankful that I was deemed worthy of an invitation to become a
member.
I enter upon the duties assigned me with a full appreciation of the
honor which the Presidency of this Conference confers and inspired by
the desire to render it an open forum for the initiation, discussion and
determination of the kind, quality and employment of the agencies
for the promotion of race betterment.
OBJECTS OF CONFERENCE
It is fitting, on establishing a new organization, to define its objects
and explain its methods. As officially annoimced, the objects of the
Conference are two-fold, as follows:
1. To assemble evidence as to the extent to which degenerative
tendencies are actively at work in America, and,
2. To promote agencies for race betterment.
Giving to the word "degenerative" its ordinary meaning — a loss or
impairment of the qualities peculiar to the race — our inquiry and re-
search includes every matter or thing which in any wise, nearly
or remotely, affects unfavorably the normal physical development and
functional activitj^ of any member of the race.
The second object of the Conference — To promote agencies for
race betterment — opens a world-wide field for observation, research
and practice, for these agencies are innumerable. The term "Race"
includes the ' ' Human Family, " " Human Beings as a Class, " " Man-
kind." "Betterment" means improvement in its broadest and largest
sense.
s
6 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
Reducing these objects as stated to a practical standard, the outlook
upon the human race from the view-point of this Conference recog-
nizes two features in its developments:
1. The tendency to degenerate ;
2. The capacity to regenerate.
In our estimation of the tendency of the race to degenerate we
must carefully distinguish between an inherent tendency or predis-
position to degeneracy under any and all conditions, and a suscep-
tibility to degeneracy under certain favoring conditions. All experi-
ence proves, and science confirms experience, that degeneracy of the
race is not due to any structural peculiarities of the individual other
than the normal susceptibility to impressions, which may be greater
in one person than in another, owing to heredity. On this account,
environment, or the conditions under which an individual lives, is a
most important determining factor in our estimation of race de-
generacy and race regeneracy.
On the very threshold of his existence man is confronted with
conditions which powerfully tend to degeneracy. All animal and
vegetable life appears alien to this planet and has to struggle for ex-
istence amid hostile forces which beset it on every hand. What vast
quantities of germinal matter the bountiful hand of nature supplies
to every form of life to perpetuate "its kind" and yet scarcely one
germ in a million lives. In summer the fields and forests are strewn
with waste germs.
Man himself is only one of the thirty-thousand possible sons and
daughters with which his parents were endowed. His birth is a
successful incident; his first breath is an accident; his nourishment
is by the grace of another. If he survive the perils of infancy and
reach maturity, innumerable evils — physical and mental — sickness, im-
becility, insanity, crime, death — assail him at every stage of progress
as if they were his inheritance.
Endowed for a vigorous, healthy life of a hundred years, man
suffers from every form of disease and lives but a moiety of his pre-
destined longevity. Of the children bom, what large percentage never
see their first anniversary birthday ! What other large percentage
dies under five years ! Few comparatively reach the age of ten years ;
at twenty the generation has dwindled to an insignificant minority
and at forty-five it disappears altogether. But three in a thousand
reach the normal period of human life — one hundred years.
But while the evidences of a tendency of the race to degenerate
are apparent to common observation in every period of human history,
there is an obverse of this sad picture of the most hopeful and in-
spiring character. The same impressionable peculiarity of his nervous
PRESIDENT S ADDRESS i
centres which tends to make him yield to degenerative influences may
be relied upon by skilled treatment to promote and effect his regenera-
tion. Estimating man 's inherent mental capacity by his achievements
in the past, we can place no limit upon the possibilities of his better-
ment. Consider how he has subdued the hostile forces of the earth
and made them subservient to his comfort and his well-being ! Though
the most unprotected of animals, he excels all others in his means of
defense; he lays the entire world under contribution for his food
supply and reduces his foods to the most digestible and assimilable
forms ; if he loses a limb, or a tooth, or an eye, another immediately
supplies its place, quite as serviceable and often more ornamental;
the lightning as his messenger annihilates time and space, and while
it transports him also supplies him with heat and light. Thus on all
sides he is capable of warding off danger, decay and death and demon-
strates his ability to exercise dominion "over all the Earth."
These facts suggest the question of the ages, ' ' What is the ultimate
purpose of human life on this Earth?" And it is very desirable that
we have a working hypothesis that will be most useful in selecting and
promoting agencies for the betterment of the race. There can be no
more helpful and hopeful answer to that question than the following
last utterance of the great scientist, Alfred Russell Wallace:
"This earth with its infinitude of life and beauty and mystery,
and the universe in the midst of which we are placed, with its over-
whelming immensities of suns and nebulne, of light and motion, are as
they are, firstly, for the development of life culminating in man;
secondly, as a vast schoolhouse for the education of the human race in
preparation for the enduring spiritual life to which it is destined."
What higher conception can we have of the world in which we
live than that it is ,a " vast schoolhouse for the education of the human
race," and what more pointed lesson can be taught as to the conduct
of our o-wn lives and our duties to the race than that this life is
*'in preparation for the enduring spiritual life to which it is des-
tined?"
PAST AND PRESENT METHODS OF RACE BETTERMENT
To appreciate fully the great service which this Conference will
render to humanity, if it establish the principles of race betterment on
the immutable basis of science, we need to consider for a moment the
past and present unscientific and inefficient methods of betterment
of the degenerates of the race. Looking backward we learn that man
has usually been regarded as an unknown entity, a mysterious com-
bination of the animal, the satanic and the divine, the two former
attributes being usually the most conspicuous. Efforts to benefit him
were limited to improving his personal appearance, supplying evident
wants, and punishment of criminal acts. The result was that neither
8 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
the iiulividual nor the race was made permanently better by the
remedies employed. The diagnosis was based on false premises and
the remedial measures were useless or harmful.
No one personally familiar with the management of the charitable,
reformatory, eleemosynary and other institutions for the degenerate
classes can doubt that we signally fail to accomplish the objects of
their creation — the betterment of their inmates. "We mass these un-
fortunates together under one name, and make one prescription for the
lot that has not the merit of several ingredients. Too often the insane
of every form and grade, curable and incurable, are crowded into
asylums, where their individuality is merged in the seething mass;
the criminals, young and old, thieves, highwaymen, adulterers,
murderers, crowd the prisons, without the slightest effort or even pre-
tense on the part of officials to individualize them and employ suitable
measures to render them capable of self-care, possibly of self-support,
and certainly to insure humane treatment.
The experience of a generation in official visitation and supervision
of the charitable, reformatory and eleemosynary institutions of the
State of New York has deeply impressed me with the conviction that
our efforts to benefit the vast population in public and private care^
idiots, feeble-minded, insane, criminals, deaf, blind, epileptic, vagrants
— is in a primitive stage of development. The institutions for their
care and treatment are becoming less and less curative and more and
more custodial. The result is the gathering and support at public ex-
pense of an immense population of more or less able-bodied men and
women who on account of their various ailments, physical and mental,
are allowed to pass their lives to old age in complete idleness. No
sadder sight awaits the visitor to these institutions than groups of
such people, well-fed and clothed, sitting in idleness in and around
the buildings on a bright summer day and in view of farm lands
largely cultivated by paid laborers.
One is reminded of Carlyle's picturesque Tourist's description of
the Workhouse of St. Ives on a bright autunm day. He says, ' ' I saw
sitting on wooden benches, in front of their Bastille and within their
ring w^all and its railings, some half hundred or more of these
men, tall, robust figures, mostly young or of middle age, of honest
countenance, many of them thoughtful and even intelligent-looking
men. They sat there near by one another; but in a kind of torpor,
especially in silence, which was very striking. In silence ; for alas,
what word was to be said? An Earth all lying around crying, Come
and till me ; come and reap me ; — ^yet we here sit enchanted ! In
the eyes and brows of these men hung the gloomiest expression, not of
anger, but of grief and shame and manifold inarticulate distress and
president's address 9
weariness ; they returned my glance and with a glance that seemed to
say, 'Do not look at us. We sit enchanted here, we know not why.
The Sun shines and the Earth calls; and by the governing powers
and impotence of England, we are forbidden to obey. It is impossible,
they tell us. ' There was something that reminded me of Dante 's hell
in the look of all this ; and I rode swiftly away. ' '
Many of these institutions could place on the lintel of their en-
trance door the famous motto, ' ' Who enters here leaves hope behind. ' '
An eminent physician, disappointed at the few discharged from these
charities, compared with the large number admitted, characterized
them as ''Great Hospitals of Lethargy." It has recently been re-
marked by an eminent statesman and acute observer, Sir Horace
Plunkett, that, "rightly or wrongly, it is generally felt that the
service which science renders in the cultivation and preservation of
our health lags far behind its marvelous achievements in the region
of the industries and arts." This statement is eminently true when
applied to our efforts to improve the mental and moral condition of
the degenerate class. Ignorance of man's physical constitution has
unfavorably influenced every effort for his betterment and still is the
greatest obstacle to .success in our treatment of the defective and de-
pendent classes. Though we live in the noon-day effulgence of the
sciences of biology and physiology, their light illumines only the
upper atmosphere, and does not penetrate the dense gloom which
envelops the degenerate of our race.
unscientific and scientific methods
There is no better illustration than that furnished by medical art
of the disastrous influence of ignorance of man's intimate physi(5al
nature upon efforts to relieve his disabilities, and the power of scien-
tific knowledge of these essential facts to apply with precision the
exact remedy required to give relief.
In the days of ignorance "the mysteries of physic" was a term in
common use by the profession. Diagnosis was merely guesswork and
therapeutics was grossly empirical. Diseases of organs were treated
in the mass as a single affection. "Lung disease," "heart disease,"
* ' liver disease ' ' were common terms, each now laiown to cover a multi-
tude of ailments, but unknown to the practiser of that time because
he was ignorant of the minute structure of the organs and of the
consequent great variety of affections to which each organ was liable.
In the treatment of the diseases of an organ, the physician made but
one prescription, and for any new symptom which might appear he
added another drug, until the single prescription sometimes contained
ten or a dozen different remedies. This was the famous "shot-gun"
10 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
prescription, which was "sure to kill something." Possibly this in-
cident exphiins the familiar story of the old physician who said that
when he began practice he had ten remedies for one disease, but in
later life he had one remedy for ten diseases.
The great revolution in medical practice came when Virchow, the
German medical scientist, revealed the fact that the ultimate elements
of man 's physical organism are a commonwealth of infinitesimal bodies
Imown as cells ; that everj^ organ is a wonderful mechanism adapted to
its special function by the multiplication and arrangement of its cells
numbering thousands of millions in a single organ ; that each cell-unit
has its own special function, its own diseases, its own symptoms and
requires its own special remedies.
It is quite impossible for one who was not a contemporary with this
discovery to appreciate its remarkable influence on medicine as an
art. The scales fell from the eyes of the practiser, and where previ-
ously he had known imperfectly but two or three diseases of an organ,
as of the heart and lungs, he now recognized scores, each with well-
defined symptoms, and each requiring a special remedy. The entire
field of medical practice was revolutionized ; diagnosis became exact ;
treatment precise ; the saving of life enormous. Evidently, the basic
principles of medical practice are: (1) Exact knowledge of the struc-
ture and functions of the organ affected ; (2) the nature of the diseases
to which it is liable; (3) the symptoms peculiar to each disease. "With
this knowledge the medical practiser no longer masses diseases and
gives a multiple dose, but carefully discriminates between the symp-
toms, determines the single disease and its progress, and then ad-
ministers the appropriate remedy and secures the desired results.
BIOLOGY AND PHYSIOLOGY THE FOUNDATION OF RACE BETTERMENT
But there is a hopeful future dawning for all classes of delinquents,
degenerates, and deficients, however handicapped by heredity, environ-
ment, accident or disease. The science of biology and of physiology',
which reveals to medical art the minute structure and function of
the ultimate elements of the vital organs and thus makes it exact
in practice to the great saving of human life, is penetrating further
and further into the hitherto mysterious mass of apparently homo-
geneous matter, the brain, and astonishing the world with its won-
derful revelations. Here it has found the very springs of human
existence — the centers of consciousness, thought, action — the home of
the soul, the Ego, the man.
In these discoveries we find the basic principles of race better-
ment. The adage is still true, that it is "the mind that makes the
president's address 11
man," and all our efforts to improve the individual and through him
the race must center in the normal development and physiological
action of the ultimate elements of the brain, the organ of the mind.
Every effort we make to improve man's physical condition should be
subordinate to its effect on the brain. A recent writer says, ''What-
ever elevates the physiological above the psychological, the body above
the mind, is an enemy of the race and no method for its regeneration."
Henceforth, all our efforts to better his condition should be based on
an intimate knowledge of the brain, admittedly the organ through
which that mj^sterious entity, the mind, finds expression.
In order to obtain a more thorough understanding of the subject
matter of this paper, especially by lay members, it will be necessary to
explain in a familiar way some features of the structure and functions
of the elements of the brain.
THE CIOLI. — THE NEURONE
Reduced to its simplest form and expression, the ultimate element or
unit of the brain is a cell which with its nerve is now called a "neu-
rone." This infinitesimal body is recognized by scientists as the
source of all mental phenomena — thought, word, act. In efforts to
express their estimation of brain-cells in the relation which they bear to
the mentality of the individual, the most eminent physiologists of our
time have used the following emphatic terms : One states that "the cell
is a unified organ ; a self-contained living being ; " a second regards it
as ' ' the sole active principle in every vital function ; " a third asserts
that it is "the medium of sensation, will and thought, the highest of
the psychic functions;" a fourth says, "As are his neurones (brain
cells) so is the man."
Recently, Ernest Haeckel. the German scientist and philosopher,
has made the following contribution to the cell theory, "We have now
ascertained in the clearest, most indisputable manner that all which
we term the 'soul' is in a scientific sense nothing more than the total
effect or function of the ' Soul Cells of the numerous neurones in the
brain '. ' '
Though the cell is so "extraordinarily complicated that its essential
constitution eludes our observation," its general structure and more
important features are well known. The following facts in regard to it
have been recorded by physiologists : A cell is "an individuated mass
of protoplasm, generally of microscopic size, with or without a nucleus
and a wall. " Protoplasm is an albuminoid substance capable of mani-
festing vital phenomena, as motion, sensation, assimilation, reproduc-
tion ; the least particle of this substance, a single cell, may be observed
to go through the whole cycle of vital functions ; it builds up every
12 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
vog'ctabU' and animal fabric ; it is the physical basis of life of all plants
and animals.
The protoplasm of the brain cells is so extremely sensitive that by
proper instruments a change can be detected in its substance when a
cloud passes over the sun ; also a thermometer v^ill detect a rise of its
temperature during any great mental effort ; and, again, delicate scales
■will weigh the amount of blood which rushes to the excited brain cells
for their nutrition when a person in a recumbent position has sudden
mental excitement.
The cells, estimated to be upwards of two thousand millions in the
human brain, are implanted before birth in a rudimentary form and
undergo an evolution from the cell of the lowest animal life to the
complex cell of the human brain. Though at birth the cell has been
perfected, so far as regards its structural adaptation to its special
future function, yet it will remain in an inert state and undergo no
further change or development until excited to activity. Each cell has
its own special function to perform and hence has its own special
stimulant; the cells of the auditory center are stimulated by sound,
those of the ophthalmic center by light, those of the olfactory center by
odors.
Physiologists believe that in the human brain there are large num-
bers of nerve-cells that remain undeveloped because never excited to
functional activity, and also that at any period of life, cells hitherto
inert may receive their proper stimulus and become active. They assert
that if to the born-blind there is no world of light, and to the born-deaf
there is no world of sound, may it not be a fact that worlds exist
around us other than those revealed by the five special senses ; worlds
which we do not recognize because the special nerve centers for that
purpose have not as yet been stimulated to activity? St. Paul hints
at that opinion when he declares that spiritual truths cannot be dis-
cerned except the spiritual (cells) sense has been awakened and
Haeckel now asserts that the soul is the output of the functional
activity of "Soul Cells." Along the same line of conjecture may we
not suggest that many strange mental phenomena — dreams, telepathy
— hypnotism — find their proper explanation.
Cells, like other tissues, are constantly undergoing change in the act
of nutrition and owing to their extreme susceptibility to impressions,
their functions are easily disturbed by the food we eat, the fluids we
drink, the condition of our digestion, in addition to the infinite number
of impressions which they daily receive from causes internal and ex-
ternal to the body. For this reason our mental moods are constantly
changing ; we are not the same this year that we were last year, this
month that we were last month, this evening that we were this morn-
president's address 13
ing. It follows that any change in the constitution or structure of the
cell must be attended by a derangement of its function that would
find expression in the mental acts of the individual. If a group of
cells should from any cause cease to act, the mental attributes which
they manifest, when acting normally, must cease. Equally, if the
same cells are overstimulated, their fiuictional activity is correspond-
ingly increased. Or, again, if the properties of the cells are changed,
as by alcoholic intoxication, or by any other toxic agent which finds
access to the brain and for which any cells have an affinity, the normal
function as expression would be changed to the extent that the aff'ected
bodies contribute to the mentality and personality of the individual
and in the particular feature involved therein.
The wise Diotama said to Socrates most truly (Symposium of
Plato) : "In the same individual there is succession and not absolute
unity; a man is called the same, but yet in the short interval which
elapses between youth and age ... he is undergoing a perpetual
process of loss and reparation. . . . And this is true not only of the
body but also of the soul, whose habits, tempers, opinions, desires,
pleasures, pains, fears never remain the same in any one of us, but are
always coming and going."
Physiology teaches that these cells endow all forms of animal ex-
istence with that degree of intelligence necessary to their personal wel-
fare in the sphere in which they live — man, cosmopolitan in his habits,
standing at the head with two thousand millions as his requirement;
and the animalcule, fixed in its place, with few to meet its simple wants.
It follows that these cells, so far as they exist and are brought into
functional activity, constitute the personality of the individual, the
"ego," whether of man or animal.
And wherever these cells are found, whether in the brain of man
or l)east, fish or fowl, insect or creeping thing, they only await the
skill, the cunning, the patience of the expert educator or animal trainer
to show the world an idiot working at his trade, a horse responsive to
every word or gesture of his keeper, a dog going on an errand by com-
mand of his master whom he does not see and always selecting the right
article, a learned pig solving arithmetical problems, seals performing
difficult stunts, ants learned in military tactics, fleas expert in social
functions.
The perfect brain must be one in which all of its cells have their
full and normal functional development. But the degree of develop-
ment depends upon so many conditions personal to the individual that
it is doubtful if a perfect human brain ever did or ever will exist on
this^ planet. In every community, and often in the family, we recog-
nize vast differences in the mental development of individuals, though
14 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
they seem to be living under precisely the same conditions. But under-
lying, or interwoven in, these external and recognized similar condi-
tions are undiscovered incidents that account for the differences so ap-
parent.
Traced to its true source it will be found that the want of opportu-
nity to apply the greater number and variety of stimulants to the
brain through the special senses — seeing, hearing, feeling, tasting,
smelling — accounts for much of what we call degeneracy. The farm
laborer toiling alone has none of the intelligence and vivacity in con-
versation, of the village tailor, cobbler or blacksmith, though equally
endowed mentally. The farmer has few brain stimulants, while the
latter are abundantly supplied through constant contact with cus-
tomers. A schoolboy rated as deficient saw an older scholar sketch a
horse on the schoolroom door ; he was so profoundly impressed by the
picture (that is, his art nerve-centers were so stimulated) that he
devoted himself constantly to sketching and became the most dis-
tinguished portrait painter of his time. Sir Isaac Newton states that
he "stood very low in his class" but the sight of a falling apple
aroused dormant brain cells which revealed to the world the law of
gravitation and made him forever famous. History is replete with
incidents of the sudden awakening of hitherto unstimulated brain
cells of persons accounted defectives. Can we, therefore, wisely and
justly determine the mental capacity of any living being, man or
animal, until we have given the opportunity for development. But
however handicapped by heredity or disease, or environment, science
teaches wdth unerring certainty that, unless their organic properties
are destroj^ed by accident or disease, cells promptly respond to such
curative measures as are adapted to relieve them of their disabilities.
I may ?;eem to have dwelt on these scientific facts wdth too much
minuteness and, perhaps, repetition, but as they are the basic princi-
ples upon vs^hich all future progress in the improvement of the so-called
defective classes must rest, and as they are obscure to a layman, I have
been impressed vdth the importance of discussing them more fully
at this first session of the Conference on Race Betterment.
The most interesting and practical feature of these cells evidently
is the absolute control that w^e may exercise over their functions.
They enlarge and become active when we stimulate them, and atrophy
and become passive when we withhold stimulants. As each cell, or
group of cells, has its own special function to perform, we can select
the group that will accomplish the object we have in view, and stimu-
late it to the degree necessary to reach the desired result. Or we may
reduce an active group of cells to their rudimentary state of quiescence
by withholding its proper stimulant.
president's address 15
METHODS OP IMPROVING THE RACE
Reduced to its simplest expression the question that confronts us is,
How can we secure to each individual of the race a normal develop-
ment of brain cells? Applying these basic principles to the better-
ment of the race, two methods of procedure naturally occur to the
scientific student. First is prevention, or the adoption of such meas-
ures as will prevent the birth of degenerates ; and, second, an effort to
improve the condition of existing degenerates.
Two methods of preventing the propagation of degenerates are
practiced; viz., (1) Sterilization, and (2) segregation of the sexes.
These methods are efficient means of preventing the increase of those
who submit to the test. But however effective sterilization and segre-
gation may be in arresting the increase of degenerates, they are
methods which must necessarily have limited application. The great
problem before this Conference and all workers in the field of philan-
thropy is the betterment of the defectives as we find them in every
grade of society.
If we adopt the basic principles of race betterment as herein set
forth, that problem may be stated as follows: How can me make the
brain of the defective most useful to its possessor? Considering the
remarkable sensitiveness of the nerve cells of the brain to impressions
both within and without the body, it is evident that the measures which
ma}^ be employed to arouse the cells to activity and restore their nor-
mal functional capacity are innumerable, and their effectiveness will
depend upon the intelligence, patience and perseverance of the re-
sponsible caretaker.
THE EDUCATION OP IDIOTS
The first efforts in this country to teach the idiot strikingly illus-
trate the preceding statement of the basic principles of race better-
ment. More than a half century ago Dr. Harvey B. Wilbur reduced
the theories of science to practice and demonstrated their truth. I
was witness of his experimental work on idiots and feeble-minded, and
it is interesting to note that it is founded on the modern teaching
of physiology in regard to the structure and function of the brain
cells. His explanation of his method was to the effect that the idiot
had a dormant nervous system, and the first step in his education must
be to arouse the brain to activity; that the best method of making a
first impression was through the sense of feeling ; that the shock com-
municated by a metallic substance through the sensitive surface of the
hand was the most effective. His argument was logical. In practice
he placed the idiot-child on the floor and laid a dumb-bell by his side,
fixing the child's hand on the shaft. Standing in front of his pupil.
16 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE HETTERMENT
the doctor delilxn-ately struck the boy's dumb-bell with a dumb-bell in
his own hand. The first trial was on a boy whose idiocy was so pro-
found that he scarcely noticed anything. The clash of the metals
startled the boy so that he involuntarily removed his hand from the
dumb-bell. This w^as the first trial, as he had just been received. The
doctor pronounced him a promising pupil, as his nervous system was
sensitive to impressions.
Three other pupils under training were tested, each showing im-
provement in proportion to the length of time of teaching ; the first of
these raised his eyes and was excited as the Doctor's dumb-bell de-
scended ; the second removed his hand before the dumb-bell was struck,
and laughed ; the third imitated the Doctor in the use of the dumb-
bell.
Doctor Wilbur explained that this method of arousing a dormant
brain (unconsciously referring to the cells) had this advantage, that
he stimulated at once three of the five special senses — feeling, seeing,
hearing. If we could trace the far-reaching connections of the cells of
the special centers with other centers higher in the brain and leading
up to the great centers of ideation, we should have seen himdreds of
thousands of inert and hitherto dormant cells awakened to activity and
the performance of their proper function.
REFORM OF CRIMINALS
The treatment of the criminal class on the physiological or hu-
mane system strikingly illustrates its value compared with the punitive
methods still practiced. It is interesting to notice the conclusion of the
last meeting of the International Prison Congress which was to the
effect that no criminal is hopelessly bad and incapable of reform.
Socrates replied to an Athenian who inquired as to the best method
of correcting the vicious and criminal tendencies of his son, ' ' Remove
from him all conditions which incite to vice and substitute the allure-
ments of virtue. ' ' In physiological language he said, ' ' Cease to stimu-
late the vicious brain cells which are now excited and govern his
thought and they will waste and cease to influence him ; stimulate the
virtuous cells and they will enlarge until they control his acts."
"When you pass through the gate to this place, you left your past
life behind you; I do not wish to have you ever refer to it; my
only concern is as to what your future life will be, and to determine
that question you are here." Such was the reply which the superin-
tendent of a prison for convict women made to the threats of homicide
of a young woman who was declared by a Boston judge to be the most
desperate criminal ever known in the courts of that city. She boasted
of having been in every prison in Ireland and in many of this country.
president's address 17
The treatment was physiological; all incitements to vice and crime
were removed and every possible stimulant to virtue substituted ; the
cells of the former wasted while the cells of the latter grew and became
dominant. Today the priest of her parish in Ireland writes that she
is the most helpful person he has in his work among the \dcious classes.
' ' Try me, ' ' said a prisoner to the sheriff who asked him if he would
work for wages. These two words reformed the management of a
Vermont prison and made it a school for the making of useful citizens.
The prisoners go out to work in the city of Montpelier and command
by their conduct universal respect. They are seen on the streets on
holidays without attendants; they receive wages for their work and
thereby support, not only their families, but the prison itself. They
leave the prison prepared to lead the lives of good citizens and few fail
to meet that test of true reform.
"I am going to make men and not brutes of these fellows," said
Governor West, of Oregon, when he began his famous prison reforms.
His "first trick" with a convict, it is reported, stirred the state from
the lowest to the highest. He requested the warden of the prison to
give one of the most desperate prisoners a dime and direct him to call
at the executive office. The warden replied that to give Jim Baggs a
dime and his liberty meant that Jim would soon be scarce in Oregon.
He, however, complied and the prisoner soon appeared at the state
house ; he was in prison dress but was very proud, informing every
officer who he was and that he came on the Governor's invitation. A
position was found for Jim Baggs on a farm where he did good service
and the Governor made him his first "honor man." This reform
in prison discipline resulted in the release of prisoners on parole "in
droves, ' ' who found situations outside and earned their living and be-
came respectable citizens. It is stated that, when one of his "honor
men" broke parole, the Governor went out himself and captured him.
Since that time the other convicts have made that prisoner's life
miserable. The Governor sent a crew of forty convicts, without prison
dress and unattended, to a distant town to work on a road. He says,
"Oregon won't need a penitentiary at an early date."
"Arizona State Prison, a School for Developing Manhood," is the
startling headline of a daily paper. Governor Hunt's policy in the
management of prisons is physiological. He says, "Shall we go on
making penitentiaries schools of crime, or make an effort to build up
the man's character, restore his self-respect, strengthen his weakness,
and cultivate in him a proper appreciation of his relation to others, and
to society in general? You can never do these things hy continually
reminding him that he is a criminal, dy suhmMting him to small hu-
miliations or to cruelties."
18 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
The result of the management based on these principles is given by
a prisoner: "The Governor thinks we are worth saving and he is
willing to let us come back. Pie has taken away all our useless humili-
ations that kept before us our condition. The Governor trusts to our
honor to obey the prison laws and there is not an English-speaking
prisoner, at least, who would do anything to bring discredit on the
Governor's policy. You have no idea already of the difference in the
men among themselves. We used to have fights every day. Oh ! it
M'as hell. Now, although we are restless, and every man longs for
liberty, we are at peace. ' '
Other states are adopting the humane policy and converting their
prisons into schools of reform and with marvelous results ; prisoners of
all grades respond to the influences which remove from their thoughts
the incentives to vice and crime and yield to the allurements of virtue.
The punitive or savage policy in treating convicts is generally domi-
nant and the result is that prisons are schools of vice and a dead
weight of taxation.
CURATIVE TREATMENT OP THE INSANE
The curative treatment of the insane received a stunning blow by
the publication of some ancient statistics showing that large numbers
discharged as cured relapsed. This report by an eminent alienist had a
blighting effect upon the faith of medical men in the real curability of
the insane, and revived the old but popular belief, "Once insane al-
ways insane." The result was that their treatment became more em-
pirical than scientific, the state hospitals custodial rather than curative,
and the rate of cures a meager 25 to 30 per cent. An expert alienist,
familiar with the management of institutions for the insane, has re-
cently stated that 75 per cent of the insane are curable, and 90 per
cent are capable of self-support, if adequate measures are taken for
their cure, and for their training. "Adequate measures" embrace an
exhaustive study of each case by a competent physician and persistent
treatment.
Finally, I can only allude to the vast but practically unexplored
field of medical therapeutics, which we have reason to believe abounds
with agents for which brain-cells have a selective affinity. As we have
stated, each cell has its own special stimulant and its own power of
selecting from the blood the kind of nutriment and stimulant adapted
to its function. When we know the affinity which any cell or group of
cells has for a particular medicine we can medicate that particular
cell or group with perfect accuracy. Thus, the oculist wishes to ex-
pand the pupil of the eye in order to explore its deeper recesses and
with perfect certainty he uses atropine, w^hich temporarily paralyzes
the nerves that supply the iris.
president's address 19
Many similar instances of the specific action of medicinal remedies
upon special brain cell-centers could be mentioned, but the investiga-
tions in that department of research have not advanced sufiQciently to
establish a code of practice. We can only conjecture that medical
therapeutics vrill give us many agencies whose direct action on nerve
centers will change their functions at our will.
THE RELIGIOUS CONSCIOUSNESS
Examples of the awakening of the religious consciousness — the
"Soul Cells" of Haeckel — illustrate our subject. Perhaps the in-
cident of St. Paul's conversion as related by himself is most illumi-
nating. "Suddenly there shone from Heaven a great light ... I
fell unto the ground, and heard a voice. ' ' A great light and a voice
— sight and sound — aroused to intense activity the dormant "Soul
Cells" (of Haeckel), which from that moment dominated every
thought, word, and act of his life.
The power of the Christian consciousness, when awakened to
activity, to change the most savage tribes into highly civilized com-
munities is related as an incident in the experience of Darwin, the
projector of the theory of "Evolution." In his first scientific voyage
he found a tribe of savages in South America which seemed so hope-
lessly animal that he was inclined to believe he had found the missing
link. Soon after his visit a pious Scotch captain of a trading vessel
visited the tribe and was so impressed with their savagery that he
felt impelled to attempt their conversion to Christianity. He returned
home, secured a company of devoted Christians, stocked his vessel with
the necessities of the colony and returned to the tribe. Several years
later Darwin visited the tribe on one of his scientific explorations, in-
tending to study the people more thoroughly. He was surprised on
reaching the place to find a flourishing community with its schools,
churches, and various industries under the government of the natives.
On returning home he visited the rooms of the British Foreign Mis-
sionary Society in London and related the incident, stating that he
desired to become a subscriber to the propagation of a religion which
could effect such changes in savages.
It would be interesting and instructive to review the efforts
hitherto made to improve the mental capacity of the degenerate, but
time will allow the notice of only the most recent and promising
methods now under trial.
THE ELECTRIFIED SCHOOLROOM
The first is known as the ' ' Electrified Schoolroom to Brighten Dull
Pupils," of Nikola Tesla. It is well known that eminent experimental
20 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
psyc'bologfists believe that tlie liigh-fre(iueiicy current intensifies cere-
bration ; that it is a mental stimulant like alcohol, but instead of being
harmful to the brain cells as is alcohol, the electricity is harmless and
confers lasting" benefits.
Mr. Tesla's attention was attracted to this subject by noticing the
efi:*ect of electricity on one of his assistants who, while making certain
high-frequency tests, was very stupid in carrying out instructions
concerning laboratory adjustments equipped with a coil generating
high voltage currents. After a time ]\Ir. Tesla noticed that his assis-
tant became brighter and did his work better, but supposed the change
was due to his becoming more familiar with his duties. On observing
the actions of the man more closely, he concluded that his assistant's
increased aptness and alertness was due to a much deeper cause than
mere experience ; that the elements of "mental life" — the brain cells —
had been stimulated to greater functional activity. This new, novel and
practical method of awakening to activity dormant brain cells, has
been subjected to trial on a large scale in Stockholm, Sweden. Two
sets of fifty children each, averaging the same age and physical condi-
tion, were placed in separate classrooms exactly alike except for the
concealed wires in one of the rooms. The regular school work was
pursued and the test lasted for six months.
The results recorded were as follows : The children in the magne-
tized room increased in stature two and a half inches, those in the
unmagnetized room increased one and one-fourth inches;; the former
also showed an increase in weight and physical development greater
than the latter. More remarkable was the difference between the
mental development of the two classes, viz. : Those exposed to the
electric rays averaged 92 per cent in their school work, compared
with an average of 72 per cent of the children in the other rooms;
fifteen pupils in the electrified room were marked 100, and nine in the
other class. It is stated in the report that the electrified children ap-
peared generally more active, and less subject to fatigue than those
not electrified and that the teachers experienced a quickening of the
faculties and an increase of endurance.
The method of applying the electricity is thus stated : Carefully
insulated wires will be inserted in the walls of the experimenting class-
room and the tests will be carried on without the knowledge of either
the teachers or the pupils ; the air of the room will be completely
saturated with incalculable millions of infinitesimal electric waves vi-
brating at a frequency so great as to be unimaginable and capable of
measurement only by a most delicate volt meter.
president's addeess 21
THE CLEARING HOUSE
The second plan proposes to establish a "Clearing House for
Mental Defectives" and is being matured in the Department of Public
Charities of New York City. It will co-ordinate all organizations
which have supervision of children in a common effort to separate the
defectives and place them under proper care and treatment.
To this Bureau are to be sent all defective children that come under
the supervision of the Department of Charities, the Board of Educa-
tion, the Department of Health, the Society for the Prevention of
Cruelty to Children, the Department of Immigration, children 's courts,
state institutions, dispensaries, social workers, etc.
The bureau will be under the immediate control and management of
a staff of experts in mental and nervous diseases. It will also be
equipped with every recognized device or appliance for determining
the mental grade of each child admitted, and the particular nature
of feeble-mindedness. Each will be subjected to the Binet test, finger
prints will be taken, and field workers will make an investigation into
the heredity of each case. The examination also will determine
whether the applicant is likely to be dangerous to the community by
reason of any criminal tendencies.
The Clearing House will name the proper course of action in each
case, and send a report on each child to the department or society
which may refer the case. It will also co-ordinate all activities into
one bureau organized to keep scientific records of the mentally de-
fective individuals in this community.
BUREAU OF SOCI.VL SCIENCE
Organized on the same principles there is maturing in the Bedford
Reformatory, New York, a state system of expert examination of con-
victs and an assignment of each to a special institution adapted to
correct the physical, mental or moral defects found to exist. The
plan is to have a branch of service of the reformatory, but entirely
separated from it, where preliminary investigations will be made.
To this so-called "Bureau of Social Science" the convict is first ad-
mitted and remains there until her exact physical and mental condi-
tion is determined. This examination may require much time, but
when it is completed the committing magistrate and the managers
have learned to place her with precision under such discipline and
influences as will most powerfully tend to effect her reform.
In this scheme we recognize the practical development of the
Basic Principles of Race Betterment, viz. (1) The thorough study of
each individual degenerate who is a candidate for public care, and
(2) his or her immediate placement under conditions best adapted to
22 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
correct, permanently, the physical defect which is found to be the
predisposing or exciting cause of degeneracy. Adopted and intelli-
gently enforced as a state policy, we cannot doubt that the Bureau of
Social Science would convert our custodial into curative institutions,
our prisons and reformatories into ''Schools for Developing Man-
hood," as in Arizona, and our almshouses into industrial, self-sup-
porting colonies. Indeed, might not these burdensome public charities
become valuable assets rather than dependencies of the state?
Members of the Conference, we organize today and place in full
operation in the field of philanthropy a new force. The field is the
world of degenerate humanity and the force is the regenerating power
of applied science. Our efforts hitherto to better the race have been
largely actuated by sentiment and hence have failed of that directness
and efficiency essential to the highest degree of permanent success.
It should be the constant aim of the promoters of this Conference to
establish its work on an enduring basis and to promulgate no opinions,
nor conclusions, nor recommendations that are not sustained by the im-
mutable truths of science.
The Conference is to be congratulated upon the favorable conditions
of its first session in the Battle Creek Sanitarium. We cannot express
in terms too complimentary our appreciation of the efforts of the
Medical Director and the officers to render this initial meeting of the
Conference in the highest degree successful. Every possible provision
has been made for our comfort and entertainment and for the orderly
conduct of the sessions of the Conference.
But perhaps the most important feature of our meeting is that we
are guests of an Institution whose beneficent mission is to promote race
betterment by teaching and practicing ' ' The Art of Healthful Living. "
The entire Institution is instinct with the "Battle Creek Idea," which
is also the basic principle of the Conference on Race Betterment,
Mens Sana in Corpore Sano.
STATISTICAL STUDIES
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF A DECLINING DEATH KATE
Frederick L. Hoffman, LL.D., Statistician of the Prudential Insurance
Company of America, Newark, N. J.
INTRODUCTION
The social and economic problems which arise out of a considerable
decline in the general death rate, extending over a prolonged period of
time, are much more serious and far-reaching than is generally assumed
to be the case. In practically all civilized countries there is annually
a considerable excess of births over deaths, the numerical excess being
conditioned more generally by a low mortality than by a high fecun-
dity. For illustration, a given country might have a birth rate of
40 and a death rate of 30, with a resulting annual natural increase of
10 per 1,000, whereas another country might have a birth rate of only
30 but a death rate of 15, with a resulting natural increase of 15 per
1,000. From an economic and social point of view a low birth rate
and a low death rate would unquestionably be more advantageous than
the opposite condition, which involves much needless waste of human
energy and pecuniary expenditure.
For reasons which require no discussion, every civilized country
desires a normal increase in population, though a high degree of social
and economic well-being is not at all inconsistent with even a station-
ary population condition, such as for some years past has prevailed
in France. It has properly been observed that the term population
embraces the most extensive .subject of political economy, and most of
the observations and conclusions which follow, comprehend the prob-
lem of population increase throughout the world rather than the
underlying elements of fecundity and mortality.
On account of the world-wide migratory movements of modem
populations, involving the transport of vast numbers from one region
to another, it has been necessary to include in the present discussion
some very general and rather approximate statistics of population in-
crease, resulting from an annual excess of births over deaths,
with, however, numerous and necessary illustrations for the several
continents and countries in detail. The population problem is no
longer merely a local one, but practically conditions the material,
moral, and political well-being of the inhabitants of the entire world,
though, of course, to a variable degree.
S3
24 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
THE POPULATION PROBLEM OP MODERN TIMES
From the time when Malthus first visualized in popular language
the menace of a rapidly increasing population on the assumption of a
less rapidly increasing food supply, much speculation has been in-
dulged in as regards the ultimate results of population growth on the
strictly limited laud area of the globe. Much of what goes by the
name of IMalthusianism stands for something never said by Malthus
in his classical "Principles of Population,"' just as much that stands
for evolution or Darwinism was never given utterance or sanction by
Darwin in his "Origin of Species," and the "Descent of Man."
Pre-Malthusian doctrines of population are of historical rather than
practical interest, largely because of the imperfect statistical basis
upon which most of the earlier estimates of population growth were
based by writers in many respects sound in their philosophical and
economic theories.
We have no modern contributions to the population problem which
correspond to the elaborate and well-reasoned inquiries of William
Godwin on "The Power of Increase in the Numbers of Mankind,"
published in 1820; of Michael Thomas Sadler on "The Law of Popu-
lation," published in 1830; and Archibald Alison's treatise on "The
Principles of Population, and Their Connection with Human Happi-
ness," published in 1840.
Sir William Petty, in his famous essays on "Mankind and Political
Arithmetic" (1682-87), assumed that a given population would double
itself by a natural increase during a period of twelve hundred years.
This estimate was well sustained by the experience of a period when
plague, pestilence, famine, and wars frequently resulted in a stationary-
condition of population, or even in a substantial actual diminution.
Petty, in one of his twelve considerations of the conditions which affect
the increase in the numbers of mankind, properly included methods of
preventing "the mischief of plagues and contagions," which, although
only a theoretical assumption at that early period, foreshadowed the
enormous sanitary progress of modern times and the realized ideals in
the administrative control of the public health. There is nothing more
instructive in this respect than the sanitary evolution of the city of
London, so admirably set forth in a work by Henry Jephson, and the
still larger and more useful work by Creighton on "The History of
Epidemics in Britain," which is a monumental contribution to the
progress in medical science, and all that is summed up in the term
civilization, which is fundamentally conditioned by the highest at-
tainable average duration of human life.
The world of today is not free from pestilence and plague, or
STATISTICAL STUDIES 25
famine and war. but, comparing the ]3resent with the past, it is an
absolutely safe assumption that the waste of human life was never
relatively as small in the world's history as is the case at the present
time. There are still vast areas of the world, such, for illustration,
as India, where fevers, cholera, and plague cause an enormous annual
mortality, best illustrated by the fact that during so recent and short
a period as 1896-1912, there should have been over eight million deaths
from plague in India, to say nothing of other sections of Asia similarly
afflicted to a greater or less extent.
The relative significance of preventable diseases in their relation
to the general death rate is best illustrated in the ease of the Presidency
of Bengal, where, during the year 1911, out of a total mortality of
32.69 per 1,000, 20.60 represented deaths from fevers;* 2.37, deaths
from cholera; and 1.44, deaths from plague. These three groups of
causes combined, therefore, accounted for a death rate of 24.41 per
1,000, or 74.7 per cent of the mortality from all causes. Considered by
local areas in which cholera was particularly virulent, it appears that
there were towns in which the death rate attained to the almost in-
conceivable proportion of 97.35 per 1,000 (Gaya), of which 11.87 was
caused by cholera, 35.61 by fevers, and 19.99 by plague. Such condi-
tions are extremely rare in modem civilized communities, although as
illustrated in the cholera epidemic of the city of IIamburg,t
the menace of serious local outbreaks is by no means a remote possi-
bility.
The sanitary security of modern countries depends largely upon
the highest attainable degree of efficiency in the control of so-called in-
ternational diseases, and in this respect no country in the world has a
better public health service than the United States.
* In explanation of the term "fevers" as used in the vital statistics of
India, the following explanation is quoted from the First Report on Malaria
in Bengal, by Major A. B. Fry, M.D. ; Calcutta, 1912 :
"Everything not cholera, smallpox or something equally obvious is put
down as fever. In etfect we have to accept the fact that fever deaths as re-
ported comprise all deaths not due to these obvious diseases. Marasmic and
premature infants, infants dying of tetanus neonatorum, impi:oper feeding
and bowel diseases, nearly all deaths from respiratory diseases, including both
phthisis and pneumonia, measles, enteric fever, etc., etc., are included under
the fever heading. Even cholera and plague are often returned as fever, espe-
cially at the commencement of an epidemic."
t During the cholera year of 1892, the general death rate of Hamburg was
39.5 per one thousand population. There were 13,948 eases of cholera, of
which 5,805, or 41.6 per cent, were fatal. The cholera death rate for the year
was 12.7 per one thousand, equivalent to 32.2 per cent of the death rate from
all causes.
26 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
POPULATION DENSITY
The effect of excessive death rates on population increase is so
obvious as not to require extended consideration. India, in 1911, had
a birth rate of 38.6 per 1,000, and a death rate of 32.0. But for the
prevalence of epidemic and largely preventable diseases the natural
increase in population would have been much greater than was actu-
ally the case. Some observations regarding the world's population, its
continental distribution and relative density, are, therefore, pertinent
to the general discussion of the significance of a declining death rate,
particularly with reference to population growth.
The number of inhabitants of the globe is conservatively estimated
at 1,750,000,000, and assuming that the land area of the earth is about
52,000,000 square miles, the resulting density is approximately 34
persons per square mile. For the European continent the density is
121 persons; for Asia, 57; for Africa, 12; for North America, 15;
for South America, 7 ; and for Australia, including New Zealand,
2.3. The facts, in detail, are given in the table following :
APPROXIMATE DENSITY OP THE WORLD'S POPULATION, ESTIMATED BY
CONTINENTS FOR. THE YEAR 1911
Continent Area in Sq. Miles Population Pop. per Sq. Mile
Europe 3,833,567 463,997,000 121.0
Asia 16,997,639 962,233,000 56.6
Africa 11,760,689 135,987,000 11.6
North America 8,631,657 127,993,000 14.8
South America 7,184,021 51,193,000 7.1
Australasia 3,317,762 7.572,000 2.3
Total land area* 51.725,335 1,748,975,000 33.8
* Does not include the practically uninhabited polar regions.
It seems unnecessary on this occasion to discuss in detail the rela-
tive density of population of different countries or political sub-
divisions, but it may be said that for the more important countries
the range in density is approximately from an extreme of 659 persons
per square mile in Belgium, 475 in the Netherlands, 374 in the United
Kingdom, and 343 in Japan, to a minimum of 31 for the United States,
13 for the Union of South Africa, 6 for Brazil, 2 for Canada, and 1.6
for the Commonwealth of Australia.
Contrarily to the common assumption as regards the ' ' teeming mil-
lions" of the Far East, it may be pointed out in this connection that
the density of population for China is approximately 100 persons per
square mile,, and for British India, 178. The term ''density of popu-
lation" is, of course, only relative in that the same has no reference
to the actual distribution of population over a given area.* A country
* For an interesting discussion of what is assumed to be a new law of
population concentration, see an ai-tiele in Peterraanns Geogr. Mitteilungen,
Februaiy, 1913, entitled "Das Gesetz der Bevolkerungs Konzentration," by
Dr. Felix Auerbach.
STATISTICAL STUDIES 27
may have a relatively high density, due to a vast aggregation of popu-
lation in a few cities, and another may have a relatively low but more
widely dispersed density of far greater economic importance. The
latter condition, for illustration, prevails in India, which in part ex-
plains the extreme difficulties of effective methods of local sanitary
control.
It would also be an error to forecast, on the basis of the foregoing
estimates of density, the probable future limits of population growth.
Belgium, with the highest relative density, is one of the most pros-
perous countries of Europe, but is dependent almost entirely for its
food supply upon other countries, in which as yet the density of popu-
lation is very considerably below the average for at least the European
continent. There can be no question of doubt but that vast opportun-
ities still exist for a very substantial increase in the number of the
earth's inhabitants, but considering the attained degree of density in
certain countries, and the unconditional dependence of population ag-
gregates for their food supply upon more sparsely settled areas, as-
sumptions regarding the future possibilities of population increase are
likely to be exaggerated since the pressure upon the limited available
means of subsistence must become more generally operative than is
the case at the present time.
GROWTH OF THE WORLD 's POPULATION
The growth of the world's population is naturally determined by
the excess of births over deaths and the resulting gradual accumula-
tion of the new-born over the diminishing remnants of previous genera-
tions. A persistently and rapidly declining death rate, therefore, un-
less offset by an equal decline in the birth rate, must, in course of time,
result in a proportionately more rapid increase in population than has
been observed to have taken place during historic periods of time. The
ultimate effect of such an accumulation of births over deaths must be
in geometrical rather than in arithmetical proportions, in the same
manner as in pecuniary calculations the results of compound interest
are considerably in excess of the yield of money invested at simple in-
terest only.
Accepting, for the present purpose, the estimate of the world's
population for 1900, of 1,607,000,000, as given by Sundberg, and my
own estimate for 1911 of 1,749,000,000, there has been an annual in-
crease during the intervening period of 12,883,000, or at the rate of
7.7 per 1,000. For purposes of comparison, it may be stated that
during the same period of time the population of the continental
United States has increased from 75,994,575 in 1900 to 93,927,342 in
1911, the annual increment of population being 1,680,252, equivalent
28 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
to 19.45 per 1.000. Tlu' density of population in tlie eontinental
United States ])ef scjuare mile has increased since 1860 from lO.H to
16.9 in 1880 and from 25.6 in 1900 to 32.1 in 1932.
Comparing or contrasting the present population conditions of
this country with other relatively well-developed sections of the globe,
we are far from having reached a point which can be considered par-
ticularly alarming, but it would certainly be a serious error to reason
from general principles in a matter of this kind, since the problem of
over-population, especially with reference to economic conditions, is
always, in its final analysis, largely a local one. Thus, for illustration,
the present density of Ehode Island is 508.5 persons per square mile ;
of Massachusetts, 418.8 ; of New Jersey, 337.7 ; of Connecticut, 231.3 ;
and of New York, 191.2. For all of New England the density is 105.7,
and for the Middle Atlantic States, 193.2.
All of the available statistical information seems to justify the con-
clusion that the world's population in general, and of the more civi-
lized countries in particular, is increasing at the present time at a more
rapid rate than in earlier years — a condition largely the result of a
persistent and considerable decline in the death rate, which is more
than an offset to the observed decline in the birth rate. There are, of
course, important exceptions to this conclusion, which has reference to
vast continental aggregates rather than to some of even the largest
political subdivisions of the same. In some of these the conditions of
population growth are so seriously disturbed by migration, immigra-
tion and emigration, and variations of fecundity and mortality due to
racial distribution, that precise conclusions are hardly warranted in
the present imperfect state of population and vital statistics.
FORECASTS OF POPULATION GROWTH
Estimates of the future population of the United States have been
many and in a number of instances they have been verified with re-
markable accuracy when limited to a reasonable period of time.
Darby, for illustration, in his "View of the United States," published
in 1828, made a forecast of the white population, which for 1850 was
placed by him at 20,412,000, and which was ascertained by the census
to be 19,553,000. Many similar estimates have been sustained by subse-
quent experience, but as a rule the rate of fecundity has been taken
too high, especially for the colored population, by writers basing their
views upon the observed rate of increase of the negro population
during a condition of slavery. Even DeBow conceded a diminishing
proportion of negro population with an increase in aggregate growth
in population fully sustained by subsequent experience. DeBow, in
1862, estimated the negro population of the United States for 1880 at
STATISTICAL STUDIES 29
6,591,000, whereas by the census for that year the same was ascertained
to be 6,580,000. All estimates of this kind are certain to fail
if projected too far forward, but they are unquestionably approxi-
mately trustworthy for relatively short periods of time, and for many
purposes are of considerable practical value. On the assumption,
therefore, that the decennial rate of increase in the population growth
of the United States will gradually diminish, partly because of a
probable decline in immigration and a possible further reduction in
the birth rate, the following forecast is included in this discussion as
a concrete illustration of the probable population conditions likely to
exist in the continental United States within a measurable period of
time.
POPULATION ESTIMATE FOR THE CONTINENTAL UNITED STATES, 1910-1960
Year — Census Population Density per Sq. Mile
1910 91,972,000 30.93
1920 109,999,000 36.98
1930 130,019,000 43.72
1940 151,862,000 51.06
1950 175,248,000 58.92
1960 199,783,000 67.17
According to this table the approximate density of the United
States by 1960, assuming a normal rate of increase during the inter-
vening period, would only.be 67 persons per square mile, or about
one-fifth of the present density of the German Empire. Glranting that
the immediate outlook for the future is not as serious with us as with
some other nations, it is self-evident that the social, economic, and po-
litical problems resulting from an augmentation in the number of in-
habitants and the gradual accumulation of vast aggregates of people,
aside from the mere problem of density itself, must be among the most
serious conceivable and, therefore, as such, they are properly entitled
to an extended critical and impartial consideration at the present time.
TENDENCY TO CITY GROWTH
The trend of the population all over the civilized world is today
towards the cities, which now contain a vastly larger number of in-
habitants than during any other period of time in recorded history.
The problem of urbanization, from a historic, geographic and an econo-
mic point of view, has been ably treated by Prof. PieiTe Clerget, who
includes in his discourse estimates of population for ancient cities,
which, however, are more or less conjectural. The same conclusion
applies to the dissertation on the "Numbers of Mankind in Ancient
and Modern Times," by Robert Wallace, published in Edinburgh in
1809 ; and the speculations of Sir William Petty, Gregory King, and
others whose writings on population estimates were previous to the
nineteenth century, which marks the dawn of modern census inquiries.
30 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
or the accurate enumeration of the numbers of mankind, for at least
the civilized portion of the globe. Sufficient information, however, of a
general nature is available to warrant the assumption that in earlier
periods the proportion of urban population was much less than at the
present time, and this certainly is true of the United States, for which
we have accurate data since 1790. During the twelve intercensal periods
the proportion of urban population has constantly increased. The pro-
portion of urban population (which term includes all incorporated
places of 2,500 inhabitants or more) has increased from 29.5 per cent
in 1880 to'4i6.S per cent in 1910. During the last decade the urban
population has increased 34.8 per cent, or in actual numbers 11,014,-
000, as against an increase of only 11.2 per cent for rural territory, or
4,964,000.
RATE OF NATURAL INCREASE IN POPULATION
The sanitary progress of civilized countries, to which primarily
must be attributed the observed decline in the death rate, to be sub-
sequently discussed in more detail, has naturally been more effective in
the large cities than in the smaller communities or the strictly rural
territory. Granting that the birth rate of cities is below that of rural
sections, it is quite possible that there is a larger excess of births over
deaths in modern cities in consequence of the remarkable results of
sanitary administration and control. The annual excess of births over
deaths varies, however, quite widely for the different countries, geo-
graphical subdivisions and cities of the world, and in some exceptional
cases even in civilized countries the deaths may exceed the births, as is
well known to be true of modern France. On the basis of the best
estimate possible, the present rate of natural increase for the world
as a whole is approximately 7.6 per 1,000 of population, equiva-
lent to an actual increase per annum of 13,260,000. This estimate is
based largely on the registration returns of civilized countries having
an aggregate population of 834,000,000, and an excess of births over
deaths of 9.3 per annum. The birth rate for these countries is 34.3
per 1,000, and the death rate 25.0. The estimate, therefore, is quite
conservative, and in all probability the actual increase is greater than
that assumed. For the non-registration countries I have assumed an
annual excess of births over deaths of only 5.8 per 1.000, which is
considerably below the normal excess of births over deaths in the reg-
istration countries of Asia, which include nearly all of India, the
Island of Ceylon, the French possessions in Cochin-China and the
Empire of Japan. For these four countries combined the natural in-
crease per annum, or excess of births oyer deaths, is 7.3 per ],000,or the
annual difference between a birth rate of 38.4 and a death rate of 31.1.
STATISTICAL, STUDIES 31
It seems a safe assumption that in the remainder of the world, for which
information is not available, the probable rate of natural increase is
about 5.8 per 1,000. With an annual increase of 7.6 per 1,000, assum-
ing no further improvement in the general death rate, which, however,
is most likely to occur, the world's population may be expected to
double itself in about ninety years. Since the death rates throughout
the civilized, as well as the uncivilized, world are known to be gener-
ally declining, the rate of doubling the population is quite possibly to
be achieved in even a shorter period of time. A summary statement of
the estimated natural increase of the world's population is given in
the table below:
ESTIMATED ANNUAL NATURAL INCREASE OF THE WORLD'S POPULATION
AS BASED ON THE MOST TRUSTWORTHY REGISTRATION RETURNS
FOR RECENT YEARS, CHIEFLY FOR 1911
„ ^. ^ Estimated Estimated No. of i^_2-J £ <»
Continents "S'3'R.s 'S'3 §
Population Births Deaths •-^'''l, ■§ a "
la's S O « t' c
H ;z; ftO^ H <1 M
Europe 463,997,000 15,545,640 10,657,220 10.5 4,888,420
Asia 962,233,000 37,306,800 31,753,670 5.8 5,553,130
Africa 135,987,000 5,279,140 4,348,324 6.8 930,816
North America 127,993,000 3,495,400 2,286,800 9.4 1,208,600
South America 51,193,000 1,950,940 1,368,150 11.4 582,790
Australasia 7,572,000 214,718 118,071 12.8 96,647
Total* 1,748,975,000 63,792,638 50,532,235 7^6 13,200,403
*The world's birth rate is estimated at 36.5, and the death rate at 28.9, per one thou-
sand of population.
DECLINING DEATH RATES OF CIVILIZED COUNTRIES
It is only for comparativelj^ recent periods that trustworthy vital
statistics are available for a considerable portion of the world with
local climatic, racial or other conditions sufficiently varied to disclose
the approximate range in the rate of mortality and the evidence of
its reduction or increase, as the case may be. For the registration
area of the world the mortality rate at the present time is approxi-
mately 25 per 1,000 per annum, which is considerably in excess of the
death rate for the more important civilized countries such as, for il-
lustration, the German Empire, where the rate is 17.3 ; England and
Wales, 14.6; France, 19.6; United States, 14.7, and the Common-
wealth of Australia, only 10.7. These comparatively low death rates
contrast with the still prevailing excessive death rates of certain other
countries, as, for illustration, 23.7 per 1,000 for Spain, 25.0 for Hun-
gary, 30.5 for Eussia, 31.1 for Mexico, 33.2 for India, and 40.9 for
twenty cities of Egypt. During the last thirty years, however, the
general death rate in most of the principal countries of the world has
declined, but since the evidence in detail does not permit of a con-
32 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
venieut suniniary discussion, the following comparisons are limited to
the two five-year periods ending, respectively, with 1885 and 1910.
The observed decrease in the rate is, in each case, the reduction per
one thousand of population, carefully calculated on the basis of avail-
able census returns.*
During the thirty years under observation the general death rate
declined in the Australian Commomvealth from 15.7 to 10.7; in
Austria, from 30.1 to 22.3 ; in Denmark, from .18.4 to 13.7 ; in England
and Wales, from 19.4 to 14.7; in Finland, from 22.2 to 17.4; in
France, from 22.2 to 19.2 ; in the German Empire, from 25.3 to 17.9 ;
in Hungary, from 33.1 to 25.0 ; in Ireland, from 18.0 to 17.3 ; in Italy,
from 27.3 to 21.0; in the Netherlands, from 21.4 to 14.3; in New
Zealand, from 10.9 to 9.7; in Norway, from 17.2 to 13.8; in Scotland,
from 19.6 to 16.1 ; in Spain, from 32.6 to 24.3 ; in Sweden, from 17.5
to 14.3 ; and, finally, in Switzerland, from 21.3 to 16.0. For a few
of these countries the decline in the rate has not been of much actual
importance, but in practically all of the countries the tendency of the
death rate during the last thirty years has been persistently downward,
and the present indications are that there has been a still further de-
cline in the rate during the last three years. Combining the mortality
of the principal civilized countries, there has been a general reduction
in the crude death rate from 25.09 per one thousand during the five
years ending with 1885 to 19.26 per one thousand during the five
years ending with 1910, an actual decrease of 5.92 per one thousand,
equivalent to 23.2 per cent. The relative decrease in the rate has been
most pronounced in the Netherlands, where the present rate is only 63
per cent of the rate prevailing thirty years ago. The corresponding
figure for the registration area of the United States is 76 per cent ;
and for a few other countries, respectively. England and Wales, 71
per cent; Denmark, 71 per cent; Belgium, 72 per cent; the Aus-
tralian Commonwealth, 71 per cent; Finland, 66 per cent; German
Empire, 72 per cent ; Italy, 71 per cent ; and Switzerland, 67 per
eent.t
It requires to be said in this connection that the foregoing rates
are not corrected or standardized for variations or changes in the age
* The international vital statistics are derived most conveniently from the
annual reports of the Registrar-General of England and Wales.
t The remarkable nnifonnity in the rate of mortality decrease for repre-
sentative countries dixring the last thirty years suggests that the diminution
is the result of more or less uniformly oper^ating' causes making for the delib-
erate reduction of the death rate in consequence of practically identical
methods in sanitary administration and persistent progress in the practice of
medicine, surgery, and personal hygiene.
STATISTICAL STUDIES 33
and sex constitutions of the respective populations considered. Such
corrections would have involved much labor, with but a slight prob-
ability that the resulting conclusions would have been materially modi-
fied. The results are verified and otherwise sustained by numerous
specialized mortality studies on the basis of scientifically constructed
life tables for the more important countries and geographical sub-
divisions of the world, particularly the German Empire and its con-
stituent states, England and Wales, the Australian Commonwealth,
New Zealand, etc. The observed decline in the general death rate and
the corresponding increase in human longevity may, therefore, safely
be accepted as a world phenomenon, and granting this, it is difficult
to conceive of a more important conclusion affecting the future well-
being of all mankind.
DECLINE IN THE DEATH RATE OP THE UNITED STATES
In the foregoing discussion no reference has been made to the
statistics in detail for the United States, since for the earlier period no
data are available which would be strictly comparable with those of re-
cent years. Most of the following observations are, therefore, limited to
the decade ending with 1910, for which the registration returns are,
broadly speaking, representative for the country at large. Comparing
the five-year period ending with 1905, with the corresponding period
ending with 1910, there has been a decline in the general death rate
from 16.2 to 15.1 per 1,000. In the table following are brought
together the official statistics for the United States from 1880 down to
1913, when the rate was only 14.1 per 1,000 of population. Taldng
the approximate rate for 1880 as 100, the corresponding rate for 1913
was only 71. In part, of course, it is quite probable that the decline
in the mortality has been slightly affected by the large immigration
during the last thirty years, but in a general way the evidence is con-
clusive that the reduction in mortality is the result of a nation-wide
improvement in sanitary conditions and increasing effectiveness of
federal, state and municipal sanitary control.
GENERAL DEATH RATE OF THE UNITED STATES REGISTRATION AREA,
1880-1913
Year Population Deaths Rate per 1,000
1880 8,5.38,000 169,060 19.8
1890 19,659,440 386,212 19.6
1900 30,765,618 539,939 17.6
1905 34,094,605 545,533 16.0
1910 53,843,896 805,412 15.0
1911 59,275,977 839,284 14.2
1912 60,427,133 838,251 13.9
63,299,164 890,823 14.1
(3)
34 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE liETTERMENT
REDUCTION IN DEATH RATE, BY AGE AND SEX
Information is fortuuately available for the United States regis-
tration area of 1900 to establish with approximate accuracy the
changes in the death rate, by divisional periods of life during the in-
tervening decade, ending with 1911. The table following has been
derived from Bulletin No. 112 of the Division of Vital Statistics of
the Bureau of the Census. The table exhibits the death rates per 1,000
of population at specified age periods, and the percentage which the
death rate in 1911 represents of the rate prevailing in 1900, with the
required distinction of sex :
COMPARATIVE DEATH RATE OP THE UNITED STATES REGISTRATION
STATES BY DIVISIONAL PERIODS OF LIFE, 1900-1911
Death Rate* per 1000 Population Per Cent Death
A?e Group for States** included in Registra- Rate in 1911
tion Area in 1900. Represents of
1911 1900 That in 1900:
All ages :
§ [S pqm % £h «!» 1^
Crude rate 14.9 15.8 14.0 17.2 17.9 16.5 87 88 85
Corrected rate *** 14.6 15.3 13.9 17.0 17.6 16.5 86 87 84
Under 5 years 36.6 39.8 33.3 49.9 54.1 45.7 73 74 73
Under 1 year 125.5 138.6 112.1 161.9 178.4 145.0 78 78 77
1 to 4 years 12.8 13.3 12.2 19.8 20.4 19.1 65 65 64
5 to 9 years 3.2 3.4 3.1 4.7 4.7 4.6 68 72 67
10 to 14 years 2.2 2.4 2.1 3.0 2.9 3.1 73 83 68
15 to 19 years 3.5 3.7 3.3 4.8 4.9 4.8 73 76 69
20 to 24 years 5.0 5.3 4.7 6.8 7.0 6.7 74 76 70
25 to 34 years 6.3 6.7 6.0 8.2 8.3 8.2 77 81 73
35 to 44 years 9.4 10.4 8.3 10.3 10.8 9.8 91 96 85
45 to 54 years 14.5 16.1 12.9 15.0 15.8 14.2 97 102 91
55 to 64 years 28.4 30.9 26.0 27.3 28.8 25.8 104 107 101
65 to 74 years 58.3 61.6 55.1 56.5 59.5 53.7 103 104 103
75 years and over 143.0 147.4 139.2 142.4 145.9 139.3 100 101 100
* Exclusive of still-births. ** Group includes Connecticut, the District of Columbia.
Indiana, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Rhode
Island, and Vermont. *** Based on the standard million of England and Wales, 1901.
The foregoing table emphasizes the fact, not generally known or
thoroughly understood, that the observed decline • in the American
death rate has been chiefly at ages under 35, and that at ages 35-44,
for illustration, the relative rate for 1911 was 91 per cent of the rate
for 1900 ; at ages 45.54, it was 97 per cent ; at ages 55-64 it was 104
per cent ; at ages 65-74, 103 per cent ; and at ages 75 and over it was
100 per cent. In other words, at ages 55 and over the death rate has
actually increased, which is the more significant when the rela-
tively considerable decrease at the earlier ages is taken into account.
DECLINE IN THE DEATH RATE BY .STATES
The next table shows the decline in the death rate r-orrected for
age in the several registration .states of the United States as existing in
the year 1900 :
STATISTICAL STUDIES 35
COMPARATIVE DEATH RATES BY STATES, 1900-1911
Per Cent Death
Corrected* Death Rate per 1,000 Rate in 1911
Population Represents of
Area :^911 1900 That in 1900:
og ^ log's I og'S I
States included in registration area of
1900 14.6 15.3 13.9 17.0 17.6 16.5 86 87 84
Connecticut 14.8 15.7 14.0 17.4 18.1 16.7 85 87 84
District of Columbia 18.9 20.8 17.2 24.4 26.1 22.6 77 80 76
Indiana 12.3 12.4 12.2 14.4 14.2 14.6 85 87 84
Maine 13.0 13.3 12.6 14.9 14.7 15.0 87 90 84
Massachusetts 15.0 16.0 14.1 18.1 19.0 17.3 83 84 82
Michigan 12.4 12.9 12.0 13.9 14.0 13.8 89 92 87
New Hampshire 14.2 14.7 13.8 16.3 16.4 16.3 87 90 85
New Jersey 15.1 16.1 14.3 18.2 19.3 17.0 83 83 84
New York 15.7 16.7 14.8 18.3 19.1 17.4 86 87 85
Rhode Island 15.7 16.8 14.8 20.9 21.6 20.2 75 78 73
Vermont 12.6 12.7 12.5 13.8 13.7 13.9 91 93 90
* Corrected on basis of standard million of England and Wales, 1901.
The table is self-explanatory and requires no discussion, but it
may be pointed out that there has been a decrease in the death
rate corrected for age in all of the registration states, but to a variable
degree, the decline for both sexes combined having been greatest in
the state of Rhode Island and least in the state of Vermont.*
DECLINE IN THE DEATH RATE OF CITIES
The evidence of a declining death rate is still more conclusive and
suggestive for the large cities of the United States and of other civil-
ized countries o£the world. Combining all of the American cities for
which trustworthy data were available in 1870, the rate for that year
was 25.5 per 1,000. which by 1872 had increased to 28.6; by 1890 the
rate had declined to 21.8 ; by 1900 to 18.8; by 1910 to 16.5; and by
1911 to 15.6. The evidence already available seems to prove that the
rate for 1912 was the lowest on record. The rate for recent years is
* The following table exhibits the changes in the age distribution of the
population of the United States on a percentage basis, showing respectively
for the several census years the proportionate population at ages under 5,
5 to 64, and 65 and over since 18S0. The obsen'ed changes cannot be con-
sidered sufficient to seriously impair the conclusion that the crude death rate
of the registration area indicates with approximate accuracy the mortality
tendency of the United States during the last thirty years.
PERCENTAGE DISTRIBUTION BY AGE PERIODS OF THE POPULATION
OF THE UNITED STATES— 18S0-1910
1S80 1890 1900 1910
Ages % % % %
0-4 13.8 12.2 12.1 11.6
5-64 82.8 83.9 83.8 84.1
65-over 3.4 3.9 4.1 4.3
All ages 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0
36 FIKST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
based upon Ihe eombiiicd returns for fifty cities, with an aggre^^ite
population of nearly twenty millions.*
During the last thirty years the death rate of large cities of this
and other countries has declined as follows, the comparison being
limited to the quinquennial periods ending respectively with 1885 and
1910: The death rate of London decreased from 20.9 to 14.0 per
1,000; of Dublin, from 27.5 to 21.6; of Paris, from 24.4 to 17.5; of
Amsterdam, from 25.1 to 13.] ; of St. Petersburg, from 32.8 to
25.5 ; of Berlin, from 26.5 to 15.5 ; of Vienna, from 28.2 to 17.0 ; of
Budapest, from 31.5 to 19.5; of Milan, from 30.3 to 19.3; of Mel-
bourne, Victoria, from 20.1 to 13.1 ; of Sydney, New South Wales,
from 20.8 to 10.5 ; of New York, from 27.5 to 17.0 ; of Chicago, from
21.5 to 14.5 ; and of Philadelphia, from 22.3 to 17.7. This comparison
is exceedingly instructive, emphasizing, as it does, on the basis of
trustworthy data, the conclusion that the decline in the death rate is
world-wdde, and that in practically all the large centers of population
the rate has declined, the decrease varying from approximately one-
fifth to one-third or more during the thirty-year period, with
definite indications of a further reduction in the rate since 1910 in
nearly all the localities, states and countries considered in the present
discussion.
IMPROVEMENTS IN THE LONGEVITY OF PRIMITIVE RACES
The foregoing conclusions are based entirely upon the returns for
civilized countries with well established sanitary departments and
effective statutory requirements providing methods and means of
sanitary control. Evidence, however, is also available for the so-
called non-civilized countries of the world to warrant the conclusion
that the longevity of primitive races is increasing and that the con-
ditions favorable to the acclimatization of white races in the tropics
are constantly and rapidly improving. This conclusion applies par-
ticularly to the vast areas inhabited by the primitive or non-European
* The death rate of the registration area for the year 1912 was 13.9 per one
thousand. During 1913 the rate increased slightly, to 14.1. The rates for the
five largest cities down to 1913 were as follows:
DEATH RATES OF LARGE AMERICAN CITIES, 1901-1913.
(Rate per 1,000)
Years New York Chicago Philadelphia St. Louis Boston
1901-05 19.0 14.5 18.1 17.9 18.8
1906-10 16.9 14.9 17.7 15.6 17.9
1911 15.2 14.5 16.6 15.4 17.1
1912 14.5 14.8 15.3 14.9 16.4
1913 14.3 15.1 15.7 14.9 16.4
From Prolimiiiarv Announcement of Division of Vital Statistics, U. S. Census Office, May
19, 1914.
STATISTICAL STUDIES , 37
races of Asia, chiefly of China, Formosa, the English and Dutch East
Indies, Ceylon, the Straits Settlements, and Siam. The conclusion
also applies to most of the European possessions in Africa and to
vast territories in South and Central America and Australia. For
India the evidence is quite conclusive that a material improve-
ment is taking place in the health of the people, which is best illus-
trated by the statistics of European troops since the beginning of the
nineteenth century. The death rate has declined from 84.6 per 1,000
during the period 1801-30 to 19.3 during the decade ending with
1879, a further reduction having taken place during the subsequent
period, the rate for 1901-05 having been 12.2 ; for 1906-09, 8.7 ; and
finally, for 1911 the rate w^as only 4.9. A corresponding decline in the
death rate of native troops has taken place, but limiting the discussion
to recent years, it declined from 10.0 during 1901-05 to 6.5 during
1906-09, and to 4.5 during 1911. These are exceptionally encourag-
ing statistics, which have their most interesting parallel in the remark-
able sanitary achievements in the American administration of the
Panama Canal Zone under the efficient direction of Col. W. C.
Gorgas. During the French administration, 1881-90, the average
death rate of the Isthmian Canal employees was 61.3 per 1,000. Dur-
ing the American administration, 1904-]2, the average rate was only
16.3 ; and during the last year of the period, only 9.2 — an achieve-
ment probably without a parallel in sanitation history. The annual
death rate of the city of Panama in 1887 had reached the almost in-
credible proportions of 121.7 per 1,000. but the rate has gradually
been reduced until in 1912 it was only 29.3. As another interesting
illustration of the observed decline in the death rate of tropical coun-
tries, a reference may be made to the mortality of non-native British
officials in West Africa since 1905, the rate having been reduced from
an average of 28.1 per 1,000 during that year to ]7.3 by 1909, and to
only 12.4 by 1912.* At the same time, there has been an increase in
the average length of service from three years and six months in 1905
to six years and three months in 1912 ; and a substantial reduction
• * See also the Reports for 1912 on Blackwater Fever in the Tropical Afri-
can Dependencies, published as Parliamentary Paper Cd. 7211, London, 1914.
Also "Medizinal-Berichte uber die Deutschen Schutzgebiete," published Berlin,
1913, including reports on all the Gennan Colonies, with extended observa-
tions on tropical diseases and the mortality of Europeans. Interesting in this
connection is the Statistical Analysis of the Mortality of Scandinavian Mis-
sionaries in the Congo Free State, 1878-1904. That the improved tropical
mortality is also reflected in the experience of life insurance companies trans-
acting business in tropical countries is brought out by a paper on the subject
in the Proceedings of the Actuarial Society of America for 1908, by Arthur
Hunter, with an extended discussion by other members of the society.
38 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
was also obtained in the rate of invaliding, from 62.3 per 1,000 in
1905 to only 28.2 in 1912. The death rate of Algeria, which was once
considered extremely unhealthful, has been reduced to 19.6 per 1,000
in 1911. and a large portion of the country has become a health resort
for Europeans. The death rate of Madagascar in 1911 was 26.5
per 1,000, and of Cochin-China, 26.2. In the West Indies the death
rates are diminishing, the rate for Cuba being only 14.7 per 1.000;
for the Dutch West Indies, 16.9 ; for Guatemala, 18.5 ; for Honduras,
18.7; for Salvador, 22.8; and British Guiana, which in former years
had a very high death rate, has now a rate of only 31.7, whereas for
Venezuela the rate for 1911 was 20.3. All of these rates may safely be
accepted as evidence of a gradual diminution in the mortality of so-
called non-civilized, or only partly civilized, countries, largely in-
habited by primitive or other than white races living chiefly in the
temperate zone.*
SANITARY PROGRESS OF TROPICAIj COUNTRIES
A truly vast amount of instructive information is available for so-
called uncivilized countries illustrating the sanitary progress which
is being made, largely, of course, in consequence of the white man's
conquest of tropical regions, and which is -bound, in course of time,
to afford almost inconceivable opportunities for settlement and the
rational development of natural resources. Attention may properly
be directed on this occasion to the annual reports on the moral and
material progress and condition, of India, of which the 58th was pub-
lished during the present year ; the report of the International Plague
Congress, held at Mukden in April, 1911, which constitutes one of
the most notable contributions to epidemiology; the annual medical
reports on the German Colonial Possessions ; the reports of the Ad-
visory Committee of the Tropical Diseases Research Fund; the pro-
ceedings of the International Conference on the Sleeping Siclcness, the
English reports on Blackwater Fever in Tropical African Depen-
dencies ; the scientific reports of the Wellcome Tropical Research Lab-
oratories in Khartoum, Egypt; the scientific publications and special
local investigations in tropical countries of the tropical medical schools
in Liverpool, Hamburg, Townsville (Queensland), London and New
Orleans. Mention also requires to be made of the excellent report of
Prof. W. J. Simpson, on sanitary matters in various West African
* The mortality statistics for Central and South America require of course
to be accepted with extreme caution. The favorable conclusions regarding
the decline in the South and Central American death rates are based upon
an extended study of the facts, with particular reference to Yellow Fever and
Malaria. A full discussion of the mortality of the Western Hemisphere is
resei-\'ed for future consideration.
STATISTICAL STUDIES 39
Colonies, and on the outbreak of plague on the Gold Coast. For all
of the British and German West African colonies thoroughly scien-
tific reports are now being published which, without exception,
reflect the evidence of more or less rapid strides in necessary sani-
tary reforms. The late Sir Hubert Boyce has admirably re-
ported upon the health progress in administration in the West
Indies ; and the Japanese Government has brought about a veri-
table hygienic revolution in the administration of Formosa, par-
ticularly in the reduction of the incidence of malaria. All of these
efforts, which are but a mere fragment of what is actually being done
in the sanitary administration of Colonial possessions throughout the
world, including the Philippines,^ Hawaii, and Porto Rico, indicate
a g'radual reduction in the mortality from preventable diseases among
both native and white races in the tropics. The inevitable consequence
must be a larger rate of natural increase and a proportionately more
rapid augmentation of the population of those sections of the globe
which constitute to a not inconsiderable extent the future sources of
the world's food supply.t
THE PRINCIPAL CAUSES OP DEATH
The human death rate is the resultant of a large number of known
or imknown. obvious or obscure, causes and conditions destructive to
human life. Many of these causes are now known to be preventable
* A practical illustration of the methods of sanitary administration in the
Philippines is the "Sanitary Inspector's Handbook," published by the Bureau
of Health of the Department of the Interior of the Government of the Philip-
pine Islands. Also the Special Report of Dean C. Worcester on the History
of Asiatic Cholera in the Philippine Islands, published in 1909. The progress
which is being made in the control of beriberi is best illustrated in the Studies
of the Institute for Medical Research of the Federated Malay States, pub-
lished in 1911, and the monogTaph on the Etioloay of beriberi by Frazer and
Stanton, derived from the same source and reprinted in the Philippine Jour-
nal of Science for 1910. For a more extended study of this important subject,
with particular reference to the diagnosis and prevalence of the disease, the
elaborate Treatise on beriberi by Edward Vedder, M.D., published by
William Wood & Co., 1913, should be consulted. In 1912 there were 12 deaths
from beriberi in the reg'istration area of the United States, but there are con-
vincing reasons for believing that the disease is much more prevalent than is
generally known.
t Indications of health progress in arctic regions are to be foimd in the
Medical Handbook for the Alaska School Sei-vice, issued by the United States
Bureau of Education in 1913, and the Special Reports of the United States
Public Health Service on Tuberculosis among Eskimos. A material improve-
ment in the health conditions of the population of Labrador and the northern
outposts of Newfomidland has resulted from the admirable work of the
Grenfell Medical Missions at Battle Harbor and other far northern points.
40 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
and subject to administrative control. The immediate or remotely
contributory causes of death are comparatively few and simple among
primitive races, and relatively numerous and complex among civilized
mankind. The hygiene of transmissible diseases is a modern branch of
medicine, based upon the epoch-making discoveries of Koch, Pasteur,
Ross, Reed, and others whose work has been of incalculable benefit to
all mankind. Cholera, malaria, plague, smallpox, typhoid fever, and
yellow fever are no longer a serious menace to civilized countries,
since their nature and mode of transmission are thoroughly under-
stood, and preventive measures are applied with increasing effective-
ness, and in some cases with absolute certainty, as is well illustrated in
the history of recent sporadic outbreaks, or the occurrence of isolated
cases of plague and leprosy on the East and "West coasts of the United
States. The best Imown of these diseases, typhoid fever, has gradu-
ally been reduced from an average rate of 35.9 per one hundred thou-
sand during 1900 to 16.5 during 1912. In the United States during
1911 the ten principal causes of death, accounting for 66.6 per cent
of the mortality from all causes, were, in the order of their importance,
organic diseases of the heart (10.0 per cent), tuberculosis of the
lungs (9.7 per cent), acute nephritis and Bright 's disease (6.9 per
cent), accidents and homicides (6.4 per cent), pneumonia (6.3 per
cent), respiratory diseases other than pneumonia and tuberculosis of
the lungs (5.6 per cent), congenital debility and malformations (5.6
per cent), diarrhea and enteritis, under two years (5.5 per cent),
cerebral hemorrhage and softening of the brain (5.4 per cent), and,
finally, cancer and other malignant diseases (5.2 per cent). In marked
contrast, the mortality of India during the same year was chiefly
the result of six principal causes, being, in the order of their im-
portance, fevers, accounting for 55.0 per cent, plague for 9.6 per cent,
cholera for 4.6 per cent, dysentery and diarrhea for 3.5 per cent,
respiratory diseases for 3.1 per cent, and smallpox for 0.8 per cent.
'The six groups of causes combined accounted for 76.6 per cent of the
mortality of India from all causes.
INDIA MEDICAL STATISTICS
The general death rate of the registration area of the United
States in 1911 was 14.2 per 1,000, while the corresponding rate for the
registration area of India was 32.0. The combined fever death rate,
including typhoid, typhus, and malaria, was only 2.4 per 10,000 of
population for the United States, against 176.3 for India. If, there-
fore, in the course of time the fever problem in India can be solved
along much the same lines as has been the case in some other tropical
countries, the general death rate of the Far East would be reduced
STATISTICAL STUDIES 41
to perhaps one-half of its present proportions. Astonishing medical
and sanitary progress has been made in India, as is evident from the
numerous official and other accounts, but mention can here only be
made of the proceedings of the Second All-India Sanitary Conference,
held at Madras in 1912, and the report on investigations into the
causes of malaria in Bombay, to give emphasis to the conclusion that
a material reduction in the fever death rate of India will unquestion-
ably be brought about \\dthin another generation. The problems await-
ing solution are truly of colossal proportions, complicated as they are
by the economic condition of the people, their exceptional racial and re-
ligious distribution, the profound adherence to caste and custom, etc.
Should this expectation be fulfilled, the present small natural increase
of India of only 6.58 per 1,000 of population, or the annual difference
between the birth rate of 38.59 and the death rate of 32.01, could easily
be doubled, or in any event be made to attain the normal average for
fairly well civilized countries, of approximately 10 per 1,000 per an-
num. If, in addition thereto, the cholera mortality of India, which noAv
accounts for about 390,000 deaths per annum, and the even larger an-
nual mortality from plague could be brought under control and ma-
terially reduced, it is self-evident that there are almost inconceivable
possibilities for a much more rapid increase in the population of India
and other countries of the Far East than have prevailed in historic
periods of time.*
REDUCTION IN THE DEATH RATE BY CAUSES
An extended consideration of the diminution in the death rate
from specified causes would unduly enlarge the present discussion.
The following observations are therefore limited to the registration
* There ai*e no better illustrations of sanitary progress in its relation to
population increase than the reports of sanitary conferences in the different
provinces of India. The Report of the Punjab Sanitarj^ Conference, held
under date of August, 1913, includes an extended consideration of such im-
portant questions as rural sanitation, town-planning, sanitation in connection
with schools and the problem of control in the case of specific diseases, par-
ticularly malaria, tuberculosis, plague and cholera. After calling attention to
the reduction in the urban death rate in the Punjab, amounting to about 4.5
per one thousand of population, it is calculated that this reduction is equiva-
lent to the saving of some 8,700 lives every year in the municipal towns, which
would otherwise have been sacrificed. It has been pointed out in this connec-
tion in a review of the census of India for 1911, by Sir J. A. Baines, that half
the net increase in the population of India during the past decade took place in
subdivisions which had less than 150 persons per square mile, and very little
of it in those which had over 450 ; a substantial reduction in the death rate
of large centers of population must therefore result in a considerable addi-
tional increase in population.
42 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
area of the United States, which may be accepted as fairly typical of
other civilized countries of the world. The rates are limited to the
two quinquennial periods ending respectively with 1905 and 1910,
since no earlier comparative data are conveniently available for the
registration area of this country. The rates for specified causes are
given on the basis of 100,000 population, and for the principal causes
the reduction during the last five-year period, compared with the first,
has been as follows : typhoid fever has been reduced from 32.0 to 25.6 ;
smallpox, from 3.4 to 0.2 ; diphtheria and croup, from 29.6 to 22.4 ; in-
fluenza, from 19.9 to 16.4 ; purulent infections, from 6.1 to 3.8 ; tetanus
from 3.5 to 2.7; tuberculosis, all forms, from 192.6 to 168.7; chronic
rheumatism and gout, from 3.6 to 2.2 ; alcoholism, chronic and acute,
from 6.1 to 5.8; meningitis, from 31.7 to 19.4; softening of the brain,
from 3.7 to 2.5 ; paralysis (not otherwise specified), from 20.1 to 16.1 ;
general paralysis of the insane, from 6.8 to 5.5 ; epilepsy, from 4.4
to 4.2 ; convulsions of infants, from 21.4 to 12.8 ; neuralgia and neu-
ritis, from 6.9 to 5.5 ; non-tubercular respiratory diseases, from 220.5
to 188.1 ; and finally, diseases of the skin, from 7.3 to 6.1. With prac-
tically no important exception the death rates for these eighteen speci-
fied and all more or less important causes, which account for 33.6 per
cent of the mortality from all causes during the five-year period end-
ing with 1910. have undergone a further reduction during 1911 and
1912.
CAUSES OF DEATH WHICH ARE ON THE INCREASE
The only important causes of death which have increased* during
the five years ending with 1910, as compared with the previous five
years, are briefly the following : syphilis increased from 4.1 to 5.4 per
100,000 of population; cancer and other malignant tumors, from
67.9 to'72.6; diabetes, from 11.5 to 13.7; locomotor ataxia and other
* Two important diseases which have increased, thoug'h as yet numerically
of relatively small importance, considering the country as a whole, are anterior
poliomyelitis and pellagra. There are few better illustrations of the thor-
oughly systematic manner in which public health activities are now adminis-
tered than the highly specialized studies which have been made of the epidemi-
ology of infantile paralysis. See particularly in this connection Bulletin No.
90 of the Hygrienie Laboratory of the United States Public Health Service,
and the Special Report on Infantile Paralysis of Massachusetts, in 1909^
published by the State Board of Health. See also the results of Investiga-
tions on Epidemic Infantile Paralysis, published in English, by the State
Medical Institute of Sweden, and the Reports and Papers on Epidemiologic
Poliomyelitis, published by the Local Government Board, London, 1912.
Even more extended attention has been given to the subject of pellagra,
the mortality of which in the registration area for 1012 amounted to 674.
The disease is apparently rapidly on the inci-ease throughout the Southern
STATISTICAL, STUDIES 13
diseases of the spinal cord, from 7.3 to 8.4; all diseases of the cir-
culatory system combined, from 161,2 to 177.7 ; ulcers of the stomach,
from 2.9 to 3.6 ; diarrhea and enteritis, under two years, from 89.0 to
96.2 ; diseases of the puerperal state, considered as a group, from 14.2 to
15.5 ; malformations, chiefly congenital, from 12.2 to 14.9 ; diseases of
early infancy, chiefly congenital debility and premature births, from
73.9 to 75.0; suicide, from 13.9 to 16.0; accidents, from 84.9 to 86.0;
and, finally, homicide, from 2.9 to 5.9. In some cases, no doubt, the
changes are the result of improved medical diagnosis, and, still more,
the consequence of changes in methods of death classification, but this
objection is not likely to impair materially any of the foregoing general
conclusions. Combining the thirteen principal diseases which have
increased, the resulting total death rate was 536.9 per one hundred
thousand for the first five years, against 590.3 for the last. The actual
increase in this group of causes was, therefore, equivalent to 53.4 per
one hundred thousand of population, or the average combined death
rate from the thirteen causes during the last five years was 9.9 per
cent in excess of the rate during the first five-year period under con-
sideration. Combining the eighteen principal diseases which have
decreased, the resulting total death rate was 63 9.6 per one hundred
thousand for the first five years, against 508.1 for the last. There Avas,
therefore, an actual decrease in this group of causes equivalent to
111.5 per one hundred thousand of population, or 18.0 per cent.
Of the diseases which have decreased, the most important are un-
questionably typhoid fever, diphtheria and croup, tuberculosis of the
lungs, and non-tubercular respiratory diseases. Since most of these
are of the strictly preventable class, there are the strongest reasons for
believing that a still further, and substantial, reduction in the death
rate, at least of civilized countries, will be obtained in the near future,
and that as a result of such diminution the excess of births over
deaths will be increased.
PROBLEMS OP CELLULAR PATHOLOGY
Momentous questions arise out of these considerations, which can-
not be adequately considered, even in part, in the remaining portion
states. A concise summary of the epidemiology of pellagTa has been published,
as reprint No. 120, by the United States Public Health Keports, Washington,
1913.
Another new disease is spotted or tick fever of the Rocky Mountains,
which has become a problem of great interest to the physicians, zoologists
and sanitarians. The report on the subject by Dr. John F. Anderson has
been published as Bulletin No. 14 of the Hygienic Laboratory of the United
States Public Health Service, Washington, 1903.
4-1 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
of this addross. The economic aspects of tlie probh'in are of the first
order of importance and less difficult of discussion than the more in-
volved biolojjical questions, which are largely beyond my own under-
standing. In a most interesting summary account of the nature, origin
and maintenance of life, Prof. E. A. Schiifer has brought forward
much apparent evidence that the dividing line between animate and
inanimate matter is less sharply drawn than has hitherto been
believed, and that the elements composing living substances are few
in number — chiefly carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen. He
therefore concludes that it is not a hopeless anticipation that the
possibility of the production of living material is not as remote as is
generally assumed. These views have not been generally accepted,
and among others, not by H. E. Armstrong and Sir William
Tilden, who are of the opinion that Professor Schafer's address
"leaves us exactly where we w^ere. " Even if it is conceded that
the problem of the origin of life is at root a chemical one, and that
carbon stands alone among the elements which condition the functions
of the living substance, it is an incontrovertible fact, in the words of
Armstrong, that ' ' organic growi;h is clearly a process of extreme com-
plexity, one that involves the association by a variety of operations of
a whole series of diverse units. ' ' Of the vast strides which have been
made by all the sciences during the nineteenth century, none have been
more astonishing than those in the domain of biology, foremost among
the new discoveries of which is the cell structure of plants and animals,
which has given rise to a new branch of knowledge known as ' ' Cellular
Pathology." It has properly been observed that a new era was en-
tered upon with the discovery of protoplasm and the promulgation of
the cell theory, as the result of refined methods in microscopical re-
search. It has been established that the cell " is a microscopic chemical
engine where the energy of the foodstuffs is finally set free and applied
to the work of life." In proportion as the nature and the function
of the cell become better understood, the factors of control in the
duration of life become obviously greater, and assume, in fact, almost
inconceivable proportions. The discovery of the functions of the
hormones, or chemical agents circulating in the blood, by means of
which the activities of the cells constituting our bodies are controlled,
and their relations to the internal secreting glands, the uses and im-
portance of which were not understood until within recent years, fore-
shadows a time when many of the now obscure diseases will also be
brought under control, with a consequential further improvement in
the duration of life. This conclusion applies particularly to the func-'
tions of the thyroid and parathyroid glands, the pituitary gland, which
is a small structure no larger than a nut attached to the base of the
STATISTICAL STUDIES 45
brain, and the suprarenal glands, which are adjacent to the kidneys.
Human life, in the words of Schafer," is an aggregate life; and the life
of the whole is the life of the individual cells." The first condition of
the maintenance of the life of the aggregate is fulfilled by insuring that
the life of the individual cells composing it is kept normal ; the second
essential condition for the maintenance of life of the cell aggregate
being the co-ordination of its parts and the due regulation of their
activity so that they may work together for the benefit of the whole.
From this point of view the vast domain of cellular pathology as-
sumes the greatest possible practical importance, and it is an en-
couraging indication of medical progress that increasing attention is
being given to this subject.*
PROBLEMS OF AGE, GROWTH AND DEATH
The most important practical contribution to the problems which
arise out of the foregoing considerations is the work by Charles S.
Minot, on * ' Age, Growth and Death. ' ' Minot discusses the condition of
old age, the cellular changes of age, the rate of growth, differentiation
and rejuvenation, regeneration and death, the four laws of age, the lon-
gevity of animals, and a new theory of life. Some of his observa-
tions are exceedingly suggestive, particularly those on the rate of
growth, which unfortunately fail in the required support of adequate
statistical data for man, though, as pointed out by Minot. if statistics
of the growth of man could be gathered with due precautions, "it
would fill one of the gaps in our knowledge which is lamentable. ' ' The
important and almost startling conclusion of Minot on the rate of
growth may be briefly summed up in the statement that the period of
youth is the period of most rapid decline in the rate of growth, and that
* The literature of life pathologically considered is quite extensive. Per-
haps the most comprehensive review of the whole subject is the "Wonders of
Life," by Emst Haeckel, published in 1905. The address on "Life: Its Na-
ture, Origin and Maintenance," by Prof. E. A. Schafer, was published by
Longmans, Green & Co., London, 1912. The essay on "The Origin of Life,
by H. E. Armstrong, was republished in the Smithsonian Report for 1912.
The biological essays on "The Mechanistic Conception of Life," by Jaques
Loeb, M.D., were published by the University of Chicago Press, in 1912. The
observations and conclusions of Charles Sedgwick Minot on "Modem Prob-
lems of Biology," originally delivered in the form of lectures at the University
of Jena, in December, 1912, were republished by Blakiston's Son ik Co.,
Philadelphia, 1913. The more popular aspects of the problem have been
made available in the treatise by H. W. Conn, in the story of "The Living
Machine," published in New York, in 1899, and "Disease and Its Causes," by
W. T. Counselman, in the Home University Library of Modem Knowledge,
1913.
46 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
the period ot" old age is that in which the decline in the rate of growth
is slowest. He emphasizes the originally enormous power of growth in
the embryo and the rapid proportionate decline almost immediately
after birth. He therefore argues that it is not from the study of the
old, but from the study of the very young, of the young embryo and of
the germ, that we are to expect an insight into the complicated ques-
tions which confront the seeker after truth in the innermost secrets of
the problem of life and death.
THE PROBLEM OF OLD AGE
For immediately practical purposes, however, the study of old age
will continue to attract attention and deservedly so. No one has
written to better purpose on the means available for the deliberate
prolongation of life than Sir Herman Weber, whose treatise includes
observations on the natural duration of life, the etfects of an unfavor-
able heredity, the value of respiratory exercise, the importance of
great moderation in food, the scientific aspects of the alcoholic and
neurotic affections, and, finally, the psychology of old age. In a still
more recent work on the care and treatment of old age, in health and
disease, Robert Saundry, M.D., thoroughly covers the entire field,
and following an important introduction on the duration of life, based
upon the fundamental concept that senility is not identical with old
age, or that, in other words, the problem of longevity is not merely one
of a quantitative increase in duration, but also one of a qualitative im-
provement in the physical, mental and moral faculties, he gives much
practical advice wiiicli must needs prove of much service to the physi-
cian called upon to render qualified aid to the aged. Out of considera-
tions like these naturally arise new conditions which, singly or com-
bined, in no small measure affect a further improvement in the rate
of mortality, with a consequent decline in the death rate in adult life,
which as yet has been only very slight in the experience of modem
countries. While at some age periods, in fact, the rate is higher now
than in former years.* The solution of the problem depends largely
upon the clear recognition of the important truth that the causes of old
age and premature death in adult life lie probably as largely without
the body as within it and that, in fact, no definite limit can safely be
placed upon human longevity in the present inadequate state of our
* For an extended discussion of the close association of cancer with the
degenerative periods of life and of the general subject of the nature of old
age and senility, see a paper by Hastings Gilford, F.K.C.S., in the British
Medical Journal for Dec. 27, 1913.
STATISTICAL STUDIES 4 (
knowledge regarding the whole problem of life, its nature, mainte-
nance and continuity.*
THE ASSUMED LAW^ OF MORTAIjITY
No one can forecast the future consequences of these scientifically
tenable and far-reaching conclusions. The chances of death are not
fixed, nor is there a true law of mortality in the sense of natural law
as distinct from scientific law, which, in the words of Karl Pearson, is
essentially a product of the human mind and has no meaning apart
from man. In the sense of this definition there is a law of mortality
which is merely a descriptive expression of as wide a range as possible
of the sequences of our sense impressions, describing but not explain-
ing the orderly manner in which human life terminates in the mass of
mankind, with a due regard to age and sex. Numerous efforts have
been made to establish w'ith scientific precision the natural and mathe-
matical laws concerning population vitality and mortality, but no ef-
fort of this kind has been successful, chiefly for the reason that so
large a proportion of the causes of death among all mankind are pre-
ventable, or postponable, as the ease may be. Corbaux, in 1835, made
an elaborate attempt to establish the natural law, according to which
what he called ' ' the waste of human life ' ' takes place, but he properly
observed that to admit as universal ' ' any law whatsoever of mortality
under the present constitution of society would be an error. ' ' He never-
theless concluded that, "on the other hand, a very extraordinary notion,
that the law of mortality had undergone a material alteration within
* In the May 29, 1914, issue of the London Times (weekly edition) a
statement is quoted by Professor Metchnikoff with regard to the ultimate result
of the campaign against preventable diseases, in which it is said that, "rid of
these teiTible scourges, humanity will be able to concentrate upon its intel-
lectual development." "Mortality among civilized peoples has certainly di-
minished," he said. "People live longer and though the strain of life may be
said to be more intense, improved communication allows them to live away
from the great centers and in the purer air of the country."
With reference to Professor Metchnikoff's views on the ultimate effect of
the lengthening of human life, the correspondent states that "his theories are
admirably exemplified in his own power to work, which is one of the reasons
why he has not given more to the world in the form of scientific exposition;
he considers he can still be of use to the present generation in directing their
studies. This ambition, wholly justified by the fact that his laboratory assist-
ants continually consult him in their work, is proof of his splendid vitality.
In his cosmos, as revealed in 'The Nature of Man,' the septuagenarian and
those of more advanced age have still work to do. Political conditions in
Russia would have improved, he thinks, if older heads had directed the reform
movement. The rashness of young men has been disastrous to the country^
because it has provoked reaction."
48 KIKST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE I5ETTERMENT
a century, seems to have gained credit with many who failed to reflect
upon the immutable character of all Nature's laws, without excep-
tion." This conclusion by C'orbaux is absolutely contrary to the facts
of human experience, for, as fully brought out by the present dis-
cussion, the rate of mortality is not only subject to a wide range of
variation, but a permanent reduction in the rate may result from
sanitarj' and other improvements which more or less condition the
termination of life. Slissmilch and many other writers aside from
Corbaux have erroneously assumed an immutable law of mortality,
but the facts of human experience for half a thousand years, at least,
sustain the conclusion that the birth rate, the death rate, and human
multiplication, are largely matters of human control.*
HEREDITY AND THE DEATH RATE
How far a tendency to longevity is inherited cannot be fully dis-
cussed on this occasion. It is no doubt true that "the organism and
its inheritance are, to begin ivith, one and the same," but the external
factors which condition longevity are of much greater importance, at
least through all the early years of life, than the internal disease-re-
sisting and possibly inherited tendencies of the organism. Unquestion-
ably there is much in inherited individual or race traits, but there
are also innumerable exceptions which have yet to be explained by
scientific theories and which will continue to perplex and confuse the
wisest of mankind. Only a scientific mind of a high order could even
attempt to unravel the interrelations of the apparent law of human
mortality, or the chances of death, to the biological phenomena of a
selective death rate, and the perhaps equally important problem of
* The improvement in longevity, actuarially considered, for the nineteenth
centuiy was discussed in a number of important papers on the occasion of
the Fourth International Actuarial Congress, held in New, York in 1903. Of
special interest are the papers on the Improved Longevity in England and
Wales, by Samuel G. Warner, and the Improvement in Longevity in the
United States during the Nineteenth Century, by John K. Gore. The sub-
ject was further considered on the occasion of the Seventh International Con-
gress of Actuaries, held at Amsterdam, in 1912, including observations on the
Decline in the Mortality of Assured Persons since 1800. Of special interest
are the reports on the Experience of the Gotha Life Insurance Company,
1829-1895; the Experience of the Leipzig Insurance Company, 1830-1899;
the Experience of the State Insurance Institutions of Denmark during the
Nineteenth Century, and the Changes in the Rates of Mortality among As-
sured Lives during the Past Century, by Messrs. Bum and Sharman of the
Prudential Assurance Company, London. Mention also requires to be made
of an extremely interesting paper on a comparison between the Mortality Ex-
perience of the Equitable Life Assurance Society at the Beginning and the
End of the Nineteenth Century, by Henry William Manly.
STATISTICAL STUDIES 49
reproductive selection. The selective death rate, with regard to which
as yet very little is actually known but much assumed, represents
the inherited longevity, but becomes operative as a general principle
only during the adult portion of life. Pearson has briefly considered
this phase of the subject in his papers on "Data for the Problem of
Evolution in Man," with particular reference to the principle laid
down by Wallace and Weissmann, that the duration of life in an organ-
ism is fundamentally determined by natural selection. According to
Pearson also, the selective death rate represents a considerable por-
tion of the total death rate, and, in his words, "having demonstrated
that the duration of life is really inherited, it has also been demon-
strated that natural selection is very sensibly effective among man-
kind." He proves, or at least attempts to prove, for his data are
hardly sufficient for entirely safe assumptions, that there is certainly
a well-established correlation between the ages at death of fathers
and sons, for he adds, "the heredity is not absolute, since there is a
sensible divergence from the law of inheritance, in that the death rate
is only in part selective. ' ' There is a vast literature on inherited dis-
eases, much of which fails to meet the test of impartial and strictly
qualified scientific criticism. Pearson himself, in his interesting ad-
dress on "Social Problems: Their Treatment, Past, Present and
Future," has emphasized the serious possibilities of far-reaching
errors in crude methods of statistical analysis, but, speaking broadly,
the liability to grave mistakes is even greater in mathematical-statis-
tical researches, resting, as is frequently the case, upon an insufficient
numerical basis of facts.*
* See in this connection a paper on "The Supposed Inferiority of First
and Second Bom Members of Families," and statistical fallacies inherent in
discussions of this kind, by T. B. Macaulay, Montreal, Canada. The Path-
ology of the Order of Birth, with Special Reference to Tuberculosis, has been
discussed by W. C. Rivers, briefly reviewed in the Medical Record, New York,
for Oct. 28, 1911. The Influence of Parental Age on certain characters
in offspring has been considered on the basis of statistical investigations in
Middlesborough by Robert G. Ewart, M.D., briefly reviewed in the Lancet of
Oct. 26, 1912, and a further review of the same discussion is contained in
the British Medical Journal, in Dec. 21, 1912, issue.
For an admirable discussion of the subject of the Inheritance of Fecun-
dity, by Dr. Raymond Pearl, see Popular Science Monthly for October, 1912,
the paper having originally been read at the First International Eugenics
Congress, London, 1912. The Comparative Fecundity of Women of Native
and Foreign Parentage in the United States has been discussed in a paper
contributed by Joseph A. Hill, published in the Quarterly Publication of the
American Statistical Association for December, 1913. See also in this con-
nection a monograph by Elderton, Karl Pearson, etc., on the Correlation of
Fertility with Social Value, published by Dulau & Co., London, 1913, and an
50 F1R8T NATIONAIi CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
CENTENARIANS
A brief refeiviu'e must here be made to the subject of centenarians
and the cliances of extreme old age, which- are apparently in-
creasing in many civilized countries for which the data are available.
It is well known that annuitants are more likely to attain to old age
than persons badly provided for with the necessaries of life, and it
therefore follows that substantial improvements in the social and
economic condition of the population must necessarily tend towards
the same result. The economic importance of this question is quite
considerable in view of the increasing extent to which the pecuniary-
needs of the aged are provided for now by state, corporate ^ or
private pensions, best indicated. in the case of England and Wales,
where, in 1912, there w^ere 642,524 old age pensioners, equivalent to
59.9 per cent of the population ages 70 and over. In the United
States in 1910 the proportion of population ages 65 and over was 4.4
per cent, against 4.1 for the year 1900. The actual number of aged
persons in this country in 1910 was 3,950,000. If half of these were
provided for with non- contributory old-age pensions of only $5.00 a
week, the resulting cost to the nation would be now about $520,000,000
per annum.* As an illustration of the extent to which extreme old age
is at present attained in this country, the census returns may be
quoted, though it is practically certain that they are proljably erro*
neous, at least in the age returns for persons beyond the century mark.
In 1910 there were 7,391 persons enumerated as of the age period
95-99, and 3,555 persons were returned as being over 100 years old.
A serious question of doubt naturally arises as regards the accuracy of
age returns for centenarians, since thorough research in individual
eases, as a rule, fails to provide the required documentary evidence of
fact. In a monograph on centenarians, by T. E. Young, published in
1899, which constitutes one of the few thoroughly scientific contribu-
extremely valuable work by Dr. Max Hirsch on the prevention of conception
in its relation to the declining- birth rate, published under the title "Frueh-
tabtreibung und Priiventivverkehr in Zusammenhang niit deni Geburtenriick-
gang," Wiirzburg, 1914.
* I have quite fully discussed the subject of Old Age Pensions in an-
address on the Problem of Poverty and Pensions in Old Age, National Con-
ference of Charities and Con-ections, 1908; State Pensions and 'Annuities in
Old Age, an address before the Massachusetts Reform Club, published in the
Quarterly Publication of the American Statistical Association, March, 1909;
and' an address on the American Public Pension System and Civil Sei-vice
Retirement Plans, Seventh International Congress of Actuaries, Amsterdam,
1912. See also in this connection the exceptionally interesting and valuable
report on the Police Pension Fund of the City of New York, published by
the Bureau of Municipal Research, 1914.
STATISTICAL STUDIES 51
tions to the subject, a discussion is included of the dependence of the
duration of life upon external physical conditions, which quite fully
sustains the earlier conclusions of the present discussion, that the hu-
man death rate is largelj^ the resultant of external conditions, most
of which are subject to human control. Young quotes the definition of
life by Bichat, the physiologist, • as "the sum of the functions by
which death is resisted," and all the foregoing considerations make it
clear that there is apparently a gradual increase in disease resistance
on the part of an increasing number of mankind, partly, no doubt, in
consequence of the economic improvement in the condition of the
population, providing better food, housing, medical attendance, etc.
LIFE TABLES AND THE AVERAGE AGE AT DEATH
The improvement in human longevity resulting from a decline in
the death rate finds its most scientific expression in the so-called mean
after-lifetime, or the expectation of life. There are no life tables for
the United States as a whole, nor for any particular section thereof,
for very recent years which afford the means of comparing accurately
the changes which have taken place in the expectation of life during a
considerable period of years.* The two Massachusetts life tables
which have been constructed for the '50 's and '90 's, it is true, indicate
a considerable degree of progress, but for reasons which need not be
discussed heije, they are not strictly applicable to the country as a
whole. For the present purpose, therefore, the discussion is limited
to the three English life tables for healthy districts, which have been
constructed with extreme care for three periods of time. According
to these tables the expectation of life at birth for males living in
healthy districts increased from 48.56 years during the period 1849-53
to 52.87 years during 1891-1900. The corresponding improvement in
the longevity of women was from 49.45 years to 55.71 years. These dif-
ferences, apparently slight, are of very considerable economic impor-
tance M'hen applied to the whole population. Stated in another form,
according to the English healthy-district life tables, out of 1,000,000
males born during the period 1849-53, the number surviving to age
* A life table for the United States has been in course of preparation by
the Division of Vital Statistics of the Bureau of the Census for several years,
but work on the same has of late been discontinued. There would appear
to be no technical reasons why at least an approximate life table for the
United States should not be constructed with the same degree of accuracy as is
'obtained for life tables of many other countries of the world. The life tables
published for certain American states and cities by the Census Office in former
years are useful, but are somewhat out of date. The most recent United
States life table, for the city of New York, has not been published in suffi-
cient detail to make the same practically useful in the manner in which the
corresponding life tables of London and certain other large English cities are.
52 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
sixty Mas 485,014, wheivas, for the period LS91-1 !)()(), the number thus
surviving was 551,973.
Aeoordiny to the vital statistics of the United States for 1910, the
average age at death attained by those dying during the year was
38.7 years, which compares with an average of 35.2 years for 1900.
The average age at death, of course* must not be confused with the ex-
pectation of life, which is arrived at by fundamentally different mathe-
matical processes. In the absence of life tables for the United States,
however, this rather crude indication of an improvement in American
longevity is the only statistical evidence available which can be relied
upon as approximately accurate. The improvement has been chiefly
the result of the diminishing mortality from the acute infectious dis-
eases of infancy, typhoid fever, malaria, and tuberculosis.* The eco-
nomic value of such a reduction must be very considerable, but it is
far from being the equivalent of a real improvement obtainable in
consequence of a material reduction in the death rate of the adult
population, by means of which the more valuable lives as representing
accumulated human skill and experience would be substantially pro-
longed.
THE MORTALITY FROM CANCER
Foremost among the causes of death in adult life which require
present consideration is cancer, or the group of malignant diseases
conveniently combined under that term. Cancer is unquestionably on
the increase in this and other civilized countries, and the aggregate
mortality therefrom in the United States approximates 75,000 deaths
per annum, and throughout the civilized world over half a million.
There are the strongest possible reasons for believing that by means
of improved and early diagnosis, operative technique, and surgi-
cal treatment, a material reduction in the cancer death rate can be
brought about within a comparatively short period of years. This con-
elusion applies primarily to the external cancers, chiefly of the breast,
but also to some of the internal cancers, particularly of the uterus.
In proportion, of course, as these efforts, whether medical or surgical,
are successful, a further decline in the death rate must follow, with
even greater economic consequences than would result from a cor-
responding diminution of the mortality of infancy or early youth. t
* For a full discussion of the decline in the death rate from tuberculosis,
see my address on the Reduction in the Tuberculosis Death Rate, ninth annual
meeting of the National Association for the Study and Prevention of Tuber-
culosis, Washington, 1913, also my discussion of the Care of Tuberculous
Wage-earners in Germany, Bulletin No. 101, U. S. Bureau of Labor, 1912.
t See in this connection my address on the Menace of Cancer, thirty-eighth
annual meeting of the American Gynecological Society, Washington, 1912.
STATISTICAL STUDIES 53
ACCIDENTS, HOMICIDES AND SUICIDES
Last, but not least, among the preventable causes of death, a brief
mention requires to be made of accidents, homicides and suicides. In
the United States there are approximately 80,000 deaths from acci-
dents annually, of which about 25,000 are accidents in industry. In ad-
dition thereto there are about 15,000 suicides and over 6,000 homicides
per annum, of which it is safe to say a considerable proportion could
be prevented by thoroughly effective methods of moral and social re-
form. There is nothing more lamentable than the growing disregard
for the sanctity of human life, as forcibly illustrated in the truly
astonishing number of suicides and murders often for most trivial
causes. The nation-wide campaign for safety and sanitation is one
of the encouraging evidences of a higher humanitarianism, resulting
from more rational conceptions of social and political justice, best
illustrated in the comparatively rapid progress of workmen's
compensation legislation, which, in course of time, is bound to include
compensation for industrial diseases. The problem, however, is not
fully met by compensation for injuries and diseases, but more effec-
tively by the removal of the causes and conditions responsible for fatal
accidents and injuries known to be preventable and needless. A meas-
urable reduction in the number of accidents must necessarily affect
the general death rate and contribute substantially towards a further
decline than has thus far resulted from the efforts, which have in the
main been limited to preventable diseases.
THE DECLINE IN THE BIRTH RATE
The interrelation of a declining death rate to a declining birth
rate and population growth is so self-evident as not. to require ex-
tended discussion. The evidence is quite conclusive that the birth
rate of civilized countries is declining, and particularly so among the
more prosperous and well-to-do elements of the population. The in-
vestigations of Karl Pearson and his associates into the problem of
fertility and its relation to social worth, are but indications of more
elaborate methods of inquiry, which are bound to disclose facts and
conditions as yet very imperfectly understood, if at all. The aston-
ishing evidence presented to the Royal Commission on the decline in
the birth rate in New South Wales, finds its parallel in nearly every
specialized study of the subject. It is encouraging to find, therefore,
that the fall in the birth rate was recently discussed at a conference
held at Edinburgh under the auspices of the Scottish Council of
Public Morals, at which the causes for the fall in the birth rate were
pointed out to be the high standard of living, the love of pleasure, the
consequent shirking of parental responsibility, and the higher educa-
54 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
tion of women and their wider entrance into industrial and profes-
sional pursuits. It was therefore suggested that the subject should be
made one of private rather than of government inquiry, so that the
underlying facts and conditions might be ascertained with less diffi-
culty, although the experience of the Royal Commission of New
South Wales abundantly proved the perfect willingness of important
Avitnosses to come forward with the truth. In an address of mine on
the decline in the birth rate, published in the North American Review
for May, 1909, and a brief statistical study on the maternity statistics
of Rhode Island, contributed to the proceedings of the First Inter-
national Eugenics Congress, I have quite fully enlarged upon the de-
tails of these phases of the present discussion, of which, however, a
brief mention could not well be avoided. The birth rate of the Aus-
tralian Commonwealth betw^een 1886 and 1911 decreased from 35.4
to 27.2; of Austria from 38.3 to 31.4; of England and Wales from
32.8 to 24.4; of France from 23.9 to 18.7; of the German Empire
from 37.0 to 28.6 ; of Hungary from 45.6 to 35.0, and of the Nether-
lands from 34.6 to 27.8 per 1,000 of population. There are no corre-
sponding statistics of births for the United States, and for the few
New England States for which they are available the results are hardly
applicable to the country as a whole.*
POSSIBLE FUTURE POPUT.ATION GROV^^TII
Passing from these biological and general considerations to the
economic significance of a declining death rate, it is necessary to con-
sider the statement made at the outset of the numerical relation of
such a decline to the world's growth in population. It was shown
that the annual increase is approximately 13,260,000, which is a con-
servative estimate and quite likely an understatement of the facts.
Further advances in sanitation, the practice of medicine, safety in
industry, etc., will tend to bring about a still further reduction in the
death rate, equivalent to a higher general rate of natural increase
than prevails at the present time. As a single concrete illustration, it
may be pointed out that wiiile for all India the natural increase in
1910 was 6.3 per 1,000 of population, the rate was as high as 11.25 in
the northwest frontier provinces and 10.5 in the central provinces. It
is therefore self-evident that there are vast possibilities for an augmen-
tation in the natural rate of increase in the world's population, and
there are the strongest possible reasons for belie"vang that, largely be-
* The national and international sigiiifieanee of the declining birth rate has
been discussed with admirable brevity by Dr. Arthur Newsholme in the new
Tracts for the Times, issued by the National Council for Public Morals,
London, 1911.
STATISTICAL STUDIES 55
cause of a declining death rate, the future rate of human increase will
be greater than the rates prevailing in the recent past. The economic
results of such an augmentation of the world's population will unques-
tionably be quite serious, particularly with regard to the available food
supply resulting chiefly from the employment of productive human
energy upon the land.
DECLINE IN RURAL POPULATION
The present indications in this respect, however, are not alarming,
for apparent!}" the area devoted to the principal food crops is increas-
ing even faster than the corresponding growth in population. But the
data are far from satisfactory. In practically all the civilized coun-
tries the tendency of the population is largely toward the cities, and
the employment of productive energy in manufacturing industries,
governmental or corporated administration, the professions, and the
modern methods and requirements of distribution. The recent rise in
the price of agricultural products is largely to be attributed to this
condition. As previously pointed out, the urban population in the
United States during the last decade has increased 35 per cent, whereas
the corresponding increase in the rural population was only 11 per
cent. In many of the most important agricultural sections of the coun-
try there has been but a slight increase in the rural population or
an actual decline. Such an actual decrease in rural population oc-
curred, for illustration, in such typically agricultural states as New
Hampshire (5.4 per cent), Vermont (4.2 per cent), Ohio (1.3 per
cent), Indiana (5.1 per cent), Iowa (7.2 per cent), Missouri (3.5
per cent). In the state of New York 15 counties decreased in popula-
tion during the past decade, including many in which the agricultural
opportunities are distinctly encouraging ; in Michigan there was a de-
crease in population in 26 counties; and a corresponding decline oc-
curred in 20 counties of Wisconsin. The rural population of Michigan
increased only 2.0 per cent; of Wisconsin, 5.7 per cent; and of Min-
nesota, 7.7 per cent. In contrast, the urban population in these three
states increased 87.3 per cent in Michigan, 23.8 per cent in Wiscon-
sin, and 38.6 per cent in Minnesota. In contrast to an apparent
decline in the growth of agricultural interests there has been a de-
cided increase in farm values, for while the improved acreage in farms
increased for the United States during the last decade only 4.8 per cent,
the value of farm lands increased 118 per cent, and the average
value of farm land per acre increased from $15.57 in 1900 to $32.40
in 1910, or at the rate of 108 per cent.*
* For additional details, see "Rural Health and Welfare," published by the
Prudential Insurance Company of Araeriea, 1912, in connection with the New
York Agricultural Exposition.
56 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
PROBLEM OF CONSERVATION OF NATURAL RESOURCES
The corresponding increase in the cost of living during the last
two decades affects practically all of the necessaries, including every
essential item of the food supply. It would seem that the methods of
general agriculture have not made anything like the progress which
has been attained in the mechanical industries, although the results in
the latter are of much less immediate importance to the consumers
than the former. A constantly increasing urban population must
tend to bring about a further increase in the price of agricul-
tural products, unless in the future a much -larger proportion
of human energy is employed in the productive industries which min-
ister to fundamental human wants. All that is summed "up in the
modem conception of the governmental duty of conservation of
natural resources for the needs of future generations is primarily con-
ditioned by the indisputable indications of a larger future rate of
natural increase in the world's population than has prevailed in the
past. Foremost, it would seem, as a public problem, is the essential
need of improved methods of agriculture, as best emphasized in the
relatively low yield of agricultural products obtained in the United
States, in comparison with foreign countries where the soils must long
ago have been exhausted to a more considerable degree. The average
yield of wheat per acre, for illustration, during the decade ending
with 1912, was only 14.1 bushels for the United States, compared
with 18.4 for Hungary, 19.8 for Austria, 20.4 for France, 30.1 for
Germany, and 31.7 for the United Kingdom. The average yield of
oats, which is a food product of considerable value, was 29.6 bushels
per acre for the United States, against 29.8 for France, 30.8 for Hun-
gary, 31.1 for Austria, 44.3 for the United Kingdom, and 51.9 for
Germany. A corresponding condition is shown by the comparative
statistics of the average yield of rye, which was 15.8 bushels for the
United States, 18.3 for Hungary, 20.6 for Austria, 27.0 for Germany,
and 28.4 for Ireland. It seems, therefore, an entirely sound conclusion
that there remain vast opportunities for increased agricultural pro-
duction without any necessary enlargement of the area devoted to the
raising of cereal crops, but as a brief contribution to the practical side
of this question, the following international crop statistics are given as
derived from the Yearbook of Agriculture for 1912 :
INTERNATIONAL CROP STATISTICS
The area of the world imder wheat in 1908 was 242,472,000 acres,
which by 1912 had increased to 265,736,000 acres. The increase in
area, therefore, was equivalent to 9.6 per cent, which compares with
3.9 per cent of corresponding increase in population. The world's
STATISTICAL STUDIES • 57
wheat crop in 1895 was 2,593,000,000 bushels, which by 1912 had in-
creased to 3,759,000,000 bushels. The increase in the wheat crop was,
therefore, equivalent to 45.0 per cent, which compares with an in-
crease of 12.6 per cent in the world's population during the inter-
vening period of time.
The world's area under com, in 1908, was 160,707,000 acres, which
by 1912 had increased to 168,154,000 acres, or 4.6 per cent. The cor-
responding increase in population during the same period was 3.9 per
cent. The corn crop of the world increased from 2,835,000,000 bushels
in 1895 to 4,055,000,000 bushels in 1912. The increase in corn pro-
duction during this period was, therefore, equivalent to 43.0 per cent,
which compares with a corresponding increase of 12.6 per cent in the
world's population.
The area of the world under oats in 1908 was 128,897,000 acres,
which by 1912 had increased to 142,935,000 acres. The increase in
area, therefore, was equivalent to 10.9 per cent, which compares with a
corresponding increase of 3.9 per cent in population. The world's
oat crop in 1895 was 3,008,000,000 bushels, which by 1932 had in-
creased to 4,585,000,000, an increase equivalent to 52.4 per cent, as
compared with a corresponding increase of ]2.6 per cent in the world's
population.
The world's area under barley, which is a food crop of no small
importance, increased from 65,663,000 acres in 1908 to 67,819,000 acres
in 1912, an increase equivalent to 3.3 per cent, which compares with a
corresponding increase in the world's population of 3.9 per cent. The
world's barley crop increased from 915,504,000 bushels in 1895 to
1,458,000,000 bushels in 1912. There was, therefore, a relative increase
in barley production of 59.2 per cent, which compares with a cor-
responding increase of 12.6 per cent in the world's population during
the intervening period of time.
The world's area under rye, which is also a crop of considerable
importance as a source of food supply, increased from 106,121,000
acres in 1908 to 108,292,000 acres in 1912, an increase equivalent to
2.1 per cent, corresponding to an increase of 3.9 per cent in the
population of the world during the same period of years. The
world's rye crop increased from 1,468,000,000 bushels in 1895 to 1,901,-
000,000 bushels in 1912. an increase equivalent to 29.5 per cent, which
compares with a corresponding increase in population of 12.6 per
cent.
The world's rice crop increased from 91,000,000,000 pounds in
1900 to 174,000,000,000 pounds in 1911. The increase in production
during this period was equivalent to 91.2 per cent, which compares
58 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
Avith a corrospondinfj incroase of 8.8 per cent in the population of the
world.
The available evidence, therefore, is distinctly encouraging, some
exceptions to this view notwithstanding, that a considerable further in-
crease in the world's population is entirely consistent with at least
an equal rate of growth in the production of the cereals required for
the world's food supply. The same conclusion, though to a lesser de-
gree, applies to the products of animal industry, which, however, it is
not possible to discuss on this occasion.
EVIDENCE OF xVUGMENTED POPULATION GROWTH
The progress of the race as an economic problem is, therefore, ap-
parently not as yet seriously affected by the material decline in the
general death rate, wdth a resulting proportionately larger increase in
population. The problems of the immediate future are social, moral
and political, as perhaps best emphasized in the following table, ex-
hibiting the population growth of Europe and the United States com-
bined, since the commencement of the nineteenth century and east
forward to the year I960:
POPULATION OP EUROPE AND THE UNITED STATES
Annual Increase
Year Europe United States Total per 1,000
1800 187,693,000 5,303,000 193,001,000
1810 198,388,000 7,240,000 205,628,000 6.3
1820 212,768,000 9,638,000 222,406,000 7.8
1830 233,962,000 12,866,000 246,828,000 10.4
1840 250,972,000 17,069,000 268,041,000 8.2
1850 266,228,000 23,192,000 289,420,000 7.7
1860 282,893,000 31,443,000 314,336,000 8.3
1870 305,399,000 38,558,000 343,957,000 9.0
1880 331,745,000 50,189,000 381,934,000 10.5
1890 362,902,000 62,980,000 425,882,000 10.9
1900 ....400,577,000 76,303,000 476,880,000 11.3
1910 449,520,000 91,972,000 541,492,000 12.7
1920* 506,151,000 109,999,000 616,150,000 13.0
1930* 571,081,000 130,019,000 701,100,000 13.0
1940* 645,901,000 151,862,000 797,763,000 13.0
1950* 732,506.000 175,248,000 907,754,000 13.0
1960* 833,127,000 199,783,000 1,032,910,000 13.0
* Based on an annual increase of 13.0 per 1,000, and the assumption that in the
future a larger share of European emigration will go to countries other than the United States.
During the period of recorded population growth for Europe and
the United States there has been a rise in the rate of natural in-
crease from 6.3 per 1,000 during the decade 1800-10 to 12.7 per 1,000
during the decade ending with 1910; and the actual population of
Europe and the United States combined has, during this period, in-
creased from not quite 200.000,000 to over 540,000,000.
POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF POPULATION GROW^TH
Foremost among the political problems resulting from .such an in-
crease in population, with a corresponding increase in density, are the
' increasing expenditures on account of government, best illustrated in
STATISTICAL STUDIES 59
the simple statement of the fact that in 1912 the approximate revenue
of civilized countries was $11,574,000,000, and the corresponding ex-
penditures, $11,687,000,000. Of the expenditures, $1,686,000,000 was
on account of interest and other annual charges upon an accumulated
debt of $41,737,000,000. In practically every civilized country these
burdens of fixed charges on account of debts, largely of a non-pro-
ductive character, are increasing ; but particularly so in the case of
local governments, chiefly large cities, which are not included in the
foregoing statement of revenue, expenditures, debts and interest
charges, which have reference only to national obligations and fiduci-
ary responsibilities. As a single concrete illustration, limited to
American cities, it may be pointed out that the per capita govern-
mental cost payments for 1910 amounted to $31.32, ranging from
$37.15 for large cities to $19.66 for small cities. The increase in
municipal indebtedness during recent years has been enormous, with
much of the expenditures for non-productive or only temporary pur-
poses, though the burdens resulting therefrom will have to be largely
borne by future generations. Against a per capita national debt of
only $10.60 for the United States and an annual per capita interest
charge of 23 cents, the per capita debt of New Zealand is $371.27, and
the per capita annual interest charge $11.26; for France, the per
capita debt is $158.67, and the per capita annual interest charge
$4.69 ; for the German Empire the respective figures are $18.78 and
88 cents. All statistics of this kind require to be accepted with great
caution on account of variations in underlying elements, since no
data are available regarding the total governmental debts of any coun-
try, including the federal, state and local governments. The data are
only referred to as an illustration of the serious problems confront-
ing the future, and which arise particularly out of the rapid actual
growth in population, which in modern countries is without a parallel
in historic times.*
FIRST CONCLUSION CONSERVATION OF FOOD-PRODUCING NATURAL RE-
SOURCES IN LAND AND SEA
As observed at the outset of this discussion, the social, economic and
political problems which arise out of a declining death rate and the
* The most convenient sources of information regarding- international
statistics of public finance are contained in the statistical abstract of the
United States, published annually by the Bureau of Statistics, of the Treasury
Department. The financial statistics of American cities are annually reported
upon in considerable detail by the United States Census Office. The most re-
cent critical observ^ations on the wealth of nations are contained in a treatise
on "Wealth and the Causes of Economic Welfare," by Edwin Cannan, pub-
lished by P. S. King & Sons, London.
60 FIRST natioxaij confewence on race betterment
resultinjr pDpulatioii growth, are of vast importance and entitled to
public consideration. Much has of necessity been left unsaid which
has immediate reference to the factors conditioning race progress as
measured by changes in the death rate, but the most pressing question
is the more intelligent, and if necessary the radical, conservation and
control of the natural resources of the earth, including the food re-
sources of the sea. On the last-named subject alone a well-reasoned
plea might have been advanced, for it is a remarkable fact, as pointed
out in the report of the Canadian Commission on Conservation, that
Canada is the only country in the world with a governmental organi-
zation with administrative powers over all the fisheries of the Domin-
ion. The Canadian Department of Marine and Fisheries has ample
powers of protection and conservation, which in course of time must
prove of vast benefit to the future generations of that country. Such
power should be exercised by other governments with an interest in
the food resources of the sea.*
SECOND CONCLUSION — IMPROVED METHODS OP AGRICULTURE
The second conclusion, partly resulting from the first, is the im-
perative need of improved methods of agricultural production and dis-
tribution and the more successful prevention of waste of soil, seed and
labor. The extent of destructive soil-erosion is enormous and the an-
nual waste of soil or impaired fertiliity in the United States is one of
the most lamentable aspects of our national life. Large areas are be-
coming practically useless for remunerative methods of farming, be-
cause of neglect and lack of proper attention to well-understood princi-
ples of soil-conservation. The progress in the reclamation of arid and
swamp lands is gratifying, but considering the vast possibilities, only
a small beginning has been made. The work of the United States
Bureau of Soils and the United States Reclamation Service is proving
of incalculable benefit to the people and it is entitled to more adequate
and well-considered state and federal support. The nation-wide move-
ment for the improvement of the social conditions of coiuatry life and,
in connection therewith, of rural sanitation, demands a properly
guided and persistent public interest. One of the most hopeful signs
of the times is the gradual development of a deliberate governmental
policy in the matter of rural credit, or agricultural finance, and the
* See in this connection the admirable reports of the Scottish Departmental
Committee on the North Sea Fishing Industry, published as a Parliamentary
Paper, London, 1914. No such exhaustive investigations have been made of
the fishery resources of the United States, though obviously called for on ac-
count of the growing importance of this industry.
STATISTICAL STUDIES 61
related subject of intelligent cooperative distribution of farm products.
All efforts of this kind foreshadow a time when agriculture will be-
come the first interest of the nation, not only as regards remunerative
pecuniary results, but also as regards health and happiness on the
farm.*
THIRD CONCLUSION — UTILIZATION OF WASTE
Third: The utilization of wastes and by-products is an economic
question of far-reaching practical national importance. The losses re-
sulting from crude or otherwise ill-considered methods of production
are enormous, but particularly so in the lumber and mining industries.
What can be done in the direction of conserving our forestry resources
has been clearly established by numerous investigations of the Bureau
of Forestry. What can be done in the direction of conserving our fuel
resources, by more efficient methods of production, is best illustrated
in a recent bulletin of the United States Bureau of Mines on the
petroleum industry. The almost infinite possibilities of utilizing waste
products to economic advantage are best illustrated in the commercial
success of the cotton-seed-oil industry, modern meat-packing plants
and by-product coke-ovens. Improved efforts in this direction will go
far to mitigate the economic consequences of an increasing population,
resulting from a reduction in the death rate.
FOURTH CONCLUSION — TOWN PLANNING
Fourth : There is the utmost urgency for the earliest possible adop-
tion of rational town-planning schemes for American cities, in con-
formity to the principles laid down in the Proceedings of the Third
National Conference on City Planning, held in Philadelphia in 1911.
The fundamental facts of a housing-reform propaganda are gradu-
ally being ascertained by means of local surveys and given wide
* See in this connection the exceptionally valuable and interesting report
of the United States Commission on Agricultural Cooperation and Rural
Credit in Europe, Washing-ton, 1913; the Joint Hearings before the Sub-
Committee of the Committee on Banking and Currency of the Senate and the
House of Representatives charged with the Investigation of Rural Credits,
Washington, 1914 ; the Report to the Board of Agriculture and Fisheries of
an Inquiry into Agricultural Credit and Agi*icultural Cooperation in Germany,
by J. R. Cahill, published as Parliamentary Paper Cd. 6626, London, 1913;
also, Bulletin No. 56, Department of Agriculture, State of New York, on
Agricultural Cooperation in Europe (this report contains some exceptionally
useful facts and observations on the business organization of agriculture in
Europe, and the commercialization and industrialization of agriculture for
the purpose of securing higher returns to the producer and reduction of cost
to the consumer).
62 FIRST XATIONAli CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
publicity by the National Confprenee on Housing.* There is a strong
tendency, at least in the development of suburban territory, towards
the adoption of European town-planning methods, as admirably set
forth in recent reports of the London Garden Cities and Town-Plan-
ning Association and the Westphalian Leagne for Housing and Build-
ing Reform. The American aspects of the problem have been dis-
cussed with admirable clearness and an unusual breadth of vision at
a meeting of the American Academy of Political and Social Science,
held in Philadelphia in 1914. This conference included observations on
the important question of the relation between transit and housing and
of the equally important problem of properly considered plans for the
most suitable location and most effective distribution of industrial
establishments. In view of a rapidly increasing urban population
throughout the world, the most effective and suitable control of build-
ing operations, particularly in badly congested cities, and with special
reference to the housing of wage-earners, assumes the greatest possible
practical importance.
FIFTH CONCLUSION — EDUCATION IN PRACTICAL DOMESTIC ECONOMY
• Fifth: There is greater need of emphasis being placed in educa-
tional courses on the principles and practices of domestic economy and
the required reduction of per capita food consumption, with a larger
proportionate and easily obtainable increase in nutritive values, con-
forming to the results of qualified studies of dietaries, such as have
been made by Atwater, Chittenden, and others. It is gratifying evi-
dence of an increasing extent of public interest in this extremely im-
portant problem that more or less drastic national food laws, aiming
chiefly at the prevention of adulterations, should have been enacted
within recent years, mth the certainty of far-reaching benefits to the
health of the nation. The physiology and pathology of metabolism
* The direct relation of model dwellings to the death rate has been pre-
cisely established by English experience. The following table shows the
general death rate of groups of model dwellings in London, compared with
the death rate of the city as a whole. For additional information on this im-
portant question, see my report on the sanitary condition of Trinity Tene-
ments, published in 1895, and my address on the relation of the suburb to the
city, published in the Proceedings of the Federation of Churches, New York,
1912.
The Improved Metropolitan Asso-
Industrial The ^''''^t'?" ^"^"^ I'?^" Peabodx-
Years Dwellin, Co., Guine.. 'i::^!^^t Donation Greater
Ltd. Trust rtustrial Classes Fund London
1908 8.0 13.3 9.0 12.4 13.6
1909 8.6 14.7 11.5 13.7 13. S
1910 6.3 13.8 6.6 10.8 12.4
1911 10.8 13.4 10.2 11.3 13.8
191:4 9.4 11.3 12.6 10.4 12.3,
STATISTICAL STUDIES 63
are as yet but imperfectly understood, and further progress in this
direction is bound to have a decided effect upon the death rate. What
can be done in educating the general public in the elements of nutri-
tion is best shown by an admirable set of fourteen charts on the com-
position, functions and uses of food, prepared by C. F. Langworthy,
expert in charge of nutrition investigations of the United States De-
partment of Agriculture.
SIXTH CONCLUSION — RATIONAL CONTROL OF MARRIAGE, FECUNDITY,
AND DIVORCE
Sixth : The increasing complexity of social and sex relations, re-
sulting partly from the vast migratory movements of modern peoples,
suggests the necessity of more qualified studies than have heretofore
been made of the actual extent of such changes and their effect upon
the stability of the family and its intrinsic social worth. State regu-
lation of marriage within reasonable limitations and with special ref-
erence to the required prevention of the marriage of the obviously unfit
is a first step in the direction of deliberate race-betterment on the basic
principle of social control. The actual and relative increase in divorce
indicate a large amount of prevailing marital discontent, as well as
the possible necessity of more effective legal safeguards against the
dissolution of the family. The economic problem of widowhood in-
creases in seriousness with an increase' in the duration of life and
the consequent necessity for more prolonged pecuniary support in old
age. The present status of family-desertion and non-support laws is
far from satisfactory, largely because of a rapid augmentation of
urban population, chiefly by migration from the south of Europe.
In its fundamentals the progress of the race is determined by the
progress of the family and its greater stability and intrinsic moral
worth.*
SEVENTH CONCLUSION — IMPROVED METHODS OP GENERAL EDUCATION
Seventh : Our methods of general education are unquestionably far
from being as practical as they require to be made in view of an
increasing complexity of social, economic and political problems,
which necessitates the elimination of all evidently useless courses im-
parting mere information or rules and formulas never likely to be
applied in the solution of practical, every-day problems.
* For a discussion of the rates of moi-tality, with special reference to mar-
riage and fruitfulness of miarriage, see the Transactions of the Faculty of
Actuaries for 1912 ; the classical treatise on Fecundity, Fertility and Sterility
by J. Mathews Duncan, New York, 1871; my address on the Maternity Sta-
tistics of Rhode Island, First International Congress of Eugenics, London,
1912 ; and the work by Chas. Letourneau on the Evolution of Marriage of the
Family.
64 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
EIGHTH CONCLUSION — PHYSICAL TRAINING AND MEDICAL SUPERVISION
Eighth -. The physical training of the young, and the medical super-
vision of schools and factories, including periodical examination for
the purpose of correcting physical defects in the initial stage, or treat-
ing incipient disease, with a reasonable chance of cure, have become
accepted principles of modern government. In course of time these ef-
forts must profoundly modify not only the health of the young, but
what is equally important, the health of adult persons employed in in-
dustry. Furthermore, there must come about in consequence of such
efforts, a decided improvement in physique and more general con-
formity to a normal physical type, and the gradual elimination of the,
at present, disproportionately large number of persons physically de-
fective or infirm, and by inference, or obviously, less efficient for the
economic needs of society.
NINTH CONCLUSION — LOCAL HEALTH ADMINISTRATION
Ninth : A decided improvement is required in local health adminis-
tration and the more intelligent coordination of health-promoting
public and private agencies and institutions. There is a considerable
amount of needless waste in present efforts, but even more important
is the abundant evidence of inefficiency, particularly in the health
administration of small communities and rural districts. With an in-
creasing appreciation of the economic value of health must come a
higher regard for the scientific and practical utility of accurate vital
statistics on the one hand, and a thoroughly efficient administrative
control of the public health on the other. Every improvement in this
direction tends towards a lowering of the general death rate, at least
from the more easily preventable diseases, and in course of time a
reduction may also be anticipated in the chronic degenerative dis-
eases less subject to public control but more amenable to a rational
mode of living, personal hygiene, progress in medical and surgical
diagnosis and treatment, and a higher standard of life generally.
TENTH CONCLUSION MODERN LIFE CONCEIVED AS SOCIAL SERVICE
Tenth -. Coincident with a more rational education must come the
inculcation of new and higher ideals of life conceived as social service,
and therefore primarily for the benefit of the community as a whole.
The purely individualistic view of personal aims and pleasures is
bound to give way to higher conceptions of social duty, without in the
least diminishing the chances for individual development, conceived
as an economic function, or as a life-long struggle for intellectual,
moral and spiritual perfection.
STATISTICAL STUDIES 65
ELEVENTH CONCLUSION ECONOMIC UTILITY OF LONGEVITY
Eleventh : An increasing average duration of life, on the one hand,
and a larger proportion of aged persons on the other, must mean new
economic problems, particularly with regard to the social and in-
tellectual utilization of old age. It has beautifully been observed by
Jean Finot that ' ' our life is nothing but a long and implacable battle
with death." But life is also for the mass of mankind an incessant
struggle against poverty and economic dependence and the more or
less degrading and always humiliating necessity of private charitable
aid or state support in sickness, invalidity and old age. No modern
agency for the amelioration of the economic condition of mankind has
been of greater benefit to the masses than life insurance in its various
forms. To an increasing extent, the needs of even the poor in sickness
and premature death are now being provided for on the basis of in-
surance principles, gradually developed into the ministry of a uni-
versal provident institution. For a tranquil and otherwise happy old
age, a modest but certain amount of financial support is absolutely
essential, but it is equally important on the ground of public mortality
that such support, to the largest possible extent, should be the result of
individual thrift, or, in other words, represent voluntary methods, the
reward of a rational economy, enhanced in value by the use of sound
and profitable methods of savings and insurance. It is on this ground
that non-contributory universal old-age pensions are to be looked upon
with apprehension and as a hindrance, rather than a help, in the
struggle for a genuine and lasting betterment in the social condition of
the poor. It is for the same reason that voluntary methods of savings
and insurance afford the most satisfactory means within the reach of
all but the very poor, to provide in however modest a manner for self-
support in sickness, infirmity and old age.
The suitable occupation of persons advanced in years in some ca-
pacity useful to themselves and society, is another serious social prob-
lem, which as yet has received but slight consideration. The most
helpful suggestions along this line are those advanced by the late
Professor Shaler, in his book on ' ' The Individual ; " by William Ed-
ward Hartpole hoeky, in ' ' The May of Life ; ' ' and by Professor Metch-
nikoff's books on "The Prolongation of Life" and "The Nature of
Man." That old age has its own and properly assigned function in
the human economy, as applied to the needs of society, is best brought
out in the admirable discourse on "The Age of Mental Virility,"
which is an inquiry into the records of achievement of the world's
chief workers and thinkers, by W. A. Newman Borland.
(4)
66 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
TWELFTH CONCLUSION HIGHER EDUCATIONAL IDEALS
Twelfth : .\jul last, it may be suggested that one of the most im-
portant problems resulting from a declining death rate and the pro-
longation of life and its consequential relation to the progress of the
race, is the imperative duty of self-culture, the adoption of new edu-
cational standards, emphasizing, on the one hand, the economic limita-
tions of life, but on the other, the practically unlimited possibilities
of individual, intellectual, moral and spiritual development. There is
nothing more discouraging to the mass of mankind than the obvious
evidences of inherent economic limitations as regards the distribution
of wealth and the individual actiuisition of articles of necessity or
luxury which only money can buy. There is the most urgent need for
higher standards of education, resting upon the incontrovertible argu-
ment by Bishop Spalding, in his masterly treatise on "Education and
the Higher Life," that the true ideal is summed up in the aim to he
rather than to have more ; and to he more spiritually, morally and in-
tellectually is practically within the power of every individual whose
eyes have once been opened to the truth. It is true that the standard
of economic well-being has risen all over the world, and unquestionably
an inconceivable amount of good, has resulted from the comparatively
recent economic progress of mankind; but there is great danger in
overemphasizing the value of such progress, at least in the individual
case, and in underrating the social value of a disciplined imagination
and the more readily attainable ideals of the intellectual life. With
an increasing population and an increasing struggle for the possession
of the land and the means of subsistence, it would seem to be of the
utmost importance that these more subtle and less readily definable
elements of the problem of race progress should not be lost sight of. If
the prolongation of life resulting from a diminishing death rate is to
be really worth while, the present disharmonies of human existence
must be, as far as practicable, eliminated, but whatever changes for
good may result from improved methods of production, from more
abundant means of subsistence, from increased earnings and shorter
hours of labor, they will all be of small consequence unless balanced
by an even greater advance in the moral, intellectual and spiritual
type of the generation which is yet to be.
STATISTICAL STUDIES 67
THE CAUSES OF THE DECLINING BIRTH RATE
Professor J. McKeen Cattell, LL.D., Editor Popular Science Monthly,
Gan-ison-on-Hudson, N. Y.
From prehistoric times the population of the world has been held
in check by war, pestilence and famine. Towards the close of the
eighteenth century these were relaxing in severity, thanks to the
applications of science and to a gradually ameliorating civilization,
and the population of Europe was increasing at the rate of about one
per cent a year. It is no wonder that Malthus Avas appalled by this
geometrical compounding of human beings, which would exhaust the
food supply and even leave no standing room on the earth, and that
his point of view dominated the economic theory of the nineteenth
century. But two factors already in existence soon gained force. The
applications of science — the use of the steam engine in manufactures
and transportation and innumerable other advances — increased the
means of subsistence more rapidly than one per cent a year, and the
birth rate was beginning to decline.
Owing to a remarkable balance between a decreasing birth rate and
a decreasing death rate, the population of Europe continued to in-
crease throughout the nineteenth century at a rate in the neighborhood
of one per cent a year, rising from 175 million in 1800 to 420 million
in 1900. The population increased about as rapidly as it could be con-
veniently assimilated, with gradually improved conditions of living,
for all. A new factor in the adjustment of population was emigration
on a large scale, some thirty-five million people leaving Europe in the
course of the century, more than half of whom came to the United
States, where the increase in population has been in the neighborhood
of two per cent a year.
The adjustment of population to means of subsistence appears at
first sight to be so exact that there is likely to be an assumption of a
controlling mechanism such as exists in a state of nature. The fact of
the matter is, however, that the food supply and the other necessities
of life are not fixed quantities, but increase in proportion to the num-
ber of men who both use and produce them. In an era of the applica-
tions of science, there are no diminishing returns with increasing
population, but rather increasing returns, owing to the production
of larger numbers of men who make discoveries and improvements for
the benefit of all. The average well-being is about the same in France
with a stationary population, as in Germany with a rapidly increas-
ing population ; but Germany through its greater share in the ad-
vancements of science and its applications is contributing more to the
world than is France. The first effect of a lowered birth rate is to
68
FIRST NATIONAL CONFERKNCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
increase Aveallh — tlioii,i>ii it is <2^enerally consuiued in luxuries — by
saving the cost of the rearing of children, but later when the produc-
tive workers are lacking there is an economic loss. France, as com-
pared with Germany, saves each year over a billion dollars by having
fewer children to support; but the gain in wealth is temporary. In
fact it ended in 1895, whereas the increase in wealth in Germany in
the course of the next generation will be enormous.
It is a fundamental question whether the relation between the
birth rate and the death rate will be maintained under existing condi-
tions so as to give an increasing, or, at all events, a stationaiy popu-
lation. Will both continue to decrease or remain approximately as at
present, or will the balance of the nineteenth be lost as has apparently
happened in France? The death rate has been halved by the partial
abolition of war, pestilence and famine in their grosser forms, and by
alleviation of their milder aspects — improved conditions for the strug-
gling classes, the limitation and mitigation of disease, and better condi-
tions of living. There is abundant room for further improvement ; it
is stated that the death rate can again be halved. But this is impos-
sible ; indeed, it seems that in certain nations the death rate has now
reached its minimum. Australia and New Zealand report a death rate
of ten. This means that in a
stationary population the average
age at death is one hundred years.
For every infant that dies, a man
must live to be two hundred years
old, or ten men live to be one
hundred ten. This is beyond the
limit of possibility. The death
rate in England and Wales is
about thirteen. It is so low be-
cause decreasing birth rates and
death rates have given a popula-
tion so constituted that an un-
usually large part is of the age
when deaths are few. The death
rate in England will probably de-
crease a little further and will
then begin to rise.
The relation between births,
deaths and marriages in England
and Wales is shown on Chart I.
The marriage rate fluctuates, but
is now as high as it was in 1880.
35
30
^5
10
15
10
li
BIRTH
RATES
V
V, ,
-
--,
"\
A
DEATH
RATES
\
V
^
\'\.
\' ■ .
M
ftRRIAGf
RATES
\'
\
76 Ifi
31 1(86 1691 18
96 1901 m 15
STATISTICAL STUDIES
69
The maximum birth rate in 1876 may be due to the introduction
of compulsory registration in 1874. From that time it has fallen
steadily; if it should continue to decline at the same rate it would
reach the minimum death rate of ten in about forty years.
The death rate has also fallen constantly, though with greater
fluctuations, dropping from 21 in 1876 to 13.3 at the present
time. In France, with its small birth rate and stationary population
there are relatively about four-fifths as many young children and
nearly twice as many old people as in England. When the latter coun-
try attains a stationary population its death rate must increase, and
unless there is a change in the birth rate curve the population will
soon become stationary and will then begin to decrease.
The declining birth rates of the three great cultural nations of
Western Europe are shown on
the curves (Chart II), and
they have continued in the
same course. Thus in Eng-
land and Wales the rate was
24.4 in 1911 and 23.8 in 1912.
The decline for France has
been very regular since the
beginning of the last century
at the rate of one and one-
half per thousand for each
decade. The decline for Eng-
land since 1876 is also nearly
in a straight line and twice as
rapid as for France. The de-
cline for Germany, beginning chart n.
later than for England, as that was later than for France, has since
1895 been more rapid than for England. These three curves, if con-
tinued, give the queer result that births in these three nations will
<3ease altogether in about the same time one hundred years hence.
Such results are of course absurd. Still it should be remembered
that there are now only three births to replace four deaths in some
French departments and in the native population of New England.
The vital statistics of the United States are entirely inadequate.
Where registrations of deaths and births exist, they are imperfect, and
the changing population, its age, composition, and the amount of im-
migration, render them difficult to interpret. But some information
concerning birth rates is given by the proportion of children as de-
termined by the census. If the percentage of children under sixteen
years of age in the population should continue to decrease as it did
^
-\
30
25
20
15
10
5
n
\
\
TOP - GERMANY
MIDDLE- ENGLAND
BOTTOM - FRANCE
\
\
\^
V
^
N
^\.^ ^\^
\
^"n^
^N ^^^ ^
'*X
81
85 51-95 m 1910 1950 20OO |
70
FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
from 1880 to 1900. there would be no children two humlred years
hence.
From a special study by Mr. Kuczynski it appears that the birth
rate of the native population of Massachusetts was 63 per thousand
women of child-bearing age, as compared with 85 in France, 104 in
England and 143 in Russia. As the French population is stationary,
the native New England population, even apart from any further
decline in the birth rate, decreases to three-fourths in one generation.
Its birth rate was 17, the size of family 2.61 and of the surviving
family 1.92. Special statistics have been gathered for college gradu-
ates. President Eliot in his report for 1901-02 stated that 634 married
Harvard graduates of the classes from '72 to '77 had an average
family of 1.99 surviving children. Other data concerning the families
of college graduates have been published by Pl^ofessor Thorndike,
President Hall and others. The Harvard graduate has on the
average three-fourths of a son, the Vassar graduate one-half of a
daughter. Curves are here drawn for some of the data, which show
6
5
1
^.^
^^\^
\ \
3
3
2
1
0
^^v'\\
,
x\
'■■■•■■..
EBURY
EYAN
YORK
'■■.
■■■....
-
NEW
I8!5 1835 1855 1875 1895 1915 1935 |
CHABT ni.
STATISTICAL STUDIES
71
that the gross size of the family of college graduates has decreased
from 5.6 at the beginning of the century to 2.5 and 2 for classes
graduating in 1875. A projection of these curves gives the curious
result that students graduating in 1935 would have no children.
"What, then, are the causes leading to the recent decline of the
birth rate, and are they likely to alter so that the rate may again in-
crease, to maintain the existing state of affairs, or to produce a further
decrease ? There is a biological adaptation which limits the fertility of
a woman to about twelve children, and social conditions have led to
one-half of the women of child-bearing age being unmarried. The
further decrease of the average family to three or four — in the case
of American scientific men or college graduates to two — must be due to
infertility or to voluntary limitation. Both causes have been recog-
nized since the time of the writing of the book of Genesis ; both have
CHART IV.
72
FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
doubtless increased in force in the course of tlie nineteenth century.
It is generally believed that the principal cause of the small size of
the modern family is voluntary limitation. A definite answer is sup-
plied by information given to me by 461 leading scientific men.
The curves of Chart V show the distribution of these families
20%
15%
10%
5%
,AM
ERI
:an
5
CIE
NT!
FIC
M
EN
/
/
\
/
\
NEV
L\5
OUT
\
H \
^AL
E5
"■•.,
MO
rHE
RS
\
\
■x
■"■-
"'X
^^^
(
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 II 12 13 14 15 16 1
CHART V.
of scientific men in comparison with the families of some twenty thou-
sand New South Wales mothers who died toward the close of the last
century. In both cases all children, whether they survived or not, are
included and no more children would be born. The New South Wales
families of from one to eight are nearly equally numerous and there
is then a gradual decrease to families of sixteen and larger. The
families of American scientific men — which may be regarded as typical
of the professional classes and other college graduates — show a re-
markable contrast. Nearly one-fourth are childless ; less than one in
four is larger than three, only one in seventy-five is larger than seven,
none is larger than nine. The average size of family is 2.2. Excluding
the earlier marriages, it is 2 ; the surviving family is about 1.8 and
the number of surviving children for each scientific man is about 1.6.
THE NEED OF THOROUGH BIRTH REGISTRATION FOR
RACE BETTERMENT
Cressy L. Wilbur, M.D., Chief Statistician Divisiun of Vital Statistics,
Bureau of the Census, Department of Commerce, Washington, D. C.
The main purpose of my coming here as representing the Bureau
of the Census, Department of Commerce, was to see that the subject of
vital statistics was one of the fundamental planks of this new organi-
zation, and since coming here, since looking over the program, the dia-
STATISTICAL STUDIES 73
grams and other things over in the Annex and hearing the remarks
of Mr. Hoffman, I am sure that there will be no difficulty about the
main proposition — that is to say, the necessity, the absolute impor-
tance of vital statistics, especially birth registration, as the foundation
of all intelligent effort for race betterment.
You will find in the corridor of the other building a little diagram
entitled, ' ' The United States Registration Area for Deaths. " It is a
map of the states showing the space in which the registration of deaths
is sufficiently complete to be used for statistical purposes, with this
inscription below it: "Vital statistics are the bookkeeping of health
and we cannot economize health any more successfully than we can
economize money unless we keep books. — Irving Fisher."
That is so absolutely true, it is not worth while to argue about it.
Yet, look at the condition in this country in regard to our bookkeeping
of public health. For a large proportion of the country, the registra-
tion of deaths is so worthless that we cannot have any reliable statistics
in regard to it. Even the great state of Illinois, the state of Iowa,
the state of West Virginia and practically all the Southern States
have not any successful death registration. The registration of vital
statistics in the United States began in 1880 when we had only two
states, Massachusetts and New Jersey. In 1890 the area had grown
so that it took in all New England. New York, New Jersey, and Dela-
ware was added by mistake in 1900. You see some of the Middle West
added Michigan and Indiana, and I am very proud as a native Michi-
gander to be able to say that Michigan was the first state, west of
New York, that had an effective law for registration of deaths and the
first state to be accepted by the Bureau of Census, before my time
there, as belonging to the registration area for deaths. Michigan was
added for the census in the year 1900, whereas Indiana, which fol-
lowed, was not added until half a year later. Since 1900 we have
been making a srood deal of progress. A large number of states are
now added, some of them in the Far West, We are now beginning in
the South. Missouri was added in 1911 ; Kentucky in 1911 ; Virginia
added in 1913, together with the partial registration in North Caro-
lina. A law establishing registration went into effect this month in
Arkansas and Tennessee. A law has been in operation in Mississippi
since November. 1912, The whole South is awakening to the impor-
tance of death registration, so that I can predict that perhaps by the
year 1920. all the states of the Union will be covered with adequate
death registration laws — although some of them will not be properly
enforced, but enforcement must follow the passage of proper legis-
lation.
When we turn to the condition of birth registration, we have rather
74 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
a dili'erent picture. The only states in I!)!! in which statistics of birth
were practically complete were Rhode Island, Massachusetts and
Connecticut.
We have a test in birth registration that can be applied to the
operation of the state law. As you Imow, every ten years we have an
enumeration of the population. In that enumeration, the proportion
of infants under one year of age is always given. Now the number of
infants under one year of age as enumerated in the population is al-
ways considerably less than the number of births. By comparison
of international statistics of leading European countries, it will be
found that the number of births will usually exceed the number of
infants under one year of age, as enumerated by the census, by per-
haps ten or fifteen per cent, or even more. Now, applying the com-
parison to 1910 or 1911, we find that the only states in which the
registration of births gives results greater than the enumeration of in-
fants under one year of age in population are Connecticut, Indiana,
Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Hampshire, New York, Ohio,
Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Vermont. The remainder are confined
to New England, New York, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Indiana, Mis-
souri and Utah. In Kentucky the first registration law went into efi'ect
in 1911. It is not fair, therefore, to compare the results in Kentucky^
for the first year of operation of the law, with states in which the law
has been in operation for some time. It would be better to compare the
results in Kentucky for the next year of operation, 1912, in which the
number of births slightly exceeded the number of deaths under one
year of age, very much like Indiana, Missouri and Michigan.
The results in Michigan are of special interest because there is
beginning to be some improvement. Michigan had no vital statistics at
all, so far as complete figures are concerned, until 1908, when the new
death registration law went into effect. The death registration law
was not passed until 1905 and went into operation in 1906. In 1910,
five years after that, the number of births registered only very slightly
exceed the number of infants under one year of age in population —
I think about one per cent. Since that time, in 1911-12 and I suppose
in 1913, there has been some improvement, so that Michigan now shoAvs
a death registration about four per cent in excess of infants under one
year of age. But I do not believe birth registration will ever be
approximately accurate until it exceeds at least by ten or fifteen per
cent the nutaber of infants under one year as in Massachusetts, Con-
necticut and Rhode Island. So there is yet much to do in Michigan
to bring up the registration of births so that they will be of real
statistical value, not only for purposes of race betterment, but for the
special application to the study of infant mortality. In fact, even
STATISTICAL STUDIES 75
in our best states, calculating their registration exclusive of the great
metropolitan cities of five hundred thousand population and over, —
even in Massachusetts, which has the highest percentage of births to
infants under one year of age — the city authorities do not claim that
the registration is even as fairly complete as that of the ordinary
European country.
I say, therefore, that the time must surely come — and I hope it may
be the function of this organization to bring about that time more
rapidly — when we shall have fully dependable, fully reliable, statistics
of births for use in connection with the subject of race betterment.
The time and place to begin this is right now and here, in Michigan,
I presume the majority of this audience is composed of Michigan peo-
ple, who can lend effective aid in bringing about this result. It is
only necessary to see that the first law is enforced. Michigan has the
best law- for this purpose of any state in the Union, because it places
the full responsibility, the undivided responsibility for uniform state
enforcement upon one man, the Secretary of state. He has the means
for obtaining information in regard to the failure to register births.
Every physician and every midwife in Michigan who registers births
is paid fifty cents. It is a large sum compared to the amount paid in
some states. In some states it is not thought necessary to give any
compensation for this purpose. There can be no reasonable excuse,
therefore, for failing to enforce the law in cases of delinquency every
time a physician or midwife fails to register a birth. If the public
sentiment of the state is aroused to this purpose, so that the state reg-
istration authorities and the local legislation authorities will be obliged
to do this, we may then have,, for the first time in the history of the
United States, a state where the registration records of births are re-
liable for the important purposes for which they should be used.
In Kentucky, for the second year of registration, the second year
of the operation of the law, the rates in a general way are graded from
the lowest. Certain counties have birth rates below twenty. Along
the Ohio River, up in the mountains, and in the extreme southM-estem
portion 9f the state, the registration is imperfect. Remember this is
the second year of the operation of the law. Then we have quite a
number of counties showing the next higher rate, twenty to twenty-
five. We can comprehend the significance of this when we consider that
twenty -five is about the birth rate of England, the lowest they have
recorded in the history of that country and a very low rate. Of course,
below twenty is absurd for any county. The counties having the rates
twenty-five to thirty-five are usually accepted as approximately rep-
resentative of conditions. The point that is of special interest is the
great uniformity of registration in the state after the second year of
76 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
operation. Nearly all of the mountain counties undoubtedly have
very high actual birth rates, and the birth rates recorded are all in
excess of thirty-five. The great bulk of counties range between twenty-
five and thirty-five. You may be able to find some interest in a com-
parison with Michigan. For the county birth rates of Michigan in ]912
the real population of which compares exactly with the population of
Kentucky, for practically all of the southern part of the state of
^lichigan, the rates are under twenty. Other counties are twenty to
twenty-five, others from twenty-five to thirty-five, and others from
thirty to thirty-five. Then the only two counties having rates of
thirty-five and over are Keweenaw and Gogebic. Now this is of in-
terest. If these rates be correct, we certainly have a great problem
before us in the low birth rates in the rest of the state. But I don't
believe the Secretary of the state of Michigan would assert, and I
certainly cannot assert on the comparative evidence, that we are get-
ting, as we should have, absolutely complete registration of births in
Michigan. These facts are of the most absorbing interest, in the com-
parative study of the growth of our population.
One point I should like to make is in regard to the number of in-
dividuals in Michigan by counties and minor civil divisions. The
growth of the rural population of the state can be compared with the
rural birth rates. Almost half or two-thirds of the lower counties
of the state show a decrease in rural population, corresponding to the
extremely low birth rates prevailing in the state.
I should like to make reference to one very important use of the
birth rate statistics in connection with the saving of infant life. Many
of you have seen, I presume, the pamphlet published on birth registra-
tion, the first pamphlet issued on that subject. A New York investi-
gation showed the great difficulty of conducting the work of prevent-
ing infant mortality, for the reason that we do not know what infant
mortality is. It is the ratio of deaths under one year of age to the total
deaths. The infant mortality in a great number of European coun-
tries has been declining somewhat. It has been brought down from 1901
to 1905 on the basis of statistics published by the French Government.
Sw^eden goes away back in statistical data valuable for this study to
1801 to 1805, beginning last century, the first century for which such
data w^ere available. Then comes France, then comes the German Gov-
ernment, and England and Wales begin as late as 1851 to 1855. But
practically now all civilized countries in the world have effective
registration of births, and of course, the registration of deaths, so
they can tell what the ratio of infant mortality is from year to year.
Some countries, China, Africa and the United States even, yet possess
no records of infant mortality. Unless the American people wake up^
STATISTICAL STUDIES ' <
China and Turkey will have satisfactory data for infant mortality
long before the United States.
A pamphlet published by the Children 's Bureau states, ' ' Convinced
that the most effective work in behalf of the public health that can be
done in this country today lies in the prevention of infant mortality."
The Children's Bureau is brought to the necessity of appealing for
legislation, and for such local records as will indicate where and when
the babies are born and where and when they die, as a preliminary
to an intelligent study of the subject."
I have a letter from Miss Lathrop which I received since coming to
this meeting, dated Washington, Jan. 6, 1914: "In answer to your
message with reference to Children's Bureaus concerned in the ques-
tion of raising the standard of birth registration in this country, I
can say that I am glad of any opportunity to express our deep interest
in this subject. The registration of all births is regarded as of so
much importance as a mechanical expedient necessary in the abler care
of children that it was made a subject of the first publication of the
Children's Bureau. The possibility of taking advantage of the in-
terest shown by women in the Bureau is suggested as a second step
toward improvement of registration, a .systematized co-operation with
the General Federation of Women's Clubs and other associations in
making a test of birth registration in different states. The response
has been very gratifying. Committees of women are now working in
many of the cities and towns of New Hampshire, Connecticut, Iowa,
Kentucky and Colorado, and the work will soon be organized in the
states of Washington and California. The club women are taking the
names of a certain number of the babies bom in 1913 and learning by
inquiry of the local authorities whether births have been registered.
The attitude of the state toward local health officers and registration
authorities has been sho\\Ti friendly throughout the investigation.
The authorities can assist most especially by giving publicity to their
endorsement of the club women 's work in making the test.
''In some instances a little difficulty has been experienced in con-
vincing the woanen that the proposed investigation is not intended
as a critical test of the work of the registration officials, but is pri-
marily a propaganda to stimulate public interest and very complete
registration, and thereby to be a distinct help to the authorities. In-
terest and friendly attitude on the part of the health officials will do a
great deal toward removing the impression that the test is not welcomed
by all earnest state officers."
There I see a very important opportunity for this Conference to
demand that such registration be complete in this state, and in our
78 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
other states, and to stand behind the healtli authorities and urge upon
them the neeessity of enforeing the hiw.
I will close now by a brief reference to the birth rates of certain
countries, and the general decline in birth rates and death rates. The
difference between the birth rates and the death rates in England, and
in Wales, for instance, is an actual increase of population. That de-
termines the growth of a country, aside from immigration. If we have
interest in our national existence, if we believe in ourselves as Ameri-
cans, or if any other country believes in itself, it should be a very ap-
prehensive time when the difference between the death rate and the
birth rate is wiped out. I have no idea that the science of eugenics
will ever become a science of nogenics, but it is certain that there is a
marked tendency in some of the more civilized populations to a very
great reduction in this difference.
I have called your attention to the Michigan death rates because
they were utterly worthless up to this time and to show the great
waste of effort given in this country in collecting statistics that are of
no value, because the laws for collecting are either not properly
regulated or not properly enforced. The Michigan birth rate, until
the passage of the law that went into effect Jan. 1, 1906, was
equally worthless. In 1890 the record went up higher than it was
for the first year of the operation of the new law, but the Michigan
birth rate records from about 1877 to 1891 were the result of fraudulent
efforts employed, and should be wiped out. Beginning in 1906, the
law ran along without the improvement which should have resulted
the first few years. It was naturally not enforced. In 1911 and
1912, there has been some increase, but I do not believe it means an
increase in the birth rate of Michigan but simply means an increase
in the returns of births owing to better registration.
I will conclude by simply making the suggestion that it might be
well, perhaps, if this organization would formally take some action in
regard to the importance of birth registration, and perhaps appoint
a committee to take up the matter as a national and state question.
Acting CnAniMAN Cbbegan
Dr. Wilbur has given us a wonderfully interestino: address, but his modesty
has omitted something that will be of intense interest to all of you. He said
Michig'an was the first to start off with vital statistics, but he did not tell us
that Doctor Wilbur was the man who started the thing off with Michigan.
The distinction he won for himself— without trying to do it— carried him to
Washington to take the whole United States under his care, on this matter
of vital statistics. Let us all help him to carry out his program.
STATISTICAL STUDIES 79
DIFFERENTIAL FECUNDITY
Walter F. Willcox, LL.D., Professor of Political Economy and Statistics,
Cornell University, Ithaca, N. Y.
Having been honored with an invitation to address you upon the
subject of ' ' difterential fecundity as one of the causes of the need for
race betterment, ' ' I have felt it both a privilege and a duty to accept
the invitation.
At the start it is well to define fecundity. This is the more neces-
sary because the definition used in biology and medicine differs some-
Avhat from that used in statistics. The definition propounded by
Prof. Raymond Pearl, in his paper before the First International
Eugenics Congress at London in 1912, was as follows: "the innate
potential reproductive capacity of the individual organism as denoted
by its ability to form and separate from the body mature germ cells. ' '
For human statistics this definition is inapplicable and useless. Sta-
tistics disregards potential as distinguished from actual or realized
fecundity and makes fecundity a characteristic, not of men or women,
husbands or wives, but of marriages. For present purposes, then,
it is a term applied to marriages which have proved fruitful in the
birth of at least one child, and is thus the opposite of sterility.
In some technical discussions a distinction is drawn between fecun-
dity and fertility, the former being applied indiscriminately to every
marriage which has resulted in the birth of a child, the latter taking
into account also the number of children born to the marriage.
If we were to accept this distinction, two marriages, to one of
which a single child had been born and to the other of which six chil-
dren had been born, would be equally fecund, for fecundity has no
degrees, but the marriage which had resulted in six children would be
more fertile than the other. In the present paper, which must be
general in character, this distinction between fecundity and fertility
will be ignored. For our purposes, fecundity means the yield of living
births in any population group in a unit of time, usually a year.
This yield can seldom be effectively stated as a total number of births,
for such a number ignores variations in the size of the group which
produces it. To avoid this difficulty fecundity is stated ordinarily as
a proportion or ratio, called the birth rate.
The word differential also must detain us a moment. The differ-
ences which it implies are differences in the fecundity of various popu-
lation groups and, in consequence, differences in the rates at which
these groups perpetuate themselves and multiply by Nature 's processes
of birth and death. The real things to be compared are the rates of
increase or of decrease resulting from the balance between these
80 KIKST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
natural procH'sses. The birth rate or fecundity gives only one term,
when what is wanted is the difTerenee between two terms, the birth*
rate and the death rate. A population group may increase either by ex-
cess of births over deaths, or by excess of immigration over emigration
or by various combinations of these two kinds of change reenforcing or
antagonizing each other. An increase by excess of births, or what is
called natural increase, differs from an increase by excess of immigra-
tion over emigration, or migratory increase, in that it is more likely to
carry on into the next generation through heredity the main char-
acteristics of the parent stock. Where the group is increased by immi-
gration there is less warrant for supposing that its qualities will be
perpetuated.
My real theme, then, may be phrased as "Differences in
the Rates of Natural Increase," a more accurate title than "Differ-
ential Fecundity." In addition to defining my subject more exactly
this has an incidental advantage. The fecundity or birth rate of the
population of the United States is unknown ; the fecundity of any of
the numerous groups into which that population may be divided, with
the possible exception of a few states, is likewise unknown. Neither
do we Imow the mortality or death rate of the population of the
United States, although we do know the death rate of many states
and are rapidly advancing towards a determination of the rate for the
entire country. These facts might seem to make a paper on "Differ-
ential Fecundity" or "Natural Increase" almost impossible. But if
a group is unaffected by migration, its total increase at one date over
the number at a prior date determined from two successive censuses
is a measure of its natural increase. The population of the United
States is far from satisfying this condition, yet within it there are
certain groups, e. g., Negroes and Indians, so little affected by mi-
gration that we may measure their natural increase from census re-
turns, though neither their fecundity nor their mortality is Imown.
Even for the whites the effort to measure the natural increase by al-
lowing for the increase due to immigration is not absolutely hopeless.
My subject, then, assumes that the population can be divided into
groups the natural increase of which can be determined and compared,
and my aim is to review the present state of statistical knowledge re-
garding the natural increase of such groups. The American popula-
tion groups of whose natural increase I shall speak briefly are the white
and the negro races, the native and the foreign born, the several
nativity strains among the foreign born, the urban and the rural
population.
Among savage or semi-civilized people, where the overwhelming
majority live little above the starvation point, there is a reciprocal re-
STATISTICAL. STUDIES 81
lation between births and deaths. When the deaths increase, the
births decrease; when the deaths decrease, the births increase. For
example, in European Russia in the famine year 1892 the deaths ex-
ceeded the annual average of the years before and after the famine by
more than half a million and the births in that year fell below the
annual average for the years before and after by more than 300,000.
Conversely, in such countries a bountiful crop lowers the death rate
during the time the food lasts, and raises sharply the birth rate a few
months later. Most civilized countries have emancipated themselves
from this close dependence upon food and in them no relation can be
traced between the crop of grain and the crop of babies. In such
countries the only surviving relies of this reciprocal relation between
births and deaths are found in cases of war and pestilence. Thus, in
Massachusetts, the effect of the Civil War was apparently more marked,
in reducing the birth rate than in raising the death rate. The first of
the recent epidemics of influenza, sweeping rapidly from Russia over
Europe and her outposts in the winter of 1889-90, was the main reason
that in nearly every civilized country 1890 was a year with a very
high death rate. But no attention has been called to the fact that the
births in Europe during that year were 200,000 below the average of
the preceding five years and that these losses of life by reduction of
the births came in each country from eight to ten months after the
mortality from the influenza reached its height.
During the last fifty years or less the most marked change in the
birth rates and death rates of civilized countries has been the gradual
decline and almost complete disappearance of this reciprocal rela-
tion between births and deaths, whereby the most significant changes
w^ere those between one year and the next and these changes were
usually in opposite directions, and the appearance in its place of a
tendency for birth rates and death rates to decrease slowly but steadily
for a long series of consecutive years. The annual variations are
much less, but the total change in ten or twenty years much greater
than under the earlier conditions. Usually the decline began with the
death rate and in that case its effect would necessarily be to magnify
the natural increase. But a decline in the birth rate soon set in and
is proceeding now in most civilized countries about as fast as the
death rate. Indeed, such a change was inevitable, if the natural in-
crease was not to be more rapid than the increase in wealth or food.
We must never forget that the decline in the birth rate and that alone
has enabled mankind to hold fast the advantages promised by the
advance of civilization and the sharp fall in the death rate. The
serious and disturbing fact is not the mere decline in the birth rate
but the differential decline. Apparently many strains or lines of de-
82 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
sceut which one might most dosire to see continued and increased are
strains which are losing ground rehitively, if not absolutely, by a de-
crease of the birth rate more rapid than that of the death rate.
The largest and in some respects the most important population
groups about whose rates of natural increase I wish to speak
are the great races of man — the European, Asiatic, and Afri-
can. Their increase has been and still is in the main dependent upon
diiferences in the certainty and sufficiency of the food supply. The
great reason for the rapid multiplication of the European folk and
their descendants in other parts of the world from perhaps 130 mil-
lions in the middle of the eighteenth century to more than 550 mil-
lions now, Mobile during the same period the numbers of other races
have altered but little, is found in the fact that new territorial dis-
coveries and new methods of stimulating agricultural production and
the transportation of persons and goods have concurred to increase
enormously the supplies of food available for the white race. There is
no reason to suppose that the fecundity or fertility of this race is
greater than that of other races or greater than it formerly w^as. Its
natural increase has been unprecedented not because its birth rate
has risen but because its death rate has fallen, and fallen more rapidly
than its birth rate.
In our own country and especially in the Southern States this
divergence in rates of natural increase is working out results of in-
terest for the two great races. That the white race is slowly dis-
placing the negroes in the United States is now well knowTi. That
this is due to the differences in the rates of total increase is equally
familiar. But the whites are being constantly reinforced by immi-
grants and the negroes are not. Where migration is a potent factor,
total increase is 'an untrustworthy clue to natural increase. For this
reason w^e may get nearer the truth by confining attention to the
Southern States. Under the slavery regime and the saturnalia of re-
construction which followed, i. e., from 1790 to 1880, the increase of
the two races in the South, and — so far as w^e may disregard the ef-
fects of migration and identify natural increase with total increase —
their natural increase was at about the same rate. During these ninety
years, when the negroes were fewest relatively, they were 35 per cent
of the total population of the South ; when they were most numerous,
they were 38 per cent, a difference of only 3 per cent. But since ] 880
the Southern whites have increased much more rapidly than the
Southern negroes and as a result the proportion of the latter is
dwindling. In thirty years that proportion has decreased more than
six per cent, or more than two per cent in each decade.
In the United States as a whole the more rapid increase of the
STATISTICAL STUDIES 83
whites is due not only to the influx of himdreds of thousands of white
immigrants, but also to the fact that in the registration area in 1910 —
an area including nearly three-fifths of the whites and more than one-
fifth of the negroes and so a fair index of conditions in the country
at large — the negro death rate exceeded the white by about two-
thirds. If the fecundity of the darker race likewise exceeded that of
the whites by two-thirds, the difference in the death rates would not
entail a different rate of natural increase. Although no exact mea-
sure of fecundity can be gained until there is an effective registration
of births, a rough substitute for it has been found in the proportion
of living children under five years of age to one thousand women of
child-bearing age. Measured in this way, the fecundity of the Ameri-
can negro is and has been for the sixty years since 1850 greater than
that of the white. During the thirty years since 1880 — and those are
just the years within which the proportion of negroes in the South has
been falling — the excess in the proportion of negro children to mothers
over white children to their mothers in the country has likewise been
falling. The present difference in fecunditj^ between the races is little
more than one-fourth of that in 1880 and at present rates of change
it will have disappeared entirely before the next census is taken. Itf
the South the proportions of children in the total population and in
each race are notably above the corresponding proportions in the
North. Indeed it is probable that a main reason for the greater fe-
cundity of the negro race is found in the fact that this race, of which
nearly nine-tenths live in the South, has the high fecundity character-
istic of the South, while the white race, of which the majority live
in the North, has the lower fecundity characteristic of the North. For
in the Southern States the proportion of children to women among
the whites already exceeds that among the negroes by ten per cent.
The evidence, then, points to a differential natural increase as an
important factor, a factor in my opinion at least as important as im-
migration, in determining the present and future relative proportions
of the two main races in this country.
Among the whites, the main classes whose differential fecundity has
been somewhat studied are the native and the foreign-born stock. This
branch of the inquirj^ is difficult not only because of that lack of data
which almost baffles one in studying the differential fecundity of
white and negro, but also because the lines between the two classes are
fluid and variable. A son born of immigrant parents the day after
their landing is of the same stock as they, yet in the statistical tables
he stands as a native American and they as foreign-born or immigrant.
Although efforts have been made to measure the proportion of the
white population of the United States at the end of the nineteenth
84 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
ceutiiry wliifli sprang from tlie whiU's who were in this country at its
beginning and the proportion due to immigration during the century,
yet none of the results seems to have won or to be entitled to general
acceptance, and for that reason I must pass this topic as still a happy
hunting ground for conjecture,
A careful and illuminating study of the comparative fecundity of
the native and the foreign-born population of Massachusetts and of
the various strains of the foreign-born in that state during the fifteen
years 1883-1897 was made in 1901 by Dr. R. R. Kuczynski.* The pro-
portion of married women who had outlived the child-bearing age with-
out ha\ang borne any child was 9 per cent among the foreign-born, and
15 per cent among the native, indicating tbat the proportion of sterile
marriages is about two-thirds greater among natives than among
foreign-born. The average annual number of births among 1,000
immigrants was more than three times as great as among 1,000 na-
tives of the United States. But a large proportion of the natives and
a small proportion of immigrants are children, and for this reason a
fairer comparison of fecundity was made by excluding the children
both from the native and from the foreign-born. After this correc-
tion had been made, the fecundity of the foreign-bom was found to
be a little more than twice that of the native. The birth rate varied
with the place of birth of the mother, the lowest rate being found
when the Massachusetts wife was born in some other New England
state, the highest rate when the Massachusetts wife was bom in Portu-
gal, the latter rate being more than four times the former. When all
women over fifty years of age and all younger unmarried women
were excluded, the foreign-bom birth rate was found to be greater
than the native by about three-fourths.
Another study of the fecundity of married women, comparing na-
tive and foreign-born wives in New Hampshire and introducing a
classification by age, added the interesting result that, while the birth
rate of foreign-born wives at all ages was twice that of native wives,
this was a resultant or average of differences which grew steadily
greater with the age of the classes compared. The birth rate of foreign-
bom wives at ages under 20 exceeded that of native wives by less than
one-fourth, but at ages 25 to 34 it was more than double and at ages
35 to 44 w^as almost treble that of native wives.t This suggests that
a large part at least of the difference between the fecundity of the
native and the immigrant stock in New Hampshire is due to psycho-
* In the Qimrterhj Journal of Economics for November, 1901, and Feb-
ruary, 1902.
tA. A. Young, "Birth Rate in New Hampshire" in Am. Stat. Assn.,
Quart. Puhs., IX (September, 1905), p. 280.
STATISTICAL STUDIES 85
logical rather than physiological causes, or causes which express them-
selves in the voluntary choice of small families rather than in sterility.
An attempt to estimate the comparative fecundity in 1900 of native
and foreign-born women in the United States, including wives and
spinsters and with no allowance for differences in age distribution,
indicated that the fecundity of foreign-born women exceeded that of
native women by more than fifty per cent.*
The statistics of Massachusetts, although they were probably as
good as those of any state, did not and do not yet afford the informa-
tion needed for a thorough study of the death rate, and so of the dif-
ference between birth rate and death rate, or natural increase, of the
native and foreign-born. But a comparison of the existing material
with that furnished in Berlin, where a similar problem has been
studied, perhaps as carefully as anywhere in the world, led Doctor
Kuczynski to conclude that the native population of Massachusetts
is probably dying out at a rapid rate.
Since his articles were written, material has accumulated making
it possible to compare the mortality of the native and the foreign-born
in 1900 in the registration area of the United States, which embraced
two-fifths of the population of the country and much more than that
proportion of the foreign-bom, t and in 1910 in New York State.
These results show that for ages between ten and forty there is very
little difference between the death rate of natives and of foreign-born
of the same sex and age and that what differences do exist are quite
as often in favor of the foreign-born as the native. Since the fe-
cundity of the foreign-bom is at least fifty per cent greater than that
of the native and the mortality is about the same, the difference be-
tween them, or the natural increase of the foreign-bom, must be far
above that of the native population.
Another classification of the population has been employed in
studies of differential fecundity, that into the urban and the rural
population. Under urban is included all residents of cities each hav-
ing at least 25,000 inhabitants, all the rest of the population being
treated as rural. The division line of 25,000 is much too high, but the
form of the printed tables makes it impossible to put the limit lower.
The fecundity of city women 15-44 years of age is only about two-
* Twelfth Census, Supplementary Analysis, p. 420.
t This is the only fact brought out, I believe, for the first time in the
present paper. The results for New York State in 1910 will he found in my
last report as consulting statistician to the New York State Department of
Health; the confirmatoi-y results for about forty per cent of the population
of the United States in 1900 have been computed from a ms. table kindly
furnished me by the Census Bureau.
S6 FIRST NATIONiVL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
thirds that of country women. But in the United States cities are
massed at the North and the North, has a low fecundity. The low
urban fecundity, then, may be due to the northern location and not to
city life. To test this, a comparison has been made between the
cities of the North and the country districts of the North and between
the cities of the South and the country districts of the South. Such
a comparison indicates that in all main divisions of the United States
fecundity in country districts is greater than fecundity in cities. It
indicates also that the difference between city and country in this re-
spect is at a minimum of about 10 per cent in the North Atlantic
group and at a maximum in the Southern groups where rural fecun-
dity is about double urban fecundity. This geographic difference may
be plausibly explained as due to the numerous immigrants in Northern
cities and their high fecundity and to the numerous negroes in South-
ern cities and their low fecundity. For the fecundity of city negroes
is only about two-thirds the fecundity of city whites, but the fecundity
of country negroes is much above that of country whites. The growth
of cities, especially in the South, and of a negro urban population
seems likely to increase the differences in the fecundity of whites and
negroes.
The twenty-eighth volume of the Report of the Immigration Com-
mission, printed in 1911, contains a contribution to our subject, en-
titled "Fecundity of Immigrant Women," the main conclusions of
which have been summarized by the author in an article in a recent
issue of the Quarterly PuUications of the American Statistical Asso-
ciation.* The tables were compiled from manuscript data in the
United States Census Bureau and deal in the main with nearly 80,000
married women under 45 years of age living in the second decade of
married life and with the number of children they have had.
This is the most important American study of fecundity and sup-
plements in many ways what we previously knew. It classifies white
wives as native of native parents, native of foreign parents and
foreign-born and adds scanty data about negro wives. Of the negro
wives who had been married between ten and twenty years, one in
five had had no child ; of the native white of native parents, one in
eight ; of the native white of foreign parents, one in sixteen ; and of
the foreign-born wives, one in nineteen. The proportion of sterile
marriages was determined for the various nationality classes of the
foreign-bom ; it is highest among wives bom in Scotland or England,
lowest among wives bom in Poland, Bohemia, or Russia and the pro-
* Joseph A. Hill, "Comparative Fecundity of "Women of Native and
Foreign Parentage," in Am. Stat. Assn. Quart. Puhs., XIII, pp. 583-604
(December, 1913).
STATISTICAL STUDIES 87
portion of sterile marriages among those where the wife was born in
one of the first-mentioned countries was about four times as great as
among marriages where the wife was born in a country belonging to
the second group. Among no group of foreign-born wives, however,
is the proportion of sterile marriages as great as among marriages
where the M'ives were born in the United States.
With reference to the average number of children born to these
groups of wives of various countries of birth, the smallest number is
to wives of native American birth and parentage. Ten such mar-
riages have resulted in 27 children ; ten negro marriages, in 31 chil-
dren ; ten marriages in which the wives were born in England, in 34
children ; and at the other extreme, ten marriages with wives born in
Russia, in 54 children ; ten A\dth wives bom in French Canada, in
56 ; and ten with wives born in Poland, in 62.
The average interval of time elapsing between births is for wives
born in the United States 5.3 years ; for wives born in Poland, 2.3 years.
This interval between births is uniformly greater in the second genera-
tion of immigrants than in the first. But the proportion of sterile
marriages does not rise similarly. So the tendency is to a reduction in
the size of families rather than to a larger proportion of sterile unions.
The influence of rural conditions upon fecundity is best measured
by the statement that among wives born in this country of native
parents and married between ten and twenty years, t^n living in
urban districts have had on the average 24 or 25 children, Avhile ten
living in rural districts have had on the average 34 children, indicating
that the fecundity of wives of a given nativity class living in the
country is about two-fifths greater than it is in the city.
Perhaps the most important body of information regarding dif-
ferential fecundity or comparative rates of natural increase in the
United States has been secured as an immediate or remote result of
the addition to the Massachusetts census schedule of 1875 of the ques-
tion, "Number of children borne by women, " the object of which "was
to ascertain the relative fecundity of women of different nationalities
and to settle . . . the question which continually arises concerning
the growth of our native population as compared with that of our
foreign-bom."* Ten years later similar information was sought in
fuller detail by asldng of each married woman two questions:
' ' Mother of how many children ' ' and * ' Number of those children now
living. ' ' The results of 'tabulating the answers to these questions were
carefully analyzed in the state census and were also of importance to
Doctor Kuczynski in the preparation of his articles. The interest
aroused in these questions and their answers was so great that five
* Massachusetts Census of 1875, Vol. 1, p. xli.
88 FIRST NATlONiVL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
years later, in 1890, the same questions were placed on the schedules
of the United States census, but unfortunately no tabulation of the
results was ever made. In 1900, after much consideration by the
office, the same questions were asked again, and again, after much
preliminary work had been done upon the answers, the work was
discontinued and no results ever reached the public except for the
fragmentary tabulation made by the Immigration Commission and
applying to about four per cent of the population.
Yet again at the census in 1910 these questions were repeated a
third time and in the report of the Director of the Census to the
Secretary of Commerce and Labor for that year one may find the
following passage: "It is also proposed ... to work out from the
returns on the schedules statistics with regard to fecundity as indi-
cated by the number of children bom and the number living for
women of different classes in comparison with their age and the dura-
tion of marriage. ... A considerable amount of preliminary work
on this subject was undertaken at the census of 1900 but the results
were never tabulated or published. It is respectfully suggested that
the Secretary recommend to Congress that the Director of the Census
be authorized to tabulate the more important information on this sub-
ject for the 1900 census as well as that for 1910. . . . This subject is
one of profound importance and the census schedules furnish data by
which conclusions of the utmost value can be readily drawn. A plan
has been devised by which the expense of . . . tabulating the results on
this subject for the census of 1910 will be much less than would have
been necessary to complete the work on the lines begun in 1900. ' '*
At the present time no funds are available for completing this
work and there is danger that for the third time the inquiry wdll
suffer shipwreck. This investigation has been imitated abroad, some
of the most interesting and significant results of the last French
census being derived from the answers to similar questions. In my
opinion the failure to utilize the answers to these questions was one of
the main defects of the census of 1890, was the most serious defect of
the census of 1900 and now bids fair to be the most serious defect of
the census of 1910. In Doctor Hill's paper already quoted and written
a few months ago. we read : " It is to be hoped . . . that the returns
obtained at the census of 1910 will not be similarly neglected, but as
yet no steps have been taken towards their tabulation." If it had
been the policy of this Conference to adopt resolutions or make rec-
ommendations, I should have proposed the adoption of some such reso-
lution as the following :
* Beport of the Director for 1909-10, pp. 45-6.
STATISTICAL STUDIES 89
Resolved, that the National Conference on Race Betterment ap-
point a committee with power :
1. To memorialize the Congress of the United States in the name
of this Conference, urging it to provide the funds needed for com-
piling the returns now on the schedules of the census of 1910 and
thereby measuring the fecundity of the races and national elements
within the United States;
2. To attempt to secure the presentation of similar petitions from
other organizations or from individuals interested in this subject.
Whether such a resolution would be welcome or not, I sincerely
hope that individuals will write to individual Congressmen urging
such action as is here proposed.
In my judgment, no statistical result could come from this Con-
ference more valuable than a concerted effort to increase the available
information regarding the comparative fecundity of the various strains
in our population, for this information lying unused in the government
files is of more value and importance than the entire sum of informa-
tion on differential fecundity now possessed by the American people.
GENERAL INDIVIDUAL HYGIENE
THE IMPORTANCE OF FREQUENT AND THOROUGH MEDICAL
EXAMINATIONS OF THE WELL
Victor C. Vaughax, LL.D., M.D., President-Eleet American Medical Asso-
ciation ; President Michigan State Board of Health, Ann Arbor, Mich.
What I have to tell tonight is iu a little different form than that
announced to you. I am going to read to you Dr. Smith's dream:
THE doctor's dream
Doctor Smith is a practitioner in one of the large cities of the
Middle West. He is a man of good training, a classical graduate,
took his professional course in one of our best schools, and did hospital
service both at home and abroad. He is a general practitioner, and
keeps well posted in all that he does. He makes no claim to universal
knowledge or skill, but is conscientious in all his work, and when he
meets with a case needing the service of a specialist he does not hesi-
tate to call in the best help. He has made a good living, demands fair
fees from those who are able to pay, and gives much gratuitous service
to the poor. He is beloved by his patients, held in high esteem by his
confreres, and respected by all who know him. He is a keen observer,
reads character for the most part correctly, and is not easily imposed
upon. Wliile he recognizes the value of his services, he is not in the
practice of medicine with the expectation of getting rich, and his in-
terests are largely human and scientific. He has deep sympathy for
those whose ignorance leads them to sin against their own bodies, but
he is devoid of weak sentimentality and does not hesitate to admonish
and even denounce the misdeeds of his patients, whatever their social
position. During twenty years of practice in the same locality he has
become acquainted with the vices and virtues of many families. He
is not looking for the coming of the millennium, but he is often im-
patient of the slow pace with which the race moves towards physical,
mental and moral betterment. One of his patients is a large manu-
facturer employing many unskilled laborers. Doctor Smith has often
pointed out to this man that the efficiency of his working force would
be multiplied many times were the men paid better wages, the work
done in rooms better lighted and ventilated, and in general with a
little more humanness sho\vn them. Another is at the head of a
GENERAL INDIVIDUAL HYGIENE 91
large mercantile house which employs clerks at the lowest possible
wages and makes the conditions of life well-nigh unendurable. A
wealthy woman gives largely to church and charity from her revenues
which come from the rental of houses in the red light district. An-
other of the doctor's patrons is a grocer who sells "egg substitutes"
and similar products ' ' all guaranteed under the pure food law. ' ' We
Mali not continue the list of the doctor's patrons and it must not be in-
ferred that all are bad, for this is not true. The majority are honest,
conscientious people, as is the case in all communities. Our country
has a population of nearly one hundred millions. Millions of these are
decent, respectable citizens, not altogether wise, but for the most
part well intentioned. Thousands are brutal in their instincts, crimi-
nal in their pursuits, and breeders of their kinds. We claim to be
civilized, but there are those among us who w^ould be stoned to death
were they to attempt to live in a tribe of savages. But I must stop
these parenthetical excursions and get back to Doctor Smith and his
dream.
On a certain day in November of the past year he had been
unusually bu.sy. even for one whose working hours frequently double
the legal limit. During his office hours he had seen several cases which
gave him grave concern. There was William Thompson, the son of
his old classmate and college chum, now Judge Thompson. William
finished at the old University and is now an embryo lawyer promising
to follow in the footsteps of his honored and honorable father, but
William belonged to a fast fraternity at college and came to Doctor
Smith this morning with copper colored spots over his body and a
local sore. The doctor easily diagnosed the case and pointed out to
William that he was a walking culture flask of spirochetes, a constant
source of danger to all who should come in contact with him, and that
years of treatment would be necessary to render him sound again.
On the lip of a girl, the daughter of another old friend, the doctor
had found a chancre caused by a kiss from her fiance, a supposedly up-
right man prominent in church and social circles. He had seen a
case of gonorrhea in a girl baby contracted from her mother, the
wife of a laboring man. A case of gonorrheal ophthalmia in a young
man whose only sin was that he had used the same towel used by an
older brother next demanded his attention. Several cases of advanced
tuberculosis among those who had been told by less conscientious physi-
cians that the cough was only a bronchial trouble made Doctor Smith
lament the standard of skill and honor among some of his professional
brethren. Rapid loss in weight in an old friend who had been too
busy to consult him earlier was diagnosed as neglected diabetes. In
another instance dimness of vision and frequent headaches persisting
92 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
for luonths h;id not sufficed to send an active business man to the
physician. This proved to be an advanced ease of Bright 's disease,
which should have been recognized two years earlier. Urinary, oph-
thalmoscopic and blood-pressure tests demonstrated the seriousness of
the present condition. A breast tumor on the wiie of an old and re-
spected friend showed extensive involvement of the axillary glands
and the operation demanded promised only temporary relief, while
had it been done months before, complete removal of the diseased
tissue would have resulted. In making his calls for the day Doctor
Smith had experienced both among the well-to-do and the poor many
things Avhich had brought within the range of his vision more and
darker clouds than those which floated in the dull November sky.
More than a year before he had become estranged from the family
of one of his oldest and best friends. The breaking of this relationship,
which had continued from his earliest professional service and had
been filled with the common joys and sorrows shared only by the
family physician and those under his charge, had cast a deep shadow
over the doctor's life. He had officiated at the birth of each of his
friend's five children, and he felt a parental love and pride in them
as he saw them grow into healthy womanhood and manhood. A little
more than a year ago, he learned that the oldest of these children, a
beautiful and healthy girl of eighteen, was engaged to a young man
whom he knew to be a rake. In a spirit of altruism he had gone to
the father and mother and protested against the sacrifice of the
daughter. This kindly intended intervention was met with a stormy
rebuff, and the doctor was rudely dismissed from his friend's house.
But when the young woman, whose life with her unfaithful husband
had made her deeply regret her fatal infatuation, felt the first pains
of childbirth she begged of her parents that her old friend might be
sent for, and that morning he had delivered her of a syphilitic child.
How unlike the previous births at which he had officiated in this
friend's house! It had been the custom to have the doctor at every
birthday dinner given the five children, and one of the boys bore his
name. There would be no birthdays for this, the first grandchild, and
what could the future promise the young mother? Surely, the No-
vember day was overcast with clouds for Doctor Smith before its gray
light awoke the slumbering city. As he walked the few short blocks
from his friend's to his own home, he cried in deepest sorrow. How
many thousands of daughters must be sacrificed before their parents
will permit them to walk in the light of knowledge and not in the
shadow of ignorance? After a breakfast, which was scarcely tasted,
he read in the morning paper the announcement that "Damaged
Goods," which was to have been given in his University town, had met
GENERAL INDIVIDUAL HYGIENE 93
wdth such a storm of protest from the learned members of the faculty
that the engagement had been canceled. "Surely," he said, "the
fetters of prudery and custom bind both the learnecl and the un-
learned. ' '
After his morning office hours Doctor Smith visited his patients
at the city hospital. Here is a wreck from cocaine intoxication, the
poison having been purchased from a drug-store owned by a promi-
nent local politician. In a padded cell is a man with delirium tre-
mens, a patron of a gilded saloon run by another political boss. In
the lying-in ward are a dozen girls seduced in as many dance halls with
drinking alcoves. Time will relieve these girls of the products of
conception, a longer time will be required to free them from the dis-
eases which they have contracted, but all time will not wash away the
stains on their lives, and what of the fatherless children to be bom?
Thirty beds are filled with typhoids, who under the best conditions
must spend long weeks in the bondage of a fever, which day by da;y
gradually but inexorably tightens its grasp. The furred tongue,
glazed eyes, flushed cheeks, bounding pulses, emaciated frames, de-
lirious brains were all due to the fact that a large manufacturer had
run a private sewer into the river above the water works. The greed
and ignorance of one business firm had been permitted to endanger
the lives of half a million of people. In his family calls the doctor
met with conditions equally lamentable. A fond mother in her ignor-
ance had nursed a sore throat in one of her children with domestic
remedies. The membranous patches on the tonsils, extending up-
ward into the nasal passages and downward into the larynx, and the
cyanotic face with labored breathing showed that even the magical
curative action of diphtheria antitoxin, that wonderful discovery of
modern medicine, would be of little avail in this individual case. The
other children were treated with immunizing doses and the doctor had
the consolation of knowing that death's harvest in that household
would be limited to the one whom the mother's ignorance had doomed.
The next call brought Doctor Smith to a home in which the condi-
tions were equally deplorable and still more inexcusable. One of the
children some months before had been bitten by a strange cur which
soon disappeared in the alley. The wound was only a scratch and was
soon forgotten. Now, the child was showing the first symptoms of
that horrible disease hydrophobia. But dogs must not be muzzled —
women, with plumes torn from living birds in their hats, had formed a
society for the prevention of cruelty to animals, and had so declared.
It must not be inferred that all of Doctor Smith's experiences on
that November day were sad. Men are mortal ; all siclmess is not pre-
ventable, accidents will happen and distressing injuries result. This
94 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE HETTERMENT
worlil is not, ail Kdcu and no onr cxiXH'ts tliat all soi'r-ow will be
banislied from it. Decay and death approach with advancing years.
Strength and weakness are relative terms and those possessed of the
former must helj) bear the burdens of those afflicted with the latter.
Doctor Smith, being a hard-headed, reasonable, scientific man, is no
Utopian, and he frequently meets in sick rooms experiences which
greatly increase both his interest and his confidence in man. He
finds the young and vigorous denying themselves many pleasures iu
order to brighten the pathways of the old and infirm, the fortunate
lending a helping hand to the unfortunate, and the wise leading the
unwise. No one, more than the family physician, can measure and
appreciate the innate goodness that springs, without an effort, from
the heart of humanity. It is difficult for the physician of large ex-
perience to unreservedl}' condemn anyone, and he is inclined to regard
all sins as due to either heredity or environment. However, it must
be admitted that on this day Doctor Smith had seen but little sun-
shine and the clouds that had gathered about him had hidden the
virtues and magnified the vices of his community. Especially was this
true of the vice of ignorance, for ignorance which results in injury to
one 's fellows is not only a vice, but a crime, a moral if not a statutory
one.
Late that night as the doctor sat before his grate he fell asleep,
and now he is busy among his patients in a way hitherto quite un-
known to him. His w^aiting-room is filled with people, old and young,
of both sexes, who have come to be examined in order to. ascertain
the exact condition of their health. A young man before proposing
marriage to the woman of his choice wishes a thorough examination.
He wishes to know that in offering himself he is not bringing to the
woman any harm. He desires to become the father of healthy children
and he is hot willing to transmit any serious defect to them. He tells
the doctor to examine him as carefully as he would were he applying
for a large life insurance. The doctor goes through the most thorough
physical examination and tests the secretions and blood with the ut-
most care. He nnderstands his own responsibility in the matter and
appreciates the high sense of honor displayed by his patient. A young
woman for like reasons has delayed her final answer to the man who
has asked her hand in order that the doctor might pass upon her case.
Here is the doctor's old friend, William Stone. Mr. Stone is in the
early fifties. He has been a highly successful, honorable business man,
has accumulated a sufficiency and enjoys the good things which his
wife prepares for the table. A careful examination of the urine leads
the doctor to caution Mr. Stone to reduce the carbohydrates in his
food. Mr. Perkins, a la^^'yer who throws his whole strength into every
GENERAL INDIVIDUAL HYGIENE 95
■case he tries, of late has found himself easily irritated, shows in-
creased urinary secretion and a blood-pressure rather high. A vaca-
tion with light exercise and more rest is the preventive prescription
wliieh he receives. Mrs. Williams, after being examined by Doctor
Smith, undergoes a slight operation under local anesthesia, and is re-
lieved of the first and only malignant cells found in her breast.
Richard Roe, who is preparing for a long journey, is vaccinated against
typhoid fever, a disease no longer existent in Doctor Smith's city
since pollution of the water has been discontinued. John Doe, who is
a mineralogical expert and wishes to do some prospecting in high alti-
tudes, has his heart examined. There are numerous applicants for
pulmonary examination. This is done by Doctor Smith and his as-
sistants in a most thorough and up-to-date manner, and advice is
given each according to the findings. It has been many years since
Doctor Smith has seen an advanced case of pulmonary tuberculosis
and the great white plague will soon be a thing of the past. Every^-
body goes to a physician twice a year and imdergoes a thorough exami-
nation. The result of this examination is stated in a permanent record
and no two consecutive examinations are made by the same physician,
in order that a condition overlooked by one may be detected by an-
other. Cases of doubt or in which there is difference of opinion are
referred to special boards. The average of human life has been greatly
increased and the sum of human suffering has been greatly decreased.
Preventive has largely replaced curative medicine. Tenements are
no longer kno\\ai ; prostitution and with it the venereal diseases have
disappeared. Institutions for the feeble-minded are no longer needed,
because the breed has died out. Insanity is rapidly decreasing be-
cause its chief progenitors, alcoholism and syphilis, have been sup-
pressed. These and many other pleasing visions come to Doctor
Smith in his dream, from which he is startled by the ring of the tele-
phone at his elbow. The call says: "Come quickly to Pat Ryan's
saloon at the corner of Myrtle and Second. There has been a drunken
row. Bring your surgical instruments. ' ' Then the smiles which had
played over the face of the doctor in his dream were displaced by
lines of care and he went forth into the darkness of ignorance and
crime.
There are many Doctor Smith 's and they have been seeing pleasing
visions in their dreams, and meeting with stern realities in their wak-
ing hours. Nearly fifty thousand Doctor Smith's constitute the
American Medical Association, which is expending thousands of dollars
annually in trying to so educate the people that unnecessary disease
may be prevented. The doctors are asking that the work of the na-
tional, state, municipal and rural health organizations may be made
96 FIRST NATIONAI, CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
more effective, that the knowledge gained in the study of the causation
of disease may he utilized. The world has seen what has been done
in Havana and on the Canal Zone, how yellow fever and malaria have
been suppressed, and how the most pestilential spots on earth may be
converted into healthful habitations for man. Scientific medicine has
made these demonstrations and the world applauds, but seems slow to
make general application of the rules of hygiene.
Doctor Foster had experienced the doctor's dream when he said
in 1909 : "I look forward with confidence to the time when pre-
ventable diseases will be pi'evented, and when curable diseases
will be recognized in the curable stage and will be cured, and I believe
the grandest triumphs of civilization will be the achievements which
will result from a realization of the possibilities of preventive medi-
cine. ' '
Professor Fisher, a most earnest and intelligent student of means
for the prevention of sickness and the deferring of death, has stated
that "by the intelligent application of our present knowledge, the
average span of human life may be increased full fifteen years. ' '
ETJTHENICS AND ITS FOUNDER
Mrs. Melvil Uewey, Honorary Chairman, Institution Economics of the
American Home Economics Association, Lake Placid, N. Y.
Genius has been defined as an "infinite capacity for taking pains."
Thomas Edison's formula for genius is perhaps more forcible — "two
per cent inspiration, ninety-eight per cent perspiration."
Mrs. Ellen H. Richards, who named the science of better living, was
endowed with a genius for hard work. America has not yet produced
a woman her equal in grasp and breadth of scientific attainments.
The list of her degrees, societies and publisht writings fills six pages in
the Memorial number of the Journal of Home Economics, which she
founded in 1909. Prof. Maria Mitchell, of Vassar College, claimed to
have first discovered her unusual gifts thru her devotion to astronomy.
Her chosen life work was sanitary chemistry and as a pioneer she first
opened the doors of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to
women. She was also at home in her husband's chair of Mining and
Metallurgy and was the only woman ever elected to active member-
ship in the American Institute of IVIining Engineers.
Like a strong magnet, she attracted to her men and women of
earnest purpose who were doing things in the world, at the same
Mrs. Ellen K. Richards
GENER.VL INDIVIDUAL HYGIENE 97
time radiating powerful currents of enthusiasm and inspiration to all
who were associated with her intimately. To discover a new, efficient
worker in her sphere of interests gave her the same joy that the as-
tronomer feels when his searching eyes, sweeping the heavens with
telescope, discover a new planet.
Sept. 19, 1904, the sixth annual Lake Placid Conference on Home
Economics met in the large rustic, white birch living room of an Ad-
irondack lodge, whose windows commanded full view of the highest
mountain peaks of the state and looked directly into the beautiful
Indian Pass, the dividing line from the tribes of the north, of the
famous five nations who formed the ancient Iroquois League.
She was full of enthusiasm for the new word which had come
to her, telling us about it before her traveling wraps were fairly re-
moved, but it was during a discussion on nomenclature that she
formally referred to the word coined by Sir Francis Galton to express
race betterment, Eugenics, and suggested that Euthenics, better living,
might be used to represent this work in higher education, adding that
"the manufacture of new words is not easy. To suit the public a
word must be correctly formed, it must please the public ear and fit
the popular tongue." With her usual scientific accuracy she had
studied well its etymology and brought ample authority for its mean-
ing from Demosthenes, Herodotus and Aristotle. It seemed much the
best word yet offered and it was voted:' That the following nomen-
clature be recommended as the suggestion of the Conference :
HANDWORK in elementary schools.
DOMESTIC SCIENCE in secondary schools.
HOME ECONOMICS in normal and professional schools.
EUTHENICS in colleges and universities.
(Household arts and science and Household Economics have also
been widely used.)
Nature had denied her children of flesh and blood and the children
of her brain w^ere of absorbing interest. Would the new word be
adopted? Would it live?
The new edition of the Standard dictionary gives full definitions
of both Eugenics and Euthenics. Their place in the Decimal Classifi-
cation of literature for libraries has been assigned for the general sub-
jects and will be included in the next edition, now in preparation.
575 Evolution.
.3 Environment, Euthenics.
.6 Development. Survival of the Fittest. Eugenics.
This Conference on Race Betterment proves abundantly the hold
they have taken in public sentiment, wath promise of large results.
From the very beginning the purpose of her work in home eco-
98 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON U ACE BETTERMENT
noiuics was educational, dealing' with eeonoiuic and sociologic study
of the home and with problems of rit^-ht living'. Its key-note was
"Efficieney thru health."
To a marked degi'ee Mrs. Richards had the gift of prophetic vision,
the clear ideal that precedes intelligent action. Recognizing that only
the child can be educated to acquire habits of right living so perfectly
that the suitable action takes place unconsciously, her first eiforts were
concentrated on developing courses of study correlated with science in-
struction in all grades of our school system. In a paper before the
National Education Association Council in 1908. her masterful plea
for the true place of Home Economics in the teaching w^orld as the
4th R, Right living, — to be incorporated in the education of the peo-
ple— ^not only brought recognition of its assured place but was fol-
lowed by her election for a term of six years to the N. E. A. Council,
the highest educational authority in the country.
History teaches that the art is developed long before the science in
any branch of applied knowdedge. Following this logical order, she
publisht in 1904 a small volume called "The Art of Right Living," in
which she considers briefly the factors that make up the efficient human
individual, showing that right living conditions demand pure food
and water, fresh air, sound sleep, safe exercise, cleanliness and sani-
tary conditions; while environment, shelter (the home) and the proper
adjustment of work, rest and amusement, give true zest and happiness
to life.
She had a forceful, original way of saying things which often gave
to others the stimulus for doing them. The mind is apt to grow callous
and give little heed to oft-repeated truisms. We know perfectly well
the importance and value of daily exercise in order to get rid of the
waste which results from all living processes, but we are much more
likely to take the brisk morning walk when reminded that "we must
shake out the ashes, as it were, from the human furnace, so that the
fuel may give energy. ' ' The fortunate guest in her Jamaica Plain
home, coming down to a 7.30 breakfast, was often surprised to find
that she and the Professor had already been out for a long walk or
bicycle ride thru the beautiful park ways of the Boston suburbs and
were full of enthusiasm in watching the daily progress of buds and
blossoms on plants and shrubs, and to learn that this Avas their daily
habit thruout the year, rain, snow or sunshine, before breakfast and
the day's work, either a brisk w^alk around Jamaica Pond, or a bicycle
ride, according to season. To them all Nature was an open book, re-
vealing wonderful secrets to those who understand her language.
There was great interest one spring in watching the frequent flights of
a male robin who was evidently caring for two nests. All day he car-
GENERAL INDIVIDUAI- HYGIENE 99
ried food to the hungry occupants in one tree and then the other ; but
one problem remained forever unsolved, was this busy bird a philan-
thropist or a bigamist?
In 1910 was publisht her book on Euthenics, the science of con-
trollable environment, a plea for better living conditions as a first
step toward higher human efficiency. In endeavoring to interpret the
spirit of her ideals, her \dsion for the future of this science, world old
in substance but new in its dedication to scientific research, her own
words are used as far as practicable.
The betterment of living conditions, thru conscious endeavor, for
the purpose of securing efficient human beings, is what euthenics
meant to her. Not thru chance but thru increase of scientific knowl-
edge; not thru compulsion but thru democratic idealism consciously
working thru common interests, will be brought about the creation of
right conditions, the control of environment.
Mrs. Richards had been greatly interested in Professor Fisher's
Report on National Vitality, publisht about this time and quoting from
him: "Human vitality depends upon two primary conditions — he-
redity and hygiene — or conditions preceding birth and conditions dur-
ing life," she added:
Eugenics deals with race improvement thru heredity.
Euthenics deals with race improvement thru environment.
Eugenics is hygiene for future generations.
Euthenics is hygiene for the present generation.
Eugenics must await careful investigation.
Euthenics has immediate opportunity.
Euthenics precedes eugenics, developing better men noiv, and thus
inevitably creating a better race of men in the future.
Euthenics is the preliminary science on which eugenics must be
based. This new science seeks to emphasize the immediate duty of
man to better his conditions by availing himself of knowledge already
at hand Avhich shall tend to increase health and happiness. He must
apply this knowledge under conditions which he can either create, con-
trol or modif3^ Euthenics is to be developed:
1. Thru sanitars^ science.
2. Thru education.
3. Thru relating science and education to life.
Students of sanitary science discover for us the laws which make
for health and the prevention of disease. The laboratory, studying
conditions and causes, can already show the way to many remedies.
Mrs. Richards strongly urged the education of all women in the
principles of sanitary science, as the key to race progress in the
twentieth century. Sanitary science, above all others, when applied,
100 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON IJACE HETTKliMENT
beiiofits the wholo people, raises the level of productive life. As long
ago as 1892 the president of the British iVIedical Association said:
"The whole future proj?ress of sanitary movement rests, for its perma-
nent and executive support, upon the women of our land."
It is barely fifty years since w^omen began to ask questions and in-
sist upon knowing, to claim freedom of movement, a chance to breathe.
Some pioneers had to enter the field of research, of investigation, in
order that they might call to those below that the way was open, and
in science Mrs. Richards was the pioneer. In this book she appeals to
the women of America with faith, hope and courage, to put their edu-
cation, their power of detailed w^ork, and any initiative they may
possess, at the service of the state, at the same time warning them that
much harm has been done by indiscreet, pushing women with only
a glinuner of knowledge who too often approach city councils with
some whim or fad, so that all women's demands are classed together.
The question is not WOMAN, but ability and women. She advises that
it is better, as a rule, to work out ideas thru existing organizations,
rather than create new ones. There must be cooperation between in-
dividual and community because the strength of combined endeavor is
required to meet all great problems. There is a real contagion of
ideas as well as of disease germs.
The dangers to modern life are no less than in pioneer days when
stockades were built as a defense against the Indians. Our enemies are
no longer savages and wild animals. To see our crudest foes today,
we must use the microscope. Men and women are apathetic over the
prevalence of disease, often because of their disbelief in the teachings
of science, coupled with a lingering superstition that, after all, it is
fate, not will power, which rules the destinies of mankind. In the
heedless rush of modern life, it is the indifference of the people them-
selves which is the greatest obstacle to progress. "Where wisdom means
effort and discomfort, many feel it folly to be wise.
The great struggle lies with matter in the wrong place — dust, gar-
bage, dirt (flies, mosquitoes) — and as population becomes denser,
with crime and the death rate. But man is aw^akening at last to the
fact that he is "the sickest beast alive," that he has himself to blame
and that it is "wathin his power to change his conditions speedily. What
has already been accomplished in Cuba, Panama, India, the Philip-
pines, and recently in lighting the "black death" in Manchuria, are
great lessons in the possibility of reform.
Laws interfering with personal liberty have always been deeply
resented by the American citizen. The protection of the man against
himself, and of his wife and child against his ignorance and greed, is
a comparatively new idea in republican democracy. The cry of pa-
GENERAL INDIVIDUAL HYGIENE. 101
temalism is raised on one hand, of socialism on the other. Each gain
has been at the cost of a hard-fought battle, but it is certain that the
individual must delegate more or less of his so-called rights for the
sake of the race, and since the only excuse for the existence of the
individual is the race, he must so far relinquish his authority. "It is
only the exceptional man, almost a genius, who learns to modify his
habits and his life to his environment and to triumph over his sur-
roundings, his appetites, and the absurd dictates of fashion."
Production of energy, force, power, is the main object of life and
nutrition easily ranks first of the primal forces of all living matter and
affects the others most pi'ofoundly. The richest food areas in the
world have provided the most powerful stocks of men of which we
have any record. All that we are, either as individuals or as a com-
plex society, is made possible by the food supply, but curiously, in
proportion as this is abundant and easily obtained, and as nations rise
in the scale of intelligence and comforts, the birth rate is lowered, not
increased.
All great nations, too, have lived in a temperate climate, where
physical and mental activity was possible for many hours a day. The
relation of both food and environment to man's efficiency is a vital
question. How far they are responsible for his character, his health
and understanding, what special elements are most potent and which
are the most readily controlled, are questions offering an interesting
field for research.
Probably more harm is done to health by ignoring physical law in
the matter of eating than in any other one thing. Public men are
dying, not from overwork but from their dinners. Habit, heedless-
ness, inertia, are all roots of the great disease, ignorance, and the
remedy is education, beginning with the child.
We hear much of educating the child for life, but little or nothing
of teaching him to live so that the life may be worth living. In our
zeal for the mind we have starved and dwarfed the body.
The home is responsible for the upbringing of healthy, intelligent
children and in the well-ordered home the child is the business of
the day. So long as affection lasts it will seek satisfactory expression
in home life, and love of home and of what the home stands for, con-
verts the drudgery of daily routine into a high order of social service.
The home table should be the school of good manners and of good food
habits of which the child ought not to be deprived, for right living
demands the right manner of serving and eating the food. At school
the child should become accustomed to the best conditions known to
science, he should imbibe with the 3 R's the fundamental principles of
right living. This is the time to inculcate facts and habits in regard
102 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
to foods, i-leanliiu'ss, dirt, iufection and porsonal methods in eating,
sleeping, exercising, while he is yet plastic and absorbs good methods
as readily as bad ones. This is economic, for then he does not have
to unlearn before he can adopt new ways.
There was never any artificial teaching devised so good for children
as the daily helping in the household tasks. Boys and girls, healthy,
industrious, frugal, capable, intelligent, self-supporting, cheerful and
patriotic, have abounded in country homes in the past and it has been
recognized that the prevalence there of these high qualities was largely
due to the family life, which re(iuired each individual from his earliest
years to bear his share in providing for the' maintenance of the home.
But the ideal American homestead, that place of busy industry, with
occupation for the dozen children, no longer exists. Gone out of it are
the industries, gone out of it are ten of the children, gone out of it in
large measure is that sense of moral and religious responsibility which
was the key-note of the whole. The child wdthout interest in work or
play does not develop ; the man with no stimulus walks thru life as in
a dream. The simplest tasks when well done give a glow of satisfac-
tion. Every child naturally tries to express his thoughts in making
things. Of course his attempts are crude but the necessity is there;
therefore this joy of doing should be cultivated in children.
The psychology of life includes a definite aim and purpose, there-
fore the task or daily work is a necessity for mental and physical
health. It must be accepted as a part of the science of right living and
the will and energy directed to doing it well. It is astonishing how in-
teresting a dull piece of work may become when intelligence is put into
it. A young man who went out to California as a '49-er was one day
digging away mechanically and listlessly, when an old experienced
miner near him said: ''Young man, you are wasting a heap of time
and strength." He show^ed him just how to dig, where to take and
where to put each shovelful of earth. At the end of the day the
youth was surprised to find that he had done twice as much and was
only half as tired.
The first step in civilizing a nation or tribe is to teach the people
to want things they never had or eared to have, to suggest things to
strive for. With savages it may not be the things that are good for
them for which they strive, too often the reverse, but it is the incentive
to work in order to have more that arouses ambition, stirs dormant
faculties, and makes a man or makes a nation out of a horde of in-
efficient people. All great men and women have had to struggle with
obstacles, to deny themselves in order to gain the goal of their ambitions.
A nature lover was watching the efforts of a butterfly to free itself
from the cocoon. A period of struggle was followed by a period of
GENERAL INDIVIDUAL HYGIENE 103
rest till only a few threads remained. The impatient watcher cut these
with scissors and the beautiful moth soared upward in the sunshine,
fluttering more and more feebly till at last it fell to the ground, un-
able to rise again. That last struggle was just what was needed to
develop the power of sustained flight.
If one lives for pleasure, one does not enjoy life in the degree
possible to one who lives for work and finds his pleasures unexpectedly,
as side lights on the pathway. Eighty per cent of so-called amusements
are not recreations. They exhaust more rapidly than they rest. Momen-
tary excitement is not recuperation, the re-making of nervous tissue.
The real pleasure in life comes from the consciousness of power to do
what the mind has willed, from seeing the work of one 's own hand and
brain prosper. Madame de Stael defined happiness as: "Constant
occupation upon some desirable object with a continued sense of
progress towards its attainment." This work of creation, of trans-
formation to desirable result, is the purest joy the human mind can
experience. Mrs. Richards thought that fourteen hours a day was not
too much for this kind of task.
Finding that many distractions were breaking in upon their work-
ing time and vitality and recognizing that work for the body and work
for the mind must be balanced, Mrs. Richards and her husband evolved
an acrostic, to be followed as a general rule, which they called the
FEAST OF LIFE
F Food — one-tenth the time.
E Exercise — one-tenth the time.
A Amusement — one-tenth the time.
S Sleep — three-tenths the time.
T Task- — four-tenths the time.
The delight in life is what we can do with it. The unrecognized
cause of the restless discontent so prevalent today is due to an inner
sense of inetfectiveness, a want of the feeling of conscious power over
things. The wage-earner is, for the most part, unsldlled. He cannot
do well the thing he undertakes ; he has power neither over his tools,
his materials, nor his muscles and the daily round becomes a deadly
monotony. There is a general feeling that the task is something to be
rid of. We have lost pride in our work and have transferred our
distaste for poor- work to work itself, to the great danger of our physi-
cal and moral health. The real psychology of work seems to be : that
which one subconsciously knows one is doing badly, is drudgery. One
who is accomplishing something, seeing it grow under his hands to
what it was in his thought, is never discontented. The feeling of
drudgery, the craving for something new, is strongest in those who are
not satisfied with their daily work.
104 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
It is a mistake to think that the fact of making- the ai'ticle for some-
one else and not for one 's self, is the cause of dissatisfaction. The time
pleasure of work is in the doing and not in the possession afterwards,
in most cases. The great evil of present industrial conditions is that
the conscious purpose is for so many limited to the week's wage, that
is, the end of effort is expressed in money, and the thought of the pur-
pose that money shall serve is too subconscious to be appreciated. In
some way the average wage-earner must be brought to see the end re-
sult; namely, a more comfortable, M'holesome, and energy-producing
life for him and his. If he strives for pleasure only, it will elude him.
No state can thrive while its citizens waste their resources of health,
bodily energy, time and brain power, any more than a nation may pros-
per that wastes its natural resources. If the scientifically trained
man is to lead the world to better things, he must secure a suitable en-
vironment, he must seek perfection of the body as a machine. But,
however far eugenics may carry the race towards perfection, unless
its sister science, euthenics, goes hand in hand, th6 race will again
deteriorate in the future as surely as it has in the past. Accepted to-
gether, as guiding principles in the evolution of life, man may build
for himself a temple worthy of an unconquerable soul.
7 HE RELATION OF PHYSICAL EDUCATION TO RACE BETTERMENT
[Abstract of Address]
D. A. Sargent, M.D., Director Hemenway Grymnasium, Harvai'd University,
Cambridge, Mass.
In considering a few of the causes which are generally conceded to
be potent factors in the declining birth rate in most civilized countries,
we soon come to the conclusion that the trouble is largely a conflict be-
tween individual instincts and abilities, and racial needs. This con-
flict may be variously expressed as poverty, or the inability of the
individual to make headway against the many ; selfishness, or the un-
willingness to assume the responsibility of giving and maintaining life ;
indifi'erence, preference for other occupations, or conscious abstinence
from marriage through the lack of physical fitness.
Some of th€ reasons which are brought forward in defense of a
marriage resulting in few children are unfortunately justifiable in
the light of our social and economic conditions. It rests with thinkers
and workers along these lines to solve this side of the problem thru
such movements as mothers' pensions and all such agencies which
center about child welfare.
GENERAL INDIVIDUAL HYGIENE 105
And it rests first with parents themselves, then with all teachers
and preachers, to so present and exemplify the ethical significance of
family life that youth will gravitate towards high and pure ideals of
sex union.
It is the province of this paper to consider those physical conditions
which have in the past produced and maintained superior races and to
try to point out the necessity of reconstructing an age of physical
idealism, so to speak, which shall help to reunite the inclinations of the
individual and the claims of the race.
The old biblical idea of perpetuating the families of the Patriarchs
by many ' ' begettings " must be justified in the light of heredity, the
superior races maintaining a high birth rate in spite of individual
preference for more ease and leisure. There was sometliing of this
stern idea of the duty of procreation which actuated our forefathers
in building up a new nation. There needs still to be a note of serious
concern for the physical vigor of our nation in the pleas against ' ' race
suicide. ' '
The present tendency of the superior races and individuals to
diminish in number is contrary to the accepted theory of the ' ' survival
of the fittest." as that law is worked out under natural conditions of
plant and animal life. Here it is the most perfect specimens of
tribe and race, the strongest and most adaptable, who become, as is
desirable, progenitors of the future race. But when applied to man,
those principles of the "survival of the fittest" through the struggle
for existence have been forced into the background because of man's
mental, social and sympathetic development.
It is especially this growth of the human sympathies that has
largely checked the action of the natural elimination of the weak, the
sickly, and the deformed ; and while there has accrued much benefit
to the finer emotions of the race, through exercising these qualities of
service and care, there have also arisen many present regrettable con-
ditions of physical unfitness, which it has become the task of our age
to eliminate.
And here again we confront the conflict between the individual and
the race, for there is undeniably a contradiction between the aims of
hygiene as applied to these two.
Hygiene, as applied to the individual, strives to conserve the life of
even the most wretched human being, but the hygiene of the race has
for its ultimate aim the elimination of those of weak constitution for
the improvement of people as a whole.
Now it is the province of the physical educator not only to in-
vigorate the individual for himself but through him to improve the
106 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
race. That is, physical edueation offers at least oue coustructive so-
lution of the problem of race betterment. Through our biological
studies, we know that there is in the human organism iself a competi-
tion and antagonism as well as a cooperation among the organs and
tissues, but that these organic forces can be so influenced and harmon-
ized by physical education as to produce a more highly perfected
structure. This is especially true of the interdependence between
motor or muscular exercise and efficient mental work.
It is also important to remember that the consciousness of physical
disability produces a reluctancy on the part of many women towards
child-bearing, while the knowledge of a large, well-developed pelvis
which permits the normal birth of healthy children increases assurance
and courage.
Statistics go to show that as the race advances, the head increases in
size, and unless the w^oman's body is perfectly developed to meet this
condition, it means her immolation and the deterioration of the race.
Long experience and careful observation have shown us that physi-
cal education, in its best' and broadest sense, is one of the most im-
portant factors in the betterment of the race. Through improving the
structure and function of various parts of the human organism, it
tends to make such functions natural and normal from the moral and
mental, as well as from the physical point of view. It so harmonizes
the nervous processes that super-sensitiveness is allayed by motor
activity and power and efficiency are developed through habits of
health.
Above all, through this individual improvement in the physical
condition of men and women there results a better race of children, so
that we may consider physical education an agent in our modem
sciences of euthenics and eugenics.
APPiLRENT INCREASE IN DEGENERATIVE DISEASES
Elmer E. Rittekhouse, Conservationist; President The Life Extension
Institute, Inc., New York, N. Y.
We have good reason to rejoice over the wonderful progress made
in recent years in the field of preventive medicine, in the spread of
knowledge of right living, and in human uplift generally.
The American people, however, cannot afford to rest upon these
splendid achievements nor to permit their confidence as to the future
to blind them to the urgency and magnitude of the task still before
GENERAL INDIVIDUAL HYGIENE 107
them. It is of the utmost importance that they give heed to the fact
that in spite of the marvelous advance of our race, there are certain
evidences of physical deterioration among our people which, if allowed
to continue unchecked, promise not only to retard further progress,
but possibly to turn backward the advance already made in this di-
rection.
We find in this Conference and in similar meetings of the serious
students of race betterment problems, the best of evidence of their
optimism as to the future, for they would not be apt to meet for
the discussion of these problems if they did not believe our civilization
competent to successfully combat them.
SIGNIFICANT SIGNS
The American nation has a declining birth rate. And at the same
time an increasing death rate in the later periods of life. Moreover,
the chronic diseases of old age are reaching dowTi into middle life and
below and are increasing in those groups.
Aside from all other evidences of degenerative influences, these
alone are surely of sufficient importance to command the thoughtful
consideration of the public.
That children born today have a far better chance of reaching the
age period 40-45 than had those of former generations is most gratify-
ing. But this gain should not be permitted to obscure the fact that the
chances of early death after that age period have materially increased
in recent years — apparently because of the heavy increase in mortality
from the so-called degenerative diseases of the heart, arteries, kidneys
and other organs.
IGNORING A PLAIN DUTY
It is claimed, and it may be true, that these adverse tendencies
are of a temporary character, that they will disappear as soon as we
have had time to adjust our lives to modem conditions. But even
those who adhere to this theory must concede that considerations of
common humanity demand that we do our utmost through educational
and other means to bring about the readjustment at the earliest
possible moment.
This being our duty, why should we longer ignore the need of a
definite program and a vigorous campaign to reduce the excessive mor-
bidity and mortality from these chronic afBictions of middle life and
old age which are to so large an extent preventable or postponable !
The death rate from diseases of the kidneys, liver, heart and cir-
culatory system, as indicated by our most dependable statistics, has
108 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
nearly doubled during the past three deeack's. Surely the signihcance
of this trend should not be overlooked in considering the future of our
race.
A life lost from a disease of the kidneys is just as valuable to the
family and to the state as a life lost from a disease of the lungs, or
from typhoid fever or accident. Should we not do something to in-
duce our people to appreciate and act upon this self-evident fact ?
THE UNGUARDED CROSSING
Let us consider for a moment the example of the railway crossing.
At our most dangerous railway crossings we put up warning signs :
we erect gates and place on guard a man in a tower to save the
thoughtless from their own negligence.
At the crossing where run such destroyers of human life as typhoid
fever, tuberculosis, diphtheria and other communicable diseases, we
also have danger signals and a guard in a watch tower — the health
otSjcer and the conservationist — to protect the way-passer by educa-
tional methods, and in some instances by force, against the needless
destruction of his life. The result is that the life waste at this crossing
has been steadily reduced.
Here we have another dangerous crossing w^here hundreds of thou-
sands of lives are destroyed annually by the degenerative diseases.
But we have no warning signs here, no watch tower, no guard to pro-
tect the ignorant or negligent passer-by. And here the life waste has
steadily increased.
WAITING UNTIL IT HAPPENS
Science has provided the knowledge wherewith to save a very large
percentage of the victims of this crossing, but we fail to use it. Society
seems concerned in these people only after they are maimed or killed.
Doctors and ambulances are at hand, with hospitals hard by to care for
the injured, and there are hearses in abundance and acres of grave-
yards provided for the dead.
"WTiat effort, for instance, does Philadelphia make to guard the
7.300 lives that are lost annually in that city from these diseases, or
Boston for its 3,000 or Detroit for its 1,300?
Is there any sound reason why our communities should not have a
watch tower of education to inform these people of their danger and to
teach them how to detect their approach to this deadly crossing, that
they may at least have a fighting chance to avoid it?
DISREGARDING STATISTICS
We sometimes hear the belief expressed — usually by those who
have not given very deep study to the statistics — that the increase
GENERAL INDIVIDUAL HYGIENE
109
in the mortality rate from the degenerative diseases, and in the death
rate at the ages where these afflictions are most prevalent, has been
more apparent than real. And the interest of many of those who ad-
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mit the increase, has been diverted from this subject by the assump-
tion that the increase, whatever it may have been, was natural and
to be expected.
AN ERRONEOUS THEORY
Their theory is that the increase in the death rate above age 40
is due to the saving of lives in the younger ages chiefly from cum-
municable disease ; that these lives passing into the older periods have
given us not only more old people to die than we formerly had, but an
increased proportion of weakened lives.
At first glance this is perhaps a natural conclusion, but the records
show that there has been little or no increase in the proportion of the
number surviving to the later years of life. Even if there were such an
increase, it would merely lead to a correspondingly increased number
of deaths at the later ages, and not to an increase in the death rate
at these ages, which is the ratio between the number dying and the
number living.
The saving of infant and early adult lives which have been at-
tacked by the communicable diseases has been so recent that but a
small proportion of them have passed into the older age periods. And
it must also be remembered that they were not all left impaired;
that the same influences that have reduced the death rate in the
younger ages have saved a large number of strong people from attack
by the same diseases, and also strengthened the vitality of man,y peo-
ple, both fit and unfit, thus permitting an increase of healthful, un-
impaired lives also to pass over the older age periods.
THE INCREASING DEATH RATE.
During the past 33 years the mortality rate in England and Wales
from diseases of the kidneys, heart, arteries, includiiig apoplexy, shows
110
FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
but a slight increase — from 272 to 273 per 100,000 population, al-
though the Registrar-General's report shows that the mortality rate
from these diseases is slightly increasing above age 65.
1890 I900 1912
110—
IOO_
90._
Increase
DEATH RATE
8
I03i^
_IIO
_IOO
_90
80_
_80
70_
Diseases of
_70
60_
QO^^^^^
THE KIDNEYS
_60
SO
(REG. AREA)
50
The death rate from the same diseases in ten American registration
states of 1900 and in the same states in 1910 shows an increase from
308 to 365, or 19 per cent.
In Massachusetts the increase from these diseases has been %^ per
cent since 1880. In New Jersey in the classification of organic heart,
apoplexy and kidneys the increase has been 108 per cent, and in 16
American cities 04 per cent during the same period. These increases
are reflected in the steady advance of the general death rate above
age 40 in the same groups.
We may make all necessary allowances for the incompleteness and
inaccuracy of our vital statistics, and yet it will be noted that wher-
ever the most reliable comparisons can be had, a steady and abnormal
upward trend is found in the death rate from these maladies.
But assuming for the sake of argument that there has been no
increase, is there any sound reason why we should ignore the present
loss of 400,000 lives annually from these preventable or deferable
causes, and devote all of our time, energy and money to checking com-
municable disease?
THE REMEDY
Time will not permit speculation in this paper as to the causes of
this high mortality. In the broad sense, we know that the remedy lies
in educating our people to adopt more healthful living habits that their
power of resistance to the chronic diseases may be raised and the at-
tacks prevented or postponed to the older age periods.
GENERAL INDIVIDUAL HYGIENE 111
We also know that the teaching of right living is one of the
primary purposes of the nation-wide health movement now in prog-
ress; but we have no direct, no specific campaign to check the life
waste from these non-communicable maladies. This task is a large one,
but it must be undertaken and it must go on permanently if our
standard of national vitality is to be raised.
HEALTH EXAMINATIONS
In the meantime, while this work in the field of prophylaxis is going
on, an enormous number of lives are being needlessly destroyed be-
cause of failure to detect these preventable or postponable chronic dis-
eases in their incipieney when they may be checked or cured.
Is it not worth while, therefore, that we should also make an espe-
cial efi'ort to teach our people the wisdom and the urgent need of
going to their doctors for periodical health examinations for the pur-
pose of heading off these and other affections?
THE RATIO AMONG POLICY-HOLDERS
"When we consider that the deaths from the chronic diseases are
estimated to be from 60 to 70 per cent preventable or postponable, and
that the bulk of life insurance policy-holders are in the age groups
where this mortality occurs, it is not surprising that the life insurance
companies are becoming interested in this subject.
The record for all the companies is not available, but out of 8,211
deaths in the past three years in one of the older institutions, 3,426,
or 42 per cent, were caused by these diseases.
If, by adopting right living habits and by having periodical health
examinations to give the physicians a chance to detect and arrest or
cure these troubles, 60 per cent of these deaths could have been post-
poned on an average of but one month each, there would have been
a saving of 170 years of life.
If the deaths from cancer, which are largely preventable if the dis-
ease is discovered and treated in its early stages, be added to the above.
204 years of life would have been saved.
UNA W^ ARE OF THEIR DANGER
During the same period the same company rejected 20,336 applica-
tions for insurance. Of these 8,782, or 43 per cent, were declined for
physical impairments indicating these same diseases.
It is entirely safe to assume that 90 per cent, or 7,900 of these peo-
ple were not aware of the impairments and of their danger, and that
a vast majority of them could have been cured or serious results post-
112 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
poned for years by placing themselves under the guidance of their
family physicians. As a matter of fact, many of them adopted this
course and were later able to secure their insurance.
From this may be gathered at least a faint idea of the enormous
number of people in our population who think they are well but
who are nevertheless developing these insidious chronic diseases, and
whose lives could be saved or greatly prolonged by adopting the sane
and simple practice of having periodical health examinations.
This very day throughout the civilized world thousands of doctors
are pronouncing the sad sentence, "No hope. Too late. If I had
known of your affliction before it became so deeply seated I could have
prolonged your life. ' ' And this has been going on since the dawn of
medicine.
TO GET DEFINITE RESULTS
Surely human intelligence has now reached a level where we may
be justified in believing that a campaign to bring our people into
closer relations with the medical profession for the purpose of pre-
venting or at least arresting sickness will accomplish definite results.
It has been my good fortune to have had the opportunity to preach
the need of adopting this very simple and sensible practice to a large
constituency since I inaugurated the plan of giving policy-holders free
medical examinations four years ago in a company of which I was
then president.
It has been impossible to gather statistics showing the results of
these efforts, but I am confident that many people have been thus in-
duced to join the constantly increasing number who have adopted the
practice of having occasional health inspections. The group of lives
actually taking these examinations shows a mortality far below the
expected, as has been demonstrated by Dr. E. L. Fisk.
A PRACTICAL SUGGESTION
To urge upon our people the wisdom of this course and of using
the knowledge and skill of the physicians to prevent sickness and un-
timely death, rather than to continue the deadly habit of waiting until
the case is hopeless before sending for them, is to my notion a thor-
oughly practical suggestion.
Here is a neglected but fruitful field. The need of having these
inspections should be firmly fixed in the minds of our school children
and of our people generally. Every individual and journal interested
in improving the vitality of our race, and every health department
should adopt the policy of constantly urging this inexpensive pre-
ventive measure. It can be done almost in a sentence. And such
GENERAL INDIVIDUAL HYGIENE 113
action would in no way conflict with the purposes of those engaged in
any field of effort for the promotion of health and longevity.
It would take but little encouragement from those who are leading
in the campaign for race betterment to set in motion a sentiment that
would soon establish health inspections as a common practice among
our people.
I believe this will ultimately come about and that a vast amount
of sickness, with its train of destitution, moral delinquency, premature
death, and economic waste, will be prevented.
Discussion.
Race Degeneration
Professor Maynard M. IVIetcalf
Just two points : In view of the horrors of race degeneration held
up to our view, I wish to suggest one slight gleam of comfort. Few
of the individuals living today will have any descendants living one
thousand years from now, A thousand years is but a moment to the
evolutionist or the eugenist, of course. Their character and condition
is, therefore, of less moment in the question of the permanent future
of the race. The implications of this fact are not so simple and ob-
vious as they may seem at first sight, but they are worth thinking over.
The conserving of those destined to persist if possible, would be the
real key to the situation.
SOME SUGGESTIONS FOE A MORE RATIONAL SOLUTION OF THE
TUBERCULOSIS PROBLEM IN THE UNITED STATES
S. Adolphus Kkopp, M.D., Professor of Medicine, Department of Phthisio-
therapy, at the New York Post-Graduate Medical School and Hospital,
New York, N. Y.
The medical aspect of tuberculosis as a disease of the masses is so
closely interwoven with the social aspect that it demands a special
consideration for every country. In the United States the problem is
quite unique and its solution unusually difficult, by reason of the
vastness of its territory, the heterogeneous population, the large and
constantly increasing immigration from all parts of the globe, the
large colored population, the increase in birth rate among the poor and
socially handicapped, and the decrease among the well-to-do and those
physically, mentally, and morally better equipped; its manifold in-
dustries, the greatly diversified housing conditions of the masses, and
114 FIKST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
— last but not least — the dift'ereiu'c in Uic saiiilary laws of tlie various
states and the absence of a Federal Department of Health.
The subject, as you must see at a glance, is so vast that it would
be folly to attempt to treat it in the short space of time allotted to me,
or even in a single paper. All I can do, as the title of my paper in-
dicates, is merely to offer soiiie suggestions tending toward a more
rational solution of the more important phases of the tuberculosis
problem, and thus work for the object of this national conference,
i. €., race betterment.
At the bottom of the great ravages due to tuberculosis lie the pre-
disposing factors, and it is in regard to these that we must begin to
act more rationally than we have ever done before, if we wish to make
any impression at all on our morbidity and mortality statistics.
A body of scientific men and women, like those I have the honor to
address at this moment, are aware that it would be inaccurate to deny
the possibility of direct maternal transmission of the tubercle bacillus,
but the occurrence is relatively rare and uncertain. What we do know
is that nearly every child born of tuberculous parents, father or
mother, but particularly if it is the mother, brings to this world as a
hereditary gift a physiological poverty which predisposes the child
very strongly to tuberculosis and other infectious diseases. The
reason why such a child becomes very frequently tuberculous can be
explained by the many opportunities for post-natal infection from
the tuberculous parents, particularly in infancy and early childhood.
To withhold the marriage certificate from the acutely tuberculous
individual is an excellent measure and of incalculable educational
value, but alas does not prevent a tuberculous procreation. I know
I may be called revolutionary, but I state right at the beginning of my
address that every tuberculous adult, male or female, married or at a
marriageable age, should be impressed with the fact that it is well-nigh
a criminal offense to bring children into the world before they them-
selves have been cured of the disease. I have said before, and I
am willing to say again, that I for one am willing to take the responsi-
bility before my God and any court of justice for every time that I
have prevented tuberculous parents from bringing children into the
world. I believe the most widespread education in this regard cannot
be otherwise than productive of great good to a very large number of
people.
By this widespread education I mean the instruction of the legis-
lature, of physicians, and the people at large. I would plead with the
legislatures to legalize the operation of vasectomy on any tuberculous
male patient who is willing to undergo this operation. I would make
the operation obligatory for any one who is actuallv tuberculous and
GENERAL, INDIVIDUAL HYGIENE 115
who insists upon marrying. I would advise the ligation of the Fallo-
pian tubes for all female patients in the same situation, or similarly
afflicted. If an acutely ill tuberculous individual procreates wilfully
in spite of the physician's warning, I would advise also in this in-
stance that sterilization be required by law. I would teach even
slightly affected tuberculous parents or married people, not only all
the details of prophylaxis, so that they may not infect each other, their
children, or others, but I should make it a sacred duty to teach them
also how not to procreate while either one of them is acutely afflicted
with the disease. To this end I should go so far as to urge parents,
even when they feel themselves apparently well and strong and re-
covered from a tuberculous lesion, not to decide on having a child
without both of them submitting themselves to a careful physical ex-
amination. Only when shown to be in really good health by a careful
examination by a competent practitioner should they feel that they
have a right to procreate a race.
Tuberculous parents not willing to listen to or heed this warning
should be told of the great danger that exists of a tuberculous mother
losing all possible chances of recovery, because pregnancy is sure to
make her tuberculous condition many times worse, and that a child
of a tuberculous issue very rarely survives any length of time. The
majority of such children die in infancy, but usually not before they
have caused the parents a great deal of sorrow, anxiety, and financial
sacrifice.
It is very difficult to get accurate statistics of the morbidity and
mortality of tuberculosis in the pre-school age, but we can get some
idea of it by referring to the prevalence of tuberculosis in school chil-
dren. Estimating the proportion of tuberculosis among the 20,000,000
children attending our public schools, as low as only 3 per cent would
make 600,000 children who are at this time acutely afflicted with tuber-
culosis in one form or another.
The next factor which in my humble opinion is responsible for the
acquisition of a strong predisposition to tuberculosis in many children
is our system of education. Splendid as it is in many respects, in
numerous instances it lacks elements which should tend to make our
children mentally, physically, and morally strong. I treated this sub-
ject quite at length in my last year's address before the International
Congress on School Hygiene in Buffalo,* and so I will only mention a
few of my conclusions here : Our school buildings should be ideal as
far as construction, sanitation, and particularly ventilation are con-
* "The Physical, Mental and Moral Vigor of Our School Children." New
ork Medical Journal, Dec. 6th and 13th, 1913.
116 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
cerned. The more open air schools we eun have, the more outdoor
instruction in kindergartens, public schools, and in colleges, fhe
greater will be the physical vigor and strength of the pupils. Incul-
cate the love for open air life into the child at school and it will be-
come a fresh air apostle at home. The school curriculum should be so
arranged that the mental strain should not react unfavorably on the
physical and moral constitution of the child, and last but not least, if
we wish to prevent tuberculosis in children the open air school, or at
least the open air class room, must become the rule, the indoor school
or indoor classroom the exception.
The next predisposing factor which we have to consider as re-
sponsible for tuberculosis, particularly in the adolescent, is child labor.
There is, I believe, no diversity of opinion among physicians, sanita-
rians, sociologists, and philanthropists about child labor being one of
the greatest curses which can befall a nation. It stunts not only the
physical growth of the future generation but also the mental and soul
development of the child. Personally I hold child labor (not useful,
helpful, and wholesome child occupation, but labor) such as is car-
ried on today in factories, workshops, canneries, fields, mines, and alas
also in not a few instances at home, responsible for the so frequent
development of tuberculosis in our young men and women.
The mortality from tuberculosis is greatest between the ages of
18 and 35, and in many instances the weakened constitution of the
adolescent can not resist the very prevalent sources of tuberculous in-
fection in factory and workshop, and the result is the invasion of the
tubercle bacillus. The most rigorous anti-child labor laws most strictly
enforced will be one of the most rational means to help us in the
solution of the tuberculosis problem in this country.
What is the next most important factor predisposing to tuber-
culosis after the hereditary tendency, the unsanitary school life, and
child labor? It is bad housing conditions, and by this I mean not
only unsanitary tenements where the masses live and sleep, but also
unsanitary conditions in factories, shops, offices, and stores, where the
masses work.
The manner in which many of the well-to-do families house their
servants in large cities is, I believe, often responsible for the frequency
of tuberculosis among this class of workers, and in passing let me say
that the predisposing factors of tuberculosis lurk in many of the homes
of the well-to-do because the houses in which they live are not con-
structed with a view to giving the maximum amount of air and light
to the individual by day and by night.
In my own city of Greater New York we have still thousands of
dark bedrooms where direct light and air never enter, and everv tuber-
GENERAL INDIVIDUAL HYGIENE 117
culosis worker will tell you that it is in houses where the sleeping
quarters are the worst that tuberculosis is uppermost. Good tenement
house laws when well enforced have done a great deal in New York and
other cities, but not by any means enough. A much more rational con-
ception of house construction so as to give opportunities to the masses
to rent a well-lighted and well-aired home and a space of the roof
garden which should exist on top of every tenement house, will be
necessary if we wish to combat the predisposition to tuberculosis which
comes from congestion and bad, unsanitary housing.
It has always been a mystery to me why the thousands of acres
of roofs of tenement houses, apartment houses, and public buildings
are not utilized for the purpose of giving the inhabitants of such
houses more outdoor life during the day, and where feasible, even
sleeping accommodations at night. Those of us who have made tuber-
culosis a study know what an important preventive factor outdoor
sleeping is, and it has been sufficiently demonstrated that with proper
precautions this can be done in all climes and all kinds of weather.
Our federal an d* municipal authorities should set an example by the
utilization of the roofs at their disposal for places where the workers in
the offices may spend their time allowed them for rest or recreation
between the hours of labor.
Not only wise state and city legislation but philanthropy also must
come to the rescue by building houses for the masses such as will de-
serve the name of human habitations, giving the occupants an abun-
dance of light, air, and sunshine.
Before I speak of factories and workshops for the adult, let me
return once more to the children and remind you here that our orphan
asylums and often even our private boarding schools need the greatest
and most careful supervision to assure sanitary sleeping and living
quarters to the inmates.
We next come to the cheap hotels and lodging houses. Only those
who have made a study of the cheap lodging houses in large cities can
possibly have an idea of what a fruitful source these so-called habita-
tions are for acquiring tuberculosis, and when not the disease itself,
surely a very strong predisposition thereto. Those who desire more
complete information on this subject I would like to refer to a paper
recently read by Mr. Chas. B. Barnes, of the Russell Sage Foundation,
before our Tuberculosis Clinics Association, entitled "Tuberculosis
among Homeless Men."*
We should do away with the cheap lodging houses and cheap
hotels by substituting for them a gradual development of sanitarily
constructed municipal hotels and lodging houses. Our Mills hotels in
* Journal of the Outdoor Life, April, 1914.
118 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
New York City give au example of how practical pliilanthropy can
also aid in the solution of this problem. In the meantime the owners
of the cheap lodging houses should be forced to make these houses
sanitarily safe, and any individual who is discovered coughing and
expectorating should not be admitted or readmitted as a guest, but
should be referred to a tuberculosis dispensary or hospital for diag-
nosis, proper care, and treatment.
The proper ventilating and lighting and the necessity of excluding
the actively ill tuberculous patient who constitutes a menace to his
fellow-men and to himself by remaining in the overcrowded factory,
workshop, store, or office have been so often discussed that I hardly
think they need reiterating. All I would wish to say is that a little
propaganda for better ventilation, ample wash and toilet facilities in
every place where the masses work, would perhaps be more effective
when coming from within than coming from without. The workers
should claim their just right concerning this and the employer should
realize that efficiency is increased by better air, more light, more
cleanliness, and sufficient rest and recreation. An examination for tu-
berculosis prior to admitting an individual into a workroom or faetoi'y
where he comes in close contact with others would seem to be the
best safeguard to others and perhaps the surest way to prevent the
individual himself from becoming seriously ill. It would be well if our
municipal and federal governments would take the lead in this matter
and ha;ve every municipal employee and every employee in post-
offices or other federal departments examined for tuberculosis. The
offices where these men and women work should be models of sanitation
and proper ventilation so that the dangers of contracting a predispo-
sition to tuberculosis should be reduced to a minimum.
Bad housing, overcrowding, and congestion, which ■ predispose to
tuberculosis and facilitate the spread of the disease if a center of in-
fection is present, while most frequent in congested cities, are, however,
not confined to the city alone. Although our farmers and people liv-
ing in the country and in small towns and villages usually have an
abundance of good air outside their habitations, they very rarely make
good use of it. The sleeping quarters in many farmers' families are as
bad as those in large cities, and to see the windows nailed dovm and
the shutters fast closed is not an unusual sight in many a farmer's
house. The best room is used for parlor and the worst for sitting and
bedrooms.
In speaking of rural hygiene, I must return once more to the chil-
dren and make a plea for better and more sanitary school houses in our
country districts. In some sections of the country, almost any old
bam or dilapidated building is considered good enough for a school
GENERAL INDIVIDUAL HYGIENE 119
house. Some pretty energetic propaganda for reform is needed in
these districts. Rural hygiene is as essential as city hygiene if we
wish to combat tuberculosis with any degree of success.
Millions of people in this country spend hours and even days in
travel; hence the sanitary condition of our public conveyances, rail-
roads, street cars, steamers, river boats, and ferries must be considered
when we speak of the housing conditions of the masses. I have dwelt
at length on this subject in a contribution on "The Hygiene of Public
Conveyances, ' '* which I read at the New York Academy of Medicine
at the request of the Public Health Educational Committee a few
years ago, so I will give it only a mention here. Anti-spitting ordi-
nances with the request to hold the hand before one's mouth when
coughing, the avoidance of overcrowding, proper ventilation and with-
out overheating, a frequent disinfection of all street-, railroad-, and
Pullman cars, cabins, steamboats, etc., are the only way to minimize
the dangers from tuberculosis and other infectious diseases of the
i-espiratory organs for the traveling public.
Our colored population and the districts where many Chinese and
Japanese live must receive special consideration under the subject of
housing. It is well known that our colored population is much more
prone to contract tuberculosis and that the morbidity and mortality is
much greater than it was before their liberation from slavery. Edu-
cation and hygiene is essential for the colored masses and perhaps more
so than for our white population. The housing conditions of the
colored people are as a rule a great deal worse than those of the whites
with similar earning capacity.
I do not think that the colored race is really more predisposed to
tuberculosis from any other reason than their mode of living. As a
rule they sleep in overcrowded quarters ; their home hygiene is deplor-
able, their love for pleasure and recreation makes them irregular in
their meals and hours of sleep, and last but not least, very often hav-
ing no thought of tomorrow, they live in abject poverty. Education
by lectures, distribution of literature, and tuberculosis exhibitions in the
districts of colored people will doubtlessly do a great deal of good, but
social service, personal visits by volunteer or paid workers in behalf of
the anti-tuberculosis cause mil alone be able to make much impression
on the fearful prevalence of tuberculosis among the colored race.
In view of the existing race prejudice or antipathy it would be
better for colored people to unite and by cooperation with philan-
thropically inclined people of their own and the white race to build
sanitary tenement houses in segregated districts, than to try to crowd
* Medical Itecord, New York, March 18, 1911.
120 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
iuto tlie already over congested districts inhabited by the poorer
chisses of the white population.
Much could be said here of the deplorable condition in which our
Asiatic friends, the Chinese and Japanese, live, as for example on the
Pacific Coast. I have visited the lodging houses of nearly all nations
but never have I seen the equal in regard to congestion and unclean-
liness to the so-called Japanese boarding houses and Chinese dens.
This becomes a matter for the serious consideration of the local sani-
tary authorities when one considers the frequency of tuberculosis
among the Chinese and Japanese and how many of them act as
servants in the households of American families.
Our American Indians, particularly those living on reservations,
are becoming more and more frequently subject to tuberculosis. This
alarming prevalence of tuberculosis among the unfortunate Indians
has resulted in the appointment of a federal commission, composed of
Senator Robinson, of Arkansas, Senator Charles E. Townsend, Rep-
resentatives J. H. Stephens, of Mississippi, and Charles H. Burke, of
South Dakota, which has recently completed an investigation. I
quote from this report :
''For the fiscal year ending June 30th, 1912, out of 190,791 In-
dians reported on, approximately 26,500 were estimated to have tuber-
culosis. Thirty-two per cent of the whole number of deaths reported
from the various reservations was alleged to be due to tuberculosis.
A comparison of the death rate between Indians and whites from
tuberculosis discloses that thirty-two per cent of the whole number of
deaths reported from the various reservations was due to tubercu-
losis. ' '
The explanation for this fearful situation is to be found in the
habits and manners of living of these "civilized" Indians as com-
pared with their inode of life prior to their being placed on the
reservations. Thus, very .justly, the report states: "Formerly the
Indians lived in tepees, engaged in out-of-door sports and earned their
living by fishing, hunting, and trading. Contact with the white man
has worked a radical change in them. They have been collected on
reservations, their hunting grounds converted into farms and pastures,
and every energy exhausted to change a naturally nomadic race into
an agricultural people. The substitution of insanitary houses for
tepees has resulted in the adoption of habits of living peculiarly con-
ducive to the spread of tuberculosis. In many Indians' homes sani-
tary' conditions are frightful.
"A comprehensive remedy can be afforded by the establishment of
camp hospitals," says the report, "in the nature of temporary sana-
toria for the treatment of tuberculous Indians on the reservations
GENERAL INDIVIDUAL HYGIENE 121
where the disease is knoM^n to be common. These hospitals should be
temporary and inexpensive and provided with necessary apparatus
and experienced nurses and physicians."
The report recommends a vigorous campaign throughout the In-
dian country of systematic instruction in sanitary habits and methods
of living looking toward the making and enforcement of reasonable
sanitary regulations.
I have only a few suggestions to add to those of the Commission,
namely, first, that whenever possible a doctor of their own race (not
a "medicine man"), educated and licensed as a regular physician,
should be put in charge of anti-tuberculosis work among the Indians,
or at least be an assistant to the government physician. Thus, early
diagnosis and timely treatment in those afflicted would be secured. As
the best possible prophylactic measure I would recommend outdoor
sleeping with the aid of cheaply constructed lean-tos of the King-
Loomis type. To all this should of course be added proper nutrition
and the prohibition of the sale of alcohol on reservations or anywhere
else to our Indian fellow-citizens. It goes without saying that the
schools for the Indian children should be open-air schools, that clean-
liness and the elementaries of general hygiene with the view to pre-
venting tuberculosis and other infectious preventable diseases should
be taught to all children according to their age and understanding.
The mortality of tuberculosis in prisons and reformatories is
about three times as high as that of the population outside of our
penal or reform institutions. What are the factors responsible for
this condition? First of all, I believe that many a young man or
Woman who is convicted of crime comes to the prison with a strong
predisposition if not already in a stage of incipient tuberculosis.
They have been raised in an atmosphere of darkness with bad personal
or general hygiene, underfeeding and unsanitary housing, not in-
frequently combined with intemperance and other evil, demoralizing
influences. When such an individual enters a prison of the kind
Avhich is alas now in the majority, a five-year sentence or more is
equivalent to a death sentence. I hardly need to say that society
has no right to punish as severely as that.
Segregation of the tuberculous prisoners from the non-tuberculous
should be established and outdoor or at least healthful indoor occupa-
tion provided under proper sanitary conditions. If cell life must be
led, let it be in cells well aired and properly heated in winter, with the
removal as far as possible of all the depressing psychical influences,
which are so helpful in the development of tuberculosis.
This is not a paper on prison reform and still if we wish to eradi-
cate tuberculosis our prison system must be reformed. In view of the
122 FIKST NATIONAL CONFERKNCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
possibilities of training and supervision in a prison, the tuberculosis
death rate should be loss there than anywhere else. I treated this par-
ticular phase of the tuberculosis situation in full in an address before
the National Prison Association some years ago.* My conclusions
today are the same as then. To discharge a tuberculous prisoner with-
out his being cured or without being assured that he will not consti-
tute a center of infection in his family or among his friends or fellow-
workers is criminal and the pardon of a tuberculous prisoner without
the assurance of his being well taken care of under sanitary condi-
tions is equally criminal. The tuberculous prisoner should be treated
like any other tuberculous patient, and the more outdoor, that is to
say agricultural or horticultural, work that all prisoners can do under
proper supervision, the fewer will develop tuberculosis, and the greater
will be the number of those restored to happy and useful membership
in society.
There is one more source of predisposition which I believe has
been greatly underestimated. I refer to the susceptibility to tuber-
culosis which arises so frequently in patients, and particularly in
poor patients when discharged from a general hospital. Although
cured from the acute non-tuberculous disease or affliction for which
they have had to submit to a surgical operation, their general constitu-
tion is, as a rule, so much below par and their vitality so lowered at
the time when they are obliged to leave the general hospital in order
to make room for new acute cases, that the unfortunate convalescents
not infrequently fall a prey to the multiple sources of infection which
they encounter in their daily lives. To have a sufficient number of
convalescent homes where the patients discharged from general hos-
pitals, including also the mothers discharged from the maternity
hospitals, can remain long enough for their physiological vigor and
earning capacity to be re-established, is the only way to overcome this
source of predisposition to tubercul'osis.
We will next consider the predisposition caused by malnutrition
during infancy, childhood, adolescence, and in adult life. I am not
going to enter here into the subject of the high cost of living, for that
is a matter for statesmen to regulate. All I wish to say is that person-
ally I do not believe there is any necessity for the cost of living being
so high, because we should not have a multitude of men who must
idle away their years in military service at a cost of billions of dollars
to the producers while they themselves produce nothing.
To return to my calling of a physician, I claim that underfeeding
* "The Tuberculosis Problem in Prisons and Reformatories," New York
Medical Journal, Nov. 17, 1906.
GENERAL INDIVIDUAL HYGIENE 123
of infants is due to three sources. First of all, there are not enough
true mothers, that is to say mothers willing to give their own breasts
to the child for its principal source of food during early life. It is
well known that if a mother is so unfortunate as not to have enough
milk for the child, partial breast feeding is better than no breast feed-
ing at all. Again, it has been shown that the disuse of the mammary
glands has a tendency to manifest itself in the inability to nurse when
the female offspring becomes in turn a mother; and the reverse is
equally true — the baby girl raised on mother milk, or even only par-
tially breast-fed will be able to nurse her child in turn. The breast-fed
baby will nearly always be stronger and better able to resist the in-
vasion of tuberculosis than the artificially fed baby.
The next cause of malnutrition in infancy and early childhood is
ignorance. Llany mothers do not know how to feed the child and
it is not always poverty or the lack of sufficient food, but the igno-
rance of how to feed the child properly which results in malnutrition.
Education, best accomplished by the personal visits of competent
nurses under the direction of a bureau of child hygiene, which should
be a part of every modern health board, will alone combat this fruitful
source of malnutrition. With the underfed child at school the cause
may in some instances be due to ignorance, but here in most cases it
is poverty that we find as the real cause. When the predisposition
to tuberculosis caused by the physical reasons of malnutrition and
lack of development, due to bad teeth, adenoids, large tonsils, and
nasal obstruction, is removed, we still find some of these children
not improving because they are underfed.
I am willing to say that I am a strong advocate of school lunches,
and this by reason of a careful investigation carried on in New York
where over 15 per cent of children attending the public schools were
found to be suffering from malnutrition. In 10 per cent of cases in-
vestigated the mother was a wage-earner and not at home to prepare
the noon meal, and of children taking school lunches last year 75 per
cent were from families having incomes below the living v/age. The
children are given for the small amount of three cents, rice and tomato
soup and bread, or pea soup and bread, or lentils and rice and bread, or
for one more cent the child may buy either cocoa, sandAviches or cooked
fruit. And what was the result? It was found that the children tak-
ing the lunches had gained in weight three times as much as those not
taking them and an immediate marked improvement in school work
resulted in those who were formerly underfed. Here is a work for
the municipalities and philanthropists who wish to help in the eradi-
cation of this source of strong predisposition to tuberculosis.
The malnutrition in the adults, or may I ,use the expression, the
124 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
underfeeding of the masses due to increased cost of living which, as
already stated, is a matter for governments and statesmen, can never-
theless be ameliorated even before disarmament and regulating supply
and demand of labor and the legislative control of prices of agri-
cultural products, i. e., the prevention of trusts in foodstuffs.
A great step in advance can, I believe, be made and the condition
of the masses considerably bettered, first, by a more widespread educa-
tion of the principles of scientific and economic housekeeping and
cooking. There is a great deal of valuable foodstuffs wasted in the
houses of the poor by mere ignorance. Cooking should become a
popular science, and the mimicipality or the philanthropist who will
establish a cooking school where practical, economic, yet tasteful cook-
ing will be taught, will bestow one of the greatest benefits on humanity.
An equally interesting and beneficent institution for municipali-
ties or philanthropists to establish in view of combating the effects of
underfeeding or bad feeding, which paves the way to tuberculosis,
is what is knowni in Germany under the name of Volkskilchen, "a
people's kitchen," where good and substantial food is prepared and
sold at cost to the masses. I have tasted meals thus prepared and
can vouch for their wholesomeness, tastefulness, nutritious quality,
and last, but not least, their cheapness. A few of such kitchens in
every one of our large cities will be of incalculable benefit to the
physical and moral well-being of the masses.
Alcoholism, that is to say, the excessive and injudicious use of
alcoholic beverages, is to my mind one of the strongest predisposing
factors in the adult. It not only renders the individual more sus-
ceptible to the invasion of the tubercle bacilli, but also makes the cure
much more difficult. In mj^ service at the Riverside Hospital-Sana-
torium on North Brother Island a large number of patients are
alcoholics and the prognosis in such cases is almost invariably un-
favorable. I regret to state here that I have had in my service as
many as 70 per cent of tuberculous patients who confessed the exces-
sive use of alcohol prior to contracting tuberculosis. I cannot, of
course, enter here into the discussion of the alcoholic problem. All I
can say is that education, wise legislation, rational temperance move-
ments, better food and better cooking, and popular healthful en-
gagements for the masses, are to my mind the most rational means
to combat the alcoholic evil.
Venereal disease also predisposes to tuberculosis in a measure.
My own conception of how to combat this evil I expressed in the ora-
tion on medicine which I had the honor to deliver before the Illinois
State Medical Society two years ago. I must refer my readers to this
article, ' ' Some Modem Medico-Sociologic Conceptions of the Alcohol,
GENERAL INDIVIDUAL HYGIENE 125
Venereal Diseases, and Tuberculosis Problems."* All I can do here
is to include syphilis and gonorrhea into the three great afflictions of
the masses — alcohol, venereal diseases, and tuberculosis — which are
more prevalent in cities than in the country, and all of which are in
no small degree th^ result of congestion and the many unwholesome
features of city life. I venture to say that all these diseases, and par-
ticularly tuberculosis, will be decreased by a return to the farm. If
our statesmen can help to make farming more attractive and profit-
able, country life, particularly for young people, less monotonous and
more enjoyable, a great step toward the decrease in the morbidity and
mortality of the above mentioned diseases and a consequent betterment
of the race will surely be attained.
We come now to the direct causes of tuberculosis. First, contami-
nated food substances, i. e., contaminated by the tubercle bacillus.
We have tuberculous meat derived from tuberculous cattle and hogs,
and have tuberculous milk derived from tuberculous cows. There
would be no difficulty in combating bovine tuberculosis and tubercu-
losis in hogs if we had uniform laws for dealing with this disease and
could prevent the sale of beef or pork derived from tuberculous
animals. As it is, one state in the Union has excellent bovine laws,
has all cattle tested by tuberculin, destroys the tuberculous cattle, and
compensates the farmers. A neighboring state has poor or no bovine
laws at all, or they are not enforced. The result is of course danger
not only to the inhabitants of the states with poor bovine laws, but
to all those who may sojourn temporarily therein. The same holds
good of pork and still more of milk. Testing all cattle with tuber-
culin and weeding out the tuberculous ones, the most careful in-
spection of all meat at the abattoirs no matter from what source, the
prohibition of the sale of milk except from tuberculin tested cows,
or the universal careful scientific and not merely commercial steriliza-
tion of all milk, are up to date our only means to avoid contracting
tuberculosis from the ingestion of food substances.
When one considers that nearly 10 per cent of all tuberculosis in
children is due to the bovine type of the tubercle bacillus, it would
seem that the time for the federal authorities to take up this question
has come.
The most important source of infection of tuberculosis is that
from man to man through the process of inhalation and close personal
contact. As most frequent .of all phases we must consider what is
known as family infection. The bacillus, being found in abundance in
the secretion of the tuberculous individual, may be inhaled with the
* American Practitioner, Februaiy, March, and April, 1913.
126 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
(lust laden with diy pulvorizod tiibci-culous sputum. It may be trans-
mitted Avith the kiss of the mother to the child, from husband to wife,
or wife to husband, or from a tuberculous child to a healthy child,
Not infrequently children in private homes or institutions become in-
fected by tuberculous nurses or maids. The greatest vigilance on the
part of family or institution physician is necessary to overcome this
danger of infection to the children under their care.
In close and congested quarters there arises in addition the danger
from droplet infection. Small particles of saliva containing the tuber-
culous germs are expelled during the cough or during loud and ex-
cited speaking. Constant exposure to the contact of these droplets
may lead to infection.
The general and principal remedy for this, the greatest of all
sources of infection (sputum and droplet infection) from man to
man. can be expressed in one little sentence : there should not be any
uncared-for tuberculous individual. Being cared for means of course
that the patient is submitted to the hygienic and dietetic treatment,
and constantly watched and supervised so that infecting others be-
comes virtually an impossibility. If every tuberculous ease of today
could be treated and watched, he could not infect anybody else nor
conld the room he occupies or the house he lives in become a source
of danger to others who inhabit it after him. Thorough disinfection
of rooms and house would follow his removal and tul^erculosis would
no longer be a house disease.
An annual, or better yet semi-annual, examination of every indi-
vidual in every community would lead to the early discovery of tuber-
culosis in any member of the community ; his being taken care of at
the right time and in the right place would eliminate him as a danger
to the family, and tuberculosis would no longer be a family disease.
What must be done in order to attain this goal is self-evident.
Clinical facilities for the recognition of tuberculosis in every com-
munity arranged by physicians in cooperation with the municipal
authorities; a multiplication of such institutions as dispensaries,
serving as centers or clearing houses to distribute the cases ; pre-
ventoria to which to send suspected cases ; sanatoria for the curable
cases, and hospital-sanatoria for the seemingly hopeless ones for
isolation ; and where it is possible sanatorium treatment at home —
these are our most efficacious weapons, up to this date, for solving this
phase of the tuberculosis problem.
But to send the tuberculous patient, particularly a laborer or a
working girl or woman, for a six months' or even a year's sojourn to
a sanatorium is not enough to make the cure lasting; it will often
demand more time. Hence, agricultural, horticultural, and general
GENERAL INDIVIDUAL HYGIENE 127
industrial colonies should be attached to our public sanatoria. It is
here where the patient has the best possible chance, by graded labor
still under medical supervision, to make his cure a lasting one.
The United States of America offers a welcome to all the people of
the Avorld and an opportunity to become citizens of this Republic.
As a result, this country stands unique as the land with the greatest
number of immigrants arriving annually in its ports. That among
these many are tuberculous and many more are strongly predisposed
to the disease is evident and well known. The medical problems of
immigration are so important a subject to this country that a year
ago it was made the subject of discussion at the annual meeting of
the American Academy of Medicine in Atlantic City.* The difficulty
of diagnosing at a glance a tuberculous invalid in the first or second
stage was there brought out. It often takes an expert a half or three-
quarters of an hour before he can arrive at a definite conclusion, and
that after a careful examination in the quiet of his office. The rela-
tively small number of examining physicians at Ellis Island, for ex-
ample, can devote but very few minutes to each of the thousands of
immigrants who pass before them weekly for inspection. The ex-
cellent appearance of some tuberculous immigrants, because of a ten
days' voyage, invigorating sea air. good food and rest, has been to my
mind in many instances the reason of the non-discovery of invalids in
quite advanced stages. When they have been admitted to this coun-
try, a few weeks of hard work in the ditches or in the sweat shops, with
nights spent in overcrowded tenements or unclean or crowded lodging
houses, usually suffice to bring about an exacerbation of the disease.
The strain, the struggle for life, the new environments, the unac-
customed food, and perhaps also some nostalgia and disappointment,
likewise help to turn, in a very short time, an incipient case into an
invalid with open tuberculosis, and thus a new center of infection is
formed. All this accounts for the great prevalence of tuberculosis
among the laboring classes who have come to us from foreign shores
only relatively recently. A goodly number of them return to their
native land, particularly the Italians, when they realize that their dis-
ease does not permit them to struggle as they must if they wish to re-
main here. I have been told that there are villages in Italy where
tuberculosis has become most prevalent because of the return of
those emigrants and because their methods of life result in infection
of others.
*"Medieal Problems of Immigration," being- the papers and their dis-
cussion presented at the XXXVII Annual Meeting of the American Academy
of Medicine, held at Atlantic City, Jime 1. 1912. Easton, Pa., American
Acad, of Med. Press, 1913.
128 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
Some rotiini volimtarily to their native homes, but you perhaps
are not aware that we have a deportation law* which, as a good
American I am sorry to admit, seems unnecessarily harsh and un-
justified, founded as it is on an unscientific basis. It is to the effect
that any iimnigrant who has become a public charge in a hospital or
other institution and is found to be tuberculous, can be deported even
after a residence of three years if in the opinion. of the examining
physician he had contracted the disease prior to his landing on these
shores. During the year of 1911, about 1,500 of such tuberculous
aliens were referred to the State Board of Charities for deportation.
On the strength of this law the deportation is done at state expense.
With all due respect to the framers of this law, I believe it abso-
lutely impossible for the most skilled diagnostician, upon examination
of a tuberculous chest, to state the duration of the disease with even
approximate certainty. A declaration that an individual had tuber-
culosis for a definite period of time, based on a physical examination
or even on the history given by the patient, must necessarily be guess-
work. I know of a case of deportation v^hich v^as declared legal upon
the statement of a young physician to whom a tuberculous patient had
admitted that he had a cough a little less than three years ago, prior
to his coming to this country.
How many thousands of us have a latent tuberculosis which has
never been discovered and which may never cause us any trouble if
we continue to live carefully and hygieuically ! Should w^e, however,
be submitted suddenly to a life of hard physical struggle, be trans-
ported into unhygienic environments, be underfed and badly housed,
the development of the tuberculous trouble would be almost certain
to take place, and in a much shorter time than three years. One must
have witnessed such a deportation in order to comprehend its mean-
ing, particularly when one is not at all certain that the case might
not be one which developed right here because of hard w^ork and pri-
vation.
And now. to the most important question of all : what can be done
to prevent tuberculous invalids, likely to become a burden to the
community, from entering the United States, only perhaps to be de-
ported after a sojourn of one, two, or three years? Tuberculosis must
be considered a world problem, a problem for every civilized nation.
Let European governments understand that they must take care of
their own tuberculous people as we take care of ours, and that in the
end, by united efforts, it may be possible to conquer the white plague
in all countries.
* Immigration Act of Feb. 20, 1907.
GENERAL INDIVIDUAL HYGIENE 129
To ascertain his freedom from tuberculosis every prospective emi-
grant should be examined by two competent medical men, one ap-
pointed by his home government and one by the steamship company
which is to transport him to this country. A certificate showing free-
dom from tuberculosis, signed by these two medical men, should be in
the possession of every emigrant allowed to come to these shores. An
individual discovered to be afflicted with this disease should be re-
turned to the care of the authorities of the city or village from which
he came with the diagnosis and recommendation for treatment. Ex-
ceptions can and should be made in the case of an individual with
ample means who is simply visiting, or seeking to recuperate his
health by a change of climate, or desirous of entering an American
sanatorium for treatment. To avoid misuse or fraudulent use of the
physician's certificate, a photograph should be taken at the time of the
examination in the home port and attached to the certificate. Or,
since a photograph could be removed and another one substituted
on the certificate, I even go so far as to suggest that it would be well
to have the finger-print taken for identification. This is the most ac-
curate and scientific method known for such purposes.
The laws relating to deportation should be changed to the effect
that if the holder of any such certificate, or any immigrant develops
tuberculosis within six months to one year from the date of his ar-
rival here and becomes a charge to the community, he shall be deported
to the port w^hence he came. The expenses for this deportation should
be borne by the steamship company who brought the immigrant to
our shores and not by the State Board of Charities. Whether Euro-
pean governments should desire to keep doubtful cases under 'ob-
servation a few weeks in cooperation with the steamship companies in
order to avoid possible mistakes in diagnosis, or increase the ex-
amining boards by one or two more experienced diagnosticians, is a
matter for the foreign governments to decide. There is no question
but that the more careful these examinations are at the foreign ports,
the fewer the cases of deportation that wall ensue.
The suggestion has been made that physicians of the United States
Public Health Service should be stationed at the important points of
departure in Europe so that each e'migrant can be thoroughly ex-
amined, and those entitled to a clean bill of health be allowed to take
passage. I question whether the international law w^ould sanction
such procedure. Secondly, there are too many minor points from
which emigrants could take passage and escape the United States gov-
ernment physician's examination. It would be of greater value for
foreign governments and steamship companies to make it known that
if a man expects to stay in the United States, he must not become a
(6)
130 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
public charge; that he must be physically, mentally, and morally
sound. With such a policy and the additional examination in the
manner above outlined, the United States government will be less
burdened with the care of tuberculous aliens who, uncared-for, are a
constant menace to the communit3^
An interesting suggestion in relation to this subject was made
at the recent International Tuberculosis Congress in Rome by Dr.
Antonio Stella, of New York. It was to the effect that every emigrant
should be insured against tuberculosis, the cost of insurance to be ad-
ded to the price of the steamship ticket, the policy entitling the bearer
to return transportation and free treatment in a sanatorium, in the
event of his contracting tuberculosis within a specified time. This
suggestion was presented in the form of a resolution, which was
unanimously adopted, but whether or not it will result in any imme-
diate or definite action I am not prepared to say. .
The suggestion of Doctor Stella leads me to the conclusion of my
paper, namely, that it is my firm conviction that unless we have a
general insurance against accidents, old age, and disease, including
tuberculosis, for every individual earning less than $1,200 a year, the
tuberculosis problem will never be solved. I realize, of course, that
there are other factors which must be considered as contributory to-
ward the solution of »the tuberculosis problem. I refer, of course, to the
betterment of the social conditions of the masses in general. That
this may occur soon is our devout prayer, but for the present let us
bear in mind that we still lose annually in the United States well-nigh
200,000 lives from tuberculosis and that we have among us eight times
as inany tuberculous individuals in the various stages of invalidism.
I venture to say that not one-tenth of these 1,600,000 are under proper
care in institutions or at home.
Yet to prevent infection and to assure a cure, the tuberculous in-
dividual must be under careful medical supervision. Because of the
widespread propaganda of enlightenment during recent years regard-
ing general hygiene, prevention of tuberculosis, and the importance of
the early discovery of the disease, a great deal of good has been ac-
complished and I urge continuation and increase of proper propa-
ganda. Education has done a great deal already, and the well-to-do
classes particularly now frequently seek timely aid; but not so the
poor man who knows that very often ' the discovery of his disease
means the loss of his job. The result is that he will hide his condition
as long as possible, infecting in the meantime a goodly number of his
fellow-beings. If, on the other hand, he could Imow that by reason of
his insurance he could enter a sanatorium the moment that his dis-
ease was discovered and receive the best possible chance of being
GENERAL INDIVIDUAL, HYGIENE 131
cured, he would not hesitate to be examined. Of course, provision for
the maintenance of his family in the event of his being the only bread
winner, should be a part of his insurance policy.
In summarizing, let me repeat then that in spite of all our efforts
we are, as just stated, still losing about 200,000 people annually
from tuberculosis in the United States. Of these, I venture to say,
50,000 are tuberculous children. Estimating the average duration of
life of the 50,000 children who die annually from tuberculosis in the
United States at about seven and one-half years, and figuring the cost
to parents and the community for each life as only $200 per annum,
the financial loss thus represented is $75,000,000. These children have
died before they have been able to give any return to their parents
and the community. What a useless sacrifice of life and of money!
How much needless sorrow and heartaches caused to parents!
Besides all this, many a tuberculous mother has had her life short-
ened because she bore one of these children. According to the report
of the Commissioner of Education, there are at this time about
20,000,000 children attending public schools in the United States.
Placing the proportion of tuberculosis among them as low as only
three per cent, would make 600,000 children afflicted with tuberculosis
who are at this time in urgent need of open-air instruction or sana-
torium treatment. According to available statistics, we can at present
provide instruction in open-air classes for about 2,000 tuberculous
children. The anemic, the nervous, and the children suffering from
cardiac diseases, who are in equally great need of outdoor instruction,
are not included in the three per cent.
The 150,000 adults who die annually of tuberculosis have at th'e
average been ill and incapacitated for work for at least two years, and
figuring their cost to the commonwealth (either to municipality or in-
dividual family) at only $1,000 per year, would mean $300,000,000
uselessly spent in caring for people afflicted with a disease that might
have been prevented and cured. Of these 150,000 adults, a large num-
ber have been married and in many instances leave either widows or
orphans depending upon public support. The annual maintenance of
these widows and orphans must, of course, also run into the millions.
"We have thus an annual expenditure of well-nigh $400,000,000. Yet
this by no means represents all the actual loss to the community from
tuberculosis. Our social economists tell us that between the ages of
16 and 45 every adult life ^\dth an average earning capacity repre-
sents an asset of $5,000 to the community. Now, as two-thirds of all
deaths from tuberculosis in adults occur between these ages, we have
an additional loss of $500,000,000 to the community. Thus, the actual
direct and indirect loss caused bv death from tuberculosis in the
132 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
United. States amounts annually to something like $900,000,000, and
this amount we spend on a preventable and curable disease!
We nnist also bear in mind the fact that we have at least eight
times 150,000 tuberculous adults, for it is well known that for every
individual who dies of tuberculosis there are eight living with the dis-
ease, still up and about, and the majority of them with an oppor-
tunity of spreading infection. Besides these, there are about 400,000
tuberculous children. By reason of lack of open-air schools, preven-
toria, sanatoria, special hospitals, and horticultural, agricultural and
industrial colonies, the vast majority of these 1,200,000 tuberculous
individuals continue the chain of infection and keep up our fearful
morbidity and mortality at an expense of $900,000,000 per annum.
Surely, the time has come for dealing more rationally with. at least
some phases of the tuberculosis problem in this country. And what
are we to do first? We must at once, throughout this vast country,
strive to have no uncared-for tuberculous patients. To this end, in-
stitutions for the treatment and care of the tuberculous who cannot be
cared for at home without endangering others, should be multiplied
by state and municipal appropriations and private philanthropy.
We must not be content with merely sending the tuberculous indi-
vidual to a sanatorium for 6 or even 12 months until the disease is ar-
rested or his condition improved and then allow him to return to his
former deplorable unhygienic home environments or to resume his
former occupation under the equally deplorable unsanitary conditions,
which were probably responsible for his contracting the disease origi-
nally. Agricultural, horticultural, and industrial colonies, where the
sanatorium graduate may have an opportunity to go for a year or
more to earn a fair wage and at the same time be given a chance to
make himself stronger and more resistant against a new outbreak or
invasion of the disease are as essential as sanatoria or special hospi-
tals. Without making the arrest or the cure of the disease lasting by
such judicious after-care, the millions of dollars spent for sanatorium
maintenance are a sheer waste of money.
Even the smallest children, if foimd tuberculous, should receive
institutional treatment when the parents are poor, and whenever pos-
sible the mother should be allowed to remain with the child. For
larger children afflicted with pulmonary tuberculosis we should have
inland sanatoria with schools attached to them. For children afflicted
with glandular, joint and bone tuberculosis, we should have seaside
sanatoria. Some of our discarded battleships or cruisers may be util-
ized for this purpose, instead of being sold as junk or made to serve
as targets.
Open-air schools, and as much open-air instruction as possible in
GENERAL INDIVIDUAL HYGIENE 133
kindergarten, school and college, should be the rule; indoor instruc-
tion should be the exception. There should be no home lessons for the
younger children. Love for life in the open air should be inculcated
in young and old throughout the country.
There should be a sufficient number of public parks and play-
grounds in our great cities to counteract congestion and reduce it to a
minimum. .The roofs of all city houses should be utilized to give more
open-air life to the inhabitants by makin» them into roof gardens,
recreation centers, or playgrounds. Outdoor sleeping should be en-
couraged whenever feasible.
Medical under- and post-graduate schools should give special
courses in early diagnosis of tuberculosis, and instruction in how to in-
augurate efficient social service for hospital cases afflicted with tuber-
culosis.
Early recognition of the disease should be facilitated for all classes
by universal semi-annual examinations, by private physicians for the
well-to-do, and by publicly appointed diagnosticians for the poor.
The federal and municipal authorities and the employers of large
bodies of men and women should set the example by enforcing these
semi-annual examinations and should further what is commonly known
as welfare work.
Besides popular anti-tuberculosis and general hygienic educa-
tion, demonstrations by permanent exhibits, distribution of literature,
lectures in schools, colleges, workshops, mills, factories, mines, stores
and offices, the examination of every tuberculous adult should be ac-
companied by personal instruction in how to prevent infecting others.
Anti-spitting ordinances should be enforced, but receptacles in public
places for those who must spit should also be provided. The man
advertising fake cures for consumption should be treated as a mur-
derous criminal, for such he is.
There should be state insurance against tuberculosis, so that the
man without means may be assured that even if he is found to be
tuberculous he or his family will not be in want. Until, as in Ger-
many, state insurance companies have their own sanatoria, our private
insurance companies should be permitted to establish and maintain
sanatoria and special hospitals for their tuberculous employees and
policy holders.
Other sources of tuberculous infection, as for example from cattle
or hogs, should be dealt with by federal laws since state laws, by
reason of their diversity and often inadequacy, have proved inefficient.
All milk, if not coming from tuberculin-tested cattle, should be thor-
oughly and scientifically, and not merely commercially, sterilized.
The influx of tuberculous immigrants likely to become a burden to
KU FIKST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON KACE BETTERMENT
till' coiiiimniity should be i^revcntt'd by conipclliiiy- all slt'aiiishij) eoni-
])aiii('s to assure a clean bill of health for every immigrant they bring
to these shores and to insure ever}^ immigrant against tuberculosis'.
The policy should entitle the bearer to return transportation and free
treatment in a sanatorium in the event of his contracting tuberculosis
within a specified time. The cost of the insurance could be added to
the price of the steamship ticket.
Procreation of the tuberculous sliouUI be prohibited by law and the
prevention of it taught to every tuberculous adult. The individual
wilfully violating this law should be punished in a way to make the
repetition of the offense impossible.
The predisposing factors, such as child labor, sweatshop labor, too
long working hours for men and women, bad housing in tenements,
apartments, lodging houses arid hotels in city and country, including
farm houses, boarding schools, orphan asylums, and other institu-
tions housing many people, must be combated by rational laws and
their strictest enforcement. The same rigor should be applied to laws
concerning proper ventilation and sanitation in workshops, factories,
stores, federal, municipal and private offices, and in public convey-
ances.
Wherever and whenever practical, the home of the married Ameri-
can workman should be a detached single family house.
Maternity and convalescent homes should be provided in every city
and town so that the laboring woman, arising from childbirth or the
laboring man or woman recovering from a surgical or a general medi-
cal disease, can recuperate, regain strength, and thus not be susceptible
to tuberculosis on returning to their daily vocations.
Tuberculosis among the Indians, Negroes, Chinese and Japanese
must receive special attention on the part of our federal government
with the view to combating the morbidity and mortality from tuber-
culosis in these races (particularly in the Negroes and Indians) in this
country, which is three times higher than that from tuberculosis in
the white race. Nearlj^ all our reformatories, prisons and other penal
institutions, including detention prisons, must be reconstructed or re-
modeled, cells and workrooms made sanitary and more outdoor life
and better food given to the prisoners if a few years of penal ser-
vitude is not to be equivalent to a death sentence by tuberculosis. No
tuberculous prisoner should be discharged, unless he is sent to a sana-
toriuni so that when free he may also be well.
Malnutrition and the underfeeding of the masses, which is so great
a predisposing factor to tuberculosis, should be combated by beginning
with having few^er artificially and more breast-fed; by instructing
ignorant mothers how to feed infants and little children ; by provid-
GENERxVL INDIVIDUAL HYGIENE 135
ing simple but substantial school luncheons for all school children at
cost ; by education of the mothers in economic housekeeping, cooking,
and food values ; and by having eating places for the great army of
unmarried laborers after the example of the German Volkskiichen
where people can receive good, wholesome food at reasonable prices;
by legislative and philanthropic endeavors to make farming more
profitable and more attractive, and by a wiser statesmanship whereby
the cost of living may be reduced for the entire people.
Alcoholism and other excesses predisposing to tuberculosis should
be prevented by education along rational temperance lines and wise
and judicious legislation.
The eradication of tuberculosis as a disease of the masses — with all
the physical, mental, and moral suffering, and the millions in money
now sacrificed largely in vain — is nevertheless possible ; but I em-
phasize once more, that it is not possible unless every tuberculous in-
dividual, in no matter what stage of the disease, is properly cared for
at home or in an institution and all the predisposing causes removed.
All the measures to attain this end must of course be inspired, neither
by a blind phthisiophobia (an exaggerated fear of tuberculosis) nor
by an hysterical phthisiophilia (allowing the tuberculous person to do
as he pleases because of our sympathy or love for him). The intelli-
gent cooperation of the tuberculous patient is as much needed in the
solution of these various problems as that of the statesman, physician,
philanthropist, and the people at large.
The various measures which I have ventured to suggest and which
are described in detail in my paper, must never be allowed to become
a crusade against the tuberculous individual, who is our friend and
brother, but for his sake and our sakes we must make henceforth a
more rational and determined fight against the disease ''tuberculosis,"
which is our most costly enemy and the most deadly foe of mankind.
Of course, there are certain social reasons for the prevalence of
tuberculosis which are also responsible for some of our other social and
physical ills. Among them I must mention first the utter ignorance
of the vast majority of people who enter into matrimony of the re-
sponsibilities they assume as fathers and mothers of the coming gener-
ation. Some great philanthropist or some wise government should
take the initiative and establish schools where the responsibilities and
obligation of father- and motherhood would be taught. To these
schools all candidates for marriage should be admitted gratuitous^. A
course of one or two months would suffice and there should be night
lessons as well as day instructions so that those occupied during the'
day may also have an opportunity to learn. These courses should in-
clude family hygiene, home hygiene, eugenics, the science of raising
L36 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BKTTERMENT
('liiMrcii [)hysic;ill\-. iiiciitally nnd iiiorjilly licallliy, jsiul surli iiulividiial
instructions for man and wonuin as the case may demand, all the work
beino' directed towards enabling the future family to live a normal and
happy lift\
Next, 1 nuist refer to many of llu' abnonnal industrial conditions
of our day and the soeial injustice arising therefrom — our strikes, the
lack of employment in some districts and the lack of workers in others,
(>tc. These conditions must be readjusted, our deserted farms must
be repopulated from the congested cities, the lives of the masses must
be made happier, larger and fuller. When all this is realized, it will
not only help in the solution of the tuberculosis problem, but will be a
mighty factor in bringing about what this Conference has been called
to consider — a genuine race betterment. But let us not think that
this will come about unless we all believe in and work for a larger love
of humanity and for more social justice and personal service to our
less fortunate brothers and sisters. Someone has said that service to
man is the highest service to God. I believe in this with all my heart.
Discussion.
Women's Work in the Open Air
Professor Robert Ja^ies Sprague, Massachusetts Agineultural College, Am-
herst, Mass.
I have listened to a good many remedies for race suicide and race
decline, etc. Some of them I believe in and some I do not, but it seems
to me that the most vital thing that has to do with race degeneracy in
the age in which we live has not been put forth. That sounds like a re-
former, doesn 't it ? The Almighty somehow made us so that we needed
to breathe air and he has not yet made any substitute that we have
found, and the most of our racial decline, physical decline, is due
largely to shutting off of air in one form and another. There is one
other great fallacy that our race has adopted. Our race does not
permit any woman of high class to do a stroke of economic work in
the open air, and any race that adopts that policy, in my opinion, in
the end perishes. A woman may work herself into indigestion, con-
sumption and everything else in the house. She may pull pansies in
the yard, she may play golf, she may motor, but she must not labor in
the open air. Go to the great dynamic races that are multiplying so
that the rest of the world does not know what to do with them, and
w^hat is the great dynamic point of those races? It is free work in
the open air for both men and women, and when we get that, we will
get such wholesome, strong bodies that many of these great problems
we have been discussing will simply disappear because they won't
exist. I just wished to bring out that one idea. It seems to me that
GENERxVL INDIVIDU.VL HYGIENE 137
both men and women of our race have got to get to work in the open
air and the extent to which we can do that will help to solve every one
of these great problems we have before us.
THE PREVEINTTION OE AUTERIOSCLEROSIS
Louis Faugeres Bishop, M.D., Clinical Professor of Heart and Circulatory
Diseases, Fordham University School of Medicine, New York City ; Physi-
cian to the Lincoln Hospital; Consultant in Cardiovascular Diseases,
Mercy Hospital, Hempstead.
Nothing can help race betterment more than the prolongation of
the efficiency and life of men and women over middle age, who, having
satisfied the personal ambition of youth, can devote themselves to the
public good.
Never in the history of the world has the study of arteriosclerosis
assumed so great importance as at the present time, because never
before has this disease played so important a part in insidiously under-
mining efficiency and shortening the lives of the most valuable workers.
I am not in a position to make a comparative survey of the fre-
quency of this disease, because, with heart troubles, it covers the
entire field of my practice, but ijisurance men tell me that the mor-
tality from the group of disorders that is covered by this name claims
a number of victims that is more than double what it was thirty
years ago. In 1910, one hundred thousand persons died of circulatory
disease in this country, and I will venture the statement that there
is not one of my hearers that has not lost a friend around sixty years
of age during the past year from heart trouble, due, primarily, to
arteriosclerosis. "While this has been recognized, but little has been
done in the way of prevention.
There are several things that need to be done: We need a clear
definition of the disease. We need to become dissatisfied with the
enumeration of indefinite causes, and we need an educated public
opinion that will shield the earnest worker in the field of hygiene and
dietetics from the thoughtlessly applied epithets of those who, seeking
a refuge behind a bad prognosis, have no etficient regimen of their
own to suggest.
As to definition, arteriosclerosis is the most improperly named of
all diseases, and yet no one has suggested a better designation up to
the present time. While it receives its name from the blood-vessels,
which are often conspicuously involved, it is in fact a disease of the
whole body, characterized by irritation, and finally, destruction of
138 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
cells in all parts of the body, the destroyed cells being replaced, ac-
cording to the law of pathology, by connective tissue.
For many years, there was discussion as to whether this disease
began in the blood-vessels, in the heart or in the kidneys, and the
Coincident involvement of the lungs, liver and digestive organs was
noted. According to the point of view, it was called "heart disease,"
" Bright 's disease" and "autointoxication."
In this instance, everyone was right, and everyone was wrong, for
all the orgxms mentioned were indeed involved, and the disease might
be named as well for one as the other.
That it is not primarily disease of the arteries is sho\^^i by the
now familiar fact that the disease may run its course with only slight
changes in the blood-vessels ; or, the changes in the blood-vessels may
be very marked and the disease itself have but little effect on the life
of the sufferer.
The arteries, being of universal distribution and bearing much
of the functional stress of the disease, may be granted the honor of
giving it a name, and, from henceforth, the disease will be known as
"arteriosclerosis" until such time as its fundamental nature is thor-
oughly understood and the underlying error of metabolism clearly
designated.
It would seem that the disease originates somewhat in this man-
ner: A person pursuing the even tenor of his way, being fed and
nourished on the usual mixed diet and resisting successfully the usual
slight accidental infections, is some day overtaken by some event that
alters the chemical functions of his cells. This event may be a great
nervous strain ; it may be an infectious disease or surgical infection ;
or, it may be some form of acute food poisoning.
From that time on, the cells of this person's body are sensitive
to particular proteins that reach these cells from the alimentary tract
or from the bodies of bacteria originating in some focus of infection.
So long as the supply of the offending protein continues, the irritation
of the cells is kept up, leading to destruction and progressive sclerosis.
Impairment of function follows and a greater and greater demand
upon the circulatory organs, and eventually, the development of the
picture of chronic Bright 's disease, heart disease, apoplexy or pre-
senility.
If, however, at any time it is possible to remove from the body
the offending protein, the irritation ceases, compensation is developed,
and the man is capable of being well.
The prevention of arteriosclerosis on these premises must depend,
primarily, upon the avoidance of sensitizing events, such as periods
of great stress and worry, infections, acute food poisoning, and the
GENERAL INDIVIDUAL HYGIENE 139
neglect of foci of infection. Secondarily, upon the study of food re-
lations of individuals from time to time, and the institution of a
strict regimen when, on account of changes in blood-pressure, pain in
the region of the heart on exertion, or because of nervous depression
and loss of efficiency, arteriosclerosis is suspected.
The great fact that must always be faced by the student of arterio-
sclerosis is, that it is a disease without symptoms. In actual practice,
sufferers from this condition seldom come under treatment until it
has lasted for from three to fifteen years, and, even then, they usually
come because a life insurance man who has examined them or a physi-
cian who has treated them for some other disease, has discovered
arteriosclerosis.
Arteriosclerosis is seldom the result of a single cause, though most
investigations reveal a sensitizing event. The effect of this sensitizing
event might have been averted, had not the individual previously
been a victim of too great ambition, of too long hours of labor, under
too great strain, of the neglect of outdoor exercise, or the over-ingestion
of food, with perhaps the immoderate use of alcohol and tobacco.
Another element in the prevention of arteriosclerosis is the educa-
tion of all persons in the habit of taking "cures," if this name may be
used for periods of time set apart for the putting of the body in the
best possible order.
We should adopt the motto, "Attend to the health while healthy,"
and encourage the European custom of the combination of a vaca-
tion and a visit to a cure resort.
We must learn the secret of right living, and avoid apoplexy, heart
failure, paralysis and sundry diseases of the liver and kidneys that
follow in the train of errors of diet and work.
Race betterment must always be a matter of the improvement of
the individual. Arteriosclerosis is not your neighbor's enemy; it is
your enemy. It is the greatest though most insidious danger to a group
such as is gathered here to consider the welfare of the race in general.
I trust that no one of you will neglect to study the solutions of this
problem of health through right living that are offered by this mag-
nificent institution, the Battle Creek Sanitarium, whose guests we are.
HOOKWORM DISEASE
Lillian South, M.D.. Kentucky State Bacteriologist, Bowling Green, Ky.
Hookworm disease is international, being found in every countrv'
in the world 36° north and 30° south, according to the recent survey
of the Rockefeller Commission. I shall not discuss this phase of it.
140
FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
but nieroly tell you how ^\■(■ Iuinc iiicl tliis coiKJilioii in Kculucky and
its elt'ec't wyiou our ]H'opl('. irookwoi-in has been found in every
HOOKWORM IN ITS VARIOUS STAGES OF DEVELOPMENT
county in the state, the intensity of the infection varying in different
localities. Of the 156,000 specimens examined during the last three
6- #
>#/*■
Kishty-fiv.. per rent of tlir .■liildn...
A (lispriisii
till' ddctdr :iii<l micrdscoiiist
A schoolhouse. Cliildi
ilv inrcctcd witli hookwi
Dr. Mullen, of the P. H. S., treiitiiig trachoma in the Mountain Hospital.
GENERAL INDIVIDUAL HYGIENE 141
years, thirty-five per cent showed hookworm and fifty per cent showed
other intestinal parasites. Hookworm disease is caused by a small
worm about an inch long and about as thick as an ordinary pin. The
male hookworm is smaller than the female and is distinguished from
the latter by its fan-shaped tail. The female lays from one to three
thousand eggs a day ; these pass out with the normal bowel movement.
These eggs, under favorable conditions of temperature, moisture and
shade, hatch out the young worms, called larvae, in the course of eigh-
teen to twenty-four hours.
Within a week the tiny worm has shed its skin twice, much as does
a snake. It lives in a sheath, but takes no food after the first few
days following its escape from the egg. Only in the encysted or larva
stage is it capable of entering the body. The larva or microscopic
worm enters the body by boring through the skin. In penetrating the
skin the embryos produce the condition Imo-v^Ti as dew poison, ground
itch or toe itch. After gaining entrance to the body the worm enters
the bloodstream, passes the heart and finally the capillaries in the
lung, these blood-vessels being too small for further navigation, the
larv£e make their way up the windpipe, or are coughed up and
swallowed into the stomach, and finally enter the small intestine.
This method has been demonstrated by actual experiment upon
human beings by Dr. Claude A. Smith, of Atlanta, Ga.
After a short residence in the small intestine they grow to be an
inch long and become blood suckers.
SOCIAL CONDITIONS
While it is true that it is chiefly among persons of poorer financial
conditions living in unsanitary surroundings that the most marked
cases are found, because the opportunity for infection is so much
greater, cases are frequently found among those who are more fortu-
nate financially and the better educated classes. The hookworm is no
respecter of persons and will attach itself to anyone. The accompany-
ing pictures will graphically illustrate the effect of the disease.
TREATMENT
The treatment of the ordinary case of hookworm disease is a com-
paratively simple matter, usually very effective and can be taken
without loss of time from business. The treatment should always be
given under the direction of a physician. The thymol comes in direct
contact with the worms and kills them, and is given in capsules, the
size of the dose depending on the age.
Hookworm disease is preventable. It is more easily prevented
than are most diseases. Not only can it be prevented, but the very
14l' first national conference on race betterment
methods to be used in its prevention will also prevent all other diseases
whose poisonous elements or germs are carried in the bowels and urine.
AVhenever hookworm disease is diminished, typhoid fever and other
diarrheal diseases are reduced in the same proportion.
The contamination of the ground with disease-producing germs or
parasites is called "soil pollution." "When we recall the fact that the
worms do not multiply in the body, but that the eggs are discharged
with the movements from the bowel and hatch out after being de-
posited upon the ground, it must be apparent that if we can prevent
soil pollution we will prevent hookworm disease. It is spread as a
result of the careless disposal of bowel matter by infected persons, and
is almost purely a question of privies, and if the people will consent
to construct and use sanitary closets, hookworm disease will be stamped
out.
'The State Board of Health of Kentucky has devised a sanitary
toilet, made of concrete, which is very inexpensive to build, is fly-proof,
odorless, and does not have to be cleaned out. A copy of the bulletin
of the Kentucky sanitary privy will be mailed to anyone upon request.
The general use of these privies will not only eradicate hookw^orm
disease but will solve the problem of rural sanitation and wall be a
great step in preventing typhoid fever.
DISEASE AND ITS PREVENTION
Guilford H. Sumner, M.D., Seeretaiy Iowa State Board of Health, Des
Moines, Iowa.
I. Introduction.
II. Preventive Medicine.
III. Scientific Doctor of Today.
IV. No Better Investment.
Y. A Newer and Greater Enthusiasm,
YI. People Not So Particular Formerly.
YII. The Neglected Member.
YIII. Certain Uprisings.
IX. Hunting through Microscopes.
X. The Consumptive.
XI. Another Yirulent Communicable Disease.
XII. Improper Things.
XIII. Manfredi's Discoveries.
XIY. Conclusion, (a) God's Motherhood, fb) The Charm of Life.
(a) Transmission of Disease. (b) The Remedy — Education
A iH.lhi-i-i
' MPs fl^^H
lil '
Same i)atieiit six nuipths later. Gained 23 ijoiinds.
Xo pellagra symptoms.
SwIliDL' of th.' frit and fare •■Ban:i
;lb<lonicn.'
GENERAL INDIVIDUAL, HYGIENE 143
DISEASE AND ITS PREVENTION
In these days of advanced enlightenment, people are seeking
knowledge in all departments of life. I see a growing sentiment com-
ing which will require that knowledge, relating to the prevention of
diseases, shall be disseminated among the inhabitants of every well-
regulated municipality.
We are just beginning to live in an era of Preventive Medicine.
Formerly the physician was trained in curative processes — instructed
in methods of healing ills. By this procedure, communities are deal-
ing with results of existing insanitary conditions. There are journals
and journals which publish regularly many reports of clinical cases or
discussions of the etiology (causes) of diphtheria, scarlet fever, ty-
phoid fever and all transmissible diseases, but broader and more effec-
tive methods are beginning to be employed.
Curative processes, while very necessary, are not the most essential
to the public in general. As we are to merge from the old lines of
procedure into the new and more progressive methods, we must not
only study the clinic, but the street, the alley, the back yard, the in-
sanitary privy, the pollution of streams and all kindred subjects which
are disease producers. These very important subjects are the doctor's
domain, and numerous new topics must be discussed, which deal with
the relationship of medicine to society, and bear on the economic basis
of disease.
Dr. Rudolph Virchow, one of Europe's foremost medical experts,
and Dr. Oliver Wendell Homes. America's poet physician, were among
the very first to advance the theories of transmission of disease. It
was Doctor Holmes who first called attention to the contagiousness of
puerperal fever. He was suspicious that his comments on this de-
structive disease, though his subject was an unusual one, would not
be well received by the staid representatives of the medical profes-
sion. The article was published in an obscure medical journal of New
England, but who can say that Doctor Holmes was not right? The
idea advanced at the writing of Doctor Holmes' article is now taught
and advocated by every progressive, modem physician in the world.
Doctor Holmes is dead, but his precept lives. It was Doctor Virchow
who was employed by the German Government to investigate an
epidemic of typhus fever in Upper Silesia. This was when Doctor
Virchow was a young practitioner of medicine, and it is related that
the government, in employing Doctor Virchow, made a mistake in
securing the services of so progressive a medical expert, for in his re-
port of existing conditions, he did not deal in technical terminology,
but delved into the very causes which produced and promulgated this
disease.
144 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
Tills iil)k- ami young iiiedical man studied well all the conditions of
the country where typhus fever was raging, and in his report, he
spoke of the extreme poverty and ignorance of the inhabitants. He
loUl liow the people were enslaved mentally, and how the Prussian
bureaucracy loaded them with physical burdens. Strange as it may
seem to us now, this wonderful young physician said: "The remedy
lies not in medicine, Imt in education." He wrote that "the great era
of social progress in progressive, preventive medicine is upon us, and
it behooves us to meet conditions and educate the people."
The German government awoke to the fact that it found itself
reading treatises on sociological cpestions which related purely and
solely to preventive medicine. Young Virchow w^as relieved from the
government service, and with his dismissal, was a request that he take
a vacation and leave the country.
This most important era of preventive medicine which Doctor Vir-
chow helped to install has come to stay. The cure-all doctor, the ex-
clusively pill-and-potion doctor, the advertising quack, the so-called
drugless healer of human ills, the so-called faith healer, the patent
medicine man, the medical liberty league man or the teacher who
claims that human ills are only imaginary is not the modern, scientific
doctor of today.
The sphere of the medical man has been enlarged, and he has dis-
covered that tuberculosis, typhoid fever, diphtheria, scarlet fever,
smallpox and many of the diseases are economic maladies, and that
trade and occupational diseases will not disappear until social condi-
tions are made better. It will soon become a self-evident truth that no
man can become a good physician unless he is thoroughly versed in
preventive medicine, and is willing to lend his personal influence for
the betterment of all social conditions. A good physician will be a
true medical sociologist.
I do not intend to decry the medical profession — far from it — but
to bring before an enlightened public the plain truth that medical
men are giving to the world the results of their scientific investiga-
tions, all of which is intended to keep the people w^ell and thereby
prevent sickness and untimely deaths. The real physicians of today
are now trying to make health conditions better all over the world,
and for this reason Boards of Health are being formed, both State and
Local Boards of Health, in order to disseminate a knowledge of
preventive measures which will give to us, as a result, a strong,
long-lived, healthy people. It is not economy to keep knowledge from
the people. Ignorance goes hand in hand with poverty, and poverty
w^alks with disease, and disease destroys.
The government or the municipality can make no better invest-
GENERAL INDIVIDU.AL HYGIENE 145
ment than to make provision to keep the people well. This can be ac-
complished only through Boards of Health, hence the National and
State governments, as well as municipalities, should formulate uni-
form plans whereby the people may be regularly informed in regard
to the prevention of disease. There are those who oppose the forma-
tion of public health boards, for no other reason than that the restric-
tive measures, adopted by such Boards, prohibit the imposition of
quacks and humbugs upon the innocent and defenseless. It is a note-
worthy fact that whenever a state practices economy in public health
measures, efficiency is not attained, but if we place efficiency first,
economy is the essential result.
The control of communicable diseases should be the prime motive
of all municipalities through their health boards, and this can be
accomplished by stopping their spread at the source, which is the
person having the disease or existing unhealthful conditions. We must
depend upon the medical profession to formulate all plans for pre-
ventive medicine work, but as yet the medical man has not been of-
fered a sufficient remuneration — too small a financial incentive — to
abandon his private practice for public service. The people should
understand that health boards are trying to arouse the people to the
general problems of clean living. I wish to impress upon you that
real clean living should begin with the basic principle embodied in the
very first verse of the Bible: "In the 'beginning God." Real right
living is based upon a clean life. It has been said that learning and
education are synonymous terms. This is not true. Learning is
knowledge stored up in the mind, but education is a bundle of habits,
and in so far as our habits are good and pure, our lives will be made
cleaner and better. All citizens of any community should unite in a
campaign for clean lives and good health, and when this is done, a
long step has been taken towards the breaking up of political partisan-
ship, which should never exist in public health work.
No community should stop short of a most rigid understanding
that all diseases which are preventable should not be allowed to exist,
and special emphasis should be placed on preventive rather than cura-
tive processes. Control transmissible diseases by stopping their
spread at the source, and in trying to abolish insanitary conditions,
remember that the strength of inspection lies in frequent reinspection.
Local interest in health work should be stirred up by practical, con-
vincing literature and lectures that will appeal to the average citizen.
Let the business man be shown that efficient health work pays large
dividends, and all workers for civic improvement should see that a
clean city offers a poor breeding place for municipal corruption.
Let us hope that better things are in store, in public health matters.
146 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
for the people of all cities in every state in this country, and trust
that future legislative bodies will make ample provision for executing
health laws and that each city will fall in line and work for more and
bettor health regulations in the future than in the past.
I was veiy much impressed by reading an illustration recorded in
the congressional record, wherein a congressman said in his speech
before the House of Representatives of the United States Congress,
that we as a nation and a people need a newer and a greater enthusi-
asm in the managing of the business affairs of this great country. He
said: "We need an enthusiasm like that which the old colored^ deacon
prayed might be given to Sam Jones from Heaven." The incident
was related, wherein it was said that Sam Jones was invited to preach
to a colored congregation down in the state of Georgia, and if any of
you here in this audience have ever been present in a colored congre-
gation where religious services w-ere being held and listened to the
vociferous hallelujahs and typical amens of an Ethiopian congrega-
tion, you w^ill appreciate the old black man's prayer. It is related
that, prior to the preaching service, this old colored deacon w^as called
upon to open the services with prayer, and with the congregation on
bended knees, this old black man, in the fervor of his soul and with his
face turned upward to the skies, prayed for Sam Jones on this
wise: "0, Lawd! Gib Brudder Jones de eye ob de eagle dat he may
see sin from afur. Gloo hiz ear to de gospel teV phone and connect him
wid de central skies. Nail hiz hands to de gospel plow. 'Lwmioiate
hiz brow wid a brightness dat will make de fires ob hell look like a
tallar candle. Bow hiz head in some lonesome valley ivhere prayer
is much wanted to be made. 'Noint his body all ober wid de ker-sene
oil ob dy salvation and sot him on fire. Amen!"
I am impressed when I recall the fervor manifested in the earnest-
ness of this old black man's prayer and msh that this land of en-
thusiasm in public health work might be manifested in the minds of
the people of every state and municipality. One needs but to examine
the conditions of any city or community in any locality to be convinced
that gross insanitary problems are waiting for solution and correction.
You have often heard the common expression: "People were not
so particular in former times in regard to matters relating to public
health." This is undoubtedly true, but we have progressed. People
were not taught methods of disease prevention in former times as they
are today. It is definitely known by all physicians that in former
times curative measures were employed alone, and all the world was
educated to employ measures to correct results, when the proper and
most economical plan would have been to have prevented the results.
GENERAL INDIVIDU^yi, HYGIENE 14 (
Disease, sickness and death are results of causes, and the purposes of
health measures are to prevent rather than cure.
Two poems, significant of conditions in the past and in the present,
have come into my possession, and I am pleased to repeat them for you
because they contain so much truth that is applicable at this time.
Dr. W. C. Rucker, Assistant Surgeon-General of the United States
Public Health Service, writes:
'^The happy days of childhood
I often call to mind,
I love to live them o'er again
By memory's light refined —
The orchard and the meadow,
And the loft of fragrant hay.
The garden and the pl■i^w,
And the well not far away.
"The farmyard with its litter
Of mannre romid about,
The milking shed where flies galore
Flew buzzing in and out.
The pig-sty and the chicken house,
The hens that scratched all day
In the ground beneath the privy,
With the well not far away.
"We took our joys and sorrows
As they chanced to come along.
My brother had the ground-itch
And he didn't grow up strong.
And Maiy died of fever-
It was mighty sad that day—
But we didn't blame the privy
Nor the well not far away.
"In the suimner time, mosquitoes
Used to sing the whole long night.
But we would keep the windows closed
And thus avoid the bite.
But Billy got the ague
And Lizzie pined away—
Mosquitoes— foul air— privy.
And the well not far away.
"We used to think that death was just
A punishment for sin^
The sin of ignorance I say! —
So let us now begin
To try and get the windows screened
But open night and day,
And a sanitary privy
With the well quite far away.
1-1:8 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
"Let's clean the cows at niilkiii.e;- time,
Let's clean the barnyard too,
. Let's rid ourselves of fevers
And the chills and ague crew,
Let in the air and sunshine
But drive the fly away,
With the ancient typhoid privy.
With the well not far away."
Henry Malins of Indiana, in speaking of prevention, makes a com-
parison between the fence and the ambulance, and says :
[This poem appears elsewhere in this volume, Ijiit is so excellent it will hear re-
peating.— Editor.]
" 'Twas a dangerou.s cliff, as they freely confessed,
Though to walk near its crest was so pleasant;
But over its terrible edge there had slipjoed
A duke, and full many a peasant;
So the people said something would have to be done.
But their projects did not at all tally.
Some said. Tut a fence 'round the edge of the cliff' ;
Some, 'An ambulance down in the valley.'
"But the cry for the ambulance canned the day.
For it spread through the neighboring city,
A fence may be useful or not, it is true.
But each heart became brimful of pity
For those who slipped over that dangerous cliff;
And the dwellers in highway and alley
Gave pounds or gave pence, not to put up a fence.
But an ambulance down in the valley.
"Then an old sage remarked, 'It's a marvel to me
That people give far more attention
To repairing the results than to stopping the cause,
When they'd much better aim at prevention.
Let us stop at its source all this mischief,' cried he.
'Come, neighbors and friends, let us rally :
If the cliff w& will fence we might almost dispense
With the ambulance down in the valley.'
"Better guide well the young than reclaim them when old.
For the voice of true wisdom is calling:
'To rescue the fallen is good, but 'tis best
To prevent other people from falling.'
Better close up the source of temptation and crime
Than to deliver from dungeon or galley;
Better put a strong fence 'round the top of the cliff.
Than an ambulance down in the valley !"
The sentiment expressed in these poems is characteristic of an
age of great progress, and the time has been when Hygeia, the poor,
neglected member of our medical family, sneaked away into oblivious
GENERAL INDIVIDUAL HYGIENE 149
places ; but now more brave, she has come forward to claim her right-
ful place in the medical home. Her sisters welcome her, and her
suitors seek her hand. Ever since I first entered an office as a medical
student, I have been a lover of this fair mistress, whose banner I have
unfurled and carried, holding that the advancement of hygiene has
enlarged and beautified the medical profession, without lessening the
value of any other branch. Though she is here to stay, her errand is
not completed by giving her proper recognition in medicine. She now
turns to the people, the government and the municipalities — the
Owen bill and the Mann bill, both of which have been considered by
the Congress of the United States, for the express ptirpose of creating
a National Health Department — the forces apart from the medical
profession, and demands her place in the councils that rightfully be-
long to her. A temporary expedient has been reluctantty permitted
a place in the councils of the hygienic interests of the land ; but the
relentless demands of our present civilization cannot be fulfilled until
the protector of our public health interests shall have a permanent
place in the councils of our government at Washington, the same as
are the other departments. "We may construct a mighty navy for de-
struction and defense and call out vast armies ; but disease wipes
out with a tiny weapon so minute that the eye cannot discern it and
no military force can arrest. We may fill our storehouse with gold
and store up wealth in other forms, thereby enabling us to purchase
the labors of human beings for profit, distinction, lands, everything
but God's great and free gift, health, the thing that makes man con-
form to Deity. All the great activities of life, together with all the in-
dustrial pursuits of mankind, which are now paramount in the minds
of the cabinet officials, who are masters and possessors in their line,
having a knowledge of political economy and civics, cannot flourish
without strong, vigorous bodies, the proper vessels for healthy brains —
vigor of human blood, brains and brawn are the mechanism of all
successful achievements; yet not until the present time has it been
thought that the skilled supervision of a thorough medical man was
necessary to maintain and protect the health of the community, with-
out which the functionaries themselves could not perform their duties
perfectly.
How clearly it comes to me now and how well do I remember, after
completing a four years ' medical course, when I was about to begin my
profession with a minimum of experience and maximum of enthusi-
asm and an exalted opinion of the dignity and responsibility of my
charge which the years that followed have only intensified, I was
astonished at my own ignorance of the real causes of disease, and my
lack of Imowledge of sanitation ! I had been taught how to cure dis-
15() FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
ease — great stress being placed upon the giving of proper medicines.
All of this is quite essential to the work of a successful physician ; but
would you not prefer to pay your physician to keep you from becoming
sick '? The results, therefore, to be attained by the health board of the
municipality and its health officer are that all communicable diseases
may not only be prevented but eliminated. "We have certain upris-
ings of a spasmodic nature whenever a pestilential disease comes, and
we grope our way under the flashlight of death in our midst ; then it
is that we begin to look around for the cause of all our trouble. There
is no better time to prepare for war than in time of peace, and this
holds true in public health work — preventive methods should begin
before the disease appears, and here is the opportunity for sanitary
work.
I remember reading of conditions which exist at times in cities
and towns, related in an old leading medical journal, and I recall them
here :
' ' Whether cholera has or has not made its appearance at ,
which is practically one of the suburbs of , it is certain
that the conditions reported to exist there are in the highest degree
favorable for the introduction and spread of that disease. All ac-
counts represent the neighborhood in which the alleged cases occurred
as filthy beyond description and occupied by a class of persons who
pay no attention whatever to the laws of health or personal cleanli-
ness. Of course, the country now has the pleasant assurance that the
place is to be thoroughly cleaned and effectively quarantined; but
why were not the steps necessary for the protection of the public
health taken before the resulting disease, whether cholera or not, had
gained such a footing that already five persons have died from it?
The time to lock the stable door is before the horses housed therein
are stolen, and the way to treat contagious diseases is to prevent their
appearance and not to wait for them to gain a foothold and then try
to stamp them out. ' '
As health officer of the city of Waterloo, Iowa, my home state, a
number of years ago, when smallpox first made its appearance in
Iowa, I had a rich experience which taught me that we should never
temporize in public health matters. A stranger came to the city with
smallpox and it was a puzzle to the local Board of Health as well as
myself to know what to do with him. The city at that time had no
place to build a detention hospital — ^and here let me say that ample
pro\dsion should be made by all communities for all such emergencies
— and to force anyone to take care of this case of smallpox was out
of the question. After a great deal of trouble and anxiety, a place
was obtained and a small detention hospital was erected. We learned
GENERAL INDIVIDUAL HYGIENE 151
a lesson, and the result was that the city at once erected a suitable de-
tention hospital, isolated from the city, where all such cases could be
properly cared for; but what we most need is perfectly clean cities,
towns and villages — so free from all forms of filth that no contagious
disease dare enter. We were forced to temporize in the above case,
but temporizing under the spur of emergencies does not bring perma-
nent benefit.
As the enlightened physician seeks to prevent his people from be-
coming ill, so should the guardians of the public health be able to fore-
stall these emergencies, whose pecuniary expense in money expended
and wasted, in trade paralyzed and diverted, in labor and its wages
lost by the sick, terrified and dead, in a single epidemic, exceeds that
of maintaining an efficient sanitary service for the whole country for
a whole year. May I pause here and ask, "What are you doing to help
the medical men who are trying to bring about better methods of
sanitation and to adopt better, purer, and nobler plans of living in
order that sickness and untimely deaths may be averted? The fault
of the medical profession has always been its lack of bold assertions
of its rights; but it can no longer hesitate to declare to the trade,
commerce, agriculture, and manufacture that the health and vigor
which are essential to the prosperity of our people cannot be secured
by their ovm unskilled, uninformed efforts. They must learn, as the
military departments have learned, that the powerful armies and
navies are the results of able and untrammeled medical departments.
It is as unwise to confide the care of the health of a community to a
financier, however shrewd, as to expect a fishery commissioner to best
administer the affairs of the public school. The general health of our
country is a national consideration involving international coopera-
tion. No priority or clash of sectional interests should exist. Lines
are not drawn by epidemic intruders. No state barriers can be so
defensive and impenetrable that the toxiferous germ cannot pass
through.
I have spoken of uprisings of a spasmodic nature, which are only
tentative provisions in emergencies and bring no permanent good. The
scientific tendency of today is the hunting through microscopes instead
of using our human eyes upon visible abominations. The sanitarian,
official or amateur, needs only to look about him to be appalled at the
spectacle of indifference of rich and poor, high and low, to dangers far
greater than from any cholera microbes which confront them every
hour and it may be worth our while to consider some of these things,
which we complacently refuse to see, while w^e are looking through our
microscopes. The preventable disease which kills more of the human
race than cholera and yellow fever combined — and in its ordinarily
]52 FIRST NATIONAL; CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
slow process of killing lessens the productive power of a coimniuiity,
directly by the enfeeblement of its victims, and indirectly by its de-
mands upon members of households and charitable institutions for
the care of these chronic invalids — tuberculosis, is tolerated with as
little concern as that which the Creole exhibits for yellow fever and
malaria.
The consumptive, whose traits no professional acumen is required
to recognize, frequents our thoroughfares, sits beside us in unventi-
lated street cars and at hotel tables, occupies Pullman sleeping berths,
shares the steamship stateroom, wholly unrestrained and innocently
ignorant that he or she may be sowing the seeds of disease among deli-
cate women and children. Anyone may verify these statements who
uses his eyes for the purpose along the railway and coastwise steamer
routes to our invalid resorts. It is related by a traveler, a physician,
of repute, that while he was journeying he had observed and he said :
"While traveling by rail I was fellow-passenger with two invalids
in the advanced stage of consumption, enroute South, one of whom
occupied the opposite berth and the other one diagonally across the
car, so that I could see and hear them coughing and expectorating
with only such attention as well-intending, but unskilled relatives
could render. They had no vessels for receiving their sputa, which
w^ere discharged in their pocket handkerchiefs to be scattered over
pillows, coverlets and blankets. They left the car in the morning and
I saw those same berths — it is true, with change of linen, sheets and
pillow cases, but with no change of blankets, mattresses or pillows —
occupied that very night by other travelers, who were thus subject
to contact with a pathogenic microbe far more tenacious of life and
power of evil doing than the dreaded cholera spirillum."
One has only to sit in a crowded street car on a winter day and
watch the clouds of respiratory steam circling from the mouths
and nostrils of the unclean and diseased into the mouths and nostrils
of the clean and healthy, as the expiratory effort of the one corre-
sponds with the inspiratory act of the other. The road is short but
straight and sure from vomica and mucous patch to the receptive
nidus in another's body. Who that has had forced upon him an
aerial feast of cabbage, onions, garlic, tobacco, alcohol and gastric
effluvia of an old debauchee can doubt that aqueous vapor can trans-
port microscopic germs by the same route. I am here reminded of
the vastness of my subject and these graphic descriptions will furnish
you wdth ideas of what you may see if you will only use your powers
of observation, but all this will avail nothing unless it leads you to
advocate and adopt measures of prevention. You are being brought
into contact with the monster w^hich is eating away the human race,
GENERAL INDIVIDUAL HYGIENE 153
and you, as a people, must know how to care for yourselves and give
that timely advice to others which a waiting public ought to know.
You are reminded that we are being constantly exposed to diseased
conditions, and were we to care for our bodies as cities care for their
streets, alleys and the construction of buildings, imagine our appear-
ance.
I feel so profoundly impressed in regard to the spread of tuber-
culosis that I cannot refrain from further bringing before your minds
an imaginary picture for the purpose of further illustrating condi-
tions which are not of infrequent occurrence.
Suppose one is on a coast steamer, journeying to some southern
resort. The air is chilly and a dozen or more consumptives are hud-
dled together, trying to keep warm, and all doors and windows are
closed until the atmosphere has become so stifling and surcharged
with their emanations and the dried sputa, which they eject on every
side, that good breathing air is as scarce as diamonds in the fertile soil
of any productive state. One can easily escape during the day by
staying on deck and by sleeping in his stateroom with windows wide
open, but the curtains, carpets, pillows and mattresses are still all
saturated by you know not how many expectorating predecessors.
Smallpox, yellow fever and cholera are not to be compared to the dread
disease tuberculosis, which is fast becoming the absorbing topic of our
leading medical lights. The Iowa death report for the month of
December, 1912, states that there were for that month 167 deaths
from pneumonia, and 117 deaths from tuberculosis. It is believed thnt
there are more deaths from these two causes than any other. Tuber-
culosis is on the increase. Our cattle are becoming infected and the
question of conveying this disease through milk is being most seriously
considered. Milk inspection should be in force in every place where
milk is dispensed. Many physicians can recall their several experi-
ences where members of a family have occupied the same chamber and
bed with a gentle and beloved one, also those of tuberculous husbands
and wives, who have become ill like them with consumption attributed
to everything but the manifest cause.
Shall I now introduce to your notice another virulent communi-
cable disease, in the interest of helpless and innocent women and chil-
dren ? Shall I labor to convince you as husbands and those who expect
to be such, that there are numerous indisputable instances of innocent
infection of syphilis? This disease may be and has been contracted
from combs and brushes and rough-edged drinking vessels in hotels,
sleeping cars and boarding houses, from pens, pencils and paint
brushes that had been held between diseased lips, from dirty old bank
notes, from street venders' toys, from a lover's kiss, a stranger's caress,
154 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
or a nurse's ministrations. A case of a young lady in a not distant city
demonstrates the fact that syphilis can be conveyed by a lover's kiss.
The young man when told of the cause was confronted with the
aphorism: ''The way of the transgressor is hard." Supported by
an array of cases of infected children, young girls and elderly men
and women, the committee of the American Public Health Association
advocated the enactment of a law placing venereal diseases in the
category of other communicable affections and punishing its trans-
mission as a misdemeanor; but in this instance, as in many others,
it was thought by the self-righteous ones that it was best to seek
to exterminate this disease by ignoring its existence and never
uttering its name — the disease that has done more harm to mankind
than all the diphtheria, typhoid, smallpox, measles and scarlet fever
combined, which are so carefully isolated, and their statistics so regu-
larly collected and promulgated; a disease which travels with the
missionary to Asia, Africa and the Pacific and decimates bodies faster
than he can whiten souls. I think your eyes are becoming opened to
the fact that preventive measures should be speedilj^ adopted in order
that we may become a better people, mentally, morally and physically.
It is not expected that all who have eyes will see these things, or
those having ears will listen to w^hat is said. The idle, perverse
generation of the first century will have its following in this present
time and men and women will continue to do improper things that they
ought not to do, and leave undone the proper precautions they ought
to take, despite our w^arning, our imploring, our advice, or denuncia-
tion. However benevolent and beneficent the good physician's aim,
his unappreciated, unrequited and often unprofitable labor is enough
to deter him from w^hat has been derisively described as only an
effort to procure the survival of the unfit, and thus thwart Na-
ture's own attempt to rid the world of them. He encounters
another obstacle to success as aggravating as the disbelief in
the necessity for his work. The authorities listen to his warnings and
then employ their perfunctory and superficial methods of protection.
The medical profession has stated that absolute cleanliness is the
fundamental fact of sanitation, and in order to keep clean streets,
cleaners are set to work brushing the surface dirt into little heaps,
as seen in many cities on almost any day after a heavy rain or in the
spring, which passing vehicles again distribute or the winds carry into
open windows of adjacent residences. The refuse of the household is
deposited in old barrels, boxes, or vessels of some kind on the sidewalks
of crowded thoroughfares to be emptied after a time into collecting
carts or wagons, from which clouds of dust envelop passers and cir-
culate back into the house, living dust, for Manfredi found millions
GENERAL INDIVIDUAL HYGIENE 155
of microbes to the gram of the street dust of Naples, from which he
cultivated pus, malignant edema, tetanus, tubercle and septicemia.
Visit any alley and there find the offal of the kitchen, there observe
the swarm of flies feed upon the decomposing contents of exposed
garbage cans and buckets, and carry their tiny germ-laden booty into
the butcher-shop of the poor and the kitchen of the millionaire. "Who
can dispute the fact, for it has been demonstrated by bacteriologists
that dogs can transport diseases in their hair, and newspapers and
letters have carried smallpox from places where the disease was rag-
ing to distant lands, that a cloud of dust, a swarm of flies or a single
fly can disseminate cholera and become a focus of infection, which
would have been impossible had ordinary care been exercised in pre-
venting the exposure and properly destroying the discharges and ex-
creta of those already sick ?
In conclusion permit me to say that every city should undergo a
cleaning often, and here let me say that I am a firm believer in cre-
mation for all refuse matter in any city. Dumping grounds are only
pest-houses for the hatching of germs. Here flies congregate and are
the disseminators of disease. No city can be accounted clean until its
ordinances require every cellar door to be widely opened to the sun
and air, that royal pair of germicides ; every cellar to be emptied of
its refuse, every cellar wall and ceiling to be scraped and whitewashed,
every cellar floor to be taken up if rotten, and sprinkled with lime if
uncovered — a tedious and expensive process, but effective prevention,
costly as it must be, is cheap beside the outlay of a single epidemic. I
have noticed fruit stands uncovered on street corners, bakers' wagons
with their contents unprotected from the dust and filth of the streets,
and waiting stations whose filth was so gross that it beggars descrip-
tion.
At this point I desire to digress for the purpose of speaking briefly
upon a subject that is very closely allied to "Disease and Its Preven-
tion." There is a name closely connected with the life and work of
every individual, and that name is "Mother." Because of this inti-
mate relation I desire to speak briefly upon the subject :
god's motherhood
When we think of the mystery of life, and how the young are
blinded by ignorance, is it surprising that the innocent stumble into
the pitfalls of sin and dishonor? "We should be impressed with the
sacredness which comes with the life of the young girl. Her eyes
should be opened and she should be taught that God has destined her
to honored motherhood, and that any condition of life short of this is
out of harmony with the Di\ane plan. Motherliood, the sweetest of
156 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
God's gifts to humanity! The Creator nuulc no mistake when lie gave
this power to woman, and every sacred and Divine instinct should be
brought into congregated activity to preserve this God-given grace,
which is the right of every woman to keep inviolate. The young girl
should have the light, and as the morning sun begins to light the new
day, so should knowledge be imparted to the young girl as she merges
from her childhood into a sacred and newer relation — that of mother-
hood.
The time is now rife with splendid opportunities to begin a cam-
paign of education that will extend into the heart life of the on-coming
generation of young womanhood, in order that every young girl may
be early taught to have an exalted idea of the sacredness of her calling
and to preserve the sanctity of her own body. To this end a loiowledge
of the dangers which may surround her, through which she may fail of
a life in keeping with that high sense of appreciation of her individual
or personal purity, should be instilled into her forming mind. The
motherhood instirvct, beautiful and sublime in its extremest sense, is
but a perfect type of Deity and a co-partner with God for no other
purpose than to carry into the world in the generation of new beings,
the joys and pleasures of Eden. Perversity partakes of degradation
and a departure from the plan which God ordained in the beginning.
]May the lost joys of Eden be restored, and may we retrace our steps to
the Creator's original plan, and in the language of Milton:
"The chariot of paternal deity,
Flashing thick flames, wheel within wheel; undrawn,
Itself instinct with spirit."
The w^omanhood of the w-orld must be protected, and all godly men
must come to the rescue. Christianity is the one plan ordained of
God that will save, hence the inner life, the life we live, must be under
the control of the teachings of the lowdy Nazarene. The girls must
be taught the sacredness of their bodies, and men should learn that the
honor of women is a God-given grace and not to be violated. Let us
get back to the sacred side of life and to the teachings of former days,
living the life that will be void of offense. Teach the girls the things
that will save them from stumbling into the pitfalls of wicked men.
If the manhood of this country will not respond to the call of this
great reformation, then let the women take the reins of government
into their own hands and rid the world of the destructive agencies that
are destroying the motherhood, womanhood and morals of the home.
I mean by this that, should men not see the necessity of taking this
advanced step, then it is time for women to take matters into their own
hands and protect that which men refuse to do. Again, educate the
girls.
GENERAL INDIVIDUiUlj HYGIENE 157
I now close with a quotation from John W. Alvord : ' ' The charm
of life, that which gives it its zest and meaning, is to do useful work
for our time, our place and our generation; to realize that we are
needed in the progress of things, and even at times appreciated ; to
give more than we receive ; to place usefulness ahead of emolument ;
to push the world a little inch up-hill, to plant a flower in everybody's
garden but our own. ' '
FUNCTION OF THE DENTIST IN RACE BETTERMENT
C. N. Johnson, D.D.S., Editor, The Dental Review, Chicago, 111.
A consideration of this subject calls for a study of the significance
of the teeth and mouth as factors in individual and community health.
We are rapidly learning the lesson that to better the race we must
better the' individual, and if w^e are to better the individual, we must
add to his physical, mental and moral efficiency. It has long been
recognized, in a general way, that the condition of the teeth has much
to do with the health of the individual, but not till recently has the
direct relationship between oral hygiene and bodily health been defi-
nitely and undeniably traced. We all acknowledge that a poorly
nourished body must result in inefficiency, but we have not always
studied with sufficient care all of the causes or all of the results of
faulty nourishment. This question concerns us most in growing chil-
dren— ^not in the growing children of the well-to-do perhaps, so much
as those of the great mass of humanity who today are everywhere —
particularly in our large cities — being gradually assimilated into our
future citizenship.
Let one of these growing children be afflicted with decayed and
neglected teeth, what is the result? To say nothing of the suffering
which frequently follows with its long train of perverted function and
incapacity, we have the immediate result of inefficient mastication.
Without mastication we cannot have good digestion, without digestion
we cannot have assimilation and without assimilation we cannot have
nourishment. Many a child is starving for lack of the necessary ap-
paratus with which to properly prepare the food which is placed before
him. And the damage is not merely negative — it may become very
positive. The child who is illy nourished intuitively develops a crav-
ing for stimulants. Observation has demonstrated the fact that these
poor children who are suffering from defective teeth and cannot masti-
cate will consume enormous quantities of coffee or tea if they can get
it. And it is not fanciful to go one step further. It may seem a far
158 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCK ON RACE BETTERMENT
cry from doi'eetive teeth to drimkeiitiess, and yet it is a possible and a
perfectly logical sequence. We are not giving these children a fair
chance in the M'orld for place, preferment or race betterment if we
permit them to grow up with faulty mouth conditions.
Not only this but there is a quite unsuspected and a very real
danger to the individual and to the community as the result of defec-
tive teeth and broken down roots left in the jaws. The inevitable
abscesses from these roots discharge large quantities of pus to be
taken up in the circulation or carried into the stomach or lungs, creat-
ing a constant poison which should no longer be ignored. A general
infection of the system sometimes results from an abscess on a single
tooth, and it is not unusual to have a life lost from this cause. These
decayed cavities in teeth also form an ideal culture place for patho-
genic micro-organisms, which are a constant menace to the individual
as well as to others with whom the individual comes in contact. Cook,
of Chicago, demonstrated the tuberculosis bacillus in the roots of
pulpless teeth and traced it down through the jaws to the glands of
the neck. There is no question that there have been direct tuberculosis
infections from this source. One writer has gone so far as to say that
95 per cent of tuberculosis is due directly or indirectly to faulty mouth
conditions, that aside from the cases of direct infection from the roots
of teeth there are the numberless other cases where the system is
rendered susceptible to tuberculosis through inefficient mastication
and its consequent train of evils. We all know that the significant
thing in tuberculosis is the factor of susceptibility — that practically
every individual is exposed to the tubercle bacillus at one time or
another on account of its almost universal existence, and that the rea-
son some people escape its ravages is because of their resistance to its
encroachment. Let an individual be illy nourished or ''run down," as
the phrase is, let the system be impoverished through faulty assimila-
tion so as to develop a lack of tonicity, and the inevitable result is an
increased susceptibility to an attack of tuberculosis. The tubercle
bacillus seeks a field where the tissues are lowered in tone, and its in-
vasion is usually the result of a lessened resistance through bad air and
lack of proper nourishment. Reasoning from this it is not difficult
to connect this disease in its incipiency with defective and diseased
teeth.
In the public schools of Chicago there was at one time an epidemic
of scarlet fever. The health department quarantined every child
afflicted with the disease the regulation time, and yet scarlet fever kept
spreading. It was noticed that immediately following the return of
the quarantined children to school new cases developed among their
associates and it was clear that in some manner these children were
GENERAL INDIVIDUAL HYGIENE 159
spreading the disease even after they themselves had long since passed
the infective stage. It occurred to the then Commissioner of Health,
Dr..W. A. Evans, that there could be only two ways in which this
might happen — the child might carry the germs of scarlet fever in-
definitely in the tonsils or in the cavities of decayed teeth. His first
order was that no child who had suffered from scarlet fever should
be permitted to return to school till all decayed teeth were filled
and the mouth made hygienic. Immediately scarlet fever was stamped
out of the Chicago schools. Precisely the same thing happened in
the public schools of Valparaiso, Ind. Doctor Nesbit, the health
commissioner, succeeded through a similar regulation in arresting an
epidemic of scarlet fever which had persisted for so long a period that
it had practically paralyzed the school system of that city.
These instances are only the merest hint of what might be written
on the relationship of defective teeth to the community health, but
they must suffice for the present occasion, with the passing statement
that nowhere in all the realm of medicine is there a more important
question than this of oral hygiene or oral sepsis.
If, then, defective teeth are such a prime factor in physical in-
efficiency it may be well for us to consider briefly the prevalence of this
affection. Few people have any conception of the relative number of
children who are growing up with bad mouth conditions which prove a
handicap to themselves and a menace to the community. In an exami-
nation of the teeth of school children in various communities it has
been found that at least 90 per cent of them have decayed teeth. In
the public schools of Chicago, where nearly 70,000 children have been
examined, the percentage runs much higher than this. During the
month of November, 1913, there were examined 2,231 children, of
whom 2,224 were found with defective teeth. When only seven chil-
dren out of 2,231 in a given community are found with perfect teeth
it is surely time that our civic authorities and our boards of health
• give some heed to this important matter.
In conducting ten free dental infirmaries in the public school build-
ings of Chicago where the teeth of poor children are cared for we
are brought face to face with the appalling enormity of the need
of this service. The waiting lists of children seeking relief, and the
verdict of the school principals where the infirmaries are in operation
are sufficiently striking to impress even the casual observer with the
significance of the work. One principal writes: "We are very en-
thusiastic over the benefits derived from the work done by the dental
dispensary in this school. So far this year, emergency cases and very
badly neglected eases have kept the dentist busy every minute of the
IGO FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
school clay. Xccdlcss lo say llic improved physical condition of these
children has helped Ihciu accoiiiijlish more in the school room."
Another one says: "I think there is no (piestion about the need
of tliis dental work in the schools and the good that the service is
doing. "We find that ])i'aetically all of the children need attention,
and that very few of them have received any. Formerly I had to send
many children home with toothache. Now I send none."
This gives me the opportunity of remarking parenthetically that
if our school boards would spend one-half the amount in a campaign
for the amelioration and prevention of disease that they now spend
annually for teaching the "repeaters" who are made such by reason of
disease, it would not only be more humanitarian but it would be an
immense saving financially.
Another consideration in this connection having a direct bearing
on race betterment relates to the handicap to the boy or girl who is
allowed to grow up with deformities of the mouth and face due to
irregular teeth. In this age of keen competition for place and prefer-
ment the appearance of the individual so far as physiognomy is con-
cerned has much to do with his prospects for advancement. One strik-
ing case came under the writer's observation, and it seems worth re-
lating as illustrative of the point under consideration. In one of the
eastern schools for girls there is a most estimable woman endowed by
Nature with the mentality and executive ability to be principal of the
school, and to wield a large influence in the educational world. Only
one thing has prevented her advancement and kept her in a subordi-
nate position. "When she was a growing girl some one who had charge
of her — let us hope it was not her parents— permitted her to come to
womanhood mth such an irregularity of her teeth that it was im-
possible for her to cover her upper anterior teeth with her lip on
account of the undue protrusion of the upper incisors. This caused
such a deformity of her jaws and face that it detracted immeasurably
from the force of character of her countenance, and as one young lady
pupil expressed it. ""Without quite knowing the reason, somehow you
could never imagine her as a principal of a school."
These things give us pause and make us wonder if we have any
right to bring children into the world and allow them to grow up with
such physical handicaps as shall prevent them from having a fair
chance to make their way advantageously in life.
It is to the prevention of disease, the relief of suffering, and the
correction of deformities — thus adding to the efficiency and happiness
of the individual and the community — that the dentist is committed in
his function for the betterment of the race.
GENERAL INDIVIDUAL HYGIENE 161
UNBIOLOGICAL HABITS
William W. Hastings, Ph.D., Dean of the Normal School of Physical
Education, Battle Creek, Miehig-an.
Even a fish feels the downward pull of civilization and contracts
its diseases. In pure fresh water in a state of nature fish are healthy,
—in private fish ponds often affected with a sort of goitre. In the
hatcheries of Long Island the spread of disease among trout has
occasioned much alarm. Dr. Henry B. Ward, Head of the Biological
Department of the University of Illinois, and United States fisheries
expert for many summers on Lake Michigan and in Alaska, said to
me recently that the disease of trout in the Long Island hatcheries is
a sort of goitre, a proliferation of the thyroid, a condition of mal-
nutrition, either hyper-nutrition or ab-nutrition due to the lack of
adaptation of the food in quantity or quality. The trout are fed on
chopped liver.
He stated also that the salmon in a free state in Alaska are free
from cancer or any other abnormal growths under the normal condi-
tions which prevail in summer at least. During one summer with the
aid of eight Chinese butchers he inspected a half million fish, 10,000 of
them himself. The Chinese were paid so much for all specimens re-
ported and a higher rate for small defects. There were deformed fins,
evidently due to some mechanical injury, but only two cases of abnor-
mal groM^ths out of a half million, one an esophageal tumor, a benign
growth, and the other a tumor of the viscera not of a malign character,
a dropsical mass, a cell proliferation but not cancerous.
The general effect of the domestication of wild animals is to reduce
the vital energy and the tonicity of the neuro-muscular system — to
subtract spirit, strength, endurance. In case of most diseases of ani-
mals no attempt is made to trace them to mankind and to claim
immediate human infection. It is an established fact, however, that
tuberculosis is transmissible from man to animals and conversely.
Cats are a very common carrier of diphtheria and are especially sub-
ject to throat troubles. Whatever the inter-relationship of human and
animal diseases, it is clear that the same conditions which tend to in-
duce diseases in animals give rise to similar diseases in men ; namely,
uncleanliness, ill adapted food, undue confinement, and inactivity due
to segregation and lack of necessity to seek food.
The first effect of such confinement upon an eagle, a leopard or any
other animal of very active habits is to provoke an apathetic, dis-
couraged or sullen attitude which may result in a state of malnutrition
and ultimate physical decline or death.
These first ill effects of the captivity of very wild things are patent
(7)
162 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
to all, but not the permanent racial efit'eets on domestieated animals
for the reason that Ave have become so accustomed to these as not to
observe such points. The popular view in fact assumes that contact
with man is beneficial, that without his over-lordship the poor things
would starve, ^^■ould revert in type, the fat sleek Jersey and Holstein
become wiry, lean, wild cattle, the dog regain his wolfishness, the race
horse become a nnistang. Usually, however, the loss would be one of
size and adaptation of use but would be in the nature of a distinct gain
in strength and vitality. The bear or wolf dog is not permitted by
the experienced hunter to lie by the fire and fatten, but is exposed to
the same battle with Nature as the w^olf with which he is to fight and
is kept lean and hungry on a m.oderate diet and by training.
Only in rare cases have men understood the nature of animals suffi-
ciently well to conserve their finest qualities, speed, strength, etc.
The intelligent trainer of race horses for example not only feeds but
bathes and exercises his horses. All this the wild horse does for himself.
Even a cow or a cat keeps the skin clean and hair brushed and the
roots active and live.
The last thing a man is learning to do is to restore and conserve his
primitive virility and the last and hardest thing he has to learn in
method is that this process must be one of return to Nature.
Our whole contention then in the discussion of unbiological habits
is against the habits of civilization, and the touchstone used in sifting
out the habits that menace vitality, longevity and racial vigor is and
always must be, ''Is this habit natural? Does it tend to produce the
normal individual ? ' '
A man at any moment is but the summation of all that he has
thought and done, he is a bundle of habits ; function makes structure.
Unnatural habits mean degeneration or subtraction from the vital
reserves and longevity, and normal habits mean on the other hand
development, long life and a stronger heredity for the coming genera-
tion.
"What is true of one man is true of an aggregation of men, a nation-
ality or a race — with the added fact that social customs involved in
segregation are the most important factor in the determination of in-
dividual habits. Climate and social habits are principally responsible
for racial types; the racial stock doubtless for centuries affects the
type thru inheritance of physique and thru traditions as to social cus-
toms.
Our country in its natural environment appears more favorable to
racial development than European countries. There are differences in
development in various parts of the United States which appear to be
due to segregation of population more than to climate.
GENERAL INDIVIDUAL HYGIENE 163
Diseases are more prevalent in states containing large city popula-
tions. Nervous diseases so common in cities are quite properly termed
diseases of civilization. Incessant noise, foul air, exposure to infec-
tious diseases, excess of food and ill adaptation of the same, the
habitual use of stimulants and narcotics and muscular inactivity, are
some of the principal causes of race degeneracy in cities.
Dr. B. A. Gould and Dr. J. H. Baxter both observe the physical
superiority of American Indians and white descendants of European
stock over emigrants from the same countries who enlisted in our Civil
War. Baxter demonstrates the physical superiority of recruits from
Western and Southern over Eastern states, and the greater preva-
lence of diseases, especially of nervous diseases, in states containing
large city population.
Thru the work of boards of health the death rate is being reduced
in some cases below the average for the country. Chicago for example
has in the last ten years lowered its death rate to less than the average
for the country ; in fact, city people are becoming very much better in-
formed as to the laws of health than country people. Only the com-
pulsion of the necessity of covering distances in the every-day round,
and the so-called inconveniences of country life which compel physical
activity, are responsible for the degree of health possessed by country
people. It appears that most men will not do muscular work unless
they must. In most ordinary occupations and the daily round there is
little or no work for arms and trunk muscles. We are, therefore,
poorly developed in the upper bod}^ We still have legs, but autos and
street cars are fast depriving us of even these.
Race degeneracy has so touched the brains of some that they are
willing to call degeneracy development and to proclaim the evolution
of a new race, in which the. body becomes attenuated and the head
mammoth-like in contrast, as in our newspaper cartoons. But big
brains demand good, rich red blood, as much as do muscles, and how
may one provide this except thru a big vital system.
The student of any species of life of today is not content with
identification and abstract classification of life; he studies it in its
relationships, seeks to know its enemies and its friends. The biologist
is of necessity also an entomologist and a student of horticulture.
Conservation is the watchword of the country. The conventions of
the Christmas holidays, whether of the various departments of the
American Association for the Advancement of Science in Atlanta, or
of the Athletic Associations meeting in New York, were full of the sub-
ject of human conservation. It comes to us from every angle, scientific
and practical.
164 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
Millions hav(> been expended by the United States and state govern-
ments in the suppression of hog cholera, the boll-weevil, gypsy moth,
etc., but only recently has man awakened to the fact of race degen-
eracy, and attempted to study himself and to ascertain the unbiological
habits which lie at the root of the decline in racial vigor and to remove
them.
The first and most obvious realization of forces inimical to life
has been that of infectious diseases, diseases communicable by contact
and aggravated in their spread by congestion of population.
By the elimination of such acute diseases the average length of life
has in one generation been increased ten years. Life expectation
is now forty years instead of thirty. This is more remarkable when it
is remembered that the death rate from diseases of heart, kidneys,
lungs and other chronic diseases due to incorrect personal habits has
nearly doubled in the same period. More men live to be forty but
fewer men live to be sixty and seventy and a hundred.
In searching for the cause for this condition we are led to the con-
clusion that there is a prevailing lack of vitality or reserve force
enabling men to throw off the more virulent germs of disease, and that
we are crippled in various ways, locally weakened in lungs, stomach,
liver, etc., by unwholesome personal habits.
Low vitality and reserve force are principally responsible for the
increase of the more virulent germ diseases, and the prevalence of
anemia, neurasthenia, insanity and other so-called diseases of civiliza-
tion or urbanization. Thru this lowered vitality of people in general
we have discovered the physiological effects of various unbiological
habits as was not possible when men were as a rule more vigorous.
Ditch diggers, coal heavers, miners or other men who do strong
muscular work, perspire freely and live in the open air, may neglect
many habits of life which are conducive to health and development,
and escape serious illness for many years, but the man leading a
sedentary life cannot do so. A man doing heavy muscular work, be-
cause of the free perspiration induced by his daily labor, and life in
the open air, may be able to keep his skin more or less active without
suitable baths, may preserve his teeth thru the chewing of coarse food
and throw off the bacilli cultures of the mouth thru the antiseptic
strength of the mouth secretions due to his splendid vitality rather
than by the use of a tooth brush, may eat an excess of meat, drink a
goodly amount of alcohol and escape immediate disease or breakdown,
but for any violation of the order of Nature he must suffer a loss of
immediate energy which corresponds to his power of resistance. There
is no escape from Nature. She exacts her due. If a man takes poisons
GENERAL INDIVIDUAL HYGIENE 165
into his system thru contracting drug habits, if he overeats (a most
common American failing) or eats ill adapted food, he must lose the
days or hours necessary to correct the mistake — and these days or
hours are not simply lost out of life but are subtracted from life ex-
pectation. Nature is inexorable.
Of all the habits which militate against life, the most deleterious is
the muscular inactivity which is involved in city life. With the in-
creased specialization of industries and the increase in work done by
machinery, few occupations involve any hard muscular work. Urban
life makes comfort and convenience and saving time its slogan, makes
rapid transportation one of its chief efforts. No man does any work
for himself except that connected with his own business, and that is
specialized until there is no variety of effort. In few occupations is
there any muscular effort left. So much is done by machinery, even
in the country, the greater part of the old muscular work of the farm
has been eliminated. There is nothing in the city from childhood up to
provoke muscularity, strength and organic vigor and everything to en-
courage the opposite. Inactivity is the most destructive of all un-
biological habits. Street cars and autos discourage even walking to
and from work. One may obtain a degree of health from the provision
of the proper air, water, food, baths, clothing and rest periods, and
the prevention of the spread of contagious diseases ; in short, by the
provision of a wholesome environment, but these negative factors will
not produce vigor, reserve force, the power to throw off disease and
the power to live long and to perpetuate the race. These can result
only thru every-day out-of-door exercise and recreation. Give us back
the physical habits of Merrie Old England.
The deteriorating effect of the unbiological habits of our modern
civilization upon the heredity, the growth and development of chil-
dren, is manifested in the decay of the teeth indicating constitutional
feebleness, in the great increase in eye disorders, in defects of hearing,
adenoids, enlarged tonsils, anemia, chorea, epilepsy, feeble mindedness
and other diseases of the nervous system. Over half the children in
city schools have some of these defects. The recent investigations in
Battle Creek in connection with the Physical and Mental Perfection
Contests have demonstrated the possibility of nearly perfect children
thru good heredity and proper care. Eugenics and euthenics should
be the study of all parents.
You will pardon my temerity in summing up a few of the simple
things which we all know as affecting the life of the individual and
the race :
It is better to have fillings in your teeth than to lose them entirely,
166 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
l)iit ht'ttcr still to choose ^ood |)iift'iits and use n ^ooil tooth Ijnish freely
and not need the Hllings at all.
It is better to take the morning cool hath daily, cleanse the skin and
tone up the arteries than to put all the work of elimination on the
lungs and kidneys and contract some chronic disease at fifty.
It is better to take time and take it regularly for proper elimina-
tion than to suiifer fatigue and loss of the power of mental concentra-
tion from the reabsorption of poisons into the system.
It is better to stand up straight like a man than to approximate the
all-fours habit of our cousins, the apes, and contract spinal cvirvature,
limit vital capacity and suffer ultimately from nervous and lung
troubles.
It is better to eat lightly and simply of digestible food rather than
to consume half the energy produced by this same food in the proc-
esses of preparation for assimilation, better also to abstain from
headaches and other symptoms of autointoxication due to wrong feed-
ing. Better to leave the young pig in the mire than to help him out
by being compelled to expend your vital energy in his elimination.
It is better to sleep in a close room long and laboriously than not to
sleep at all, but best to sleep with windows open wide or out of doors
and save an hour of life daily.
It is better to allow yourself some amusement daily for a. few
minutes at least, but not preferably for several hours in a stuffy theatre
or public dance hall until late at night. We Americans are losing our
mental poise partly by indulging in the tense exciting things rather
than retaining the simple home amusements of our English forebears.
It is better to do resistive exercises in your own room or formal
gymnastics in the gymnasium than to get no exercise at all and no
neuro-muscular tone, but best of all to get out of doors and work or
play where God meant you to be. Men require recreation, relaxation
for strong life and long life.
"It is better to marry than to burn," Paul says, but better still to
remain single and burn out your life in the service of humanity than to
marry without health and without perfect mating. Even the birds
know better than this. If Avedded life is the most natural and most
important matter in the world individual and national, why not pre-
pare for it by seeking the greatest possible physical perfection and
mentality and real character and by a study of the nature and func-
tion of true love, which is the highest force in all Nature.
GENERAL INDIVIDUiVL HYGIENE 167
THE INCREASE OF INSANITY
James T. Searcy, A.B., M.D., LL.D., Superintendent Alabama Hospitals for
, Insane, Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
As our Chairman has said, "It is the unexpected that happens.'"
I would have prepared myself to speak more succinctly and concisely,
within ten minutes, on such a subject, if I had knowTi I should have to
make a talk,
I am called sometimes down in Alabama the "Head Crazy Man
of the State, ' ' because I am at the head of about twenty-two hundred
insane persons. About eight hundred of them are negroes and about
fourteen hundred are whites. My following is increasing faster than
any other one class of people in the state.
We feel ourselves discouraged often by the rate of increase of the
patients who are coming into the insane hospitals. The population of
the state of Alabama, according to the census (during the ten years
which the census included) , increased sixteen per cent ; the admissions
into the insane hospitals increased forty-five per cent — sixty per cent
increase among the negroes and thirty per cent among the whites.
These are appalling figures, but "misery likes company," and we
can parallel them all over the United States — not like them exactly
in each state, for they differ. The general population of the United
States increased eighteen per cent, and that of the insane hospitals
increased twenty-eight per cent during the years of the census. In
Alabama we have about two million two hundred thousand people, and
we have twenty-two hundred patients in the insane hospitals, or about
one patient to every thousand of the population. In Georgia they
have one to about seven or eight hundred; in Virginia one to six or
seven hundred; in New York, they have one to less than three hun-
dred. In these states up this way (toward Michigan), it is about one
to every four hundred or five hundred.
Something is wrong. This increase of insanity is prevailing in
civilized countries more than in other countries, and, apparently, the
more civilized, the greater the increase. This is evidently the effect of
civilization.
The increase of insanity is a perplexing question. A man who is
a psychiatrist, in charge of persons of defective brains, is cross-fired
from all directions every day with inquiries as to what is the matter.
"Why is insanity increasing at such a rate ?
Insanity represents the extreme end of human deficiency and de-
fectiveness. People in insane hospitals have reached such an extreme
grade of mental deficiency and defectiveness that the state has had to
interpose and take charge of them. Short of that grade there are
1()S FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
tlioiisiuuls at lar^'c, oi" every ^rade. Do you know tliat in the schools in
this country there are more children dullards today, not able to keep
lip with their classes, than there were five years ago? Also there are
more wayward boys and bad girls. Among adults, all types of
aberrance are increasing. We are building institutions — penal, cor-
rectional and charitable — to benefit all these, by placing such people
in them. We cannot build them fast enough. We have attempted
to relieve the insane hospitals by starting epileptic colonies, reforma-
tories for inebriates, schools for feeble-minded, and many such institu-
tions. They are full. Still the insane hospitals are crying for more
room.
I am asked what causes prevail in civilized, more than in other
countries, tending to this. One of the reasons, I throw out as a sug-
gestion is that we have been taught to value all human lives alike.
All our social work runs on these principles. Those who are defective
and deficient reap quick advantage of these opportunities and live to
adult life. Then they multiply themselves. Civilization is multiplying
the deficient and defective classes in that way — by giving an equal
valuation to all alike. In the uncivilized stage of our history they
dropped out.
The kejmote of this Conference should be to deny that all are
alike valuable; to show that there are grades in excellences and in
deficiencies; and to show that the hereditary multiplication of the
deficient and defective ought to be discouraged in every way.
There is another reason ; it is in harmony with a good deal of the
talk you have heard here at this Conference.
We have in medicine a line of drugs that are much used ; some-
times called ''anesthetics" and "anodynes." These range all the way
through a long list. There are chloroform, ether, nitrous oxid, chloral
solutions, the alkaloids that we get out of opium, like morphin, codein
and heroin, and its solutions, paregoric and laudanum. There are
cocaine from cocoa leaves, nicotine from tobacco, alcohol from ferment-
ing material, caffein from coffee, tea and cola-nuts. The effect of
these drugs is to chemically act upon the sensory nerves and brain
tracts — because they are more delicate than any other structures.
They make a person at first feel better ; when he takes them, he likes
them ; but, secondarily, the repeated use of any one of them impairs
these nerve structures to such a degree that he feels generally bad
when the drug is withdrawn. The habitual user of any one of them,
I don't care which (whether caffeine, nicotine, alcohol, cocaine, mor-
phine— through the whole list), is dragging a lengthening chain of dis-
comfort, which shows itself when the drug is withdrawn. A drug
GENERAL INDIVIDUAL HYGIENE 169
habitue is nothing more nor less than a person with that kind of im-
paired nerve structures. He feels bad from the chemic effects of such
a drug and he knows he can take more to relieve it and he does it.
Their continued use, as luxuries, is having a general effect through-
out all the civilized land. It is producing in this country "dope
diatheses." Children are born "feeling bad." A child of parents,
both of them, or either of them, taking any of these agents, comes
into the world with that kind of discomforted nervous system. He
"feels bad," he is "born tired," and takes to the use of these drugs
just as readily as a duck takes to water. We are increasing in this
country this kind of neurasthenia : it is said to be more prevalent in
America than anywhere else. And we are doing it in this very way.
Increasing insanity comes as a final result of bad heredity and
drug abuse of the brain, both most prevalent in civilized countries.
THE INCREASE OF INSANITY
Professor Walter F. Willcox
Almost everybody who has studied insanity believes it is on the
increase and at a very alarming rate. I have no desire to question,
much less to deny, that statement. At the same time, I think there
are reasons for believing that, if it is increasing, the increase is much
less rapid than the figures, on their face, would indicate.
For example, several years ago a paper was written by one of the
foremost of English statisticians on the increase of insanity in Eng-
land.* He believed that there was no conclusive evidence, from the
statistics, to warrant the inference that insanity was on the increase.
The Royal Statistical Society gave the writer a silver medal, on the
ground that his was the most valuable statistical paper of the year.
How is it in the United States? No such careful study as was
then made by Humphreys has ever been made of the American figures
indicating an apparent increase of insanity in the United States. But
it should be pointed out (as to some extent qualifying the apparent in-
ference from the facts and figures) that, in the first place, insanity is
preeminently a disease of old age, and as a people we are living longer
than we did a generation ago ; and thus many more people are living
into the insanity age ; and, in the second place, our whole evidence re-
garding the increase of insanity refers to its increase in hospitals and
other institutions. Many people, who a generation ago or even ten
years ago, would have been taken care of in their families and never
gone upon the records are now admitted to institutions. They thereb/
* Noel A. Humphreys, "The Alleg-ed Increase of Insanity," in Royal
Stat. Society, Journal LXX (1907), pp. 203-233.
170 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
tend to swell the apparent increase of insanity, wliich after all means
simply the increase of recorded insanity.
Whether insanity is on the increase or not, I do not profess to be
able to say. All the evidence of the facts and figures indicates thnt
it is, but there are so many qualifications of those figures before one
can get their correct interpretation, that I think we need in this coun-
try a thoroughly disinterested, competent and qualified study of the
subject. I feel sure that, if such a study were made, it would show that
the increase that exists, if it does exist, is far less than the increase
showm on the face of the figures. I am disposed to say that some in-
crease would be found but nothing like the increase we ordinarily hear
about.
DETERIORATION" OF THE CIVILIZED WOMAN
Richard Root Smith, M.D., Grand Rapids, Mich.
The subject assigned me demands a note of explanation — perhaps
I may say warning. I do not believe that modern woman is degener-
ating or deteriorating. In our estimate of any individual as to his po-
tential ability to obtain happiness for himself and to act for the good
of his family, his neighbor, and the state, we recognize roughly cer-
tain factors — the moral, the intellectual, and the physical. Eecog-
nizing in the abstract (and I may say concretely) in many individuals
their close interdependence, w^e may yet discuss one or another of these
factors independently.
In his present state, man's moral side, his intellectual side, and his
physical side, each possesses certain elements of varying strength and
wealmess, and the estimate of any individual, to be impartial, must
recognize this fact and take both into account.
It is the purpose of this paper to point out and to describe certain
physical defects in civilized women which we must regard as marks
of deterioration, since they are largely inherited, and represent a less
perfect physical development, less strength, less endurance, and a
lessened power to cope with life 's problems. These defects in varying
degrees are found in a large percentage of our women. I must empha-
size at the beginning that in pointing them out we must at the same
time recognize woman 's splendid intellectual attainments, her superior
moral status, and that physically she shows an endurance and strength
equal to many of the strenuous demands upon her. In estimating any
individual case, we must also recognize her strength as well as her
weakness; otherwise we shall err into an unwarranted pessimism.
Since, however, these defects interfere with her efficiency and her wel-
GENERAL INDIVIDU.y^ HYGIENE 171
fare, they may well be studied in order that we may cope with them
more successfully.
The word ' ' deterioration ' ' must not be taken here in any progres-
sive sense. We have no adequate reason for believing that women are
more vigorous or less so than for many generations back. We have
certain factors in modem civilized life that are tending toward her
physical betterment; others that are acting toward impairment.
These factors vary greatly among different civilized nations, and still
more in different walks of life. More than this, these defects are not
confined to civilized women alone, but may be found among those
classified as uncivilized, since here also we find certain factors in cus-
tom and environment tending to the same end.
It is well that we begin by defining the mature physically ideal
woman — ideal from the standpoint of vigor, strength and en-
durance. We find her in Greek art in the often quoted examples
of the Venus de ]\Iilo and the Venus de iledici. The impres-
sion we obtain at first glance from such figures is that of vigor and'
strength. The body is sturdy, compact and fully developed. It is
well muscled and covered with sufficient fat to round out the angles
— in other words, well nourished. From the standpoint of vigor she is
perfect, and from the standpoint of beauty the best ideal that art has
produced — the two correspond closely.
These figures have, of course, been idealized. In actual life we
find but few women who attain this perfection. Many, however, are
of the same vigorous type and closely approach it. The thorax is
large and deep, and there- is plenty of width at the waist line.
I am showing you here a figure taken from a photographic art
study. You will note the same characteristics seen in the ideal figures
just presented. The body is well developed, strong and well nourished.
There is perhaps no better criterion of woman's natural vigor than
the size and form of the chest. In women of this type it is large and
deep, rendering the upper abdomen of ample capacity.
Modem conditions of life (environment) vary enormously, and it
might be seriously questioned whether the physical make-up of which
I have been speaking, in its highest degree, is best suited to indoor
living and a physically inactive life, for such women as a rule tend to
obesity as they approach middle life and develop the troubles attend-
ing it; but under circumstances which call for considerable bodily
exertion it is well suited. We frequently have women of this type who
have cared for their homes, who have reared large families, and have
had the ordinary amount of responsibility, care and stress which al-
most all modern conditions impose, tell us that they rarely if ever have
known fatigue or physical distress. Certainly under all conditions of
172 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
lifo a considerable degree of vigor as depicted in these figures shown
you is necessary to meet its conditions efficiently and maintain health.
Let us now briefly describe, in its most essential characteristics,
another type of woman — a deteriorated type. This is a type or body
habit variously named by medical men — the asthenic habit because
of her lack of vigor and strength; the neurasthenic habit because oE
her unstable nervous system ; the phthisical habit because of the pre-
disposition to tuberculosis; the enteroptotic habit because her ab-
dominal organs are prolapsed.
Our first impression is that of frailness. She is slender and has
but little fat — is in consequence angular. She strikes you as being
lacking in vigorous development — her muscles are slender and small.
These are the fundamental characteristics of such a woman. Asso-
ciated with and dependent upon this we find a small, shallow chest,
contracted at its lower end and distinctly narrowing the capacity of
the upper abdomen. We may note also that the neck, legs and arms
jare longer than usual. If we examine more closely w^e may note that
the other tissues partake of this same frailness, and that the bones are
small. Very characteristic is the softness or fiabbiness of her tissues ;
the skin is of fine texture and the features delicate. It is this delicacy
of form and feature, which have accentuated her feminine qualities,
that have led artists at different periods of art to regard her as
the highest type of beauty.
I am showing you, for example, a picture from the gallery at
Dresden, painted during the middle ages. Note the slenderness of the
body, the length of the limbs, and the small shallow chest.
Closely coupled with this form is almost constantly found a nervous
instability, which is perhaps its most serious feature. It is by no
means confined to this type of woman but is here peculiarly difficult
to manage.
Another common and more important factor is that she is lacking
in muscular development. She fatigues easily and is, therefore, unable
to maintain her body in a normal attitude in spite of her lightness in
weight. We see this evidenced in round shoulders, an abnormal
straightness of the back in the lumbar region, and flat foot. These
muscular insufficiencies are not essential parts of her lack of vigor, for
under satisfactory hygienic conditions they are often not outspoken.
They follow easily, however, when she is subjected to long-continued
fatiguing influences.
If we examine the abdominal viscera of this frail type we will in-
variably find them more or less prolapsed, the prolapse being on the
whole proportionate to the degree of body frailness. The kidneys,
especially the right, the stomach, and the large intestine are the organs
GENERAL INDIVIDUAL HYGIENE 173
most affected. The kidneys normally lie, one on either side, high up in
the abdomen, beneath the diaphragm at the back. They cannot ordi-
narily be reached by the examining hand. In these frail women as
a rule the right kidney (occasionally the left also) is found to a
greater or lesser degree prolapsed, in the pronounced cases even coming
to occupy a position over the brim of the pelvis.
By means of the X-ray and the bismuth meal the position of the
stomach and the large intestine is easily demonstrated. In all of these
frail women we find, as stated, a prolapse of the lower border of the
stomach and of the large bowel. The stomach is stretched out, its
lower border coming to occupy a much lower position than normally.
This is but a hint at the vast amount of work that has been done
by medical men in recent years, seeking to obtain knowledge in regard
to the prolapse, its complications, its relation to health, and its relief.
The problems are most complex and as yet there is little uniformity of
opinion on many of the points involved. Students of the question are
agreed, however (first), that a simple prolapse of the abdominal vis-
cera, when unattended by complication, frequently exists without giv-
ing rise to trouble ; the digestive functions are satisfactorily main-
tained; (second) that disturbances of digestion with stagnation of
food products in the gastro-intestinal tract are frequently associated
with the prolapse, and that this disturbance of function gives rise to
the gravest consequences as far as the maintenance of the health of
the individual is concerned. Numerous mechanical devices in the way
of abdominal supporters have been in use for a number of years, and
recently a number of operations have been suggested and carried out,
wdth the idea of obtaining relief. In spite of some encouraging results,
these operations must be said to be more or less snb judice. I speak of
this phase of the problem with w^hich -we have to deal in frail women,
to call attention to its existence and frequent seriousness.
I have pointed out to you the main characteristics of the two types
of women, the one reflecting vigor, the other weakness. If we examine
a large number of women in various walks of life, we will find usually
that each is a mixture of these two types. In a large number of women
the defects are so slight or so offset by points of strength as to be in-
consequential ; in others the points of weakness are so great as to re-
sult in marked limitations in her activities — ^marked suffering or even,
hopeless invalidism. We may judge each one on several points — First :
the sturdiness or frailness of ber body ; second : the stability of her
nervous system or lack of it ; third : her state of nutrition and her
muscular sufficiency or lack of it.
A frail woman does not necessarily suffer ill health. She may be
well in the sense in which we ordinarily use the term. An unusually
17-4 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
proocl nervous system will often go a long way toward maintaining
lioaltli and efficiency, and it is common to see such women taking their
l)l;u'e ill tlie social system and maintaining it as well as their more vigor-
ous sisters. Taken as a class, however, these women are not as able
as others to withstand the strains of life. Care and responsibility, in-
door living, overwork, and child-bearing, if carried to any excess, bring
her to a state Avhich we may roughly describe as fatigue. In popular
speech she breaks down. She develops a train of symptoms as well
defined as any of the well-known diseases. She is irritable, nervous
and easily fatigued ; she develops mental symptoms often designate*!
as neurasthenia ; she shows signs of muscular wealmess in an abnormal
attitude of body ; she has disturbances of many of her bodily func-
tions, notably those of digestion, menstruation and urination; also
eye and heart symptoms of functional origin, though these .less com-
monly. She has backache, pains in the side and a feeling of weight
in the lower abdomen. Many of these frail women are constantly suf-
fering from symptoms which may be placed in one or more of these
groups ; others easily develop them when under strain and but few if
any can withstand it if prolonged. Indoor living or occupation, if the
hours are long, is especially harmful unless properly balanced by out-
door living and rest. In the contemplation of industrial conditions,
it is these women who should perhaps receive one's first consideration,
barring those actually suffering from disease.
As to child-bearing, the worst of these women are manifestly unfit
for marriage and child-bearing, but in those of less degree we may not
nnder present social conditions advise against it without grave con-
sideration of all the consequences. Child-bearing and child-rearing
are essential to the happiness of the majority of women (though fre-
quently not recognized) and necessary to the development of character,
which in turn makes for greater nervous stability. In any instance,
however, it is apt to be a severe tax upon her health. This applies not
only to child-bearing, but more particularly to the labor of rearing the
offspring. These women need careful supervision during this period.
As a class these women do not lack intelligence — in fact, they are
more capable mentally than the average. They are certainly not less
moral. An active brain, in fact, and an unusual conscientiousness
lead them to go far beyond their lessened powers of physical endur-
ance.
If we examine into the early history of the frail woman we will
find that, in all marked instances at least, her fundamental characteris-
tics may be traced to childhood, and back of this to her immediate
progenitors. The parents and grandparents are one or more of them
of like type. This is a fact well known to those who have investigated
•GENERAL INDIVIDUAL HYGIENE
175
the matter, and which I have had occasion to verify by questioning
some three hundred women on this point. Of all the factors in making
the frail woman what she is, that of heredity is unquestionably the
strongest.
Such womeri have their counterpart in the frail child, with the
same fundamental characteristics of slenderness, thinness of muscle,
lack of fat and tissue tone, and backwardness in vigorous development.
Children vary at different periods of their growth in body form. To
bring out these characteristics we may place a frail child alongside of
one of vigorous type and similar age.
Up to ten or twelve years of age we find but little evidence of
actual prolapse of the organs — the prolapse is not congenital but ac-
quired during adolescence. At about eight years of age, or what is
known as the bisexual age, a widening of the pelvis becomes
apparent. This increases more rapidly at about puberty, with a
corresponding or compensatory narrowing of the waist line. In vigor-
ous women this narrowing is inconsequential. In the frailer ones it is
one of the mechanical factors, though by no means the only and most
important one, in the displacement of her organs.
We find in these children, the type of which we are speaking, that
many show signs of muscular insufficiency in round shoulders, curva-
ture of the spine, and weak foot. I am showing you normal children
and then those in whom these deformities are well marked. These
abnormalities denoting muscular weakness or insufficiency are not con-
fined to frail children but are very frequent among them, and similar
to those found in frail women later in life.
The lesson is obvious. It is safe to say that it will be many years
before eugenics will do much to eradicate the frail individual, but a
very encouraging fact is that a great deal may be done to better mat-
ters by attempts to overcome this child's tendencies. These children
need an outdoor life, an abundant, nutritious diet, a correction of their
deformities, the removal of offending adenoids and tonsils or other con-
ditions interfering with their nutrition, a regulation of their school
duties and exercises graduated to their individual needs. I believe
this can best be done through our schools and that when wisely under-
taken and carried out on a large scale we mil do much to do away
with the frail, neurotic woman that now forms such a serious problem
in modern life. Intelligent school inspection and the outdoor school
already inaugurated in this country will find a most profitable field
for its activities when once the frail child is clearly recognized as an im-
portant entity and one that must be dealt with during the years of
growth.
176 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
Old Age
(Acting Chairman Creegan: Before I call upon the next speaker, I
i-eo-ret to announce that our honored President will be obliged, before the
next address is concluded, to leave the hall and make his preparations to re-
turn to his home in Now York. I am veiy sure that I speak for this entire
body when I say to Doctor Smith that it has been a benediction to all of us
to have him with us these days as our presiding officer. I count it one of the
honors of my life, Sir, to have the privilege of sitting- by your side, to use my
voice when yours seemed not to reach to the utmost part of the gTeat hall
where our meetings have been held. Your counsel, your planning for these
meetings, has been a blessing to us. Your life has been an eventful one. I
undertook the other day to make out a memorandum of the various institutions
with which you have been connected, and I concluded it was too long to read
to this audience. Those of us who came here feeling that we would make our
arrangements to retire from active life at seventy or seventy-five, have changed
our minds. "We have found an example worthy to be copied. Now we want
to take you into our confidence and we want to invite ourselves, if you will
permit us, to meet you eight years from now when you celebrate your one
hundredth anniversary, hale and hearty as you now are with that splendid
phenomenal memoiy untouched by the shafts of time. We want to meet and
celebrate that event with you. In the meantime may God's richest blessing rest
upon you, our dear friend, and highly honored President.)
President Stephen Smith, M.D., New York, K Y.
I regret very much that I have engagements that will compel me to
leave today and that I cannot remain until the close of the Conference.
I wish to express my gratitude to Doctor Creegan for his great kind-
ness in relieving me of the burdens of conducting these great meetings,
which I thought probably I had not the voice to meet. That occasion
led me to assume the position that befits the occasion that I mentioned
In my opening address, the position of silence and meditation.
During the period of this Conference I have enjoyed immensely the
discussions that have been going on. The Conference has grown con-
stantly in my estimation in its greatness and especially in its possi-
bilities for the future. It seems to me that it combines in its program
and in its purposes about all that is to be done or said in favor of im-
proving the race. I look forward to this as the beginning of perhaps a
new era. I think the interest that has been shown here shows the great
interest of the public, that the public is ripe for a movement that will
probably, as a gentleman said yesterday, * ' extend throughout the entire
country and give a new life to all our efforts for the benefit of the
race."
I am congratulated somewhat on my age. When people speak of
that, I generally look around to see whom they are talking about. It
is a familiar thing to me to be called old. I was reminded of it not
long ago in a way that was very pleasant by coming into a crowded ear
GENERAL INDIVIDUAL HYGIENE 177
and having a gray-haired lady some distance away beckon me to take
her seat. I told her that I thought I was quite as capable of standing
as she was, but she insisted, so I took the seat and bowed her my
acknowledgment.
An old lady patient came to me the other day. I met her at a
gathering. I think she is past eighty. She seemed trembly and very
much excited and had not seen me for several years and wanted to
know how I maintained such health at such an age, and I said, ''I
never talk with old people. ' ' And there is a great deal more in that
perhaps than you are aware of. I realize, at any rate, that the way
to keep healthy and strong and well and alive and live long is to live
in the age that you are living. Shut the door behind you. As Paul
said, "Forget the things of the past and enjoy the things of the pres-
ent and the future ' ' and especially look forward to the development of
the future.
In a more serious way, I am sometimes asked what my course of
life has been, what I would advise anyone else to do, to live long. I
say, ' ' Be sick the first fifty years of your life and be compelled to live
on milk and the next fifty years you will probably be compelled to
enjoy life, and long life too." That is pretty nearly my history.
I do not think I saw a well day from the time I had any conscious-
ness of life until I was about sixty, when a little event occurred that
I might perhaps mention here, although it reflects somewhat upon
discussions of alcohol and possibly some may take the prescription.
I do not mention it very often to young people. I was invited by
President Cleveland to be one of the free delegates to the International
Sanitary Conference that met in Paris in 189-4. I had always suf-
fered so much from indigestion, and had to be so very choice of what
I ate and so largely of the simplest kind of diet that I was opposed
at first to going. But under some urging I went abroad — satisfied I
could not live long on French cooking and especially to attend the
great French dinners that I knew I should have to attend. I went, and
the dinners began. We certainly had about twenty or thirty courses
and about three hundred persons in the dining room. After each
course wine was served. Well I never could drink wine, it always
made me very sick and the menu was of a kind that did not appeal
to me at all, one that I could not endure — at any rate for three months,
during the time I was to be there. The first dinner we had there was
by President Parnot at the Palais de I'Hygiene and I saw then what
my fate was to be. These long dinners with so many courses and so
much Avine were something I could not endure at all. At the second
dinner given by Madame Cornell the next day, or rather breakfast at
twelve o'clock, I found seated next to me a prominent physician of
178 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
rai-is whoso writings I was familiar with. I thought I would ask him
wlial my course should be. I found he could speak a little English
and I a little French and we got along very well together. I finally
turned to him and said, "Doctor, I am an old dyspeptic and I don't
see how I am going to live through these dinners. I can't partake of
them on account of so many courses, so much wine, etc." "Oh," he
said, "I can help you out. We have a perfect understanding about
that. These dinners are all scientifically arranged. Every particle of
food put on the table is scientifically prepared for the occasion and the
wine that is used after each one will digest that food before the next
course comes on. So you need not be afraid of having any difficulty."
He said, "You follow my prescription and you will get on perfectly
well." I told him that was a very pleasant prescription. I didn't
want to drink any water, for they were using it from the Seine, which
at that time w^as said to be very foul. So I consented. I drank every
wine that was brought on — and I have had no dyspepsia since !
With reference to old age, I wish to say that old age has a great
many amenities and a great many enjoyments. I sometimes tell my
friends I wish I could feel the weight of years for an hour or two to
see how it seems. You are disposed to say, ' ' Pity the sorrows of a poor
old man," but they are very few compared with what I anticipated.
I find we have a great many sources of happiness, a great many sources
of enjoyment. I was interested not long ago in reading an anecdote of
Whittier and Holmes, the poets. Whittier was four years older than
Holmes and when he became eighty years old, Holmes wrote a very
witty poem, asking Whittier how it looked from that high ground,
"what is there in the future that you see," and Whittier replied with a
poem stating that it was perfectly beautiful from that point. There
was no more hill climbing. It was all dow^n hill, very pleasant and
for him to hurry to come up to that point where he could enjoy with
him the age of eighty. I remember an anecdote of Victor Hugo which
was very interesting. When he reached the age of seventy, he said
he was very much depressed. He could scarcely write and for ten years
that followed him, that sense of depression; but at eighty everything
brightened and he became exceedingly interested in all his work, and
renewed it. He began to philosophize, and to wonder what had hap-
pened, and what was the explanation of this, and finally concluded
that at seventy he had reached the old age of youth and at eighty he
had reached the youth of old age. I think I have experienced that
very decidedly. But after all, the question has risen why we live to
be old, why we can live. I believe it is within the province of every
one, but I think with myself it was heredity; it was having a good
father and mother. My mother died at ninety-seven and I have a
GENERATE INDIVIDUAL HYGIENE 179
sister at ninety-seven now. With this heredity we had led the simple
life, avoided everything that tends to lower the vitality later in life.
One must do everything possible to save the stock of vitality one has,
the stock in trade. You are born with a certain amount and you can
use it up very early or you can prolong life very much longer than
people ordinarily do.
So I think that if we escape the chloroformist at sixty that Osier
has provided for us and can reach the age of seventy and are then
careful with our habits and bur work, we can reach the age of eighty — ■
where that old pessimist Moses said it would be labor and sorrow,
which I did not find to be the case. If we still continue to be careful
of ourselves we can reach ninety, and from ninety by the grace of God
with the last words of Irving on our lips, "we can pass into Thy hands,
0 Lord. ' '
(Acting Chairman Creegan: Probably not one of us here has
ever witnessed such a scene before, a man ninety-two years of age
being at every meeting, staying here last night for three hours, refus-
ing to use the elevator, climbing four flights of stairs every day ! But
what an example he has been to all of us. The younger men and wo-
men who are here will live to see the day when nobody is going to
marvel if a man one hundred years old should be present at this meet-
ing or some similar meeting and perform his duties as presiding
officer. )
SERVICE
Acting Chairman Reverend Charles C. Creegan^ D.D., President Fargo
College, Fargo, N. D.
The object of this gathering is one that takes hold of my mind and
moves my heart and when I was asked to come all the way from North
Dakota, a distance of about a thousand miles, to attend this Confer-
ence, I did not hesitate at all to respond to the call. I feel that the
time has come for a plain speech along these various lines ; the time
has come when we all want to put ourselves on record against the open
saloon, against the liquor traffic in every particular ; the time has come
when we want to learn, if we do not now know, better methods of
living.
When I see men like my venerable friend here at the right more
than ninety years'of age, hale and hearty, with a phenomenal memory^
today practically as good, I suppose, as he was when he was forty, I
ask the question, Why is it we do not have scores and hundreds of men
in the country and women, too, who have memories like his and can
climb four flights of stairs and insist upon doing it as he has been
insisting upon doing it ever since he has been here ? Why can 't we do
180 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
it? What vh^\\\ is tluM-e for any man to assert that we must die when
we are thirty-live, forty, fifty or even when seventy? No man has a
right to say anything of the kind. I have come to believe that we
ought to live. If we have made up our minds for various reasons that
we are not prepared to do it, we ought to teach our children and
our grandchildren so that they may expect to live in the neighborhood
of one hundred years and to have those years full of splendid living
and beautiful characters.
One of the biggest words in the English language or any other lan-
guage is "service," and oh what fields for service open up as we hear
these various papers and the addresses that have been delivered since
this Conference began. Service ! service ! along so many lines ! We
cannot sit down at a table anywhere, in a hotel or restaurant, without
seeing that multitudes of people have not learned the first lesson in
regard to right living. You can see that the food they call for, the
food they have before them, the way they eat their food and all that
sort of thing indicates that they have not learned those first principles.
I have a growing feeling that this institution has come at the right
time. There was a time when I had a very great prejudice against It.
It was not until seven years ago that I would consent to come and see
it. When Doctor Kellogg invited me on a special occasion to come here
and deliver an address, my prejudice gradually began to shake away,
and I have visited the institution as frequently as I could since. I
have never been an invalid in all my life and I have not needed the in-
stitution for that reason, but I have needed it because I knew that
there were certain things that I needed to learn. I have been learning
them here and so have you.
Now let us make this Conference a great success. Do you think I
am right when I say that up to the present moment, it has been a
wonderful success ? What splendid papers we have had ! — W^hat
magnificent and eloquent addresses ! How they give the true ring !
What a great privilege this has been to all of us, and when we go back
home every single one of us, women as well as men, will be practical
missionaries to the spirit, to spread the tidings and to make this world
in which we live more like that we pray for when we say, ' ' Thy king-
dom come. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven." I have quit
worrying myself about how heaven is going to be, how beautiful it is,
what sort of trumpet I am going to blow. I don 't care a rap about it.
It is going to be all right if I am lucky enough to get there. What T
want is to see that I live right here, and that the kingdom of God
comes right do^n here in my heart and that I help so far as I have
any influence to make earth like unto heaven.
ALCOHOL AND TOBACCO
THE EFFECT OF ALCOHOL ON LONGEVITY
Arthur Hunter, Vice-President Actuarial Society of America, Actuary
New York Life Insurance Company, New York, N. Y.
A good way to determine the interest taken in the subject of al-
cohol is to inspect the indexes of some of our great public libraries.
Tens of thousands of books and articles have been written on the
effect of alcohol on mankind, and on the legislative and other prob-
lems connected therewith. It is a serious task to read even the writ-
ings of prominent scientists on this subject. Before dealing with
the effect on longevity, it may be of interest to give the results of
my study of many articles on the use of alcohol.
The experiments of Atwater, Reid Hunt, and others indicate that
alcohol, in moderate quantities, is a food. This point of view "is
almost universally accepted by physiologists, and the drift of opinion
is certainly toward the view that alcohol is in all respects strictly
analogous to sugar and fats, provided always that the amount used
does not exceed that easily oxidized by the body." It is, however,
generally considered as a dangerous food, and in this connection it
should be borne in mind that the laboratory experiments do not
represent the conditions as they exist in every-day life. They do
not properly allow for the increasing need and desire for alcohol,
and for its taking the place very largely of solid food among ex-
cessive users.
A large number of experiments have been made by Partridge,
Kraepelin, Rivers, and many others, into the effect of small doses
of alcohol upon muscular power and mental efficiency. On human
beings it seems to have been conclusively demonstrated that even
small doses of alcohol have a detrimental effect on muscular power.
"The laborer who gains his livelihood by the strength of his arm
destroys by the use of alcohol the very foundations of his efficiency. ' '
Noted army officers, such as Grenfell, Kitchener, and Roberts, of
Britain, von Haeseler, of Germany, "Wahlberg, of Finland, have tes-
tified to the fact that the abstainers from alcohol can stand far more
hard work than those who drink in moderation. Their experience
is based on keen observation of soldiers engaged in warfare. Doctor
Parkes divided a number of soldiers into two gangs, each as nearly
like the other in all respects as was practicable. The men in one
gang had beer placed at their disposal, while those in the other were
181
182 ALCOHOL AND TOBACCO
liiuitod to non-alcoholic drinks. The men in each sroup were paid
according" to the amonnt of work accomplished. The non-alcoholic
gang- did far more work in the day than the alcoholic gronp, al-
thongh the former did less work than the latter in the earlier honrs.
The men who had formerly taken beer at their work were asked to
discontinue using it, and those in the non-alcoholic gang were asked
to use beer. Again, the non-alcoholic gang did more work than those
who drank beer, showing that it was not the superior stamina of
the men in the first experiment which had determined the amount of
work accomplished. In this, as in many other tests, it was noted
that those who took alcohol did more work in the early hours than
those who abstained, but at the end of the day the results were re-
versed. The pleasant, buoyant feeling which alcohol gives is prob-
ably the basis of the popular belief that more work can be done with
it than without it — a belief which is not supported by the facts.
With regard to mental efficiency, there seems little doubt that
a deadening influence on the mental processes is produced by alco-
hol, even in small quantities. For instance, Kraepelin makes the
following statement :
"The powers of conception and .judgment are from the beginning
distinctly affected, although he who takes alcohol is quite uncon-
scious that it has this effect. I must confess that my own experi-
ments, extending over more than ten years, and the theoretical de-
ductions therefrom, have made me an opponent of alcohol."
Herbert Spencer remarks that "incipient intoxication, the feel-
ing of being jolly, shows itself in failure to form involved and ab-
stract relation of ideas." Tests made of translating from one lan-
guage to another, of rifle shooting, of adding figures, of writing,
of memory, etc., showed a marked loss of efficiency throiigh small
doses of alcohol. The Rosanoffs concluded, after certain experi-
ments with small doses of alcohol, that it impairs every human fac-
ulty which has been tested, and that the higher and more complex
the faculty, the more pronounced is the effect.
Turning now to the opinion of the medical profession, we find
that surgeons dread operations on alcoholic patients; that alcohol
is generally believed to interfere with the production of immunity
against specific infectious diseases; that it plays an important part
in bringing about degeneration of nerves, muscles, and epithelial
cells. "In my experience of nervous and mental diseases," says
Dr. T. B. Hyslop, "I am of the opinion that alcohol is of little or no
use except in some cases M'^here it may be administered as a tem-
porary experiment to overcome a crisis. The role of alcohol in the
nervous and mental economy is, in the healthy individual, an evil
one."
ALCOHOL AND TOBACCO 183
Alcohol is not now considered a true stimulant. Sir Horace
Horsley says that it is a narcotic ; that in all its forms it has a pro-
longed depressant after-stage ; and that like other narcotics it pos-
sesses the transitory so-called "stimulant" properties.
All these experiments and experiences indicate that the use of
alcohol probably shortens life, but in order to demonstrate this it
will be necessary to compare the longevity of two groups under pre-
cisely similar conditions : one of abstainers, and the other of non-
abstainers. To obtain two such groups is impossible, because so
many factors must be considered, such as nationality, habitat, diet,
climate, occupation, etc. For example, it would not be proper to
compare a group of abstainers who were heavy eaters with a group
of moderate users of alcohol who were abstemious in their diet, al-
though all other factors were the same.
While it is practicalh^ impossible to obtain statistics regarding
mortality for two groups of men alike in every other respect with
the exception of the use of alcohol, a comparison on a fairly satis-
factory basis may be made of men insured in life insurance com-
panies. The statistics on some of these classes enable us to reach
certain broad conclusions regarding the effect of alcohol on lon-
gevity, but it is not claimed that the extra mortality which will be
shown to exist in many classes is due solely to the use of alcohol.
During the last three years, under the title of the Medico-Ac-
tuarial Mortality Investigation, the Actuarial Society of America and
the Association of Life Insurance Medical Directors have been con-
ducting an investigation into various classes of lives insured during
1885 to 1909 in forty-three of the leading life insurance companies
of the United States and Canada. The classes investigated included
persons in hazardous occupations, those with defects in physical
condition, in family history, or in personal history, those who were
overweight or underweight, etc. The investigation is based on the his-
tory of over 2,000,000 lives. Three volumes of the results have already
been published, and the fourth volume is in the press. At this time
I shall deal only with several occupations connected with the manu-
facture and sale of alcohol, and with certain classes of men not in
these occupations, but who formerly used alcohol immoderately, or
were steady users of it at the time the insurance was issued.
Before presenting the results of this investigation, it is necessary
to consider a standard of measurement for mortality. Just as in
measuring height a standard foot has been chosen, for weight a
standard pound, so for measuring relative mortality we have
a standard mortality table showing the number of deaths per
thousand at each age. This standard table represents the aver-
184 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
aiie mortality for each age and for each j^ear of insurance among
persons insured at the regular rates of premium. For example, the
tabular mortality among- a group of men aged 37 in the first year
of insurance would be 41 per 10,000, whereas under a group of the
same age (37) who had been insured ten years before, at the age of
27, it would be 53 per 10,000. While the attained ages are the same,
the mortality is different in the two groups because one group had
been medically examined within a year, and the other ten years
before. These sets of ratios are applied to the classes under inves-
tigation, and the expected or tabular deaths are calculated. Thus,
if there were a group of 5,000 saloon-keepers insured one year ago
at age 37, the expected mortality would be 20.5, i. e., 5,000 at the
tabular death rate of 4.1 per 1,000, and this would be compared with
the actual deaths. Should the actual deaths in the group be 31, then
the actual mortality would be 150 per cent of the expected or tabu-
lar, according to the average mortality of the various companies on
standard lives who were not engaged in hazardous occupations. A
ratio of actual to expected deaths of 150 per cent means 50 per cent
in excess of the normal mortality; 175 per cent means 75 per cent
in excess of the normal mortality ; and 200 per cent, 100 per cent
in excess, or double the normal mortality by the standard table.
Another way of interpreting these ratios is to consider 100 as the
number of deaths which would normally be expected, so that if the
ratio of actual to expected deaths were 150 per cent, there would be
150 deaths, whereas, in a similar group of normal lives there would
have been onl,y 100.
The statistics of the Medico-Actuarial Mortality Investigation de-
scribed herein were based on men who were resident in the United
States or Canada at the date of application for insurance, and the
results, therefore, relate to the effect of the use of alcohol in the
temperate zone. There are no similar statistics with regard to tropi-
cal countries, and, accordingly, the conclusions of Major Woodruff
regarding the beneficial effect of alcohol in the tropics are neither
confirmed nor disproved by the statistics contained in this paper.
In all the classes connected with the liquor trade, which will be
brought to your attention, the men insured in the different com-
panies did not drink immoderately at the date of application for
insurance. The high mortality in this trade cannot be ascribed to
the inclusion of men whose habits were bad: many of them un-
doubtedly, however, succumbed to temptation some time after the
policy was issued.
In accepting for insurance the men in the liquor business, the
companies were generally as severe in their selection as in that gov-
ALCOHOL AND TOBACCO 185
erning the acceptance of persons in non-hazardous occupations; in
fact, the statistics prepared by the Committee indicate that the com-
panies accepted for insurance men engaged in unfavorable or doubt-
ful occupations less freely than those in non-hazardous occupations.
The first group of occupations with which I shall deal is that con-
nected with the serving of liquor. The group covering Saloons also
includes Billiard Rooms, Pool Rooms, and Bowling Alleys in which
there is a bar :
c'trrtnvc Actual Expected Ratio of Actual to Extra
.•>Ai.uuj\/i : Deaths Deaths Expected Deaths Mortality
Proprietors and Managers not attend-
ing bar 222 122 182% 82%
Proprietors and Managers attending
bar 830 479 173% 73%
HOTELS WITH BAR:
Proprietors, Saperintendents and Man-
agers attending bar 519 292 178% 78%
It will be noted in the foregoing that the mortality is higher
among the proprietors and managers of saloons who stated that
they did not attend bar than among those who admitted attending
bar ; and that the mortality among hotel-keepers attending bar is
practically the same as among saloon-keepers. There were fully
22,000 cases in the above classes — a nuanber large enough to give
reliable results.
In the following two occupations the policy-holders did not attend
bar:
TjriTT^T V TJ-TTTT KIT? Actval Expcctcd Ratio of Actuul to Extra
tiui£.in-i Willi JiAK: Deaths Deaths Expected Deaths Mortality
Proprietors, Superintendents and Man-
agers not attending bar 529 392 135% 35%
RESTAURANTS WITH BAR:
Proprietors, Superintendents and Man-
agers not attending bar 105 69 152% 52%
It is apparent that where liquor may be had freely, there is
danger to the men who may have it without price.
It is unnecessary to give examples of all occupations connected
with the liquor trade, but the following two large groups, contain-
ing the records of men insured under 15,000 policies, are of par-
ticular interest:
PprirfiipTrc. Actual Expected Ratio of Actual to Extra
rs^iiin £,A,j£,^ ; Deaths Deaths Expected Deaths Mortality
Proprietors, Managers and Superin-
tendents 483 359 135% 35%
WHOLESALE LIQUOR HOUSES:
Proprietors and Managers 992 811 122% 22%
It is freely recognized that there is a considerable difference be-
tween the various types of breweries and between the duties of those
in charge of the various wholesale houses. If these two classes were
broken up into more homogeneous groups, the mortality would
186 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
raiiue i'roni nornial to twice the normal, depending on the habits
of the men and their specific work. The loss of life may be readily
seen in the case of wholesale liquor merchants. If these proprietors
and managers had been in a non-hazardous occupation, there, would
have been about 180 less deaths during the period under observa-
tion.
Other classes have been investigated, such as clerks in breweries,
traveling salesmen, clerks in wholesale liquor houses, etc. In every
instance the mortality was higher than among lives in non-hazard-
ous occupations, with the single exception of the proprietors, mana-
gers, and superintendents of distilleries.
Valuable information regarding the influence of occupation on
mortality may sometimes be obtained from a study of the causes
of death. A standard of comparison is necessary, and this is ob-
tained by tabulating the causes of death among a large group of
persons who had been accepted by life insurance companies at the
regular rates of premium — that is, who were considered standard
or average lives. From such a group the normal death rate from
each cause is deduced, and a comparison can then be made with the
actual death rates in the class under investigation. Thus, the nor-
mal annual death rate from tuberculosis of the lungs at age 35 is
about 8 per 10,000 exposed to risk of death, and if, in a specific oc-
cupation, the death rate were found to be 16, it would be twice the
normal. The causes of death in the occupation classes just dealt with
show distinctly the efifect of alcohol. For example, among the hotel
proprietors, superintendents and managers who attend bar, the
death rate from cirrhosis ,of the liver was six times the normal ; from
diabetes and Bright 's disease, three times the normal; and from
apoplexy, heart disease and pneumonia, twice the normal. Unques-
tionably, some of the excess mortality among those in the liquor
trade is due to the long hours and other unsatisfactory conditions,
but the greater part of the excess is due to the contact with alcohol
in its various seductive forms.
In the reports on the Medico-Actuarial Mortality Investigation,
there appears the mortality among several classes of men who have
used alcohol to an immoderate extent in the past, but who were not
in the liquor trade at date of insurance. None of the cases, there-
fore, in the groups now to be considered entered into the classes
which have already been considered.
HISTORY OF OCCASION.y^ EXCESSES
The forty-three companies in the Medico-Actuarial Investigation
issued during a period of twenty-five years about 5,800 policies at
ALCOHOL AND TOBACCO 187
the regular premium rate on men who had a history of occasional
alcoholic excesses in the past and who were not in hazardous occupa-
tions (including as hazardous occupations the manufacture and sale
of alcohol). The great majority of men with this history who ap-
plied for insurance were declined, and, accordingly, the classes con-
sisted of the very best of the applicants, so far as the companies
were able to determine. NotA\dthstanding this extreme care in selec-
tion, the mortality was high, as may be seen from the following
synopsis :
Actual Expected Ratio of Actual to Extra
Deaths Deaths Expected Deaths Mortality
Occasional alcoholic excesses, the last
ivithin five years of the date of ap-
plication for insurance 110 67 164% 64%
Occasional alcoholic excesses, the last
more than five years prior to the
date of application for insurance... 58 40 145% 45%
An excess at an indefinite time in the
past 121 83 146% 46%
The heavy extra mortality, averaging 52 per cent, is not due solely
to excesses in the past only, but arises partly from excesses after
the policy was taken out. A proportion of those who had exceeded
the limits of moderation in the past undoubtedly became heavy
drinkers at some time after the policy was issued.
FORMERLY INTEMPERATE, REFORMED WITHOUT TREATMENT
Another class consisted of those whose habits were formerly in-
temperate as to alcohol, but who had reformed without any treat-
ment, and who were in non-hazardous occupations. This class also
consists of the best types only of risks presented to the companies,
cases where there was reasonable assurance that the satisfactory
habits at date of application for insurance would be likely to con-
tinue. The statistics are divided according to time elapsed since the
habits were intemperate.
Actual Expected Ratio of Actual to Extra
Deaths Deaths Expected Deaths Mortality/
The last record of intemperate habits
within five years of date of applica-
tion for insurance 150 113 133% 33%
The last record of intemperate habits
more than five years from date of
application for insurance 154 137 112% 13%
It may be inferred from the foregoing figures that the longer
the time elapsed since the habits were intemperate, the more pros-
pect there is of a permanent cure.
TAKEN CURE FOR ALCOHOLIC HABITS, TOTAL ABSTAINER SINCE CURE
This was not a sufficiently large class to justify a division accord-
ing to time elapsed since alcohol was taken to an immoderate extent.
188 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
The followiiii;:, therefore, shows all cases in which the habits were
unsatisfactory at least two years prior to date of application:
Actual Expected Ratio of Actual to Extra
Deathn Deaths Expected Deaths Mortalitii
Record of intemperate habits at least
two years prior to application;
policy holders took cure for alcoholic
habits, and had been total abstainers
since cure up to date of application
for insurance 79 58 136% 36%
The mortality among those who had taken a cure and were total
abstainers from that time to date of application for insurance was
somewhat higher than among those who reformed without treatment.
It should not be deduced therefrom that the alcoholic cures are not
of value; it is probable that those who had taken a cure had used
alcohol more freely than those who had reformed without such a
cure, and also that the men in the latter class may have been
stronger-minded than in the former. The companies hoped to de-
termine the mortality among men who had taken the cure for alco-
holism and had not been total abstainers since the cure, but the
number of cases was too small to justify an investigation.
STEADY USE OF ALCOHOL
Another interesting class of men investigated by the Actuarial
Society and the Medical Directors' Association is that comprising
those who were designated "steady, free users" of alcohol. In col-
lecting the statistics, the decision as to the cases which would prop-
erly fall within this designation was left to the judgment of the in-
dividual companies. As a result, the type of cases placed in this
class was found to vary to a considerable extent, depending largely
on the view of the medical directors, and the class was accordingly
divided into two groups. In one group ("Liberal") were placed all
the cases in which the companies had used as a test Anstie 's limit of
two ounces of alcohol in a day; and in the other ("Conservative"),
those which considered less than Anstie 's limit as constituting a
steady free use. In the "Conservative" section appear the cases
where two glasses of beer or one glass of whiskey daily was con-
sidered a steady, free use, although few persons would consider such,
a quantity as a free use of alcohol. (In a publication of a promi-
nent insurance company, the equivalent of Anstie 's limit is stated
to be two wineglasses of sherry or other strong wine, one pint of
champagne, three tumblersful of strong ale, or five tumblersful of
beer. ) The following shows the results of the subdivision :
Actual Expected Ratio of Actual to Extra
Deaths Deaths Expected Deaths Mortality
"Conservatire" : Interpretation — steady,
but very moderate use 1,725 1,460 118% 18%
"Liberal": Interpretation — steady, free,
but not immoderate use 698 374 187% 87%
ALCOHOL AND TOBACCO 189
There can be no better evidence in my opinion of the bad effects
of alcohol on longevity than the foregoing. These classes do not
constitute men who were immoderate drinkers at the date of appli-
cation, or whose standing in the community was bad. They were all
men considered to be entitled to policies without extra premium
by the insurance companies, their habits not being considered a
serious detriment. Yet the extra mortality among those who used
two ounces or more of alcohol a day was 87 per cent, and the causes
of death showed that the death rate from cirrhosis of the liver was
five times the normal, and from diabetes, tuberculosis, pneumonia,
and suicide, twice the normal. The mortality among saloon-keepers
whose habits were satisfactory at the time the policy was issued was
slightly lower than among men not connected with the manufacture
or sale of alcohol who took two or more ounces of alcohol each day,
but who were not considered immoderate drinkers.
In the foregoing presentation I have included all classes enter-
ing into the Medico-Actuarial Mortality Investigation which were
composed of persons who were free users of alcohol at the time of
insuring, or had previously been immoderate users of alcohol. The
Medico-Actuarial Investigation included thirteen classes of persons
connected with the manufacture or sale of alcohol, and only one of
these classes showed a mortality as low as the normal (Managers
and Proprietors of Distilleries). It is evident, therefore, that the
presentation here made is not unduly unfavorable.
MORTALITY AMONG ABSTAINERS
It may interest abstainers to know that in 1840 an application
was received by an English insurance company for a policy on the
life of an abstainer, and the directors of the company decided to
charge 10 per cent more than the ordinary premium because they
looked upon the applicant as "thin and watery, and as mentally
cranked in that he repudiated the good creatures of God as found
in alcoholic drinks." As the result of this action, he, with his
friends, founded the first temperance insurance company in Britain,
and himself lived to the age of 82.
There has been published only one comparison between abstainers
and non-abstainers, based on the experience among the insured in
an American company, and this was presented by the New England
Mutual Life Insurance Company. The insured were divided into
four classes: (1) Total abstainer; (2) Rarely use; (3) Temperate;
and (4) Moderate. The standard used in testing the mortality was
the American Table, which is generallv the basis for the calculation
190 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
of preiniiiiiis. The following- shows the approximate percentages of
that table :
Total abstainer 59%
Rarely use 71%
Temperate 847o
Moderate . . .125%
According to the above table, the moderate drinkers had twice as
high a mortalitj^ as the total abstainers. There have been no other
data published in recent years in this country of the experience of life
insurance companies with abstainers, except that published by
the Security Mutual Life Insurance Company, of Binghamton,
N. Y. Unfortunately, a comparison was not made of non-abstainers
with abstainers, but the mortality among the latter was very low,
and, so far as may be judged, much lower than among the general
insured of the company. The following is a synopsis of the pub-
lished experience of insurance companies in other English-speaking
countries :
Morfaltty of General or Approximate excess of
N on- Abstainer Section mortality among Non-
compared with that of Abstainers over Ab-
Abstainer Section. stainers.
United Kingdom Temperance and General
Provident Institution (England), ex-
perience from 1866 to 1910 135% 35%
Sceptre Life Assurance Company (Eng-
land), experience from 1884 to 1910. . 150 50
Scottish Temperance Life Assurance Com-
pany (Scotland), experience from 1883
to 1907 140 40
Australian Temperance and General Life
Assurance Society (Australia), experi-
ence from 1900 to 1910 160 60
Manufacturers Life Insurance Com-
pany (Canada), experience from 1902
to 1910 175 75
From the non-abstainer section were excluded those who were
known to drink immoderately at the date of application for in-
surance.
There is conclusive proof in these figures that those who are
total abstainers live much longer on the average than those who are
non-abstainers. It must not be assumed, however, that the very low
mortality of the total abstainers is due solely to their abstinence
from alcohol. Dr. Dwight, the Medical Director of the New Eng-
land Mutual Life Insurance Company, points out that the mortality
among men who are total abstainers from alcohol is practically the
same as among men who are total abstainers frorii tobacco, and that,
generally speaking, the same body of men are included in these two
classes. There are other factors which enter into this matter, such
as these: (1) abstainers are proportionately oftener found in non-
hazardous occupations than in hazardous. For example, there would
be a larger proportion of clergymen, who have normally a very low
ALCOHOL AND TOBACCO 191
mortality, among the abstainers than among the moderate drinkers ;
(2) the conditions which surround the home life may be better
among the abstainers than among the non-abstainers, and there may
not be the samie temptation to the former to devote a large amount
of time to club life ; (3) a man who is a crank on one subject is
likely to be a careful liver. (A crank, says 0. W. Holmes, is a man
who does his own thinking.) An abstainer and non-smoker is prob-
ably abstemious in his diet, and lives in the open air as much as
possible. It has also been suggested that those who are total abstain-
ers are so because they are vigorous and active and do not feel the
necessity for stimulants, whereas those who are not total abstainers
might not be quite equal in physique. There is not a consensus of
opinion in this matter, however, the President of the United King-
dom Temperance and General Provident Institution of Britain giv-
ing his opinion that there was little foundation for the belief that
the better mortality among the abstainers is due to their generally
careful, quiet, methodical mode of life. He believes that, other things
being equal, abstinence from the use of alcoholic liquors as bever-
ages is conducive to health, and promotes longevity. He states that
a large number of persons come before him, and that he would defy
anyone who saw them to say which was the abstainer and which
was the non-abstainer unless he had the record before him; ''they
lived in the same towTi, they worked at the same occupation, they had
the same rate of income, they were practically the same kind of
person."
Unfortunately, there are no statistics in existence of two bodies
of men exactly alike in every particular with the single exception
that one group consists of total abstainers and the other of moderate
users of alcohol. Yet, as there is always the temptation to drink to
excess among moderate users of alcohol, and this temptation a pro-
portion of them will not be able to resist, we may say with assurance
that a body of abstainers would have a longer life-time on the aver-
age than a body of non-abstainers alike in all respects except as
to the use of alcohol. "There is no more perplexing problem of in-
dividual psychology and physiology than the subtle differences
which make it possible for one man to drink moderately through-
out life without danger of excess, while another, apparently as well
constituted and living under as favorable conditions, perishes in the
presence of alcohol." (Partridge.)
I have been in the actuarial profession for over twenty years,
and have had the opportunity of studying, not only the published
statistics, but many private investigations. I cannot recall a single
large class of men or women using alcohol freelv but not immod-
192 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
eratoly at the date of application for insurance, or who had used it
in excess formerly and were now temperate, that did not have a
higher mortality than the normal. AVhile not a total abstainer, I am
convinced that it would be immeasurably better for this, or any other
country, to have the production and sale of alcoholic liquors
abolished if it were practicable. The advantages claimed for alco-
hol are a small offset, in my judgment, to the evils which proceed
from its use and its abuse.
ALCOHOL — WHAT SHALL WE DO ABOUT IT?
Henry Smith Williams, LL.D., M.D., New York, N. Y.
I should like at the outset to subscribe to every word that Mr.
Hunter has told us about the effects of alcohol. I should like also
to subscribe very fully to the optimistic point of view that he pre-
sented at the close. I, too, am an optimist. I, too, believe things are
not nearly so bad as they might be and that they are going to be
very much better.
But at the same time in regard to this matter of alcohol, we are
confronted with some very unpleasant statistics. I shall subscribe
a third time to what he said about the unreliability of statistics,
but the few that I must give you I think are authentic. They refer
merely to quantities of alcohol that are being consumed. He spoke
of the attitude of insurance companies in 1840. Now it chances that
in 1840, the time of our grandparents, the amount of alcohol con-
sumed in this country per capita each year was just under four gal-
lons, specifically two and one-half gallons of distilled spirits and
one and one-third of malted beverages, something less than four gal-
lons. Last year for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1913, the per
capita consumption of alcoholic beverages in this country was some-
thing over twenty-three gallons ; that is to say, there were almost six
times as much alcoholic beverages consumed last year as in 1840. Let
me at once point out, however, that the case is not quite as bad as it
seems, for, of course, we all know that last year and now-a-days we are
consuming a great deal more beer, in proportion, and a great deal less
whiskey in proportion. We know also that the detrimental effect of
alcoholic beverages depends very largely and perhaps entirely on its
alcoholic content, and that whereas whiskey or distilled liquors have
thirty, usually forty or forty-five, up to sixty per cent of alcohol, the
malted beverages have only from two to six per cent. Nevertheless,
if we reduce the amount of liquor consumed last year to terms of
ALCOHOL AND TOBACCO 193
alcohol, and make the same reduction for the liquor consumed in
1840, we find that there was a larger consumption of absolute alco-
hol last year in America than in 1840.
That is a fact of almost appalling significance, at least when we
reflect that seventy-three years of effort have been made to combat
alcohol. At the end of that time we are consuming more than we
did at the beginning. The tide of alcohol has risen, decade by decade.
There has been no decade since 1840 when the per capita consump-
tion has not been greater than it was in the preceding decade.
The statistics regarding the rise are very clear because they are
based, of course, on the government records. The payment of an
internal revenue tax must be made, so that the alcohol statistics are
among the few statistics that we can really trust, I think. It seems
that in 1896 the per capita consumption of distilled liquors in the
United States was about eighty-six hundredths of a gallon per
capita. Last year it was one and a half gallons per capita. There
was a notable falling off in 1908, and some of us were deluded into
hoping that the crest of the wave had been passed, that now it was
receding; but apparently the cause of the falling off was merely
the industrial conditions of the time, and now the tide is rising again,
with no seeming tendency to reach the high water mark.
Meantime there has been an incessant effort, notably in the last
dozen or fifteen years, to combat alcohol by means of legislation.
Needless to say I refer to the prohibition movement. In 1880 Kansas
passed a prohibition law ; in 1884 Maine ; in 1890 North Dakota ; and
five Southern states have come in in recent years, beginning with
Oklahoma and Georgia in 1907. Local option has spread so widely that
today we are told no fewer than forty million Americans are living
in dry territory. Now if this territory were really dry, no one as-
suredly would take greater pleasure in contemplating that fact than
I do or I would ; but unfortunately we must recall that it is legal to
ship alcoholics into this dry territory, even where they have state-
wide prohibition. I have recently been making a personal investiga-
tion to endeavor to find out what really are the conditions in the pro-
hibition territories. I will give you one or two illustrative instances.
In the month of September of 1913 — last September — ^there were offi-
cially shipped into Topeka, Kans., ninety thousand quarts of alco-
holic beverages, or ten quarts per family. The little town of Te-
cumseh, near Topeka, a town of one hundred inhabitants, received
fifteen hundred quarts in the month of September. Turn to the
South. I made an investigation there recently, and, as an illustra-
tion, in Asheville, N. C, where there is not a saloon open and
where I verily believe the prohibition law as regards the sale of
(8)
194 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE I5ETTERMENT
li([uor is eai-riod out absolutely, there were shi|)p(Ml in four thousMiid
li-allons of alcoliolie beverages, exclusively distilled liquor, I think —
four thousand gallons in ten days, into a worthy town of two thou-
sand inhabitants. If we look a little more widely, we find the re-
turns of a recent investigation of the Interstate Commerce Com-
mission pointing out that no fewer than six million gallons of dis-
tilled liquor are shipped by the express companies from four or five
Southern states, almost exclusively, of course, into prohibition terri-
tory. The city of Chattanooga, itself lying in the prohibition state
of Tennessee, ships seven hundred and eighty-eight thousand gallons
per year. Incidentally the entire shipment to Asheville came from
Chattanooga. Other cities in the prohibition states shipped enor-
mous quantities, and the estimate is made by the Interstate Com-
merce Commission that the total shipments of liquor by express
companies amount to not less than twenty million gallons per year.
These are all very unpleasant facts. They seem to show that the
legislation of recent years has discriminated in favor of distilled
liquors against malted ones — not intentionally, of course, but in
effect, because the distilled liquors are so easily transported, shipped
by express.
That is not quite all. In the South there has grown up in the
past few years since the prohibition laws were passed in Georgia,
North Carolina and other states, an enormous traffic in other drugs,
morphine to a certain extent, but notably cocaine. The poor white
population and the ignorant negro population, sometimes not being
able to write or not having the intelligence to write for liquor as the
more intelligent people do, or perhaps not having the dollar or two
to send, content themselves with buying a box of cocaine from the
nearest newsboy. I meant to bring with me, but forgot to do so, a
little box of cocaine taken from a negro prisoner in a Southern jail.
It looks like an ordinary pill box. Those are sold for a quarter.
Enormous quantities of it today are being sold throughout the South.
The effects are seen in the most disastrous way because, unfortunately,
bad as is the effect of liquor on the negro in particular, the effects of
cocaine are far worse. Under the influence of cocaine, the negro be-
comes homicidal even though normally a mild person ; he becomes
homicidal and ugly in every way. The policemen of the South are
finding a new problem presented to them by the cocaine negro. And
there can be no question that, very largely, increase in the use of
cocaine is due to the fact that it has become somewhat difficult for the
negro to secure liquor.
A word about one other line of legislation in the South. South
Carolina attempted to solve the problem, as you know perhaps, by
ALCOHOL AND TOBACCO 195
having a dispensary law. They got hold of one corner of a great
truth. The great truth is that the real solution of the liquor problem
must come through taking the control of the traffic out of indi-
vidual hands, making it so that no individual and no corporation
makes money out of the sale of liquor. That is the great truth w^hich
originated and was promulgated in Sweden. They got hold of a
corner of it, but they did not apply it in a rational way.
They did take the traffic out of the hands of individuals and gave
it over to the state, but unfortunately they applied the profits to the
regular tax rate, and so instead of there being a few people wiio
were interested and having profits from the liquor business, every-
body was more or less interested.
I chanced to find the other day the official ann'oiuicement of the
commissioners of one county, Barnwell County, in South Carolina,
which has a population of 35,000, asking for bids for liquor for the
coming year and, without troubling you with figures, I may sum-
marize them by saying that the quantity of liquor called for
amounted to four gallons per capita of whiskey and its allies, and
only two quarts per capita of beer. We see that by this law there
is an enormous discrimination in favor of whiskey. That would be
my criticism of all of the legislation of recent years. Unintention-
ally, but none the less effectively, it is discriminating in every way
in favor of whiskey.
I shall make just one other reference to the investigation that I
have made to test the effects of liquor, to judge it by its effects in the
prohibition territory. After all we have no objection to alcohol as
such. It has almost the formula of sugar. We have no objection to
its particular combination of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen. What
we object to is its effects — its effects on the brain, on the mind and
morals of the people. And so I thought to make a test to see whether
— since it is impossible to determine the exact amount of liquor that
is shipped into prohibition territories — whether or not it is true that
the effects of alcohol are as conspicuous in prohibition territories as
elsewhere. So I made an investigation in Kansas and then in the
South. It is not yet published but will very soon be in detail. Sum-
marizing let me say that the records of police courts, the records of
prisons, the records of almshouses, the records of asylums for the
insane, all show conditions in the prohibition territory that average
at least as bad as and very commonly w^orse than elsewhere. I fear
there can be no question about that.
It remains, then, to inquire, What shall we do? Accepting the
facts as I found them, I cannot make myself believe that the pres-
ent line of legislation is effective, or is the best that we can do.
19f) FIRST NATIONAI, CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
Others feel the same way, some of those in anthority. Last summer
Senator Works, of California, introduced a joint resolution in Con-
gress providing for the total abolition of distilled liquor. He wishes
to have a (Constitutional amendment passed to that effect. [Ap-
plause.] I like to hear the applause, because I should applaud that
move myself if I thought it had any prospect of success. But 1 fear
it is illusory. I fear in the first place that there is no probability that
it will become a law, and, in the second place, I fear that in the
present state of things it would not be effective if it did. If we can-
not enforce partial prohibition, I cannot see how we can hope to en-
force the total prohibition of a substance that is so popular that one
and a half gallons per capita of it are consumed each year in the
United States. Yet this resolution marks a stage of progress in that it
does discriminate, definitely and precisely, against distilled liquor.
TJhe other laws have had the unfortunate effect of discriminating in
their favor. I also consider it as epochal in another regard, in that it
recognizes the principle that we must advance by evolution, rather
than by revolution; that we cannot take away from a people any-
thing that is used in such enormous quantities.
All through history there is no example of a people changing its
habits radically in a single generation. Always those changes must
be slow, always by substitution. The best that I can hope, from
my study of history and my knowledge of human psychology, is that
we may substitute the milder drink for the stronger one, ultimately
a still milder for that, and ultimately an altogether non-alcoholic
one. That, it seems to me, is the principle w^e must attempt to apply.
Speaking practically then, just a few words as to what possible
lines of action seem to me to lie just ahead. I would say. Tax "hard"
liquor — a modification of Senator Work's idea to put a very high tax
on distilled beverages, double the present tax at least. Then I would
have the saloon, since w^e must have it, pay a much higher license on
distilled beverages. That would discriminate against whiskey and in-
crease its price. As a mere economic result its consumption would
therefore tend to decrease. This w^ould not keep the people who are
the most injured by whiskey from taking it. That is a second prin-
ciple that we must recognize. Alcoholism is always an effect. It is
the cause of many things, but it has its effect because of the bad
brain which the person who is injured hy it has had the misfortune
to inherit. The normal person will not become a drimkard even if
liquor ran free from the fountains at the street comers, but the ab-
normal person, with a lust for alcohol, will get it if he must go through
fire and possibly water for it. We have got to recognize that, and
treat the dipsomaniac. Recognizing that, our present plan of sending
ALCOHOL AND TOBACCO 19 (
him to jail for a day or a week and then turning him out again to do
the same thing over is foolish. It is grotesque, and we must get away
from it by treating him rationally, by segregating him for a sufficient
period.
One other point. We must recognize that the greatest dangers of
alcohol are to the adolescent. We must make it as nearly impossible
as it can be for the adolescent, for the youth, to secure alcohol. Let
there be an absolute interdiction of the sale of alcohol, either to the
drunkard or to the minor. Let the records of our police courts be
given to the saloon-keeper, and let him be restrained from selling al-
cohol to a person who has been arrested for intoxication within a
period of one year, let us say, or two years, and take away his license
if he violates that. Take away his license at once if he ever sells to
a minor.
Then — more important, as I see it, than anything else — let the en-
tire proceeds, both the government revenue and of local license fees,
be used for public utility, and not applied to the general tax rate.
Let them be used for eleemosynary institutions, playgrounds, gym-
nasia, music halls and other counter attractions to the saloon. That,
of course, is the second fundamental principle of the great Swedish
Gothenburg System. We should therefore discriminate against
whiskey, treat the dipsomaniac rationally, keep alcohol away from
the youths and use all the money that may come from the traffic
to fight the traffic.
Discitssion .
The Sacrifice of Boys and Girls
Dr. Amanda D. Holcomb, Mount Pleasant, Mich.
I was intensely interested in the cure given last night by Doctor
Williams for this liquor condition. The thing that interested me
especially was that it is a cure that we can get. It is easy of attain-
ment. If we want a bill to supersede the National Prohibition Bill,
we can get the Bill that he suggested, to raise the license and to
raise the revenue on liquor. We can get that. It will be easy.
Money will be furnished by the breweries to put it through, and we
will get it, and it will work, because they have our one hundred
thousand boys who are being debauched every year by the liquor
traffic, and this will be increased to one hundred and fifty thousand
boys. And we shall have plenty of rescue work for women, then, be-
cause our fifty thousand girls that are being debauched to satisfy
that hundred thousand boys w^ll be increased to seventy-five to one
hundred thousand girls that we will have to rescue.
198 FIRST NATIONAL CONFEEENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
Discns.fiou.
The Worst Dry Town versus the Best Wet Town
Damei. a. Pouno, Battle Creek Sanitariiun, Battle Creek, Michigan.
For the last fourteen years, or since my undergraduate work in
Michigan, I have been intensely and in a very vital way interested in
the question discussed last night by Doctor Williams. I have been
here [at the Battle Creek Sanitarium] for the last three weeks with
one who needed me very greath^ Because of that I have not par-
ticipated in the Conference. Last evening I heard the paper of
Doctor Williams and I appreciated it very much. I would say as an
announcement, so that you will understand that I can speak with
the authority of representation at least, that I am Citizenship Super-
intendent of the Christian Endeavor, and, as such, represent officially
upward of four million young people ; I am one of the National Vice-
Presidents of the National Anti-Saloon League, National President of
the Temperance Council of one hundred official national organiza-
tions ; I am also educational superintendent of the Prohibition Na-
tional Committee. I appreciate what Doctor Williams said, not be-
cause I agreed with him in every particular, because I did not, but
because I appreciated the way in which he dealt with the sub.iect,
and believe he meant every word he said.
I am very sure we shall not solve this problem, from my view-
point or from your point of view, until we deal with every phase of
the question, until we are quite unbiased and willing to understand
the thing the other man sees more clearly than perhaps we see it.
I do not disagree with the statistics quoted by Doctor Williams. I
do disagree, in some instances, with the statistical application of
what he said. For instance, the introduction of 90.000 quarts of
liquor into Topeka is not conclusive. The real question is how much
liquor was shipped into Topeka before prohibition became effective
there. Were there more than 90,000 quarts shipped in, within the
same time, before prohibition became operative ? We are bound not
to forget also that Asheville, in the South, is a resort frequented by
Northerners and that these men are men of great wealth.
There is another thing we are bound to recognize : I agree with
the Doctor when he says prohibition does not prohibit. He did not
make the statement in that way; he said it Avould not be effective
under the circumstances. Prohibition does not prohibit because it
cannot prohibit. It is an amendatory law, but I submit to you that
prohibition can be made effective, that it is subject to enforcement
just in proportion as prohibition is appreciated as an opportunity.
Just in that proportion will it be effective in accomplishing that
whereunto it is sought. I do not say it will wipe out drunkenness.
ALCOHOL AND TOBACCO 199
Some people will get liquor. Proliibition is said to be a failure. So
far as some kinds of people are concerned, it is a failure. I am talk-
ing about the rising generation.
I say, out of first-hand experience in every great city of our
North American Continent, that the worst dry town is unspeakably
better than the best wet town, so- far as the raising of children is
concerned. I was in Maine in December. I went to Portland with
the new sheriff of that county. I saw thousands of gallons of liquor
confiscated.
I believe in prohibition because I believe it is a great moral ques-
tion. I am convinced that the Government ought to assume a proper
attitude on this question, that the Government ought to say as a
foundation basis, a basis upon which we can work to eugenics, a
foundation basis upon which we may work through every depart-
ment, especially unto the uplifting of mankind — the Government
ought to say in the beginning whether the liquor traffic as an insti-
tution, whether the liquor traffic as a great problem industrially,
economically, politically and morally is right or wrong, and having
so declared itself, then it comes to us as a greater opportunity to
take care of the actual situation that confronts us at the present
time. Prohibition does not prohibit, but it can be made effective.
It is subject to enforcement.
When men say more liquor is sold in dry territories I am sure
we are not troubled greatly. Why is it, then, that the liquor man
does not spend a great deal of money and time in bringing to pass
prohibition, so that it will be possible for him to sell more liquor?
I saw some agencies employed to make the introduction of liquor
in Portland. Me., possible. I saw a tank that had been set in
cement between the floors of a building. Eighty feet of pipe led
down to the faucet. On turning the faucet one way with a given
pressure you get whiskey : by turning it another way you get water
— all of. which goes to show that liquor is sold in greater quantities
in dry territory than in wet territory, all of which goes to show that
it is easier to get intoxicated under prohibition than under license.
But I ask you whether or not license has succeeded. We have
had laws all over the United States against selling intoxicating
liquors to minors. We have had laws all over the United States
against selling intoxicating liquors to those who have become habit-
ual drunkards. Have these laws been effective? No man here will
say that these laws have been effective. But I charge you now, that
inasmuch as at the end of a long period of years prohibition has been
as supinely a failure as license, we shall find another way. The
burden of proof rests on license today, not on prohibition.
200 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
And T woulil remind you that this is a national question. After
all, we have never had a loot of real prohibition territory in the
United States. This is a national disease. It is a national problem.
Until we deal with a national problem in a national way, until for
national disease we bring a national remedy, we shall not begin to
solve finally the great question that confronts us at the present time.
I submit to you today that we are studying a many-sided proposi-
tion, and that to arrive at a wise conclusion we need not only the
research work of those who are already committed to prohibition,
but we need the research work of men like Doctor Williams and
other men who are just as honest as I ever hope to be, and who are
doing their very best to solve the greatest problem that has ever con-
fronted this race or any other race.
Discussion.
Proportionate State Consumption of Alcohol
Dr. E. G. Lancaster, President Olivet College, Olivet, Michigan.
There is not one onje-hundredth part of the liquor drunk in Maine
and Kansas that there is in the "wet" states, like Massachusetts.
I think I can prove that by the statistics Mr. Williams gave us in
his strong paper. I appreciate the paper very much, because it is
just in time to head off a lot of wild stampedings. He said that the
express companies are handling twelve million gallons of liquor a
year, and that the people drink about two or three gallons per
capita. This means two or three hundred millions of gallons per
year. It shows there is one hundred times as much liquor drunk in
wet territory as there is in dry.
Discussion.
Caution in the Use of Statistics
Edward Bunnell Phelps, Editor The American Underwriter, New York,
N. Y.
I want to say just a word in the way of general caution — on the
strength of quite a number of years of work in statistics — that at
best statistics are a hard lot. All of you know, of course, the old
saying regarding the association of statistics, "lies and liars." I
am every day more and more impressed, even in studying statistical
publications and papers, with the ever-present perils and dangers
and glorious uncertainties of statistics which have not been thor-
oughly masticated and thoroughly digested. In fact, I am rather
inclined to believe that there is room for a movement in this country
in the direction of fletcherized statistics.
There can be absolutely no question, Avhen a man is starting to
ALCOHOL AND TOBACCO 201
build a house, of the importance of the house being well grounded
and well founded, which importance obviously increases with the in-
creasing height and area of the building. I can distinctly recall, in
the early days, the building of skyscrapers on Manhattan Island
where a number of intelligent people thought certain corporations
were really throwing away a great deal of money going so far down
into the ground to get their foundations on a bed-rock basis. But
as people's eyes opened to the rapidly growing height and possi-
bilities of the skyscrapers of New York and they began to get even
an approximate idea of the tonnage, so to speak, of thousands and
thousands of tons of steel, iron and stone, they realized that, after
all. it had not been a fad, but a necessity, to get down to the bed-
rock basis.
Now if we are going to do sane and rational and useful and
lasting things in this Conference, for heaven 's sake, let us start on a
sane and sound basis, and do not let us get into the published tran-
sactions of this Conference, which certainly will circulate all over
this country and possibly through Europe — do "not let us get in, with
the sanction of the printer's ink, alleged facts which are not facts,
figures which may be honestly misstated but nevertheless are in-
correct and entirely misleading.
Dr. Henry Smith Williams : Inasmuch as we are talking about
alcohol, I want to ask Mr. Phelps frankly if he heard my statement
last night and if he is referring to any figures that I may have used.
Mr. Phelps : Your paper, sir, was one of the most sane papers that
I have heard in a good many years.
Doctor Williams: I thank you. I hope that my statistics were
correct.
Discussion.
Expedients in Violation of Principle
Dr. Charles G. Pease, President Non-Smokers' Protective League of
America, New York, N. Y.
I am opposed to the state having anything to do with the traffic
of liquor. I do not think that we as a people can afford to profit
through the downfall of the people of the race. We can get our
income without taxing liquor. We want to seek principles and to
act upon principles which, given time to work them out, will bring
about the right condition. But to have makeshifts, or expedients,
used in violation of a principle, it may seem to better the conditions
slightly at first, but in the ultimate we are still presenting to the
people the right to indulge in that which the state sanctions and
receives a financial income from.
202 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
I should like to sa}', in regard to the craving for alcohol, that
Charles B. Townes, recognized authority and one who is engaged in
bringing men out of alcoholism and drug addiction, says that if we
can get rid of tobacco, we will get rid of ninety per cent of alco-
holism and ninety per cent of other drug addiction.
Discussion.
The Rising Tide of Alcohol Consumption
Dr. Henry Smith Williams.
I shall not attempt in any way to answ^er anything that has been
said. Most of it I agree with. I wish to point out just one thing,
that a good deal of the discussion has not really been pertinent to
the idea that I had, which was a way of getting rid of alcohol. A
good deal of the discussion has been about alcohol.
I am constrained to say just a personal word. I assumed per-
haps a little over-optimism, that everyone interested in temper-
ance knew of my work on intemperance. Probably none of you
knew of it. Five years ago I published in McClnre's Magazine a
series of articles on alcohol. That was regarded by Mr. McClure
and others as perhaps the most popular series of articles on any
scientific topic ever published in any American magazine. The
proof of that was that there were nearly one hundred thousand re-
quests to reproduce those articles wholly or in part. They came
not only from temperance unions and societies all over the country,
but from the presidents of railroads, the heads of manufacturing
companies and all that. I set forth, as some people were kind enough
to say, for the first time in a dispassionate way the essential facts
and the effect of alcohol on the human body, telling it without prej-
udice and yet without gloves.
As I say, I assumed that my attitude in that regard was known
to this assembly and thought it was understood by everybody that
I regarded mj^self as one of the foremost champions of temperance
in America and that I was only going to supplement this work with
what I regarded as a practical effort to get some results. Mr. Mc-
Clure happened to come out on the train with me yesterday and he
said to me, "Doctor, how does it happen that after that exposition
and after we have set forth the physiologic effects of alcohol so that
everyone knows them, there has been no result," and I said, "Mr.
McClure, that has been one of the bitterest disappointments of my
life.'" I really did think in 1908 and 1909, when the tide of whiskey
went down a little, that I had had a small measure in cutting out a
few gallons of that. I said, ' ' At last it has come ; people are listening,
they know now." These thousands of letters came from men of promi-
ALCOHOL AND TOBACCO 203
nenee, saying, ' ' After reading your articles I shall never again touch
alcohol," etc. I have stacks of letters like that. The articles were
published in book form by the Century Company and I hoped they
were doing something to help in a little way to stem this tide. Then
after 1909, the tide began to rise again and I saw that nothing had
happened. When I have spoken on other occasions and have advo-
cated the Gothenburg System, I have been bitterly assailed and
criticized for that, so I have now attempted to find a compromise,
something that seems to be practical.
Now just one other word that is personal. It makes some dif-
ference who is advocating a thing, so let me say that personally
I have been a lifelong advocate of temperance. My mother brought
me up to think that it was almost as bad to touch liquor as to steal,
and I have that old Puritan strain. I do not need those things, so
I do not take them. I don't take tea, coffee, tobacco or alcohol. At
the same time I do not say to my fellow-man who does need them —
I think he needs them or he wants them — "Because I don't need
them, you shan't have them." I don't feel that is ethical. How-
ever, I do not wish to discuss this matter. I would say this, how-
ever. If any here are interested, or would like to see my little
book on alcohol, which sets me right as to my attitude toward tem-
perance, if they will leave their names with the Secretary, I shall
be most happy to present a copy to any who may ask for it.
Discussion.
Licensing Light Drinks
Professor Robert Sprague, Massachusetts Agricultural College, Amherst,
Massachusetts.
For about twenty-five years I have lived in various prohibition
states, many years in Maine. I have gone through practically every
capital of the civilized world at midnight and noon, and all the time
with the liquor question in view.
I should like to mention just a few things in connection with
Maine. I am very well acquainted with Maine. Maine started her
prohibition laws in 1851; it might have been in 1854. But it
was in 1884 that she put it into her Constitution. Now up to two
years ago I had been living for five years in Maine. I believe that
there are no more polite people and no better stock on this conti-
nent than you will find today in Maine, and certainly no people ever
made a stronger and more gallant fight for their liberties than the
people of Maine have in the last 60 years on the liquor question —
against criticism, against everything that might be brought up,
against money. They have stood firm on that liquor question.
204 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
One of the liomls of departinents in Harvard two years a^o came
to me and wanted to take a little trip in Maine to find out something
about how liquor was handled. He went into one city with which
I was well acquainted. The first place we went to was a big build-
ing three stories high, a second-class hotel. There was a smoking
room on the first floor and back of that there was a bar. We went
in there and stood around a while, saw men come and go, drinking
everything. In behind that we found another room. It was the
room where the people who had gotten drunk were deposited. The
men in that room were piled about four feet high on top of one
another. We had to drink a little beer in order to stay, but while
we stood there they were dragged in by the collar, by men who
had the thing in charge, and thrown onto the pile. There they were
spewing over one another. Some of them got more or less conscious.
They would then struggle out and be taken care of in another room,
where they were kept until they were able to go on to the street and
take care of themselves. Around the city we went, in twenty-two
places. There was no liquor sign in that town; there was no open
saloon. Everything was closed. At that time there were four or
five special state deputies in the city especially appointed by the
government, with no other duty than to enforce the prohibitory law
with all the power of the state behind them.
I have seen that for years in Maine. There are more divorces
granted in Maine today because of drunkenness than in any other
state in the union.
Mr. Poling: I challenge the figures. Will you give them to us?
Professor Sprague: All right, I will refer you to the last (1910)
report of divorces of the United States, the last regular census. I
cannot carry the figures in mind, but will be glad to look them up
with you. I do not think that it is because of more drinking. I
suspect it is due to this, that the folks in Maine are more sensitive
to drunkenness, which is the cause of divorce ; it indicates the keen
sensitiveness of the Maine conscience on the matter of drinking. So
do not take that in the wrong way. But there is a great deal of
drinking in that state and in various other states.
Then I w^ant to refer to this : In Maine today I rarely hear a real
temperance lecture, a really out-and-out, hard-fisted temperance lec-
ture that calls for self-control and moral suasion.
I want to agree with what Doctor Williams said last night. It
seems to me that we have never in this country attempted what
he has proposed, the elimination of the strong drink by some system
whereby the people may get the weak, the light drink, with light
alcoholic elements, light proportions in them, but get them freely
ALCOHOL AND TOBACCO 205
and get them guaranteed pure. We have not tried that. Certainly
we are forcing upon many of our prohibition states, upon the drink-
ers, the most and worst undrinkable stuff that ever has been made by
man anywhere on the planet, that I have ever seen. The people in
Maine are drinking today, I believe, the worst stuff that has ever
been poured into the human system. I can take you to places in
prohibition states in the East where in the cellars of drug stores
they have set up a can of sulphuric acid, a can of prune juice, a can
of this and a can of that. These things are drawn off, and the liquor
is made on the spot according to the demand — perfectly destructive.
There is no question about that. I say, I agree with the effort to try
an experiment, at least, along the line of Doctor Williams' proposi-
tion, that we should ^try to cut out the destructive stuff and give
some license.
Just one more thought. I don't believe in the national prohibi-
tion proposition. I don't believe that if a man out on the Pacific
Coast wants to take a glass of beer, I as a citizen of Massachusetts
have a right to say that he shall not. I believe it is contrary to the
very spirit of American liberty.
Disctissio7i.
The "Booze Special"
f Mrs. J. L. Higgins, Temperance Worker, Battle Creek, Mich.
I want to give you just a little experience within ten miles of
this town. You know Battle Creek was dry for two years, this city
of thirty thousand inhabitants. They commenced first by going to
Augusta. Then Augusta shut up its saloons. Then they went to
Galesburg, and Galesburg shut up its saloons. Then they went on
down to Kalamazoo, twenty-two miles away, to get their drink.
They came back nights on the last car. It became so notorious that
it was called the "booze special."
One night I was in the city of Kalamazoo and coming back I
missed my first car and got on the late car. At the first corner a few
men got on with their grips, a half dozen more at the next corner
with their grips. I looked at them and said, "If those are traveling
men, they are degenerating fast." At the next corner some more
men got on with their grips, and I recognized the fact that I was
on the "booze special." A man sitting across saw me, knew my busi-
ness, knew what I was doing. He had read somewhere that every
dog has his day, and he made up his mind that his day had come.
He said to me, "Madam, do you see this?" I certainly did. He
said, "Does that not reveal to you that prohibition is the greatest
farce on the face of the earth? These men have been down to Kala-
206 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
mazoo. Their grips are full of liquor. They are taking the liquor
back to Battle Creek." He continued, "More liquor is drunk under
prohibition in Battle Creek than was ever drunk under a high
licensed system. It is the biggest farce on the face of God's earth."
I am not in the habit of making temperance speeches on "booze
specials," but, as the Quakers say, "the spirit moved me," and I
said to him, "Let us count them," and we counted them. There
were just fifteen men aboard. I said, "Here are just fifteen men. It
is Saturday night. These would not be one drop in the bucket in one
saloon in Battle Creek on Saturday night, and we had over thirty
saloons. Where are the rest?" He said, "They are at home with
their families tonight," and I said, "Thank God that the tempta-
tion is twenty-two miles away. ' ' I said, ' ' These fellows are regular
old soaks, anyway. ' ' Then those men began to gather around me, some
of them. They had heard me speak before and they did not want
to hear me speak again, and I said to them, "My friends, you heard
what I said. You are regular old soaks. The money that should be
spent for clothes and comfort and food for your families, you have
spent for the liquor that you have in your grips. ' ' I said, ' ' I would not
be surprised if you are in debt to some honest dealer in Battle Creek
for the very clothes you have on," and I continued, "That is not
the worst of it. You are law breakers. If you had your just des-
serts, you would be behind the bars, and the worst of all is, you'are
not ashamed of it. We cannot do much for you. God pity you. You
poor fellows, we cannot do much for you. All we can do for you
is to leave you in the hands of the just and merciful God." I said,
"We are not working for you especially. We are working to turn
out a race of citizens, among whom such men as you will be prac-
tically unknown. ' ' And then one of them sat down on a seat, folded
his hands a little meekly and said, "But madam, think of the taxes."
I looked at him a moment and I said, "My friend, I don't know
you, but I know your kind — ragged, blear-eyed, run down at
the heel." You have seen them many a time. And I said, "I know
your kind and I venture to say that you don't pay taxes, one dol-
lar." He looked at me a moment and his friend sitting beside him
grinned a little and said, "You are just right, madam, he don't."
I said, "You are a pitiable subject to worry about taxes."
My friends, one thing faces us. That is what God's will is toward
men, and God has but one method of dealing with sin — extermina-
tion.
ALCOHOL AND TOBACCO 207
Discussion.
The Saloon and the Taxpayer
George B. Peak, President Central Life Assurance Society of the United
States, Des Moines, Iowa.
When we observe the increased amount of alcohol that is being
used now, as compared to formerly, what would have been the
amount if it had not been for the fight against alcohol? I suppose
the use of alcohol would have been quite general and we would all
be showing some of the effects of it. As the consumption has been
increased some five times what it was in 1840, perhaps it would have
been ten times or twenty times the amount. I believe, for one, that
the fight against alcoholism has been a gaining one. We have been
gaining on ourselves — perhaps not conquering the great evil, but
teaching the world the great injury from alcohol and preparing
ourselves for a more effective fight in the future.
A few years ago the leading newspaper in our city announced
the fact that no liquor advertisements would appear in the paper in
the future. That paper was soon followed by the other papers and
now, in Des Moines, a city of over one hundred thousand, it is im-
possible to insert a liquor advertisement in any of the papers.
I am somewhat acquainted with. Kansas, somewhat acquainted
with Oklahoma, somewhat acquainted with the prohibition territory
in Texas, somewhat acquainted with states that have no prohibition
territory, and I feel very certain that the condition is far better in
states that have made the earnest, vigorous fight against alcohol than
where the fight has not been waged — far better. I am acquainted
with the condition in our own state, Iowa; also the condition in Des
Moines. You remember that in Iowa they had a state prohibitory
law. The legislature amended it, and now the cities — ^by getting up
a petition signed in the larger cities by the majority, which is one
over the half of the voters — can introduce saloons. We had
a very severe fight on the last petition, that went through all the
gourts to the supreme court. It was decided that the petition was
not valid, and the saloons were closed last November and remained
closed for about a month. During that month there were just about
one-half of the arrests for crime in Des Moines as during the pre-
vious month. Compared with the year before, at the same time, there
was about one-half of the criminal practice going on in the city, and
less than one-half of the drunkenness — there was some drunkenness
during this time, because there was a little town about four miles
from Des Moines that had two open saloons, one bar-keeper in each
saloon. These saloons increased their bar-keepers, one to twenty-
five, and the other to twentj^-two men, serving out the drink to
208 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
some of the Des Moines people, who, yon see, went out to these places
to get drinks. Notwithstanding that, the drunkenness in the city
and the arrests for drunkenness were reduced to about fifty per
cent of what they were the month previously.
Now I believe that the only successful fight against alcoholism
is to stop the open places that educate the young man to drink.
When they circulated this last petition, they raised the question of
finance. These saloons paid into the city a tax of something over
one hundred thousand dollars. Now the saloon-keeper raised the
question of the state's need of this hundred thousand dollars. They
finally succeeded in getting quite a number of men to sign the
petition who would not have signed it otherwise, but that peti-
tion is now in the courts again, and it will be tried out through the
lower courts and the supreme court.
I noticed the other day, in a Des Moines paper, that about twelve
of the leading business men of Des Moines — men who pay the largest
taxes with the exception of one taxpayer there, who rents his build-
ings very largely for saloon purposes (these other men are not in-
terested in renting places for saloon purposes) — that these business
men found an affidavit and presented it to the courts. They de-
manded that the saloon be closed on the ground that it increased
their taxes because it increased the expenses of looking after polic-
ing the city; because it increased the expenses of the courts; be-
cause it filled the poorhouses, and added to the expense of the in-
ebriate asylum, and all of those things ; because the saloon, instead
of being a revenue producer, was an expense maker. Whenever you
can get the people to see the saloon from that point of view, that it
is an expense maker instead of a revenue producer, you make a gain.
Discussion.
A "High-Class" Saloon
Mrs. Maud Glassner, Michigan Federation of Women's Clubs, Nashville,
Michigan.
I want to indorse what has just been said about the saloon and
to add a little personal experience, if I may be pardoned for doing
so. When we were married, my husband had a small store and we
lived above it. We got along very happily for three years, when
the building next door was converted into a saloon. Now I am
convinced that the great majority of men and women in gatherings
of this sort, who do not frequent saloons, know very little of really
what goes on in an open saloon. So I want to tell you some of the
things that happened when the saloon was set down eighteen feet
from the side of our building. In the first place the saloon-keeper
ALCOHOL AND TOBACCO 209
who was to run the business, came into our store and ordered some
supplies and very pompously informed us that he was an excep-
tional man — he was a teetotaler, in fact. He did not use the vile
stuff; he was an exceptionally good saloon-keeper; and that in the
last town where they were his wife was such an excellent woman they
had asked her to teach a class in a Sunday-school ; that he was going
to run a high-class place ; that we had never known what a high-class
saloon was, but we were going to learn. He almost persuaded me
that there might be such a thing as a beneficent influence coming out
of the saloon in a town of our size. So while they carried the plate
glass mirrors into the saloon and the mahogany furniture into the
front of this building, in back they were building a high board fence,
enclosing a part of the back yard. Our customers were very much
amused when I said I didn't know why they built an addition onto
the back of the building when they did not knoAv how much busi-
ness they were going to do. I was very much amused when I found
that every saloon had to have some place where the men might wal-
low as hogs in their own filth. That is what that was. Those men
would get out there and engage in rough singing and talking and
fighting. There never was such a storm of vile langniage and pro-
fanity coming from any place as there was from that part of that
saloon. The saloon-keeper used to stand in the door of the saloon to
coax the boys into the place, while men were discussing the means
by which they had turned themselves from men into carrions. The
worst part of it to me was that I had been accustomed to doing my
sewing in the sunny side of the doorway of the store. I could not
sew, I could not rock my baby to sleep in that upstairs window, or
hang my washing in the back yard, without hearing language that
would scar the soul of any woman. And I said to myself, "If that
is the sort of language and the sort of talk that goes on in an open
saloon, the fewer we have of them, the better for our population."
It seems to me that is a self-evident fact. The most terrible part
of the whole thing to me was the fact that these terrible social dis-
eases which we are trying so hard to combat now-a-days were
laughed at and joked about. Sure cures were swapped and patent
remedies recommended, just as if decent people were miles and miles
away. And I faced bad men under the influence of liquor over
the counters of our store until I really wished I had the grit of Carrie
Nation and a stick of dynamite. It seemed to me as if it would be
of service to humanity to wipe that thing off the globe. I know of
young boys who got into the atmosphere, who heard that talk, who
went out and formed clubs to carry on that vicious bruteness.
210 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
Discussion.
A League of Publishers
;Melvil Dewey^ President Lake Placid Club, Lake Placid, New York.
I think it is true tliat Avliile the people are equally sincere
and earnest in regrard to this, there are diametrically opposite
opinions as to what should be done. The pathology we all know.
It is the therapeutics we should get at. Has not someone here a sug-
gestion upon which we could all agree? The paper of Doctor "Wil-
liams does not stand at all as the expression of the opinion of the
Conference. The Conference itself simply publishes what has been
said. The remarks of Doctor Williams are his, and the remarks of
some other person are his, and people must choose what they think
to be the right. In regard to the remark about statistics, I would
suggest that the truth may be absolute truth and yet very mislead-
ing. You know if you take a fish pole and look at it end ways, it
is the size of a ten-cent piece. Look at it otherwise, and it is the
length of an elephant. So one man looks at the thing from a certain
point of view, another man from another point of view equally
honest. What we see is true, but we must learn to walk all around
it and see it in all its bearing if we are going to command the con-
fidence of the public.
I don't believe it would be of any use if we spent another week
here, discussing prohibition and other regulations, for men equally
able, equall}^ honest, equally experienced are diametrically opposed
on these questions. But there are things on which we could agree.
For instance, a suggestion was made last night that I wish someone
would take up here and give some sidelight on. That is, what the
publisher said who stated he was very ready to join in a league of
publishers who would refuse to break into their columns the ad-
vertising of alcohol, tobacco, and patent medicines, a get-rich-quick
scheme, or any other thing distinctly inimical to race betterment.
There are hundreds of publications in this country. This Confer-
ence might unify them, form a league of that kind. All sides will
agree on that. Whatever you may say on drink and liquor, we all
agree that it is a bad thing for the race to have it advertised and
thrown before them in all sorts of ways. The employers of the Em-
ployers' League will pledge themselves not to employ users of al-
cohol and tobacco, if you go as far as that. AVe could get a thousand
employers in a very short time wlio would refuse to take into
their employ any man or boy, or woman either, addicted to this
vice that is making a race of runts.
ALCOHOL AND TOBACCO 211
Discussion.
Soothing Syrups and Alcohol Craving
Dr. Edith B. Lowry, St. Charles, Illinois.
I have been very much interested in one of the causes of drink. I
notice in Chicago that among the downtown offices many men would
work in the office under stress for two or three hours, then they
would feel the craving for something, rush out, and get a drink. I
decided there must be a cause for that. In my own work, I found
that sometimes when I had been working for two or three hours I
began to have a restless feeling, a craving for something, and I felt
that it was the same that these men had and which a great many
would interpret to mean a need of alcohol and others would a need
of coffee. I found out that if I kept some molasses candy on my desk
and ate two or three pieces at that time, that satisfied the craving.
I found that it is a craving of the system for something which can
be satisfied only by the right diet.
Another thing, I found that a great many of those men in the
offices, who rush out for drinks, were eating regularly at the res-
taurants. They did not have well-balanced meals; they did not
have the right things in their system, the right food that the system
craves. It seems to me one of the best solutions of this alcohol ques-
tion is being offered now in the schools by their domestic science
and domestic economy classes, which are teaching the girls how
to have well-balanced meals in the home. Then the men are not
going to have quite the same craving for alcohol.
Another cause for this alcoholism is the training from babyhood.
It is quite customary among a good many families to give the babies
soothing syrups and a little whiskey and water, when they have colic,
or various other stimulants. The system naturally becomes accus-
tomed to the stimulation and naturally craves it. As a child grows
older, this craving is satisfied by some soft drinks at the soda foun-
tains and various other places. Then, as the child advances to an
older age, it outgrows this habit of soft drinks and takes to harder
drinks. So the training of mothers to manage their homes
rightly, to bring up the babies rightly, feed them rightly, and also
feed the families rightly is going to do a great deal in solving the
alcohol question.
Discussion.
Prohibition and the Drug Consumption
Dr. James T. Searcy, Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
There is no question that, the scientific aspect of the alcohol ques-
tion is what the whole question rests upon. When a man takes a
212 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
driiik of alcohol or wIumi he smokes his pipe of tobacco or drinks
his cup of coffee or takes his toff of cocaine, he does it with the
knowledge that it is a scientific question. There is no doubt about it.
He feels better for having taken any one of these agents. Now,
there is a great deal of information coming up from all directions
as to what occasions the better feeling that that man has when he
takes any one of these drugs. Most anybody feels more or less dis-
comfort., a great deal at times, more than others. If he can take any
agent that will prevent his recognizing the discomfort, he has done
something. Whatever the effect is, he recognizes it as a fact that he
does feel better. But the chemical action of those very drugs, when
removed, is to leave him more delicate and more sensitive. That man
feels worse than he did before he took that agent. If he repeats this
continually, he continues to feel bad and continues to increase his
hyperesthesia, so he wants more of the drug and he takes more to
satisfy him.
Now we have gone all over this world of civilized people and
collected from everywhere agents of this kind and are using them.
We are using the caffeine from tea and coffee that we' get in Asia,
using the caffeine from the cola nuts that we find in Africa and now
are producing in South America. We find in the Andes Mountains
that the Indians chew cola leaves. We find the Indians in this
country using tobacco. Now it takes whole states to furnish enough
for the country. We found that the Moors of Spain distil the milder
fermented drinks, getting stronger alcoholics. Now we cannot get
enough agents strong enough for us. The users of milder ones, like
caffeine, take directly to nicotine, then they get to alcohol. The
caffeine fiends are coming from all directions, and the morphine
users, and sometimes the chloral, sometimes the coal-tar products.
We are relieving our headaches everywhere through civilized society
with the broadcast use of these things. That is having some effect.
It is having a broadcast effect in this country of producing in every
direction psychroesthenic hyperesthesia of the nervous system,
from which people feel bad. As I said last night, they are born tired.
They know they can get these things. They are advertised as stimu-
lating, invigorating, refreshing, exciting ; these chemists having
pushed out that kind of scientific information for the use of these
drugs. Then they come to me for some information as to the cause
of increasing insanity. Long before you get insanity, the indica-
tions of nervousness come.
I can tell the effect of the prohibition principle by its effect in
my own institution. Birmingham, some two or three years ago. had
ALCOHOL AND TOBACCO 213
prohibition. We did not get the alcohol inebriates from Birming-
ham— not nearly so many as we did before or as we have since they
have taken away the prohibition of alcohol — but we did get drug
fiends in greater number. They changed from one to the other.
All through that Southern country we have prohibited the use of
alcohol in negro districts, so poor negroes are taking cocaine and it
makes worse fiends of them than the other.
Doctor Williams: They are a good deal worse, aren't they,
Doctor?
Doctor Searcy : We cannot say that. I had brought into my office
the other day a druggist who came into the hospital as an inebriate
from the use of caffeine. We are manufacturing that kind of people
by the cigar, by alcohol and we, a civilized people, have done it all
over the world.
Discussion.
International Committee on Liquor
Frederick L. Hoffman, Statistician Prudential Insurance Company, Newark,
N. J.
About a year ago, on the initiative of the Russian Government
and of the French Government, in cooperation with other European
governments, . an International Committee was formed for the
scientific study of the liquor question entirely de novo, without any
preconceived notion whatsoever. The United States has formed a
Sub-Committee of that International Committee. Of the Sub-Com-
mittee, Mr. Taft is chairman. It includes on the Executive Com-
mittee a number of those who were on the original Committee of
Fifty which studied the liquor problem. While they have not as
yet seen their way clear to organize for active work, they have
divided into five or six specific committees, each of wliich will deal
with a separate and well-defined branch of the whole question of
the relation of alcohol to the public in all its phases.
Discussion.
Alcohol Posters
Mrs. Charles Kimball at^d Elizabeth Hewes Tilton. Boston, Mass.
Mrs. Kimball : Just now we are carrying on aggressive work
against alcohol in Boston. It is being done through posters in an edu-
cational way. A little over a year ago, the first poster came out, put on
214 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
JOHN MITCHELI.
LABOR LEADER,
said (Toronto, 1909). that ho was not at all
impressed with the statement that if you closo
down the Liquor business, you bring a calamity
to the community. If a brewery or distillery
were closed down, on its ruins would go up
A FACTORY.
Thlak>ll.Over, Poster Commlltee, II Mason St., Cambridge.
WKo is the first man
to be laid off, and the
last man to be taken
on?
Hr Nliui Who Ibiid
OVESFt ^J^i CENT
MORE ACCIDENTS
TO WORKMEN WHO DRINK
THAN TO WORKMEN IN GENERAL
ALCOHOL AND TOBACCO 215
a small building; on Charles Street. It justified its excuse for being
that day, for in a short time groups of people came up and stood long
enough to read, ' ' One dollar in, two dollars out, for every dollar the
street receives for license. Two dollars go out to take care of criminals,
paupers and insane brought to our institutions through drink.
Think it over." On the same afternoon the newspaper men came
there and, following them, the photographers. In a little while it
became newspaper news. We had word from all over the country
inquiring about the poster campaign. This offers perhaps a con-
tinuous movement that nothing else offers. The sound of
the human voice passes. We listen to an eloquent address ; we enjoy
it and we think of it. It comes up at times. The poster remains
with its educational value. When the voter goes to vote for license
or no license, he sees the poster. It brings to his mind the thing
he should vote for.
In our university city, Cambridge, we had a poster day. Mary
Barry had the posters placed on all public buildings. Citizens
loaned their fences, bankers gave their windows, and we had a roj^al
day. We have had many such days in the state of Massachusetts.
Doctor Southern, of the Psychopathic Hospital, looks over every one
of our posters, in connection with Dr. Putnam, the famous neurolo-
gist of Harvard. These posters are given careful study. Everyone
can rely on the poster as being statistically correct.
I submit a statement by Elizabeth Hew^es Tilton, Chairman of the
Poster Committee, Cambridge, Mass.
ALCOHOL EDUCATION THROUGH POSTERS FOR THINKERS NOT DRINKERS.
Alcohol Education through Posters is a movement of Boston
doctors and social workers, affiliated with the Boston Associated
Charities. For thinkers, not drinkers, it aims at no specific legisla-
tion, but works to change men's attitude tow^ard alcohol. It is not
Prohibition: it is not No-License. It stands for the only thing that
can make Prohibition prohibit. No License means AO EDUCATION.
In short, it is no use legislating against what men want. You
must educate your average man not to want, and then legislate for
the laggard. It seems a long road, but what scientists, physicians, so-
ciologists think today, the man on the street thinks tomorrow. The
selected minds of the race have turned against alcohol. To take
these facts, and without sentimentality or exaggeration pass them
on to the average man, is the object of this health and efficiency
campaign against liquor.
Posters were chosen because alcohol is such a time-worn, crank-
216 FIRST NATIOXAI. CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
Sl.OO m! $2.00 OUT!
rm m $1.00
HUT IB SM RECEIVED
LAST YEAR FOR,
LIQUOR LICENSES
XT PAID OUT
OVER
• I
For the CRIMINALS. PAUPERS
and INSANE broiiglit to our In-
stitutions tlirougli DRINK
■ iiiiiiili
THINK THIS OVER!
MOi Annu«l Report. Mib. Bureau o< Lelxir
BUCK PSIffTINO COMPANt. BOSTON ---i, -„^-
ALCOHOL AND TOBACCO 217
worn subject that you are forced to apply a very fresh handle to
make the subject new and news, to carry it into that final educa-
tion, the press. With this fresh approach, Collier's, Miuisey's, The
Survey and The Outlook have all come forward and offered to help.
Had it been simply Alcohol, it is doubtful if they could have got a
hearing for the campaign.
Now I want to call attention to a curious fact — the utter silence
of all our social service work on the alcohol question. In the New
Year's Survey, it summarizes all the work being done — better hous-
ing, trade unionism, sex hygiene, but not one word about alcohol.
I do not know but my impression is that there are few courses de-
voted to alcohol in our schools for social science, so that it has come
about that the average social worker does not think the question
important.
The real leaders never doubt its importance, but they tell you
that it is so intricate, and men get so passionate about it, that they
have been at a loss how to move on it. They say it is not a cause,
but a war. But move on it we must, for it plays too great a part in
all the things that social workers are fighting for them to ignore it
longer. We are fighting against these things that destroy the health
and efficiency of our nation — poverty, insanity, crime, immorality,
disease. In every one of these alcohol plays an appreciable part.
The Boston Associated Charities found that one-fourth of the
poverty that comes on charity in Boston, Mass., is directly and in-
directly due to drink. Curiously enough, the Committee of Fifty,
working through several states, also declared one-fourth of our
poverty due to drink.
Only one-fourth you may say, but if you are fighting poverty
and have found something that is making one-fourth of it, don't
despise that one-fourth. Move on it.
Doctors agree that alcohol is the inunediate cause of from one-
fifth to one-third of our insanity. Insanity causes a very great ex-
pense to a state. If you find something that is making from one-
fifth to one-third of that expense, good judgment, good business,
would be to move on it.
Here I may insert, by the way, the arrests for drunkenness hav-
ing increased in Massachusetts one hundred and sixty per cent in
eleven years, we have a Commission to look into the matter. Doctor
Southard invited this Commission to the Psychopathic Hospital
and showed them one patient after another clear out of their minds
from alcohol. I was present and no more depressing sight have I
ever seen. At the end Doctor Southard said, "Gentlemen, individual
liberty is a doctrine very much in vogue. From it I will not dissent.
218 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACJE BETTERMENT
Ti 1 mniiii MiW!
i
96
°o
OF IKE IMPIRIIH
Qwann H!
Back Printinit Compni^. Boston <)g^g^
ALCOHOL AND TOBACCO 219
But I wish to say that a state that licenses shops that sell insanity
should pay out its millions liberally to support the victims of its
hobby."
Excluding- drunkenness as a crime, the IMassachusetts Bureau of
Labor found that fifty to fifty-three per cent of our crime was due to
drink. The Committee of Fifty found forty-nine to ninety-five per
cent due, directly or indirectly, to drink.
I believe in prison reform, but some of the energy ought to go,
not toward the reform inside the prison, but in reforming the causes
outside that send men there. Statistics are loose things, but every-
thing shows an extremely strong connection between drink and
crime, and if you can reduce our prison expense by one-half or even
one-third by removing alcohol, I think it is worth while to bring this
fact out, to make it prominent in all this splendid prison reform
movement. In fact, I think it is the opposite of "efficiency manage-
ment" not to bring it out.
We had a letter on this subject, which I now submit by permis-
sion.
IjETTER received FROM A FORMER POLICE COMMISSIONER IN
SAN FRANCISCO
San Francisco. May 15, 1913.
"I notice in the Lexington Minute Man, that I receive from my
native town weekly, a paragi-aph to the effect that a poster is to be
displayed in Bedford saying that 'directly, indirectly, one-half of
our crimes are due to drink.' It may interest your committee to
learn of my experience in that line.
"While Police Commissioner in San Francisco in 1907-08-09, it
was my custom to examine the records in the city prison frequently,
showing all the crimes and other particulars attending arrests, that
numbered about two hundred daily, and my conclusion was that
fully ninety per cent were due, directly or indirectly, to the use of
liquors. Again, all saloons in San Francisco were closed for thirty
days following the great fire in April, 1906, the result being that
there was so little police duty necessary, in spite of the great confu-
sion growing out of the fire, that one-half the police force were given
vacations for periods of from ten to thirty days. When the saloons
were again opened, the officers on vacation were recalled, as it was
deemed necessary to place the entire force on duty because of the
increased crime and disorder.
' ' Yours truly,
"A. D. Cutler.
"510 Kohl Bldg., San Francisco."
The connection between alcohol and immorality is too well
known to dilate on. Miss Jane Addams says that those who have
220 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON UACE liETTKRMENT
ARCHBISHOP
IRELAND
SAYS.-
"The Great Cause of Social Crime is
Q||||y|4; the Great Cause of Poverty is
QUII^K^ When I hear of a family broken
up, I ask the cause, - DRINK. ^^ ' 9^ ^o
the gallows and ask its victim the cause, the
answer, -DRINKi
Then I ask myself in perfect wonderment,
Wliy do not men pnt a
STOP to tills thing?"
ALCOHOL AND TOBACCO
221
ALCOHOL!
YOU MAY THINK:—
It is only Heavy Drinkinif that harms.
EXPERIMENTS SHOW:—
That even Moderate Drinkin({ Injures Health, Lessens Efficiency.
YOU MAY THINK:—
Alcohol braces us for hard work and lessens fatiifue.
EXPERIMENTS SHOW:—
That ALCOHOL IN NO WAY INCREASES MUSCULAR
STRENGTH OR ENDURANCE.
ALCOHOL LOWERS VITALITY; ALCOHOL
OPENS THE DOOR TO DISEASE.
At the Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, the nse of Alcohol as a
medicine declined 77 per cent, in eight years.
Most Hoders Hospitals show the same tendeaej.
ALCOHOL IS TH£ IMMEDIATE CAUSE OF
MUCH OF OUR INSANITY.
MUCH OF OUR POVERTY.
MUCH OF OUR CRIME.
THE MASSACHUSETTS PRISON COMMISSION REPORTED THAT 96%
OF THOSE IN PRISON IN 1912 HAD INTEMPERATE HABITS.
LASTLY, ALCOHOL PROMOTES COMMERCIALIZED VICE.
YET YOU MAY SAY:— We need the Revenue from Liquor.
DO YOU REALIZE—HOW SMALL IS THE REVENUE com-
pared with the Costs of Carrying the Victims.
YOUR MONEY SUPPORTS THESE VICTIMS,
FOR HIGHER TAXES MEAN HIGHER RENTS.
IN SBOZtT
ARRAYED AGAINST ALCOHOL arc ECONOMY. SCIENCE. EFFIQENCY. HEALTH. MORALITY.
CITIZENS, THINK!
SOSTOn ASSOCtATEO CHARITIIS.
AlCOHOL EDDCAIIOd
TREES ALONG
-■"^^^
222 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
stiulied tlu> subject know that it is the iiidispciisahlc vcliidc ol' white
slavery.
A great American, known to all of you, said, in a private letter,
that his recent trip around the world made him feel that alcohol,
in conjunction with venereal disease, might carry off the white race,
unless great educational and restrictive measures were instantly
applied.
All these facts should sink deep into the minds of social workers
and come out in action: for they are their own particular subjects —
poverty, crime, disease, immorality. To fight them efficiently, one
must fight alcohol, fight it with education.
The youth of the nation will be appealed to by the fact that
alcohol is probably the greatest health and efficiency "sapper" that
we have.
Experiments prove that even moderate drinking injures health
and lessens efficiency. This has made the Kaiser a total abstainer
and caused him to beg his army to give up beer.
Another fact that cannot fail to impress the race is that alcohol
is dying out as a medicine because, far from giving life, it destroys
life by lowering vitality. It really opens the door to disease. Hence
at the Massachusetts C4eneral Hospital, Boston, the use of alcohol as
a medicine declined seventy-seven per cent in eight years.
In short, the passing of alcohol would restore untold amounts of
health and efficiency now being lost, not through heavy drinking,
hnt through moderate drinking.
These things should not be done all at once — but education boards
should be run through long periods.
For information regarding Posters, please write to —
Elizabeth Hewes Tilton,
Chairman Poster Committee,
Cambridge, Mass.
TOBACCO A RACE POISON
Daniel Lichty, M.D., Senior Consultant, Roekford City Hospital ; President,
Trustees Roekford Municipal Tuberculosis Sanitarium.
Man, generic man, is the greatest asset of the age, and of the
world. It is the duty of those who dwell on the heights to conserve
this asset.
It should not be necessary to put the subject of tobacco on the de-
fensive, yet, in its almost universal use, to openly declare it a
race poison demands this; it requires the courage and 'sacrifice of
a martyr to do it.
ALCOHOL AND TOBACCO 223
LIQUOR BILL
$1,750,000,000
IN THE UNITED STATES FOR ONE YEAR!
THIS WOULD -
1. Build Ten Hospitals in each of the 48
States in the Union at a cost of $10(),-
000 each and endowed with $500,000
each $288,000,000
2. Build 4 Colleges in each State each costing
$1,000,000. and endowed with $1,000,000 384,000,000
3 Build a Road from New York to San
Francisco at a cost of $10,000,000, and
give each State $1,000,000 to build
tributary roads 58,000,000
4. Equip 10.000 Playgrounds for Children
at a cost of $2,000 each 20,000,000
5. Give each State $10,000,000 for lndus=
trial Education in the public schools 480,000,000
6. Place 50 Libraries in each State, each cost=
ing $100,000 and endowed with $100,000 480,000,000
And Leave $40,000,000
F^OK
MUNmi RECREATION CENTRES
IN PLACE OF THE SALOON
By W. E. PITTENGER
South End AlcoholiMuaitlon Commlttte II MiMon St., Cambridtt. Mass.
Buck Friatla* Ccaipu;, BMtsn a^Sto
224 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
However, as Abraham Lincoln said of his opi)Osition to human
slavery, "If the end brings me out wrong, ten angels swearing I
was right would make no difference."
Tobacco is a poison, a narcotic poison, an acro-narcotic ; it is so
classed in every text-book on poisons, in every book on botany.
Every chemistry so classes its alkaloids, and every dictionary, medi-
cal or otherwise, so defines it. Every part of the plant is poisonous.
Even the sweet secretion of its flowers is stupefying. Only a few
poisonous plants excel it in deadliness. In Germany tobacco is fit-
tingly called teufel kraut, "devil's weed."
Tobacco alone possesses the fascinating flavor and aroma that
lures the world. Eighty per cent of the adolescent and adult male
population are enamored of its narcotic and lethal potency. How
some are poisoned and others are immune is the paradox of human
physiology and pathology. Here heredity and education, maternal
and filial affection, are all deposed and dumped into a commoir mire
of tobacco debauchery.
That it possesses a potency to disturb function in callow youth
or adult decrepity, most beginners will readily attest. King James'
counterblast against tobacco is such a worthy and graphic clinical
recital of its systemic effect as a modern therapeutic professor might
be proud to have composed. "A custom loathsome to the eye, hate-
ful to nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs, and in
the black stinking fumes thereof nearest resembling the horrible
Stygian smoke of the pit that is bottomless," is his characteriza-
tion of burning tobacco.
That it has lethal properties, stupefies and kills, neither scientist
nor layman can successfully refute. The recital of its exclusive dis-
covery and use in the Western Hemisphere has many character-
istics of the recital of the ardent adventurer, or the buccaneer sailor.
Pipes, implements, not unlike modern smoking pipes, have been dis-
covered in Italy, Greece, Asia, Turkey, China, Ireland and the East
Indies. Areheologists acknowledge these finds and admit that they
may have been used for the combustion and inhaling of some nar-
cotic substance.
Anesthesia and narcosis, from whatever substance, are regarded
as pathological conditions ; they produce perversions of function and
increase morbidity. That a universally acknowledged narcotic
and poisonous substance has found such lurement to man, the
boasted monarch of earth, is an enigma of modern ethics and eth-
nology. There are other pernicious, habit-forming drugs as well as
tobacco being insidiously foisted on susceptible humanity by un-
relenting commercial advertising that have their toxin and their
ALCOHOL AND TOBACCO 225
menace. National and individnal perspicacity seems already myopic,
if not blinded, by the blandishments of their advertising. Prance
was slow in recognizing the demoralization absinthe was working
on her people nntil its wrecks tainted her society and blotted her
landscape.
China passed from dynasty to dynasty under the stupor of
opium — an Empire in area, mines of wealth at her feet, but with a
paucity of appreciation of these gifts or of the degradation opiuni
was working among her people, until the sober remnant of virile
civilization compelled her to abandon the cultivation of the seduc-
tive poppy. Century upon century passed over opium-tinctured China,
but her race was stupefied and retrograde among nations. Spain,
once "the Mistress of the seas," has become a mendicant at the feet
of nations since she introduced tobacco to her impetuous people,
and is begging for her autonomj^ with the tobacco-shriveled ghost
of her former proud self mocking her pleadings.
In 1896 the National Board of Health of Mexico issued a pam-
phlet on tobacco using, calling on all good people, especially doctors,
saying, "We can continue our devotion to tobacco, knowing, as we
do, its calamitous results, but let us warn the innocent who sin from
ignorance," etc.
Man the world over has sought and possessed a sense obtunder.
Tobacco, alcohol, opium, cocaine, are all narcotics which make all
races adverse to ethnic as well as ethical progress. No substance
has become so universal as tobacco. Through his stupor he severs con-
nection with the real source of joy and power — fresh air, pure water,
right food, and wins false force through intoxication and narcosis.
The recognized degenerate opium user of Eastern Asia, the betel
chewer of the Andes and the Himalayas, the hashish eater of Arabia,
and the absinthe wrecks of France, are graphically the antecedent
degenerates of the Occidental tobacco inebriates, who must follow
their trail to final race extinction. Narcotic indulgence, whether
in Asia or America, means race degeneracy, ethnic inferiority and
extinction, race poisomng.
The efficiency engineer, the corporation superintendent, the
transportation chiefs, all captains of industry, are calling for
greater efficiency in their several departments — but the smoker
blazes away, and the snuff and tobacco chewers roll their quids in
stupid indifference to the requirements of comity and efficiency.
Employers refuse the cigarette kid, while compulsion secures the
veteran pipe fiend employment. David Starr Jordan says there is no
use in considering the future of the cigarette boy, as he will have
no future.
S2b FIRST NATKINAIi CONFERKNOK ON HACK HK'I'I'KRM KXT
The (ioc'tor. the roseareli stiidciit, tlic biological cti^iiKU'i- seem
timid, lax or indifferent to the ethnic hlio-ht of tobacco.
Occasionally articles appear in scientific medical or other hij^hly
ethical and literary maf>azines deplorin{>: the spreading use, economic
waste, and bane of tobacco and its racial wreckajje. In other
more popular magazines, whose circulation is measured by mil-
lions (and their readers by tens of millions), with front and back
full -page covers in four colors we find display lines of illustrated ad-
vertisement extolling the merits of their respective tobacco manufac-
tures, each with positive declaration and loud boasting that their prod-
uct has neither ' ' bite ' ' nor ' ' sting, ' ' nor poisonous nicotine. A score of
pipes are patented every year claiming to prevent the acrid smoke
and toxic oil and deadly nicotine from reaching the consumer. The
anxious, hurried reader does not recognize between the lines the
admissions of the cunning advertiser of both pipe maker and tobacco
mixer that there is poison in his product, in the substance and in
the advertisement. A chewing gum is now advertised to relieve
the dryness of the mouth after smoking. No trust is so conscience-
less in its advertising as the tobacco trust. A hundred or two
human lives may be burned to death or horrible disfigurement in
shirtwaist factories ; another several hundred destroyed in burning
hotels; ships may be set on fire, mines burned, hospitals, homes,
morgues and graves be filled, while widows wail and children 's cries
fill the saddened air, but the news press must not tell that these
grewsome and grief-laden tragedies were all caused by stupefied
cigar, cigarette, and pipe smokers, indifferent and carelessly crimi-
nal with their matches and embers and stubs.
The nicotine from tobacco combustion and chewing enters the
.system through the usual channels of respiration, gestation and al3-
sorption. In chewing, the extracted toxin takes the course of foods,
through the stomach and absorbent glands, and probably has some
of its virulence burned out or diluted in passing through the liver
before it enters the right heart and is admitted into the general
circuit. In smoking, the poisonous oil and nicotine are volatilized,
and with the carbon monoxide — the product of combustion which
has both an affinity and an avidity for the blood — a triune toxin
enters the pulmonary circuit. Saturates the alveoli of the lungs, and
hits the base of the right heart and the partition between auricle
and ventricle— Avhere are located the wondrous bundles of nerves
that eontrol the contractions and expansions of tl\e heart's chambers
— and paralyzes the valves and muscles of this wondrous organ.
It taints the lung tissue, and leaves the residuum of stinking toxic
air in the air-cells that remains for daj^s, to pollute his exhalations.
ALCOHOL AND TOBACCO 227
Doctors and patients need only to recall the exhaled breath of ether
and chloroform days after the operating room, or to try to shun the
garlic and other odors of the oriental condiments of the recent immi-
grant days after their ingestion. Tlirough all these circuits absorp-
tion is going on, and back-firing, and pulse-halt and ■ heart-block
signal the examining doctor, and warn both that the track is wrong,
weakened, wrecked. Early, too, in these rounds the centers of both
the intellectual and functional brain and spinal cord are being as-
saulted ; in fact, the earliest impact is here, and sensation and motion
are crippled. Through these come also the protesting reflexes, the
nausea, the tremors, vertigo, convulsions, and deaths.
Why clamor for pure air when every waking breath of the to-
bacco user is polluted with toxic fumes? The poison is absorbed
from mucous membranes and from the skin. The snuff and tobacco
chewers get theirs by the former waj'. In Alaska, vyhere the ex-
treme cold cracks the lips and cheeks, while attempting to hold a
pipe or cigar in the mouth, the dupe rubs up plug and fine cut and
binds it in bags under the arm-pits or over his solar plexus and
imagines he gets the effects of his cherished weed. The smoker in-
hales and exhales, and leaves a trail of highly volatilized toxic
residuum along the entire respiratory tract that paralyzes, benumbs,
and easily makes a tuberculous victim, adding another race ex-
terminator.
When used as a poultice for spasmodic croup in infants it has
caused alarming depression and death. Formerly used in strangu-
lated hernia, it produced pallor, cold sweats, and such alarm that its
use in medicine is abandoned ; it is too poisonous. Through smok-
ing and inhalation, all these symptoms come more direct, and the
fatal invasion is averted by the protest and paralysis that releases
the vigil of the flexors of the jaw and lips, that drops the pipe or
cigar from the mouth to burn the skin or clothes and arouse the
body to salvation.
It is said tobacco soothes perturbed nerves, calms mental and
corporeal irritation, smooths business ruffles and domestic infe-
licity. That is why the messenger and delivery boys must have it
as soon as they get around the first corner; why the grocery loafer
and dray drivers must have it. It allays itch, cures corns, relieves
the irritation of the unwashed, and assuages the hunger of the
pestiferous tramp. Any excuse or none suffices to win a recruit
and hold a devotee.
Imitation, as a relic of the simian age, remains strong in man.
His Caucasian cousin cannot beg ancestral infirmity for his narcotic
frailty. He insists he cannot stop it; he must have it. He denies
228 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
thiimb-suckinfr to his woaklino- babe and «iinn-eh('vviiis- to his ner-
vous {rirl. but he must take a "cure" to stop it. His immunity lies
in his will that tobacco has weakened. Caesar sai(J, "To live is to
will." The tobacco user's narcosis made him forget that "he is the
master of his fate, the captain of his soul." He cannot escape the
oblififations of present progressive civilization. He nnist abandon
his quest, his habit of dru<^, whiskey and tobacco narcosis, and alij?n
himself with men and not with monkeys or be left behind in the race.
Real men should arise above imitation. Imitation is mere servility.
Tobacco usinja: is drug- slavery.
The blastopthoria, or germ damage, produced by alcohol on the
cell wall and substance is now microscopically as well as physio-
logically and pathologically demonstrated. The same study applied to
tobacco gives the same results. The toxic dent of tobacco is made on
the incalculably thin film of the cell wall and the poison is projected
into the cell elements, even to its nucleus and nuclei. This may be by a
vital dynamism or physical osmosis, but the law is unrelenting. It
matters not whether this be a squamous scale from the lips or mouth
or the palm or back of the hand, whether it be the more highly organ-
ized cell from the cortex or the sympathetic, the sperm cell of the
male or the sacred citadel of the ovum ; tobacco, alcohol and syphilis
make the same sear and leave the same blight on sire, self, and progeny.
The blood does not furnish an antitoxin, an amboceptor, against
phytotoxins. The working principle of Ehrlich's bacterial theory
of immunity does not apply against the alkaloidal poisons, plant
poisons, like morphine, nicotine, soapin, etc. The body does not
develop an immunity against these in the same sense that it does
against bacterial toxins ; the blood serum does not manufacture or
acquire the substance capable of neutralizing these poisons. There
is no amboceptor between nicotine and the blood or the cell struc-
tures. Neither has an elective affinity been found that is harmless
to metabolism or helpful to liistogenic structure. There must, how-
ever, be a substance in the plant, cultivated; in curing, or added by
the manufacturer, that has an alluring as well as a paralyzing effect
on cell life and an impairing and a destructive one on the germ plasm.
We know that next to reptile venom and prussic acid, nicotine is
a most hemolytic, blood-destroying, agent ; it breaks the cell-wall of
the cell and destroys its nucleus, its vital center. Added to this
is furfurol, carbon monoxide, by-products of tobacco combustion,
poisons that are readily taken up by the cells and quickly dissolve
their primary chemical elements. Within this organism, the cell,
besides its elements, is inherent the very potential of life, the nu-
cleus, the primal dynamism that correlates these forces and directs
ALCOHOL AND TOBACCO 229
them to organic function and to final destiny. Thv< is the deter-
mdner of species, the nearest we get to the Great Directing Divinity.
That it is atomic does not deny its existence or dynamism.
Epilepsy, insanity, idiocy, imbecility and all the collateral
grades of mental infirmities are on the increase. The statistics of
increase of positive defectives over population are appalling — to
say nothing of the criminals, substandards and repeaters of com-
mon society. To enumerate them would be wearisome. Let this
suffice : In Illinois the increase of insanity is 667 per cent, while
population increase was only 50 per cent, census 1900. That
these unfortunates, wrecks, and derelicts have been cast upon the
moaning beach of the Sea of Life in regularly increasing winrows,
parallel with the increasing use of tohacco, is a graphic and signifi-
cant presentation that cannot be ignored nor denied. There may
be comfort in this reflection, however, that blocking this blight on
humanity in part, is absolute sterility in the male, which is also
on the increase, in the original, in the secondary and tertiary issues
of the tobacco user.
Prof. Howard A. Kelly, of Johns Hopkins University Medical
School, quotes, endorses and emphasizes the statement of the late
Dr. Prince A. Morrow that "the unpremeditated childless marriages
due to the husband's incapacity from gonorrhea vary from 17
to 25 per cent, and that 75 per cent of sterility in married life is
not of choice, but is due to the inca,pacity of the husband." But
he does not account for the difference between the maximum of 25
per cent due to gonorrhea and the 75 per cent of general sterility.
This balance of infertility readily points to other toxin than venereal
and easily admits tobacco into the ranks for competition for barrenness
and this race extinction.
The latest reports (1911) of the Census Bureau show that slightly
more than 42 per cent of the infants dying under one year of age
in the registration area did not live to complete the first month of
life, and that of this 42 per cent almost 10 per cent died as a result
of conditions existing before they were born — probably of paternal
assault and toxemia before conception, or of injury or accident dur-
ing delivery. However, with modern asepsis and manual technique
and skill, deaths during birth are rare, and this change does not hold
true. Of those that lived less than one week, about 83 per cent died
of conjugal assault from venereal or other toxic projectile in which the
very general use of tobacco would be conspicuous. Of the number that
lived less than one day, 94 per cent died of prenatal toxins in either
or both parents. While these figures exhibit an appalling waste of life,
apparently at fetal conception or maturity, they in no degree represent
230 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
the aceidontal Jiiul i^rciiKHlitattHl feticidt's in iiiircf/islcrrd districts of
the vicious stratum of society, that without doul)t fur outnumber the
fi^ires given in a very small registration area. Registration districts
betoken a higlier sanitary and ethical standard than non-registration
areas, and better conditions are expected to exist.
There are prenatal conjugal considerations here that census re-
porters do not recognize and enumerate.
Procreation when either parent is alcoholized, or tobacco
narcotized, should be prohibited, whether this be acute or chronic.
In either way it affords a good example of transient blastophthoria
in w^hich the germ-plasm, sperm-plasm, is damaged, so that degener-
ative progeny is very likely to result.
Nicotine begets very decidedly neuropathic stock. The heredity
of nicotine-tainted stock is never on the right side. Nicotine is an ethi-
cal as well as a race poison. Heredity as a science has made rapid prog-
ress and is advancing. Humans are entitled to equal considera-
tion with plants and animals. Propagation should be made selective
from both sides. There might well be a parent inspection before
there is the child and pupil inspection, before the "Better Babies"
enter their contests. There needs be a standard of narcotic-free
fatherhood before a standard of childhood and scholarship is de-
manded. Prophylaxis should precede prosecution and segregation.
It is realized that statistics are the mystics of argument. The aggre-
gate of life is made up of vicissitudes of transmigration, climate,
environment, vocational disease and accidents, habit and habit-he-
redity, disease and disease-heredity, alcohol, syphilis, and tobacco.
Alcohol is in almost universal use. Syphilis is all too prevalent;
its spirochetie leave their unmistaken trail in rural and mural "Dam-
aged Goods." But there is a bane as prevalent as all these combined.
It is the Race Poison, Tobacco ; it is running a neck-and-wreck race
with syphilis and alcohol for supremacy. No athletic or scholar-
ship test has ever been made in which non-smokers did not excel
the smokers ; a similar comparison would militate against progeny.
Dr. Frankel-Hochwart, of Berlin, Germany, in an article in the
Deutsche MediziniscJie Wochenschrift of December, 1911. relating
to several thousand cases in his clinic, emphasizes the fact learned
from his experience, that "the localization of the toxic action of
nicotine is very much like that of syphilis." These observations are
along the line more especially of nervous diseases, brain diseases.
Hesse, in 1907, made similar observations in tobacco intoxica-
tion ; Huchard and Bunge confirm these clinical data. Much ex-
perimentation with tobacco has been done to ascertain the cause of
the increase of arteriosclerosis and heart disease, the so-called
AT^COHOL AND TOBACCO 231
"hardening of the arteries," also the cause of interruption of func-
tion and nutrition, leading to mental perversion, insanity, sudden
deaths and the many palsies. The earliest observation on this line,
and which establishes beyond doubt the deleterious action of to-
bacco upon the arteries, is that of Isaac Adler, demonstrating har-
dening in the end arteries of rabbits as a result of feeding them
with a tea made of tobacco. Boveri confirmed these results by giv-
ing this tea by stomach tube, and caused damage at the base of the
aorta in ten out of sixteen rabbits, while Baylae on the same line
got the same results in each of eight rabbits into which tobacco tea
was injected into veins or under the skin. Jebrowsky and AV. E.
Lee obtained the same results in other rabbits by making them
inhale tobacco smoke. A great number of experimenters with to-
bacco in this country and Europe obtained results so akin to these
that no other conclusion can be entertained. The general conclu-
sion is that a toxic principle in the tobacco is the cause of arterio-
sclerosis. What more prevalent toxin is present than nicotine or
other tobacco toxins?
Chewing, more than smoking, through absorption and hemolysis,
also causes an acidosis of the blood which increases blood-pressure,
strains the heart, impairs the kidney's function, precipitates the soluble
calcium into calcium carbonate, whose granules find lodgment in the
lattice framework of the media and produces the arteritis nodosa
of arteriosclerosis. The liigli blood- pressure will account for some
of the flights of genius and descents into iniquity of some great
minds otherT\dse blameless. Tobacco toxcDtiia is- more to blame than
alcohol. A man usually knows when he is drunk, but rarely knows
when he is tobacco inebriated.
Dr. Ludwig Jankau, of Miinchen. carried on experiments and
observations in his nose and throat clinic through a period of three
years before issuing his brochure ^'Der Tabak," in which he pours
a deluge of evidence against tobacco using. A society of scientists
and physicians worked with him and confirmed his investigations.
That tobacco is a causative factor in heart and blood-vessel dis-
eases is apparent in this — that tobacco is promptly excluded in the
treatment in all diseases of the heart and arteries.
Dr. Hirsehfelder, of Johns Hopkins University Medical School,
author of a classic treatise on Diseases of the Heart and Aorta,
says, "Tobacco should be absolutely excluded in both organic and
functional cases.'" A. Abrams, of California, places tobacco non-
use ahead of alcohol in both prevention and treatment of heart dis-
>ea:ses. Bovaird, of the Columbia University Medical School, New
York, is equally emphatic in demanding immediate abstinence in
232 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
all heart afTeetions. Similar quotations of eminent authors could be
continued ad infinitum — and the users will say ad nauaeami. Dawn is
coming. If abstinence aids to cure, why not total abstinence to pre-
vent? Nowhere would the ada^j^e of ounce of prevention and pound of
cure be more appropriate. All alienists also recofj:nize that in the in-
sane, heart and blood-vessel diseases, congenital or acquired, prevail.
Experiments made with plants demonstrate that solutions of
poisonous substances, accidentally or intentionally introduced into
the interior of the ovaries of plants, mar their form and even change
their character. Wisconsin University has a field lecturer making
investigation and experiment in this line. Can man saturate his
germ with poisons and escape so great a condemnation ? Sterility
is preferable to inferiority or imbecility.
A neuropathic inheritance is often a nicotine inheritance. In
Switzerland idiots and imbeciles are called Bausch-Kinder, ".jag chil-
dren." In this country they might, with equal propriety, be called
Rauch-Kinder or "smoke kids." If this recognition has become so
apparent that it has reached the stage of popular jesting, should it not
arouse the serious-minded? The Western World is shocked at the
burning of widows on the funeral pyre of the husbands in India.
We are slowly consuming on the pyre of tobacco beautiful boys
in the prime of life and the vigor of manhood, father's pride, mother's
darlings. We turn pale at the mention of the "Yellow Peril" in the
East, while a yellow peril greater than the entire Mongolian horde is
menacing our youth and our race. Race came from ' ' the beginning, ' '
race should extend far beyond the eternity of "the beginning." into
the eternity of the future, ever advancing, never receding.
Temples and tombs survive, but the earth is fertile with the bones
of extinct races. No monument is so favored of God as that which
in His image continues achievement in His name, through Race
Betterment.
Discussion.
The Cigarette
Miss Lucy Page Gastox. Anti-Cigarette Leaprue. Chicago, Illinois.
Recently a returned missionary from China said that it was im-
possible for the Missionaries of the Cross to go so far into the in-
terior of that great, giant land that the cigarette missionaries were
not there before them. That is what they themselves call "cigar-
ette" missionaries. They make the claim that by the introduction
of cigarettes they are helping the people to free themselves from
the curse of opium. The American Tobacco Company, and the
British American Tobacco Company, and the different organizations
ALCOHOL AND TOBACCO 233
that are preying upon China today, estimated that they could afford
to give from fifty to one hundred cigarettes free to every man,
woman and child to upward of four hundred millions of population
in China. They did, and now there are hundreds of factories pouring
forth their products in that country. There is an organization being
formed in China by Dr. Wu and other patriots to combat the evil,
which is only second to the opium habit. Do you people know that
the opium addict will smoke a cigarette at the close of his debauch
for the added pleasure that it gives?
That is the product that is in the hands of the immature youth
of this fair America. In this Race Bette'rment Conference I wish
there might be some ringing protest that would reach every nook
and corner of this land, warning the people against the dangers from
this. Ninety per cent of the high school boys and the college stu-
dents today are addicted to cigarettes or to some form of tobacco,
and because tobacco in some form is the vice, the popular vice, of
good men, it is only the most incidental mention that is given to
this question.
But, friends, what can we do about it — this question that we are
struggling with at our headquarters at the Woman's Temple in Chi-
cago and that our paper. The Boy magazine, the official organ of
the league, is dealing with? Today we are undertaking to organize
a force. The strength or the charm of organization to youth is well
known. We have a plan of organization that should be introduced
in every community in the country. There seems to be something
about this anti-cigarette movement, this "A. C. L." button, that
arouses the heroic element in the young American.
Today the prohibition movement is the thing, but it is only part of
the thing that is needed. What we need today is a great inspira-
tional campaign for total abstinence, not forgetting tobacco and the
other drugs that this good Doctor from Alabama brought to the
front. We ought to have in every community a clean-life movement.
Anti-Cigarette League stands not only for anti-cigarette league but
for a Clean Life — yes, a Christian Life, a Consecrated Life. We have
in our movement a thing that we can go into public schools with.
There is a great opportunity for a getting together on that. People
think I am loony, you know, on this cigarette question. Well, it is
time somebody was. I see in this Conference an opportunity to
reach out and do all of the things that are needed.
A minister of Chicago who is very active in law enforcement
work in civic affairs stated to me in our headquarters at the
Woman's Temple one day, "Miss Gaston, some of us have never
gotten to the point of total abstinence of cigarettes and things like
234 FIRST NATIONAL CONFEKENCE ON KACE BETTERMENT
that." He said, "AVhy, really, 1 would not care to iutroduce a total
abstineiRH' pledge into my ehurcli." He said, "The leading mem-
bers of my church have wine on their sideboards and beer in their
cellars," and he said, "Other than the children, who will do any-
thing that they are asked to do, I don't believe there would be half
a dozen who would sign a total abstinence pledge. ' ' It was not very
long after when that iiian came into our headquarters and said,
"Miss Gaston, what do you think has happened?" I replied, "What,
Doctor?" "Why," he said, "you know my little boy, Robbie?" I
said, ' ' Yes. " " Well, ' ' he said, ' ' I found he was smoking cigarettes. ' '
"But," I said, "be careful, Doctor, now. Don't get hysterical."
*Yes," he said, "but when a thing like that comes right into your
own home, you have to wake up," and he said, "It was one of the
boys of our own Sunday-School who w^as teaching him to smoke out
in the alley, and his sister found it out." "What did you do, Doc-
tor?" I said. "Oh, I sent the boy away and told him to keep off
the premises." I said, "What I think you ought to do would be to
organize a work in your church against the cigarette."
In New York City I was doing work among the boys of the Postal
Telegraph Company. About one hundred of those boys, from homes
of all nationalities, joined our league. I spent about an hour every
night, from 5.30 to 6.30, among those messenger boys — gamblers,
drinkers, all kinds of boys. One night a Hungarian boy came to me
and said, ' ' Miss Gaston, I want to sign for life against tobacco, but, ' '
he said, "I don't want to take the temperance pledge." (We
have the temperance pledge on the anti-cigarette blank.) I said,
"Why not, Frank?" He, a seventeen-year-old boy, said, "We are
Hungarians and we have wine every night for dinner at our house
and I don't think it Avould be very easy for me to see the others
drinking and I not drink, but," he said, "I want wings on my but-
ton." We put a little red ribbon on the button to indicate total
abstinence for life from both liquor and tobacco. A boy can join
until he is twenty-one. That boy signed up for both. The last thing
he came to me and I said, "Well, Frank, how did you get along
without your wine last night?" and he said, "Well, my brothers
never did a thing to me, but my father never said a word. ' ' I said,
"Frank, I believe your father was proud to have a boy who stood
for what he believed to be right. Are you sorry you signed up?"
"No," he replied, "and I am going to stick to it as long as I live."
We are not giving the boys and the girls today a chance to have
their blood stirred by any great splendid, heroic moral reform. We.
have the plan and I w^ant to invite you all to help us.
ALCOHOL AND TOBACCO 235
Discussion.
The Cigarette-Smoking Hero of Fiction
Dr. Amanda D. Holcomb.
Because of m}^ blind mother, I am obliged to read a good deal of
fiction, and to select what she desires. I read the best fiction I can
find. In that fiction I find the purest, sweetest, most ennobling hero
smoking cigarettes. I believe this one thing has a very strong influ-
ence on the best-reared boys and perhaps girls. I tried to investi-
gate this subject. I am informed that there are only two magazines
in the world that are absolutely independent, that cannot be bought
and are not bought by the tobacco trust. In many instances it
seems to me that the writer of these pieces of fiction did not put
that cigarette into the hero's mouth, but that it was interjected in
the publishing offices. I should like to know more about this and
what we ought to do.
Discussion.
Magazine Advertising of Tobacco
S. S, McClure, President S. S. McClure Company, New York, N. Y.
My name is S. S. McClure, of McClure' s Magazine. I did not
hear this address, except the last two or three words. Now, then,
I have heard many times about newspapers and magazines being
controlled by the trusts. Last year there was a meeting in Madison.
Wis., of people to discuss that question. Professor Ely, of Madi-
son, is here with us today.
Now, there is much loose thinkiug on this question. Magazines
are controlled by the necessity of paying their expenses and making
some money. If a magazine were controlled by the trust and it did
not suit its subscribers and advertisers, it would fail. It is subject
to exactly the same economic laws that obtain in every other busi-
ness. The main support, the life blood, of a. magazine is the confi-
dence of and the monej^ from its subscribers, upon which, secon-
darily, is based the revenue from its advertisers.
Now I know the magazine business very thoroughly, and I de-
plore the present quality of most of the magazines. I left the maga-
zine business two years ago, since which time the magazines have
not improved. But no magazine and no newspaper can prosper if
it is the organ and the servant of any institution, financial or com-
mercial, or of any trust or of any business like that. Such a maga-
zine ceases to have revenue and ceases to have influence. When
people supposed that Mr. Morgan, whom I greatly honored and re-
spected, owned the New York Sun, which he did not, the New York
Sun lost a large share of its influence.
236 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
No publication may have what makes a publication live if it is sub-
ject to outside control. The reason is this, that, after all, every pub-
lication depends upon pleasing the people. If it does not please the
people, the advertiser does not find that it pays. It has to have the
support of the people. Now if it tries to please a particular interest,
it cannot please the people.
I heard that remark about the publisher putting a cigarette into
the mouth of a hero in the office. He does not, as a matter of fact,
I have often taken them out of their mouths. The editor, the pub-
lisher, generally takes things as he finds them. When a chap like
Richard Harding Davis writes, the hero smokes a pipe — almost all
of them smoke a pipe. I had certain rules about McClure's Maga-
zine. One was this, that nobody except Rudyard Kipling could say
"damn" in McClure's Magazine. I did not like anybody smoking
in McClure's Magazine. 1 did not like any picture of smoking in
McClure's Magazine. But if they had these pictures, it is not be-
cause of the trusts or of this or of that; it is simply because of the
general taste of the public.
Dr. E. G. Lancaster, President Olivet College, Olivet, Mich.: Isn't
it true that the tobacco advertisements are so valuable to a live
magazine that they cannot do without them financially ?
S. S. McClure: That is not true; that is not true at all. It is
not half true. All advertisements are valuable to the magazine in
the way of money. The advertising in magazines has grown a great
deal less than it was a few years ago, so that many magazines that
a few years ago would refuse tobacco advertisements are now ac-
cepting them. Some of them hate to accept them, but they all do
it, they all accept them — just as Harper's Weekly for many years
accepted whiskey advertisements, when other magazines would not.
Magazines won't take whiskey advertisements and patent medicine
advertisements, but their morality is just to the point where they will
take tobacco advertisements.
Discussion.
A League of Employers
]\Jel.vil Dewey.
There are many people who feel strongly, in this race bettennent
effort, that the tobacco evil ought to be combated as the opium evil
is combated. Psychology teaches us that the human mind is in-
capable of seeing in any right light the evil of a habit of which it
is the victim. The liquor user smiles at the facts presented by those
who are opposed to liquor. We hate to say things when we know
AX.COHOL AND TOBACCO -237
all our personal friends are hit. It comes back to us. A negro
clergyman who was asked why he did not preach about chicken
stealing in his church, said that it would create so much prejudice
in his congregation he did not feel like taking up the topic.
I have this practical suggestion to make in regard to tobacco.
In talking with Dr. Kellogg, he suggested that an outcome of the
Conference ought to be a national league of employers who would
refuse to take into their offices, as I have for many years, a boy who
uses tobacco or liquor or profanity or vulgarity. I have had hun-
dreds of cases where a man says, "I won't do it in official hours.
You don't mean to say you wish to interfere with my personal lib-
erty?" "Not in the least," I always answer, "but you must not
interfere with my personal liberty, and a part of my liberty is to be
free from the annoyance of tobacco, and the people who go about
our offices shall be free from that annoyance." I have had many
cases where young men have given up their use of tobacco because
they wished the position, and their wives have come back and
thanked me heartily for breaking them of the habit, so that the men
had no desire to return to it.
Then we run into this difficulty, that so many of our physicians
are tobacco users. It is almost unheard of for a man who is a drink
addict or addicted to opium or tobacco to share in a campaign against
it. Many of our clergymen also use tobacco. I have known delicate
women, with high ideals, to go to a communion service and be physi-
cally sickened and nauseated by the odor of stale tobacco on the gar-
ments of the priest officiating. [Voices, "Shame!"] It is a shame,
and when one goes back to the question of professing the religion
of Jesus, it seems like sacrilege that one should be a user of tobacco.
Now if we face frankly this question, we see that while it is a
widespread evil and many of our friends whom we prize in the high-
est degree, whose feelings we would be very sorry to hurt, are ad-
dicts of this habit, we still recognize that it is a strong factor in
making a race of runts. If we would begin with a league of em-
ployers who should say as a matter of economics and of practical
business wisdom, "We will not employ in our o^ces or in certain
places any young man who uses tobacco, liquor, profanity or vul-
garity," it would help immensely. For the boy who wants to get on
in the world, if he knew a thousand employers in America would ab-
solutely refuse to have him in their employ, it would help him to take
that attitude, and as a practical example, it would be easier to com-
bat the evil. I wish we could prohibit in the magazines and all pub-
lications the advertising of tobacco. I believe the time is coming
when we will recognize, as we have with the opium habit, that it is
288 KIRST NATIONAIi CONFERENCE ON RACE liETTERMENT
a thiiitr that is pulliiiji' down the race. We ought to push it into the
background as persistently as we can.
This does not appeal to us as it ought to, because we are so
familiar with it. But just stop for a moment and consider: If a
person went into the street car or public elevators, and burned some
chemical that gave off a fume that the chemist told us was as poison-
ous as they tell us the fumes of tobacco are, there would be a mob.
The burning would be stopped. As it is, we go to the best hotels of
the country and are put into rooms where the mattresses and the
carpets and the hangings of the room are redolent with an odor
that would not be tolerated from anything else in the w^orld. But
we are used to this.
My suggestion is the suggestion of the law. We should control
the sale of tobacco, as the French do, and make it no longer an ob-
ject for the small dealers to induce the boy to become a smoker. A
woman has just as good a right to smoke as a man, and we find in
the women's clubs of the great cities that the European habit is
spreading, more and more women are smoking, but I believe that
men who respect women in the highest degree feel that there is some-
thing lowering in it to womanhood. In the Lake Placid Club we
have put our foot squarely down. Whatever a woman's social posi-
tion or wealth, she cannot smoke at the Lake Placid Club. We feel
that while she has as good a right to smoke as the men, it is pulling
down the standard, and we will not tolerate it. Let us put our feet
squarely against that growing habit of American women and girls to
smoke.
Miss Lucy Page Gaston : May I add one word on that last point.
Since the first of August, 1913 [to January. 1914], at our head-
quarters in Chicago, we have had over sixty thousand applications
for our cure of the cigarette and tobacco habit. Of that number
quite a good manj^ were women who applied for the cure. So the
women today are smoking.
Voice : Here is a good place for another ' ' single standard, ' ' if you
please.
Discussion.
The Non-Smokers' Protective League of America
Dr. Charles G. Pease.
My topic is the "Harm of Tobacco-Poisoned Atmosphere." The
poisonous character of tobacco smoke is not generally appreciated.
People know that the florist employs tobacco smoke to destro}'- the
animal life in the greenhouse, but they make no application of that
knowledge to the tobacco smoke in public places, as affecting the
ALCOHOL AND TOBACCO 239
human race. Surely, if a poison is great enough to destroy the ani-
mal life in the greenhouse plants, it will do some harm to the human
family.
The poisons in tobacco smoke, or quite a number of them, have
been enumerated by Vohl and Eulenberg and others. I will not
attempt to name them now, on account of the hour, but I would
refer you to the United States Dispensatory and the article on to-
bacco therein. Smoking in public is a violation of a constitutional
right of individuals to breathe pure atmosphere. I will read here
the declaration of the Non-Smokers' Protective League of America,
which I represent:
First: "That the right of every person to breathe and to en.joy
fresh and pure air, uncontaminated by unhealthful and disagreeable
odors and fumes, is one of the inalienable rights guaranteed by the
Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and the Laws of
the Land."
Second: "That tobacco smoking in public and from our public
places is the direct and positive invasion of this right, that it is
dangerous to the public health and comfort, offensive and annoying
to individuals, and an intolerable evil in itself. We do, therefore,
pledge ourselves first to encourage and insist on the enforcement
of all public laws, ordinances, rules and regulations prohibiting or
restricting tobacco smoking in public and to secure the enactment
of any other laws, ordinances, rules and regulations which may be
or become necessary for such purpose, and to cooperate with Boards
of Health, Police Officers and all Executive and Administrative Offi-
cials and Departments to secure full and effective enforcement
thereof."
Third : " To secure the cooperation of all persons in control of
buildings, halls, elevators, hotels, restaurants, theatres, street ears,
railway cars, sleeping cars, dining cars and other places provided for
the use of the general public, to prohibit tobacco smoking therein, and
to limit and restrict it so that only those who indulge in the habit
may be required to inhale tobacco fumes."
Fourth: "To create a wholesome public opinion, and to en-
courage individuals, whose rights and comforts are disregarded by
tobacco users, to insist upon proper respect for such rights, and to
protect the same from invasion to the fullest extent guaranteed by
the Constitution and the Laws of the Land."
We issue a legal opinion in leaflet form which indicates the right
to use force, if necessary, in terminating this most persistent Jiui-
sance. Our League is composed of some of the most prominent men
240 FIRST NATION^VL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMJ3NT
in this country. We desire, through the medium of this League, to
accomplish the purposes that we have started out to accomplish.
In New York City we have, through the Public Service Com-
mission, which gives us a hearing upon our application, the exclusion
of tobacco smoking from our cars and stations, from the rear plat-
forms of cars and from the four rear seats in convertible cars in
summer time. We are on the way, I believe, to a still better order
of things there. The United Cigar Stores Company endeavored to
nullify our victory through securing 72,000 signatures to a petition
which they issued asking for smoking cars upon the elevated rail-
way structure and upon the surface lines or compartments therein.
We combated that, and defeated the Company. I should like to
read here some portion of our brief, which we handed in, as it will
be helpful to others. We claim:
"First, that to require street railroad corporations to maintain
a nuisance or for city corporations to maintain a nuisance would be
a violation of a principle of law, and opposed to the provisions and
guarantee of the Declaration of Independence and to the Constitu-
tion of our Land. The right to make laws and to prohibit smoking
in public places was taken to the highest court in Alabama and was
there sustained. To show also the poisonous character of tobacco
fumes: There was a case in Alabama, Hudler versus Harrison 26
S. O. Rap, 294, 123 A. L. A. 292, where the fumes from a tobacco
dry house made the people in a residence a little distance away
very, very ill. The highest court stated in its opinion that that dry
house was a nuisance and compelled it to be closed."
CHILD LIFE
THE BAD BOY
Hon. Jacob A. Riis (deceased), The Jacob A. Riis Neighboriiood Settle-
ment, New York, N. Y.
They brought the kid into police headquarters between two
policemen, bound. I was there and saw him come. I don't believe
in all my twenty-five years in that place in New York City as a
newspaper reporter that I had ever seen a ruffian who bore the ear-
marks of it so plainly upon his face and over it as did that kid. He
was all smeared over with blood and had great bumps on his head
where the policemen had struck him. He had not been idle, appar-
ently, for the men bore marks of his fists; their clothes were torn
down their backs. They were the tAvo angriest policemen I had seen
in a long while. They passed me in the hallway and I took notice
of the fellow. I knew of him by reputation. He came from the
neighborhood of "Hell's Kitchen," a lad about eighteen or nineteen
years old, a husky fellow. They took him into the detective's office,
the headquarters. There they measured him, photographed him.
indexed him, hung his photograph in the Rogue's Gallery, did all
the things they could to make him more sullen, if possible, than when
he had first appeared. When they had held him up before the as-
sembled detectives, then they brought him again through the hall-
way on the way to the jail and to the gallows, as they said, by way
of the Jefferson Market Police Court. That was the police verdict
on the kid.
As he passed me in the hall, the sunlight fell into that fellow's
face — into the eyes of the kid — and something there made me sud-
denly turn and go along. I think the soul in me saw the soul of the
kid, and owned it for kin. "We walked doAvn Bleecker Street and I
talked to the policemen. They told me what he was, what I already
knew, and then I turned to him and said some pleasant words. He
gave me one of the most vicious scowls I had ever seen, and he told
me to hold my tongue and attend to my own business. And I did
just that. I said no more. Walking so, we came to Broadway,
which we had to cross in order to get onto the East side, to the Jef-
ferson Market Court. In those days the cable cars ran on Broadway.
I don't know whether or not Battle Creek has ever had experience
with cable cars, but we had them for a little while in New York. As I
now look back, it seems to me the one thing I sum it all up in is
just this: They were never normal; they were either jammed, stand-
241
242 FlUST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
ing on the street iiiimovjible, oi- else tliey were nmiiing away— one
or the other. They were jammed when we reached Broadway, and
we stopped with the prisoner between. They started across the
street, but just as soon as they put their feet upon the other tracks,
there came a warning cry a little farther up the street that made
them step back quick out of the way of a runaway car. What hap-
pened then, was. I suppose, in the flash of one or two seconds. To
me, it seems, looking back, as if it were half an hour. I can see that
car come rolling down the street with the speed of a race horse or a
cyclone, and the motorman trying to brake with the grip of despair,
and ringing the bell on the platform with his foot, trying to clear
the way a little, his eyes bulging with a kind of stare, as he looked
down on the track in front of him. I followed his eyes and saw the
thing that frightened him and my heart stopped for the longest
period I think I can remember. For right in the middle of that
car track was a little toddling baby with yellow curls, and its little
face showing pain. The car was only ten or fifteen feet away at
the time I saw it, and the little baby hand was held up as if to stop
it. I caught just a fleeting glimpse of a frantic woman on the side-
walk, the mother evidently trying to reach out and save it, and
three or four men holding her. The child was irretrievably lost.
I turned away so as not to see it. Everything turned black before
my eyes, because I had little children of my own at home. But just
as I did, I heard another cry, and just at that moment I Icnew the
''kid" had taken to his heels and run. It seemed an age before the
light came back to me, and I fell mechanically in the wake of that
car to see the mangled remains of the child, but the street was per-
fectly clear. There was nothing there and when I came entirely to
myself, there stood the kid alongside of me, with the baby in his
arms, safe and sound, setting it down upon the sidewalk and dis-
engaging its little baby hands from his big, rough finger. He had
just about one chance in a million of saving his own life, doing what
he did. While the rest of us stood like so many fools looking on.
good, square citizens all of us, who had had no encounter with the
police, the kid — then indexed, you know, in the Rogue's Gallery,
at that very moment on the way to jail and the gallows, according
to the police — jumped and risked his own life ten thousand times in
saving that child. He made the longest jump I ever heard of, in
doing it, because that was the beginning of a new life for the kid.
He not only jumped across the street, but jumped clean out of the
old life into the new. When I last heard of the kid he was a trusted
workman in a factory Avith a wife and baby of his own at home to
keep in a straight way. You see, friends, I didn't make a mistake
CHILD LIFE 243
when I had seen something: in that fellow's eye — the image of God
that is in all of us, the thing we call manhood and womanhood when
it grows up and gets a chance, if it ever gets a chance. The kid
had never had any chance at all over in "Hell's Kitchen." He
came out all right in that chance. A man he came out.
Why am I telling you that? In the first place, because the kid
was the worst boy I ever knew in all my experience, and I have
known many, all of them in my own city ; and in the second place,
because I want you to go home from this Conference with a true
note of it all — regeneration, not degeneration, is the note. Regenera-
tion along the first and only real line, better babies, born into a
better, brighter world, made better and brighter by the hope and
faith and the skill and the devotion that they inspire.
We have heard friends here talk about heredity. The word has
rung in my ears until I am sick of it. Heredity, heredity. There
is just one heredity in all the w^orld that is ours — we are children
of God, and there is nothing in the whole big world we cannot do
in His service with it. That, friends, is what we are here for. Re-
generated, reborn, as the world was when it was born into the under-
standing at last of the Commandment that we love one another
unto the service of the practical.
We talk here about insanity. In the old toAvn in which I was
brought up — in Denmark — there lived, 200 years ago, a Bishop, who
will be remembered to the last day, because he sang some of the
sweetest songs in the Danish tongue, hymns that began with men
and women, trouble and suffering, the very brink of the day, to the
last. That was the service he performed. There was in that time
in that day, among the preachers, curiously enough, one of those
yellow, vicious, jaundiced souls. He came to the Bishop and said:
"It is easy for you to sing of heaven and glory and happiness, for
you have no trouble ; you live in a fine house, you have everything
that man's soul could wish, but what about us?" And the Bishop
said: "Come along," and he led him upstairs, two or three stories
up, to an attic room, and he opened the door, and there, clamped to
two iron bolts in the wall, with chains, was his son, his only son, a
raving maniac. That, friends, was how they dealt with insane pa-
tients at that time. The iron bolts are still there. I remember very
well in my childhood how" they put them into a big place behind the
fence, in which we boys pulled out the knotholes and looked through
and shuddered at those glooms behind the fence.
That was the way, friends, we treated insanity even in my child-
hood, and see what we do today, in New York City, in my own town,
in the span of fifty years since that venerable man who has presided
244 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
over your deliberations liere, Dr. Stephen Smith — since he broke
the past as chairman of the Citizens' Council of Hygiene in the early
'60 's. See what a great change has happened since then in my city.
In the last fifty years we have rehoused the population that lived
in our tenement houses, more than a million and a quarter. They
lived often in an environment in which all the influences made for
unrighteousness and tended to the development of the worst
instincts of the young. We found pretty nearly four hundred thou-
sand of dark, sunless, windowless, airless bedrooms in those tene-
ment houses. We got rid of three-quarters of them. The other
fourth we will get rid of before this Congress has met three times
more in Battle Creek. In that day, when Dr. Stephen Smith pre-
sided over the early deliberations of the citizens in my city, we were
afraid of the coming of cholera. That is why that council of hy-
giene was organized. In that day the death rate in my city was
thirty in a thousand of the living every year. Last year, the year
that has just closed, in my city it was something over thirteen. That
means that in the interval we have so amended things, in the biggest
city of our land, that there would have died in 1913 one hundred
thousand more people than actually did die if the old death rate
had been maintained with the present big population. These are
some of the things that we have done.
We have added a thousand kindergartens to our public schools,
and if there are any here who do not know what that means in the
education of the children of the people, I pity them. Within the last
ten or dozen years we have made more than four hundred play-
grounds in schools and streets everywhere for the children. There
Avas not one before that time. We have now seventy social settle-
ments in my city that are morning, noon and night looking after
the lost neighbor. There was not one twenty-five years ago, friends.
Babies — we have heard a great deal about babies here. It is all
a matter of loving care, friends, but don't misunderstand me. The
emphasis is upon the loving care. We find in the streets and gutters
and sewers of our city every year something like three hundred or
so of foundlings, of outcast babies that nobody wants. We used to
send them to Randall's Island to the Babies' Hospital and there they
died. The mortality among the outcast babies, the foundling babies,
was one hundred per cent right straight along. None of them sur-
vived. We explained it as w^e could by saying that they started out
Avith a bad heredity, the heredity of the gutter or ash-barrel, and a
cold night is not conducive to the long life of any baby. We tried
every conceivable way upon the Island to mend this, but it would
not work. It was finally not the doctors' efforts with their knowl-
CHILD LIFE 245
edge of science that mended it, but it was the ett'orts of the mothers
of my town. There are two bodies there known as the State Chari-
ties Aid Association and the Association for Improving the Condi-
tion of the Poor.
A lot of women connected with those, mothers themselves, one
day decided that that scandal was no longer to be borne, so they
Avent to the city and begged for some of those infants to experiment
W'ith. The city gave them some. For eight years they experimented
with those infants and in that time they had sent to them one thou-
sand babies. These were the babies among whom the mortality used
to be 100 per cent. In the first year they reduced the death rate
among those babies to one-half; the next year to one-third. They
went upon the assumption that every baby in the w^orld is entitled to
the care of one mother 's arms and if it cannot have that, it is cheated.
And they proved their contention. The first year they saved one-
half the babies and the next year they saved two-thirds, and the
third year at the same rate. By the eighth year, they had reduced
the mortality among those babies to 11 per cent, which was a great
deal less than the general infant mortality in the city. They were
picked mothers, you see. The rich mothers are not always the wise
mothers, by a good deal, you know.
You see, friends, what it is we are doing. Have you recently
read the parable of the good Samaritan ? That is what we are doing.
We are finding the helpless on the roadside and we are caring for
them, binding up their wounds, pouring in oil and wine. But we
are doing more than that, friends, nowadays. We are policing the
road to Jericho so there shall not be any more of the kind of rob-
bery and assault that left a man lying- helpless on the roadside.
And are we done? No. Thank God, there is something to do
yet. Don't let that discourage anybody. Let us be glad that we
have a chance to work with the Almighty, because that is emphat-
ically what we are doing on that road. The whole thing is just
climbing a mountain, friends. You go up, up, and the farther you
go up the mountainside, the more you see of the landscape. You are
always improving, therefore, for every time you set two things right,
there are five or six or eight or ten that remain still to be made
right. Let us be glad. The work won't give out in this generation.
Now, I came to talk to you about the bad boy. My position on the
bad boy is very simple, very emphatic, very direct. I believe with
the Eastern schoolmaster, who said that there were different degrees
of good boys, but bad boys, he didn't know of any. There are, dear
friends, not any who are deliberately bad, but plenty whom we make
bad. Even then the boy would rather be good than bad, as one of
246 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
them said, ii" he was i>iven a chance. That chance is the environment
whicli it is our business to provide.
Let me tell you of one bad boy of my personal, close acquaintance.
I am the boy. I ranked as a bad boy when I went to school and a
good reason why. I was taken to school first by an angry house-
maid who thrashed me down the street, hammering the pavement
all the way down. I was all the time bawling, yelling and I didn't
want to go to school. On the step of the school stood the teacher
and she reached out one long, skinny arm, grasped me by the neck,
yanked me into the schoolhouse, then down into the cellar, then over
the edge of a hogshead that stood there, then put the lid on, then
snarled through the bunghole. That was the way they dealt with
bad boys in that school. I saw there was no chance to get out till
I ceased howling, and I ceased howling then and there. Then at re-
cess she introduced me to a sow with pigs in the yard. She showed
me the ear with two long slits, and said that was because the sow
was lazy, reaching the shears up by my ears, zip.
The Latin school was founded in 1859 and it had all the tradi-
tions of those old days. I no more fitted into that place, well, than
I would fit into Kingdom Come, I suppose. Now, beside me was
another boy of exactly the same mind, and we were exactly of the
same size, well matched. We never could get it settled which boy
could put it over the other one. We left before the university days
came, and the school was glad to get rid of us. The other lad,
Hannes, went into business and became a very successful business
man. He is today a member of the Upper House in the Parliament,
from the old town itself — and with good reasons. He is a splendid
citizen, I came over here — and do you see what kind of a scalawag
I became here? Some years past I went back to meet forty of my
classmates. They were doctors, lawyers, clergymen, fine as silk, all of
them, and we were the two black sheep they were glad to get rid of.
That day I saw the King confer an honor on the other boy because
he had been the head of the citizens' committee that had labored to
restore the ancient Cathedral that was being rebuilt. It was the
occasion of my going home. King Christian had conferred that very
same honor upon me three or four years before. That is the rib-
bon I wear in my coat now. When I looked down the buttonholes
of all the rest of the boys, these solemn men who had come from our
school, I was surprised that there were only two ribbons in the whole
lot, and they were worn by Hannes and myself. You see, friends, we
were the two bad boys.
Now take the boy here, take the boy who lives in a tenement
house in the city, in the environment that makes for unrighteous-
CHILD LIFE 24: i
ness, perfectly hopeless, underfed, stunted, boxed up at night in one
of those terrible sleeping rooms I spoke about, without light or air
or anything. There was a neighbor of mine, who in her back yard
made a pile of sand, for her children to play in when they came home
from school and they played there and the cat and the kittens and
the dog were with them, and they had a very happy time — except
that there was always an ancient feud between the dog and the kit-
tens. Whenever their backs were turned and the dog could grab a
little kitten, he would try to kill it, bury it in the sand, and get rid
of it. One day they were too late to protect it and they found a
dead kitten in the sand. I was in that house when the little girl
came racing in with it in her apron with her eyes all flashing with
anger and she said, "Mamma, there is a perfectly good cat .spoiled."
Hundreds of perfectly good children are spoiled in that kind of
tenement house. That is how we make bad boys. Then we turn
them into the street and there, until ten years ago, we had no play-
ground, none whatever. What is an American boy, anywaj^, but a
little steam boiler with the steam always hot. The play of that boy
is his safety-valve. Sit on it, hold it down, and bang! goes that
boiler. We have formerly provided no outlet for their natural steam,
and bang! went the boy every time. I am afraid it is not so dif-
ferent in the country, either, for when the good boy has to get up
at four o'clock in the morning to do the chores, I cannot imagine the
kind of sentiment in that little lad's mind, but I can easily imagine
why he gets aM-ay from the farm — and sometimes goes to the devil,
too.
In our school we have eliminated the old-time hogshead and pig-
sty, but, friends, we are not out of the woods, and we will not be
out of the woods until we make our schools places fpr boys and girls
to be fitted for the work of the life they are to live — where we teach
our boys not to be ashamed of overalls and rough hands, and to pre-
fer the job of an honest mechanic to standing behind a counter in
a boiled shirt and earning six dollars a week and looking nice. I
know what I am talking about. I learned the carpenter's trade
where our girls learn home-making and housewifery or where men
and women are moulded, with college in the far background. There
are entirely too many good mechanics spoiled to make very poor
professors, friends.
So with the home and the play and the school. Is it any wonder
the boy turns out bad? But what do we mean by bad, anyway?
Did I tell you the story of how I came into Portland, Me., and found
the town all excited about a young Irishman who had been com-
mitting a number of robberies? They had arrested him, a boy of
"248 P'lRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
fourteen, for stealiiiu' a handbag'. Tliis })articnlar hag contained
sixty-eight dollars. They asked me to come out and look at the lad.
I wish I had had Judge Lindsey there; he would have been an
expert on that lad. I saw the finest boy I ever saw in my born days,
brimful of fun. I asked, "What did he do with the money?" be-
cause when you can find out what the boy does with the money he
steals, you can then get a line on what is really in him. First he
summoned two pals and they divided it up and got one beautiful big
feed. Then they bought a bugle to make music — and couldn 't blow it.
Then they threw away all the rest, excepting that each one kept a
ten-dollar gold piece in his pocket. And what do you suppose he
did with that last ten-dollar gold piece? He took seven dollars and
a half of it, went up to the Young Men's Christian Association and
bought a membership ticket there. Where now is your bad boy?
The Children's Aid Society, in the last sixty years, have sent
seventy thousand and more boys out of the slums of the cities to the
Western plains, where they have a chance to grow up. If you could
see the army of clergymen, lawyers, doctors and splendid nice play-
grounds we have turned out of the slums of my city, and two straight
governors — good governors, too, both of them. About four per cent
of all the boys went to the had ; about four per cent of any number
of boys anywhere goes to the bad, anyhow, from general neglect, that
is, running wild. They were taken too late, I presume.
Now we have good playgrounds and the pedagogue is at work
trying hard to class and enroll the boys' play into team play, into
group play, and heaven knows what other kind of play. I say, let
them run and let the boy have a show of his own — hands off the lad
except for overseeing his play, otherwise you may see him run to
the gang. See to it, but keep away from him, and let him have it
and let him run it. Let him kick up his heels in perfect aimlessness
and drop in a giggling heap somewhere, and if he wants to fight, let
him fight. Sometimes a black eye and a bloody nose is a means of
grace, you know. What boy is there that is worth his salt unless he
has a good fight every day or as often as he needs.
What mistakes we grown folks make, but we think •vre can lay
down rules for everything. You have heard it these last few days,
laying down rules for everything. Happily the rules won't hold.
The youth is always renewed with just so much badness in every
generation to keep it from souring or from petrifying. The bad
boys have always slipped up. There is almost always a mistake —
and we are the mistake, not the boy. I hope we shall have him with
us always, to sharpen our wits on and our consciences on. And let
me tell you, you women know perfectly well how to deal with him.
CHILD LIFE 249
The men don't know always. I think men are the greatest misfits
in dealing with bad boj^s, that ever were — including myself. I had
one, and I didn 't know how to deal with him at all, but my wife did.
The women know. You believe in that bad boy. and. ten to one, yes
ninety-nine to one, he will come out right.
What things would the world have done in all the ages but for
the boy who did not fit in? He was fitted bad, and so went out to
find the place where he did fit in and broke half the task upon which
the whole world has been following behind in his wake, to a better
and a brighter and a happier day. Henry Ward Beecher said of
himself that the only time he stood at the head of his class was when
the class deserted him. That was my experience, and I remember
very well — but I won't tell you about that. That night when I dis-
covered that Hannes and I wore the ribbons alone of the crowd of
us old classmates, I went to have dinner with him and sitting across
the table, it came to me suddenly, the thing worked out in my mind
and I looked fixedly at him and said, "Hannes, has it occurred to
you?" and Hannes stopped me with an imperious wave of his hand
and turned around and said to his boy, ' ' Fritz, why don 't you go out
and tend to your business?" Fritz went out and as the door fell
to behind him, Hannes said, "Yes, it has. I am not going to have
him here because he is at that end of the bench now." When Gen-
eral Grant was President one day, in a sudden panic, he wrote to
West Point and asked them how things stood with his boy Fred,
who was down there. Word came back from West Point, "Don't
you worry. He stands better in everything than you ever stood in
anything." You have all known those bad boys, friends. They are
not bad. They are just on the fence, and haven't made up their
minds on which side to get off.
Let me tell you of my own little boy at home when he was five
years old. He peeled off the la.bel on the ammonia bottle and we
found it pasted on his door, and it said, "William Riis very strong."
Just about that time, one day, he went to his mother and said,
"Mamma, would you be very mad if I was to be a burglar when I
grow up?" "Oh," she said, "a burglar! — and you might get ar-
rested." "Well," he said, "well, all right then, I will be a sailor,"
and she pleaded with him not to be a sailor. She said, "You have
one brother who is a sailor and shall I sit out here and think of you
on a stormy night on the deep black sea?" And he said, "What
shall I be? A fellow must be something when he grows up. He
can't always be nothing." She said, "Would you like to be a little
minister. We never had a little minister in the house, and wouldn't
it be so nice?" and his face went right under a black cloud. He
250 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE RKTTKRMENT
didn 't like it for a cent, but he left his mother and after a while he
came over and said, "Well, all right, all right, if I can't be a burg-
lar and you won't let me be a sailor, then I will be a minister." The
lad was simply on the fence, not having made up his mind on which
side to get off, and our business was to help him get off on the right
side.
Acting Chairman Rev. C. C. Creegan, D.D.
I scarcely know what to say about the next speaker. He lives in the
largest city in America that has the reputation of being above the clouds. It
is nearer heaven than any other large city that I have any knowledge of any-
where in the world, and I have seen pretty nearly all the large cities in the
world. But there are some things about Denver, if I am not very greatly mis-
taken—and I lived the:-e two years— some things that do not exactly remind
you of heaven. And if there is any one man in all the Rocky Mountains that
the saloon-keeper, the white-slave cadet and all the bad men and bad women,
if there are such out there, have no use for, one they hate a good deal worse
than they do the devil, that man is the one who' is going to speak to us. If
there were no other reason under the sun for my loving this man, it would
be because of the enemies he has made. I want to tell you that no living man
can go into the jungle of the beast, as he has done, and not be thoroughly
hated by all unclean men and all unclean women. I am rather inclined to
believe that no man has any business to call himself a refonner, probably no
business to call himself a full-fledged Christian in this twentieth century, if
everybody is saying soft and beautiful things about him. "Woe unto you
when all men speak well of you."
THE DELINQUENT CHILD
Judge Ben B. Lindsev, Juvenile Court, Denver, Colorado.
I am sure it is a privilege and an honor to come back to Battle
Creek — under somewhat different auspices from those that originally
brought me here. Yet I am not complaining about those, for I found
that sometimes it pays to get sick if you can come to Battle Creek
and to Doctor Kellogg. I am sure it is also a privilege to be here at this
splendid Conference. I did suffer in not being here through the days
of those wonderful discussions, a sample of which we have just heard
from my dearly beloved friend, and your friend, Mr. Eiis, who was
the inspirer of my own young manhood. I remember so well, when
writing the story of the ''Beast and the Jungle," of getting back
the copy from the editor one day and of finding that he had cut out
a whole page that I had devoted to Mr. Riis. It told about hoAv I
stopped in a drug store one day and picked up a book called, "How
the Other Half Lives," and how I began to get interested in these
great problems. T complained of the liberty the editor had taken
CHILD LIFE 251
Avith my manuscript. He said they weren't publishing the story for
the sake of giving me an opportunity to throw bouquets at my friend.
But now, my friends, I am not hampered by any editors and I am
sure the Chairman will not interfere when I express nw deep appre-
ciation to be here under these auspices in the presence of such an
audience, upon this platform with two glorious men, who have done
so much for this country and for you, and for me — Doctor Kellogg and
Jacob Riis. I assure you it is a privilege, and I am also honored, far
beyond my deserving, to share with Mr. Riis the honors of this
evening in discussing the so-called "Bad Boy." I know Mr. Riis
agrees with me, that "there ain't no such thing." I accept the creed
of the Hoosier poet who expressed it for us through the lips of a
little child :
"I believe all ehilliiii's dood if da's only understood.
Even the bad 'uns, 'pears to me, is just as dood as they can be."
And we have come to find it so.
There is a difference in the two titles, however, assigned us. I
am given the more favorable opportunity, perhaps, when I find on
this program assigned to me, not the "Bad Boy," but "The De-
linquent Child." That possesses a deep meaning and significance,
and it is this : It is the concession of the state, it is a declaration by
the state, the acceptance by the state, of the creed I have described.
The child is not bad, but conditions are bad — things are bad.
That recognition in a state came first in a law passed in April,
1899, in the state of Colorado, and June 1st, 1899, in the state of Illi-
nois. These laws recognized the so-called "bad boy" no longer,
but rather the bad things that got him. It was the declaration of
the state that it would no longer fight boys or girls, but it would
fight bad things, if you please. It was a big step forward, funda-
mentally, that came from out there in the West to join with
that other great reform accepted first in Massachusetts, when its
first probation law in 1868 had been passed. It calls upon men and
women to help rather than hurt in dealing with tliose who are
stricken with bad things.
And so from that day down to date, out of this great reform
spreading over the Middle West and then circling the globe,
has come the new influence, the new power, the new force, coming
into the lives of men while they are children. It is a force differing
from that of violence. Not that the days of the old-time force have
passed away, but rather have we come to recognize new forces. How
curious it is that it took us so long to wake up to the possibility of
the forces of patience, of kindness, of understanding, of sympathy.
252 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
And the last is the diviiiest instniniontality in all the world in the
hands of the skilled when it conies to the ills of the human soul.
Under the new justice, that recop:nizes the child as a ward rather
than a criminal, the state has come to help and not to hurt, to up-
lift and not to decade, to love and not to hate. It is a big step
forward in the great struggle for justice, rather than for law, for
law was not always justice. Do you think so ? Hardly. If we could
go back to a proceeding within a century in the Old Bailey Court in
the great city of London, we might find before the bar of justice
five little boys, all under fourteen years of age. The youngest only
twelve, and that boy the chief culprit. We listen to the examination
of the officers. "Little boy, you stole a shawl from the house you
entered. What did you do with that shawl ? " " Took it to the pawn
brokers, sir." "What did you do that for?" "To get money, sir."
And after the suggestion of Mr. Riis a moment ago, bent upon find-
ing out what the boy did with the money, in this way proceeded:
' ' What did you do with the money ? ' ' said the officer. ' ' Went to the
Punch and Judy show, ' ' said the little boy.
Just like that little boy brought to court the other day for taking
the gunny sacks and the cement sacks from the barn to sell to the
rag man to get money to go to the moving picture show. Not the
best way, surely, to get money to go to the show.
But oh, my friends, what a difference there is in the method em-
ployed by the state in handling such cases. The mother of that little
boy of twelve came to the Old Bailey to plead with the judge to help
save her boy. But the judge, in the formality of the time, explained
that under the law — the law, if you please — he was not there to deal
with the boy, but rather wath the thing he did, and that was, break-
ing and entering, taking something that did not belong to him, which
was an invasion of the sanctity of property. It was a rule that had
come down to us through feudalism, attended with all its respect
for property rights, with corresponding disregard for human rights.
The court had nothing to do with the boy, but rather with the thing
he did. It could not help the boy. So there followed the sentence
from the bench that each of the little prisoners, all under fourteen
years of age, be taken to the Tyborne Prison, and before the rise
of the next day's sun that they be hanged by the neck till they were
dead, dead, dead, and may God have mercy on their souls. That was
not a thousand years ago. It was 1833, on an October day. It was
not a lawyer or a judge, but a schoolmaster Avho thought less of law
and more of justice, whose appeal to the Home Secretary wrung
an unwilling commutation of that sentence from death or life im-
prisonment to fifteen years of hard labor — for a little boy of twelve
CHILD LIFE 253
who took an old shawl ! Those of us who have the accounts of the
frightful conditions then existing in the prisons may well doubt
whether it was a mark of consideration that the sentence was com-
muted and may have almost wished that they had been consigned to
a merciful death, rather than to those hell holes where souls were
seared and bodies degraded.
It had been only a short time before when they cut their heads
off and put them on the gibbets above London Bridge to terrorize
the "wharf rats," as they called the children of that day, into right-
eousness. But they did not terrorize. Crime increased, and finallj^
down through the years, as pity took the place of vengeance, as un-
derstanding took the place of violence, we began to mitigate the
penalty.
But we forgot the fundamental thing, that only within a decade
or so has been recognized by the state, and that was simply this:
The child was the ward of the state. The child indeed was the state
and the state was the child. When we saved the child, we simply
saved ourselves. Then, my friends, came the first step in the new
justice, that brought this child before the bar, not as the real cul-
prit, but rather as one who was the victim of a real culprit and that
culprit was rather the state itself — society itself, if you please.
It was not so recognized until within the last ten or fifteen years.
A community responsibility for the child was but little considered
or tolerated. I found it so in my own experience, from that very
first ease I used to tell about — or among the first — when the district
attorney had asked for five minutes to dispose of a case of burglary,
and I looked about to find the burglar, but I saw nothing of the
kind. There had been ushered in three little boys. The grouchy
officer had said, almost under his breath, "Sit down there. I guess
you didn't give us the hot foot that time." And lined up before the
bench in the formal fashion of a criminal law as I faced them there,
that day, I beheld not men, but boys, twelve to fifteen years of age.
These were the burglars. They certainly didn't look it. In the
center of the group of three was a little tow-headed, freckle-faced
boy all frazzled out at the elbows of his little coat and the knees of
his trousers and indeed some other places thereabouts. He dug his
fist into his dirty face and began to whimper out excuses. But in-
stead of pleading "not guilty," as he might be expected to do, the
little fellow, with a sort of determination and independence that
we have since come to love and mark as a good sign, rather than
impertinence, said through his tears, "Oh, I ain't no burglary." And
I explained in simple terms that burglary was breaking and enter-
ing. Then that little boy began his own defense, that became classic,
254 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
it' not iiidtHHl historic, in the annals of our court. He hadn't any
laywer to defend him. He said, "Jud^e, I live down by the railroad
tracks where dese yuys live, and they said there was watermelons
in those box-cars." I have often said there was not a lawyer at the
Denver bar who could have started with a more powerful appeal
than that, for it did strike a responsive chord in the bosom of the
judge, reminding him of some other days. As I was forcibly re-
calling that other occasion when I sought to sympathize with the little
rascal, without justifying any wrong, of course, he turned to
me somewhat suddenly and said, "Jedge, when you was a kid, didn't
you ever swipe a watermelon?" And from force of habit or that
sort of self-righteousness, perhaps, that protects us sometimes, I did
what the lawyers do when justice is not on their side. They have
a way of side-stepping the real issue, of resorting to the technicalities
of the case. And I said, "You little rascal, it is against the rules
of the court to cross-examine the Judge."
And in this Conference on Race Betterment, I want to cross-ex-
amine you, in behalf of this prisoner at the bar, right here, for he
is a type of nearly one hundred and fifty thousand children hauled
up into the courts every year in this country. Do you know what
that means? It means nearly two million in a generation of child-
hood. What can we do about it? You think you are going to de-
crease it by courts here and there, but courts cannot do it all. They
never will, and they ought not to. It is a pity that we have to resort
to such an instrumentality. It is better than the old jails, of course,
and the criminal court.
But to return a moment to that little boy, and take the lesson from
him in the concrete, through his tears. I explained, of course, to that
little boy that because the subject of temptation was watermelons,
was not any excuse for larceny. But it seemed he had other de-
fenses in reserve. He said, "Judge, when we got down there and
got into those box-cars, we didn't find any watermelons." And I
said, "Look here, little boy, you found something or you would not
be in court." He said, "Do I have to tell?" I said, "Yes, you have
to tell." "Well, if I have to tell, it's like this: When we got in
there and didn't find no watermelons, Ikey said, 'There is some-
thing good in those boxes.' Yes you did, Ikey, you needn't say you
didn't! Then we found something that looked like figs. We got
out something that looked like something good and we drank a
whole bottle full and it was California Fig Syrup, it was." With
some indignation at the smiles that broadened and rose into titters
and passed around the room, he concluded with great feeling, "And
I think we have suffered enough." Well, I said I thought so, too.
CHILD LIFE 255
That plea was not alone for the gang, but for all boys and girls that
have suffered enough, not only from fig syrup in that case, but from
other things. I waited for that to sink in — ^not the fig syrup, but the
eloquence. The trouble Avas the fig syrup was not prescribed in
bottle doses and the gang had not stopped to read the directions.
You know, Mr. Riis, that is one of the faults and failings of the gang.
It is a thoughtless institution, without any direction except that fur-
nished by the policeman who was there that day to condemn. He
was the old type of policeman, happily passing away.
I believe a policeman, as Mr. Riis has shown us, could and should
be a social factor, as he is coming more and more to be. I have
known a whole neighborhood to be changed by changing the police-
man. There was a bad gang there and the whole thing was changed.
We didn't change the gang. We changed the policeman. That was
all. So much for the power of personality, if you please — the soul-
to-soul, and heart-to-heart, dealing with human beings, rather than
with the mere things they do. A policeman of the old type glared at
the little boy as if he wanted to eat him up, and the boy glared at
him as if he wanted to throw a brick. One policeman said to me,
*'He w^as stealing lumber from the builders' pile where they were
putting up a warehouse, and every time I come in sight, he sees
me coming, and yells, 'Jigger de bull,' and everybody runs and I
can't catch 'em." I asked the district attorney what "jigger"
meant. He said it had a familiar sound of a bug he knew down in
Missouri when he was a boy. The^n I learned one of the first of
the many lessons I had to learn from the child : for we have much
to learn from the child, who teaches us unconsciously, perhaps,
but nevertheless effectively. I asked the boy what jigger was, and
he said, "That's the guy that watches for de cop and snitches
to de gang." Don't forget, that was a peculiar duty to the gang
— not to the policeman, but to the gang, at tha approach of danger
to give the signal and everybody scoot. He said, "If you told on a
boy, you snitched on him." That was against their law. It was
quite as real as ours. Indeed, I found that our law, "Thou shalt not
steal," had a poor chance with the first commandment of the gang,
"Thou shalt not snitch. You will get your face smashed if you do."
Now, my friends, what did we face here? We faced the case of
all society. You could not try it in five minutes. Don 't forget that.
No more than the doctor could protect the community against the
plague just by treating each patient stricken down with a fever.
He might better go beyond the hospital even if it led him to the
swamp lands beyond the city, to find the condition that affects all
the people. So our thought is for all children, for this boy was not
256 FIRST NATIONAI, CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
nuu'li different from others. His environment was different. Mr.
Riis lias taught us that perhaps better than any other man in this
country, in his battle against the slum and the fight for the play-
ground. One of the early cases that came to my court was a little
gang of bedraggled, dripping boys that a policeman had dragged
out of the only "swimming-pool" in town, down by the railroad
track. Some prudish people couldn't stand it to see little boys in
that unfortunate state. As I gazed out of the court house windows
I saw two big fountains, gurgling up their artificial showers. Sport-
ing down below were little boys of brass and iron clad in a coat of
paint. It was shocking, but did not shock any prudish people. I
found on investigation it cost us several thousand dollars a sum-
mer to have those fountains, and I said to myself, if this town can
pay several thousand dollars a summer for artificial fountains for
boys of brass and iron, it can pay something for boys of flesh and
blood. So the judgment of the court, in that case, was not that they
be sent to jail. I said. "Kids, you better go swimming in the foun-
tain since there is no swimming-pool." You know sometimes a
community needs a jar and a jolt, to be waked up. Mr. Riis gave
it to them in New York and he taught some of us to do it in some
other cities. The police did not think I meant it. When they
brought the bedraggled, dripping little kids into court again, ex-
pecting we would send them to jail, I smiled into the faces of the
kids and the policemen, and the verdict of the court was, "Kids,
back to the fountain." The smile on the face of the kids was an
interesting contrast to the frown that covered the visage of the offi-
cer, who did not understand. But in time — when the community
woke up to the fact that it was not the child that ought to be before
the bar of justice, but the community — we had seven public baths
in the park and one great big, splendid public bath in the town,
and we didn't need to jail any more boys for that sort of thing.
A little boy had been in jail ten days for taking lumber. I
visited his back yard. There I saw the lumber converted into an
elevated railroad. He pointed it out enthusiastically to me. The
judge was now his friend and not an avenger. And there was a
soap box on wheels, the first contribution to the rolling stock of this
remarkable railroad. But the unfortunate thing about it all was
that the soap box was stolen from the corner grocery and the lum-
ber from the builders' pile, still it was not the first railroad that
had been stolen ! The remarkable thing about it was that the cul-
prit had been in jail. Did you ever hear of a case like that? I
never had. If you had the patience to pursue with me "the beast
through the jungle," you may recall that I had to try the political
CHILD LIFE 257
gang for stealing a railroad, a real railroad, and before we finislied
that case, the man who had had the most to do with stealing that
railroad came a good deal nearer getting to the Senate of the United
States than he did in jail. We had a great deal of difficulty in
keeping him out of the Senate.
But, my friends, we went beyond the court down to the railroad
track, out into the streets, and alleys, and we found that the only
place to play was there where the wheels went round and something
w^as doing, doing all the time. But when the community felt the
jar and the jolt, and waked up on the question of the public play-
ground, that sort of lawlessness decreased more than one-half in
six months. And it was so much better and cheaper than that jail
we had used as our remedy for delinquency. We are waking up,
my friends. With this fact has come the "Boy Scouts" and the boy
clubs, the Y. M. C. A. and don't forget the Camp Fire girls, as I
see Brother Gulick, their director, sitting here. I don't say much
about the girls and we haven't much on the program about them,
but it is not because we want to neglect the girls, but because they
are so much better than the boys. One boy said to me once, "How
could they get in trouble? If they throwed a rock, they couldn't
hit anything anyhow." And I know a very dear little boy
whose sister had violated the law of the gang — or rather did not
know what it meant and had told on him. He was very indignant,
and I said, "Jimmy, what do you think of girls?" "Oh," he said,
"they were just born as a joke on the boys." And there was that
other little girl whom I spoke to once. I said, "Jennie, how do you
make it out that we have about twenty little boys in court to one
little girl." With that feminine determination not to be outdone
even by the boys in demanding suffrage and a few other things these
days, she said, "That's nothin'; one bad girl is worse than twenty
bad kids any day." However that may be, we are now getting deep
into this case. It leads into what is sometimes called the sociology
of this case, to the home and the parents in the home or that ought
to be there. The mother of one of our little prisoners worked all
day. The father was on a bed of pain right in the last stages of
lead poisoning, that came from sixteen years of work in the mills
amid the poisonous fumes and gases of a great industry. And he
was only one of a hundred thousand fathers stricken down by occu-
pational disease evers^ year in this country. Now how are you
going to prevent delinquency unless you put a father and a mother
in the home and keep them there. They are the natural judges, if
you please, to look after the child. How are you going to reduce
delinquency when six hundred and fifty little children were made
(10)
258 FIRST NATIONAL CONPEHENCK ON RACU'; l?KTTKRMENT
oi-pliiiiis l)y exi)l(»sions in coal mines in one or two counties in our
state within four years. Sixteen thousand children made orphans
in a few years in three or four states in this nation from explosions
in coal mines, a large part of which could have been avoided, ac-
cording- to the government reports, if they had used the right kind
of safety appliances. You can't get rid of delinquency unless you
put the child in the bosom of the home and the father and mother
there to look after him. Don't forget that. That means that Denver
had to get into politics, because we could not change conditions un-
less we could change laws, and we couldn't change laws unless Ave
got into politics. Then you might go to a home and find no father
there at all. In one home, the man was a deserter from wife and
child. There are a hundred and fifty thousand deserters every year
— more than from any army in times of war, more dangerous than
deserters in times of war. But here is the story of one of the thou-
sands of suffering mothers every year in this country. The father
had gone to the gambling den, the dive, the brothel. We pray,
"Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil," and then
do nothing, if you please, to answer our own prayers. Men are be-
set by temptation on everf hand. Husbands, fathers and sons go
down to ruin every year, that a certain type of business, if you
please, may flourish. And then those of us who hold up our hands
and cry against the evils that threaten to undermine the American
home are rebuked for interfering with business and knocking the
town, if you please.
The lesson from the child is that it is all children up, all children
down, and I am my brother's keeper. No home is safe unless all homes
are safe, in the final analysis. We owe a duty to one another. We find
that in the sociology of the case. It is a long story that I cannot follow
now. But the fight for industrial, social and economic justice in
this country is a fight for the child. Don't forget that. There is
no child problem that is not a parent problem. Don't forget that.
And there isn't any parent problem that is not a social, economic
and industrial problem. Don't forget that.
Then there is the psychology of the case. We are dealing with
human souls. We are here no longer to save the old shawl. We
are not here to save the gunny sacks except as a secondary
purpose of our work. We are here to save the boy. But
how long it took us to put the boy above the gunny sack! Hun-
dreds of years ! That means that we must deal with him and un-
derstand him. Now. friends, we are looking into his soul. No matter
how calloused or covered up it may be by bad environment, — ^much op-
portunity for evil and none for good, — down in every human soul we
CHILD LIFE 259
know there is the image of God, as I heard Mr. Riis say once, if we
only know how to bring it out. That becomes one of our great duties
in the home, in the school, in the church. These are the great institu-
tions upon which our civilization must depend ; these are the founda-
tion stones upon which it all rests. We in homes and schools owe a
duty to the citizenship of this country, by discharging well their
functions toward the childhood of the nation. That means that we
must know how to put our lessons over.
Sometimes the appeal comes unconsciously from the soul
of the child. I asked a little boy, "You will always do
right?" I was speaking to a group of petty pilferers about my
table. "Yes." he said, "I will do right." I said, ."Why will you
do right?" He said, "Oh, de cop will get me." "Yes, he will if
you keep it up," I said. The next little boy, after struggling and
fighting with himself, finally gave the same answer in a different
way. "I would get a licking. I got two." "Yes, I suppose you
deserved them," I said, "but there is a better reason for doing right."
The next boy said, "I will get in jail." "But there is a better
reason than that." As I appealed to the next little boy, who was
a tow-headed, freckle-faced little fellow, I said, "What is it?" He
said, "I would go to hell." Well, my friends, we must know how
to teach these children to do right because it is right, and not be-
cause they will get in jail if they don't do right. You can't trust
any citizen who has been reared with the artificial restraints ever
above his head; in the home it is the nag and the lash, and from
the bench of the court, the bars and stripes. Not that these things
are not necessary, as one poison is an antidote for another poison,
and therefore, poisons are necessary, but there is another restraint
and that is the restraint that is self-imposed, that comes through the
human heart, through the divine speaking in the soul of the Small
Voice to the conscience and commanding man to stand up in the
face of temptation and difficulties and do right because it is right;
to be willing to suffer for the right. When we get that kind of
citizenship, the days of graft, the days of the shame of cities, wall
then pass away and there will be less need for the artificial re-
straint, for the boy who does not learn his lesson right, any more
than did little Jimmie whom I used to tell about. I saw him a few
days after he attended Sunday-school and I said, "Jimmie, what do
you think of Sunday-school?" "Oh," he said, "it's de place where
all de little kids go and dey gives up a penny and don't get nothin'
back." I said, "You little rascal, you learn tilings there that you
ought to know." "Yes," he said, "learned about de angels that
have wings just like de chickens but those guys didn't learn me
260 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
whetlier tlu\v Inid eogs or not." It iii;iy not have been altogether
the fault of little Jimmie or the Sunday-school, but little Jimmie
was like some men. The lesson had fallen on deaf ears. He saved
his precious pennj^ for the sake of the candy he could get at the
corner grocery. He had no conception yet of those values that con-
cern the hmnan soul, the spiritual values. We must know how to
endow men while they are children with the spiritual values. They
are not to be measured in dollars and cents or material things.
Here is where we sometimes fail. The child grows up to be that
man in the world of business who, because he is more intelligent, is
simply more dangerous; who is a practical man, and through his
injustice robs thousands and thousands of people — the big sinner
in society, the big crook in society, who is too sharp to get caught,
gets away with the goods and goes unwhipped of justice. Let us
learn how to make the school and church most effective so as to
give our children their greatest heritage, that sort of equipment
that means moral and industrial efficiency, so that in the future
we will have citizens who will last, not only over night, but — as I
used to say to the boy that I sent to the reform school alone — a
week, a month, a year, forever. So much for the psychology of this
case. We in the courts are merely trying to help the home,
the school and the church; for every little child that goes astray
means simply there has been a failure somewhere along the line,
not altogether with the Sunday-school or the home perhaps, or the
school, but because of certain conditions in society that we permit
to flourish and exist and make no effort to cure.
Then there is the physiology of the case. Of this I might speak
just a few words in closing. It was never better illustrated than by
a certain little "Mickey," a little Irishman, who came to my court
years ago after his trouble with the police. He was a boy who brought
the witnesses up before the Governor and the Legislative Committee
to tell the evils of the jails and the brutalities that have been visited
upon the youth in those days of struggle for the Detention Home
School to supplant the jail for children. Mickey came in a few days
after a successful light to say, "Jedge, didn't I help yer get that
law through?" I said, "Yes, you did, Mickey. We could not have
gotten it through without your help." "Well," he said, "where
do I come in?" For a moment I couldn't understand just what he
meant until he explained. He said, "Jedge. do you know big Peter-
son?" I said, "Yes, I laiow Peterson." Peterson was a big police-
man w^ho, when he couldn't catch the right boy, arrested Mickey
on general principles. He said, "Jedge, that law only keeps kids
out of jail under fourteen years old." He looked at me quizzically
CHILD LIFE 261
and said, "Did I ever tell you I was fifteen?" I said, "Yes, you
did, Mickey, come to think of it." He said, "Can you do me another
favor? Can you forget that?" He added, "If this legislature can
keep kids out of jail under fourteen years old,, it can set my age
back two years and I am thirteen from now on." And he said,
"Jedge, the law don't help me a bit until this trouble blows over.
I think I will join the navy." I said, "You better see the recruit-
ing officer." He said, "I've been down to see that guy and he
said, ' Say, kid, go eat some more. ' ' ' That flippant remark of the re-
cruiting oifieer had more truth than flippancy in it.
This brings us to the final head under which I like to discuss the
problem of delinquene.y and to which we must come if we are going to
save the child. Doctor Kellogg has told us and he is telling the people
of this country that what a man is depends largely upon what he
eats. He has been telling us that and other men have been telling
us that. We in the courts are not going to decrease delinquency
permanently unless we remember the lessons of this Conference.
"What the child is, depends upon how well he is nourished, — what
he eats, — how well he is clothed and what Idnd of parents he has
and how free they are from diseases before he comes into this world.
That is the phj^siology of the case. We cannot neglect that.
So, my friends, let me at this Conference on Race Betterment
•impress upon you as best I can, after more than fifteen years in a
children 's court in a city of a quarter of a million people and some
experience in the children 's courts of every city in this nation, that we
cannot save this child that comes to the court unless we save all the
children that do not come to court. They are all mixed up together in.
the same problem. They are all our children. Don't forget that.
Their salvation depends upon how v/ell we solve their problems
under the sociology of the case, the psychology of the case and the
physiology of the case. The sociology of the case means the great
social, industrial and economic problems that concern the home and
the parent in the home. The psychology of the case means the ever-
lasting soul, that divine instrument, if you please, upon which we
are called to play. It was a master teacher who said that skill in
handling marble is as nothing compared to the skill in handling
men, and the best time to handle men surely is in childhood and
youth, when character is plastic and can be molded as clay in the
potter's hand. We are putting our prisons in charge of skilled
men and women. My friend, Tom Tynan, at the head of our Colo-
rado penitentiary, said four years ago, "Lindsey, you have been
sending hundreds of boys to these prisons alone without officers and
without handcuffs, and never lost a prisoner. Why can't we do some-
2()2 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
thiug by trusting men?'' We said we believed it could be done. Men
are only children grown up ! And so, my friends, when a man like
Tom Tynan puts hundreds of convicts upon the road camps in our
state without the emblems of degradation or the restraint of vio-
lence, he brings out the godlike image rather than that of hell itself.
Why, I am told he does not even have to have a firearm in camp
and he has less escapes than he had in the old days. He came to
see me one day and said, "Lindsey, we have had to get a gun in
the road camp." I said, "What on earth has happened?" "Oh,
he said, "the infernal natives are robbing the convicts and we had
to get a gun to keep them off. ' '
After all in this world there are only people. There are the eternal
currents of good and evil. Our work on earth is to fight evil and not
men and to encourage good in men.
THE DEPENDENT CHILD
Dr. Gertrude E. Hall, Director Biu-ean of Analysis and Investi.ffation,
Department of State and Alien Poor, State Board of Cliarities, Albany,
N«w York.
All children are naturally dependent upon their parents and
guardians, for it is characteristic of the human species that its young-
are born more helpless and remain dependent longer than the young
of any other spedies. When, however, parents die or try to dispossess
themselves of their children, and to make others responsible for their
physical and moral welfare, the children, if accepted as public or
private charges, become thereby what is technically known as "de-
pendent children." The several states treat dependent children in
various ways. Some place them in institutions, others send them to
foster homes and asylums, while still others have a system of home re-
lief or so-called "pensions for dependent mothers." Each system is
criticized by thoughtful observers, for it is said that the indoor method
of relief "institutionalizes the children;" that in the placing out to
work "undesirable children are sometimes transferred in large num-
bers to communities where they later become social burdens;" and that
the "pension" system, unless wisely applied, "leads to corruption and
the pauperization of families."
The recognized defects of child-caring work warrant us in analyz-
ing its results. Both as individuals and as a nation we should give
serious- study to this problem, for it is one of the largest that con-
fronts public and private charity today ; it involves the investment of
millions of dollars annually, and decides the destinies of thousands of
CHILD LIFE 263
the states' future citizens. Charities for children are always popular,
for no philanthropic theme appeals so strongly to the hearts and
' pocketbooks of right-minded persons as the promotion of the hap-
piness and welfare of little children. But the impulse to give liberally
in response to appeals should not be followed without first weighing
the good and the harm that may result therefrom. The efficacy of
methods of relief should not be measured in terms of so much food
and clothing, but broadly in those of child, race and social welfare.
The problem is therefore to know what conditions make it necessary
for children to be supported outside their homes, what kind of chil-
dren are becoming dependent, what effect their previous life had upon
them, and also the influence of the institutional or other new environ-
ment provided. We should know whether our children, like Romulus
and Remus, the first dependent Roman children, grow up to be kings
and rulers, if not of others, at least of their own hearts, or whether
they tend to swell the ranks of unskilled labor, or even of vagrancy
and vice.
A special study along this line is in progress in New York State
and while it is far from completed, some of the indications are signifi-
cant. First, as to the causes of dependency, not more than half are
legitimate causes, such as the illness or death of one or both parents,
and even some of these catastrophies might have been averted, as. for
example, deaths due to industrial accidents and dissipation, and ill-
ness from communicable disease. The other causes of dependence are
desertion of parents, improper guardianship, destitution, illegitimacy
and the intemperance of parents. The desertion of parents amounts
to twenty-five per cent of the causes so far studied, and reflects a
weak phase of family life. This unfortunate condition is by no means
confined to the poor, for certain boarding schools patronized by the
rich are said to have as large a percentage of children who are sent
away from their homes because of marital troubles and separations, as
occur among the class of dependent children. One means to lessen
the amount of child dependency and misery would be to strengthen
home life in America and exalt its sanctity.
The children proposed for commitment should also be studied and
compared with other children, for if we are to care for the children
of others, we must know what manner of children they are. before we
can wisely decide on the best method of training them. Our studies
in New York State indicate that only one-half of the dependent chil-
dren we have examined and tested mentally are up to normal standard.
More than twenty -five per cent are a year retarded, nine per cent two
years retarded, eight per cent three years retarded, and seven per'
26-i FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
cent more than three years retarded. Most of this seven per cent
grroup are feeble-minded, although they are found in an institution
Avhich intends to receive only normal children. This is a rather bad
showing considering that we are speaking of one of the best groups
of dependent children, for this paper does not deal at all with the
large quota of delinquent and defective children. It would seem that
the dependent child is not on the average a satisfactory child, and
that it is desirable racially to have a better breed of children than he
represents.
We pass now to a study of the effect upon the parent and his
child of the acceptance of that child as a public or private charge.
Supposing the parent has neglected his child and the public assumes
its care, society seems thereby to side in with the parent and say:
"Why, yes, you may neglect your child altogether. We will support
it. Spend all your money on yourself." Or even if the parent is
required to pay a weekly stipend, it is not a wholesome thing to re-
lieve him from moral responsibility for his child's upbringing. If,
however, the parent is good but needy, the breaking up of the home,
which has frequently been advised, is a serious matter, for the effort
to keep a family together acts as a moral tonic on the parent, whereas
nothing in the world will recompense a child for the loss of his
mother's love. A few more clothes or a little more to eat will not
requite him.
We must admit that some parents are intemperate, cross, unwise,
neglectful and vicious. In these cases the removal of one group of
children probably means that others will be born, and this shows that
the removal of children from the home does not really solve the prob-
lem, but only aggravates it. As a temporary expedient the child i^
snatched as a brand from the burning, but radical social measures are
needed to prevent such vicious homes.
Another type of home is poor and ignorant, but not vicious. Often-
times social workers, born to higher social development, cannot under-
stand these homes of retarded civilization Avhich are found here and
there, as for example the Jackson-Whites within thirty miles of New
York City, and exclaim: "This is too bad, it must not continue."
But one of the first things a eugenics investigator comes to realize is
that in this nation which claims to be so advanced and civilized, there
are nevertheless communities which are still in the age of barbarism.
Their food, raiment, tools, moral ideas and general knowledge are
those of barbarians. If this condition existed only in a few families,
we might perhaps hold that these families should be broken up. But
there are thousands of such families, mostly healthy, contented with
CHILD LIFE 265
their lot, doing little harm except petty thieving, who live out their
lives in some mountain retreat or secluded valley, making baskets,
living on cornmeal and pork, inured to cold and scanty clothing. It
would seem to be a sounder policy to bring the school and the church,
social centers and a better paying industry to these people, than to
place them forcibly in an altogether different environment to which
they are not yet adapted.
It w'ill be no easy task to improve the race to the point where there
will be few or no dependent children, but the elimination of the de-
pendent child will be one of the best indices of superiority in our
national stock and in our civilization. This country of ours is big
enough and rich enough so that every family ought to find room
enough to live, and be sure of steady employment at a living wage,
so that the little home groups can be kept together, and the parents
can see the reward of their hard toil and faithfulness in the vigor and
virtue of their children. A child, more than one dreams, forms his
whole philosophy of life and the universe before he is six or seven
years old. Who feels more trusting and confident of the Heavenly
Father's love than the little child chanting his evening prayer at his
mother's Imee? His faith in God is built by analog}^ on his faith in
this mother 's love. Beneficent home life is a national institution which
must be sacredly preserved. Society should take measures to prevent
the grinding poverty and discords which wreck some homes, and
thereby create a better parenthood and neighborhood life, so that
the problem of the dependent child may be eliminated as far as
possible. American civilization must be built on sound home life, on
devotion of parents to their offspring, on respect of children for their
parents, and finally on the protection of the home by philanthropic
agencies and by the state itself.
EDUCATION FOR PARENTHOOD
Dr. Ltdia a. DEVnjBiss, Director Better Babies Bureau, Woman's Home
Companion, New York, N. Y.
Without exception, all the vitally important papers presented
so far at this Conference have borne directly or indirectly upon edu-
cation for parenthood. Every evil discussed, every remedy sug-
gested, should be known to the men and women who -yvould do their
duty to society as parents. But those of us who are engaged in
public health educational work, those of us who try to leaven life
in our big cities, our towns, even our country districts, with what
might be termed popular knowledge on sanitation and hygiene, know
200 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
that more simple means must be taken to I'oach the average man
and woman, the average parental conscience.
The mother or father who will pass over sensational headlines
in the dail}' papers dealing with problems of eugenics and euthenics,
regarding such material as thought for scientific minds only, will
drink in slowly, but fully, less spectacular ideas brought to their
attention through the medium of their OAvn children, or, what we
might better term parental pride. The man who does not know
his child, naturally thinks it fit. He finds that it is unfit, abnormal,
subnormal, only when he is forced to compare it with the children
of other men. He does not think of himself as an unfit parent until
he realizes that he has brought forth offspring physically and men-
tally unfit to stand comparison with the children of his neighbors.
The average man does not pay much attention to the children
of his neighbors, whether they be better or worse than his own.
He does not go to public gatherings where he will hear talks on
life, hygiene, parenthood. Nevertheless, he has a certain instinctive
pride in the child which he has brought into the world. For that
reason, if he hears of what is commonly known as a "baby show."
he is not averse to having his child washed, curled and beruffied,
and taken by his wife to be compared with the children of his neigh-
bor. If the child wins a prize at the baby show, the father is properly
puffed up. If the baby fails to win a prize, he has the ready excuse
— it was merely a matter of beauty, of dimples, of influence, of
prejudice, on the part of the judges, altogether a matter of opinion.
He does not take the decision very seriously. But the fact remains
that he did want to know how his child stood by comparison with
others.
Upon this instinct, upon this very primitive method of reaching
the unthinking parent, there has been founded a movement which
promises to do a great deal toward the betterment of the human
race. This movement has been worked out in various forms in dif-
ferent parts of the country, but it is most commonly known now as
the Better Babies Campaign.
During the past year at least one hundred thousand babies have
been examined for physical and mental development, as part of this
campaign for race betterment. The parents of these babies have
been taught that the unfit child is not a visitation of Providence,
but the natural result of ignorance or sin. They have also learned
that in this day of scientific care of children, practically every baby
can be made a better baby if properly and intelligently brought up.
Tens of thousands of these parents have had their first lesson in
child hygiene, their first instruction in the important branch of
CHILD LIFE 267
medical science known as infant feeding. There are one hundred
thousand better babies in America today because of this instruction
received by parents. More important still, one hundred thousand
babies have been started right.
The first step has been taken in teaching them respect for their
bodies. With each successive year these children will leaam more
about their bodies, the care of the body, the functions, and the right
use of the functions, sex hygiene and sex relations, on a clean Imowl-
edge of which the greatness of this nation will be founded. The
work which these awakened parents have begun will be carried on
by the teachers in the schools, by social workers in settlement houses,
in welfare clubs and in social centers.
As Medical Director of the Better Babies Bureau of the Woman's
Home Companion, it is my privilege to tell something of this work,
how it has been promoted and placed upon a solid foundation by
those who believe it a vital factor in the betterment of family life
in America.
The scheme of the Better Babies Contest is extremely simple.
Babies are scored by physicians for physical and mental develop-
ment, and a dozen or more clear questions," printed in connection
with these results, show Avhat influence breeding and care have had
on the child's condition. The mental tests are the Simon-Binet tests.
The weight and measurements are taken and then compared with
standards furnished by authorities in Europe and America. The
physical examination is made according to schedule furnished by
pediatrists and men who have had long experience in examining
children at clinics and dispensaries.
The person least interested is the child examined, but parents
are aroused, not only to the condition in which the child is found,
but to the realization of the wa^ong they have done society and the
child, in a union which results in subnormal or abnormal offspring,
the propagation of the unfit. In this way the Better Babies Con-
test is working in its correlative features, talks by physical expertS;
diagrams and literature, toAvard Education for Parenthood.
In the Better Babies Movement, the Woman's Home Companion
does not lay claim to originality. Before the Better Babies Bureau was
fonned. a dozen agencies at different points of the country had at-
tempted, in rather scattered fashion, to conduct the work. The editors
of the magazine do claim, however, that by giving proper and dignified
publicity to the plan through its pages, which reach over a million
homes every month, it has accomplished in six months the work
which the race betterment organizations, without a mouthpiece,
would have taken years to accomplish. It has assisted social workers
2G8 FIRST NAT1(,)NAL CONFEHKNCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
all over the country to start these contests and to reach parents by
this very simple method of education in hygiene and supplying, with-
out cost, the literature needed for the contests, and encouraging con-
tests by donations of medals, certificates, and cash awards.
The growth of the Better Babies Bureau has been one of the
marvels of the publication world. It was organized in March, 1913,
to supply the score cards, literature about contests, and to answer
queries from contest managers, usually officials of state and county
fairs. Within a few months the fair officials made up but a small
part of the men and women interested in^ this movement for race
betterment. Club women and public-spirited citizens wanted to
know how to hold a Better Babies Contest. Physicians asked for
information about judging and scoring of babies. Mothers desired
instruction in the care and feeding of their babies. "How can I
bring my baby up to the standard of a prize winner?" was a com-
mon question. Three-fourths of the mail proves that the writers have
received no education for parenthood.
At last, the public recognizes — what educators have known for a
long time — that the subject of parenthood should be made one of
the vital subjects in a young man's and a young woman's prep-
aration for life. You will notice that I do not say motherhood, im-
portant as that is, but parenthood, which includes good motherhood
and good fatherhood. We are inclined, perhaps, to lay too much
stress on the education for motherhood, forgetting that a perfect
child must have a good father as well as a good mother.
It is a sorry state of affairs when a great public school system
entirely ignores, or overlooks, education for parenthood. Pro-
gressive educators and a few parents have recognized this. But
between our great political school boards, who know little and care
less about eugenics and euthenics, and the great mass of American
citizens, who are indifferent, those who know the crying need of
education for parenthood are sometimes discouraged at the slow
progress of introducing this and allied subjects into our great public
school curriculum.
The Better Babies Contests are filling in this great gap in a won-
derful way. We cannot say to parents, "You are not a good mother
and father," or "You could be a better mother and father." They
would resent this, and justly, too, but we can reach their hearts and
their pride through their babies. Wlien fond parents bring their
babies to the contest to be scored, love casts a softening veil over
infantile defects. They believe that their particular baby will most
certainly take all the medals and the certificates in sight. When
a doctor points out baby defects which they did not know existed.
CHILD LIFE 269
their pride is touched. They are alive immediately to the necessity
of knowledge that they may remedy these defects. The parent is
now ready for a course of education for better parenthood. He will
come of his own free will to the educators for this knowledge of
which he feels a real and crying need.
Every contest is unlike every other contest. Each has its own
little tragedies and its humorous side. I learn much from each con-
test I am privileged to attend. One Western mother of a prize win-
ner told us a very interesting story. From childhood she herself had
been delicate in health, and she knew through bitter experience the
humiliation and sorrow of the child who cannot play like other chil-
dren. She resolved that her baby should be spared this suffering if it
lay within her power. From the very inception of this new little life,
she placed herself under the intelligent direction of her doctor. She
exercised regularly, followed the proper diet, kept herself free from
worry and in the best possible condition. At birth her child was a
normal child. The same intelligent care has been given him every
day of his life. As a result this one-time invalid is not only the proud
mother of a prize-winning baby, but her own health is established.
It is more than a coincidence that our prize babies are in almost
every instance babies who have been fed regularly, who have had
plenty of fresh air and sleep, and whose mothers have followed, to
the best of their ability, the schedule for the scientific care of babies
laid down by leading pediatrists.
In contrast to this baby is one scored at a contest in a great
Western stock-raising state. The father of this baby was a promi-
nent and wealthy ranch owner and breeder of fine stock. He had
made the trip to the state fair to enter his blooded stock and had
won many first ribbons. Learning that there was a baby contest at
the fair grounds, he decided to enter his little son. A few days later
the physicians were engaged in re-examining the highest scoring
babies, when the wife of the man whose stock was taking prizes at
'the stock show approached the doctors nervously: "I did not get any
card to bring my baby back for re-examination, but I thought that
as we were strangers here, it might have gone astray, so we just
brought our baby down to see if it was not wanted for this final ex-
amination." It had never occurred to these parents that their child
might not have come up to the standard required for the re-examina-
tion. The doctor, thinking perhaps the card had gone astray, ran
through the score cards of the previous examination until she found
written in stern figures the tale of this baby's failure to qualify.
Flabby flesh, slightly bowed legs and inability to concentrate, were
among the points, indicating that the mother was overworked and
270 FIRST NATIONAIi CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
the l)aby undornoiirislied. A dull Hush overspread the man's face,
"Come on,"' he said, "we are goini^- to see the best doctor ri^ht now
and find ont what's wrong." The family doctor in his home town
might have suggested nndernonrishment and been laughed at.
The mother might have poured her worries into unhearing ears.
But when a group of judges, expert authorities, scored his child far
below his live stock, this father received a lesson which struck home.
He learned that straight legs are as important in boys as in mules,
and that ability to concentrate is a sign of high breeding in humans
as well as in horses. Let us hope that this father and mother w^ill
carr}"" the gospel of better babies back to their Wyoming home.
At these contests even the brief conferences betw^een mothers and
doctors develop a surprising change in the mental attitude of the
former. For the first time they seem to recognize the scientific value
of the contest. Maternal pride and confidence give w^ay to maternal
anxiety. Some of the women w^ho enter the contest smiling and con-
fident and, perhaps, feeling just a trifle superior, at the close of the
contest turn to the doctor nervously, "Even if my baby doesn't win
a prize, you'll let me have his score card, won't you? I want to take
him to our doctor right away and, if there is anything wrong, I want
to know how to make him better." So another mother is started
on the road tow'ard liberal education in parenthood.
I hope that most of you have seen some of the examinations con-
ducted here at the Battle Creek contest. One of my pleasantest duties
at this Conference has been to assist in the final re-scoring of the
baby candidates for the medals. Nearly six hundred children, five
years and under, of Battle Creek and vicinity, had been examined by
the local doctors. A number of the highest scoring children in each
class were brought back for the final contest. An interesting inci-
dent was that of a little boy scored by one of the Sanitarium doctors
and given a total of 940 points out of the possible 1.000, or 94 per
cent. Taking a fresh score card, another physician and I scored this
boy again. When our score was totaled it w-as found that we had'
also given him 940 points. This proves that scoring babies can be
made accurate and scientific.
The indirect results of the Better Babies contest are perhaps
greater than the direct results. Parents w^ho have had their children
in 1913 contests will not need to be urged to enter their babies in
the 1914 contest. Thousands of visitors w^ill carry the news of Better
Babies to every part of the country. Women and men like to be in
style. There is every indication that parenthood is going to be more
fashionable once again.
There is a commonly accepted belief that the marriage ring be-
CHILD LIFE 271
stows the gift for parenthood magically — works a miracle of under-
standing in the newly wedded couple. The divorce court, the juve-
nile court, the reformatories, the homes for defective children,
thoroughly disprove this theory. We train our citizens for every
other worth-while profession. Is it not the most glaring incon-
sistency to fail to train them for the most important profession of
all — Parenthood ?
There has been great agitation over the question of introducing
certain phases of education for parenthood into the public schools.
Most of this has been due to misrepresentation and ignorance of
methods to be used. It is better if certain phases can be taught in
the home, better for the child and better for the parents, but these
subjects are not taught in the homes, and very few parents possess the
requisite scientific knowledge to teach them successfully. If more
parents will attend the lectures planned by those having this phase
of the work in charge, much of the now existing prejudice will be
overcome.
To have a home, with all that word implies, we must have a
mother and a father endowed with talent by their Creator and
trained in the use of their talents by their educators. We must have
a certain economic independence, or, in other words, our legislators
must secure to a great army of American citizens, men toiling with
hand and brain, an equitable share of the product of their labor, in
order that they may be able to support homes and children. And
last, and most important, we must have that love and harmony be-
tween man and wife without which truly healthy and beautiful chil-
dren are not possible.
In the past, education for parenthood has been a system of don't'sv
repression, negation. Ignorance, and morbidity, and crime have
been the natural outcome of these pernicious teachings. The new
education for parenthood will be characterized by its scientific
foundation, its clarity, its sacredness, its loveliness, and its holiness.
This is the work to which we have set our hand. If we begin with
Better Babies, in a few years there will be Better Boys and Girls',
Better Men and Women— BETTER PARENTS.
In conclusion, I should like to present a few concise thoughts for
parents :
There is no man so manly as the man with the tender heart of a
woman; there is no woman so womanly as a woman with the cour-
age of a man. We prate about the "eternal womanly," when we
mean only the expedient feminine.
A man cannot sow his wild oats alone. He must sow them at the
expense of some other mother's carefully nurtured daughter.
272 FJllST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
xVs a stream canuot rise above its source, so a uatiozi cannot rise
above the potential greatness of its mothers.
The mother who risks her life to produce a child, surely does as
great service for the state as the man who kills another mother's
son in defense of it, and she ought to be so recognized, and pen-
sioned if in need.
Only a mother knows the worth of a man. She alone knows what
it costs to produce a man.
BETTER BABIES
RoBBixs GiLMAX, Head Worker University Settlement Scciety, New York,
N. Y.
Better babies are but a means to an end. That end is the object
for which we are gathered here — race betterment. However, race
betterment is not necessarily synonymous with better babies.
The remarkably widespread and apparently intelligent grasp of
the underlying ideas of the science of Eugenics augurs well for the
future of our race. The seed of the eugenic ideal, which was sown
so broadcast by the First International Eugenics Congress held in
London a year ago last summer, seems to have fallen on fertile soil
where it has germinated and already brought forth good fruit. When
a popular interest can be aroused in taking better care of ourselves
for the sake of bringing into this world better children, or in so
taking care of our children that they may bring forth better children,
the dim dawn of a better civilization may truly be said to have
broken. There are unmistakable signs of an ever-deepening popu-
lar interest in race culture, and that not by scientists alone but by
fathers and mothers, both actual and prospective. This interest
manifests itself in various ways, and while all of its manifestations
may not have been the result of conscious efforts toward the fulfil-
ment of the eugenic ideal, nevertheless they represent the first glow
of color in the dim dawn. One of the most practical, if not scientific,
phases of popular interest in the underlying principles of Eugenics
is the many Baby Health Contests that are being held throughout
our broad land today ; they tend to lay stress on race culture, which
is wholesome.
The ordinary "Better Babies" Contest brings to the mind a com-
posite idea made up of a very few elements — healthy babies, com-
petition and prizes. There are other ideas, fundamental, important,
and consequently enduring, — which I \vish to bring out briefly in this
paper, — that resulted from a contest held at the University Settle-
CHILD LIFE 273
ment last May in the heart of the most congested section of New
York City.
Concisely stated they are :
(1) The relative unimportance of the healthy babies in a contest.
(2) The need of offering two prizes in addition to those for per-
fect health.
(3) The inadequacy of a national conference.
At the expense of seeming to make a paradoxical statement, I
wish to say that I think the healthy babies, and especially the prize
winners, in a contest are the least important part of the contest. This
is so simply because health, whether in baby or adult, represents a
satisfactory present state or condition, and unhealth or ill health calls
for attention. Therefore, the babies which need no immediate care
should not absorb our time and attention while there are sick or un-
Avell babies to be looked after. One of the most important phases,
therefore, of a Baby Health Contest is the detecting of unhealthy
babies, which because of their unhealth need care and proper nursing
for the purpose of fitting them for the race of life — to start them off
with the least possible handicap. After a careful record has been
made of the names and addresses of the imperfect babies entered in
a contest, and their homes have been visited, and further and more
careful examinations have been made, they should then become the
special care of the municipality or private baby welfare organiza-
tion, and the first great result of your contest has been achieved,
"Without any lengthy clarification, you can easily see that without
having had the contest, without having offered your prizes, you
would no doubt have never found that this need for the care of these
below-par babies existed.
Another important phase of a contest is its educational side ; I
mean that side of it which gets people to talking about, to thinking
about, and reading about better babies. One of New York's most
conservative newspapers headed a column article "Babies All the
Rage" during our contest last spring. When the press of the cos-
mopolitan city of New York carry for a week, as most important
stuff, something, — not a murder, nor a divorce, nor a kidnapping, nor
the mysterious disappearance of a prominent person, — that subject
has become of unusual interest to the reading public. Mothers, old
and young, and even prospective parents, were interested in babies
last May in New York. Motherhood seemed to take on a more im-
portant aspect. The effect of arousing so much talk was most whole-
some and I believe could never have been produced except by hold-
ing a Contest, by offering prizes. While competition was keen, and
the spirit of rivalry rife, and the desire to win eager, yet these paled
274 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
into insi^iiiHc'iiiu'e beside the fact that fjjroni)S of mothers gathered
here and there in the crowded East Side of New York and wanted
to know, "Was this good for the baby," or "I wonder should I do
this," or "Don't do that, it ain't good for him," or "Don't face him
to the sun, it'll hnrt his eves," or best of all, "Have you seen the
nurse at the Milk Station about it ? "
Now turning to the babies in the contest, those eligible for the
prizes, — the healthy ones,— I ask this question, honestly. What does it
amount to to find a perfect baby ? Of what great importance per se ?
If the contest is to consist in finding a physically fit baby, to single
out one from 100, or 200, or even 1,000, and to give to its parents the
proud distinction of bearing such a prodigy, and incidentally arous-
ing bad blood in the parents of the bab^^ who came so near to win-
ning but didn 't. then I say let us have very few contests. As a social
worker, I am more interested in the possibility of an imperfect baby
growing up into fairly fit physical manhood or womanhood than
in searching out a physically perfect baby who may not so grow
up. but above all am I interested in having a perfect or imperfect
baby grow up into moral and spiritual fitness for parenthood and
citizenship. Temperamental endowment, or better, "emotional con-
trol," to use Doctor Davenport's words, is, from the social stand-
point, from the standpoint of the society of tomorrow, much more
important than physical health, important as that most certainly is.
To make a Baby Health Contest of more than passing importance
it therefore should be followed by two distinct additional examina-
tions, one into the environmental conditions surrounding each baby,
and another into — as far as we are with our present knowlege able
to gauge it — the possible inheritance that the baby is to fall heir to.
In other words, I think that each contest should otfer three prizes :
one, as at present, to the most perfect physical baby ; another to that
baby whose parents have sought to keep and have kept his environ-
ment best, and the other — and possibly the most important — to the
best selected parental union, to the baby which has the best parents.
In examining into the environmental conditions of babies en-
tered in a contest, we may find very direct causes why a certain
baby, or a number of babies, did not win or stood no chance of win-
ning. We may find, for instance, that the mother worked at some
trade or occupation during pregnancy which sapped her vitality.
This might have been made necessary to supplement inadequate in-
come. We may find sanitation of home, court yard or street to
have a direct bearing on the ill health of the baby. We may dis-
cover that on account of midwife or physician, or through lack of
instruction and care of mother before childbirth, the babv comes into
CHILD LIFE 275
the world, or soon after becomes, handicapped. Home manufactnre
may have filled the living rooms with bad air, as for instance es-
caping gas, with a tailor. Such things have prevented an otherwise
normal baby from being normal. Lodgers in the family, lack of
windows, or windows opening on air shafts, or on a swill barrel
where flies congregate, or a defective milk supply (if bottle fed) —
any or all of these might v/ell be, and possibly are, the causes of
many babies growing u^ physically imperfect. As a result of this
supplementary examination into environment, laws might be en-
acted which would materially affect for good the health of genera-
tions to follow. In other words, the measuring of a baby up to a
fairly perfect physical standard, no matter by whom devised, should
not be the end and aim of a Better Baby Contest.
Nor should we stop at bettering or endeavoring to detect adverse
physical conditions in their possible relations to ill health or future
growth. "We should go back of the baby and ask, "What kind of
parents have you ? At what age were your parents married ? Have
either of them any defect in vision, hearing, speech or teeth? What
are the diseases to which there has been liability ? Have either of
them undergone any surgical operation ' What is their mental abil-
ity! In what condition does your mother keep her home, herself,
"your sisters and brothers? What is her general reputation in the
community ? How did she select her husband ? How many times has
she been pregnant? Did your father use alcohol before marriage
and does he now use tobacco and in what form? When did he be-
gin to use it? Has he ever had specific diseases, especially syphilis?
Questions should be asked also of each of the brothers and sisters
of the baby, and information sought about the surviving brothers
and sisters of the father and mother. Schedules with questions along
both these lines of investigation have been prepared through the
assistance of Doctor Davenport and of Professor Chaddock of Co-
lumbia University, and are now being used by us at the University
Settlement in connection with our recent, contest.
The many suggestions we hear of and see in print in reference to
a further restriction of immigration, because of the menace to our
racial stock in the influx of "foreigners," are based largely, it seems
to me, upon ignorance of facts as same pertain to the character of
our immigrants. Apart from the perfectly proper restrictions which
are at present incorporated in our immigration laAvs, such as relate
to criminality, physical deformity, impeeuniosity. etc.. any fur-
ther restrictions, merely as restrictions, would amount to selfishness
on a national scale.' Race Betterment should be a world-wide slogan,
not an isolated American, or British, or German, or French, attempt.
276 FIRST NATIONAL, CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
"Of one blood hath He made all peoi)les. " Let ns take an interna-
tional stand in this matter. If we restrict undesirables from our
shores, they remain on some other shores. If we prevent certain
peoples from coming hither, it is possible that we shut forever the
door of hope in their faces ; we blight their spirits. Under, ordinary
conditions we cannot as a nation meddle with or suggest changes in
another nation's internal, political, economic, or social arrange-
ments. We have no right to say to England, for instance, you must
cease from having any unemployed, or, you should give women the
vote. To France we cannot say that syndicalism or sabotage must
not be interfered with, when the workers insist upon either. How-
ever, we can say that as the world grows smaller in circumference,
due to improvements in means of travel and communication, we all
must get together, all nations, and agree that, as international inter-
course, so to speak, becomes easier and more general, each nation
is to a large extent concerned in the general health and mental and
moral stamina of all others, because such things are of mutual inter-
est in this day of interchange of population.
As another expedient to limit immigration into this country, it
has been suggested that agents be sent to all foreign countries for
the purpose of inquiring into the qualifications of prospective immi-
grants. It is said that such a system would not be a very difficult
one to inaugurate, and I am perfectly willing to grant that it could
easily be done. But what is its objects To keep from our shores un-
desirable aliens. We are here today to confer on Eace Betterment.
I ask, do you mean the American race (whatever that may mean) or
do you mean the English-speaking race — if there is such a thing —
or the Teuton race, or the Indo-Iramic, of which latter I have never
heard. It is not so much a question of what w^e do mean as what
we should mean. My humble contention is that when we speak of
Race Betterment we should include within our meaning all the na-
tions of the w^orld, the human race. If, when thinking of Race Bet-
terment, we simply mean the United States, then we are not only
parochial, but essentially selfish.
Coming down to something concrete, I not only believe that there
is room for race improvement, but I believe that some immediate
steps should be taken to improve it. I believe that because of ignor-
ance, upon which ground we should no longer excuse ourselves, and
because of selfishness on a national scale, which we should be
ashamed to offer further as an excuse, we have allowed conditions
not only to exist but to grow until today Ave cannot say positively
that our civilization is not actually threatened with rot at the core.
As science reveals to our wondering eve the marvelous inter-relations
CHILD LIFE 277
between and inter-play of forces wh^cli up to a comparatively short
time ago we thought of as isolated and independent, we should begin
in our social endeavor to coordinate agencies for the dissipating
or cohering of these forces, as by so doing they may be made to, work
for the good of society the world over. "What does the importation
to this country of a few million, more or less, of immigrant unde-
sirables amount to ? What is that as a burning question to the pres-
ent-day almost world-wide extent of a syphilitic infection, or of
inheritable mental deficiencj^ ? "What is needed is a world-wide move-
ment to look into and study this most important of all subjects, be-
cause it lies at the very bottom of our existence or civilization. As we
grow broad in our vision, as we expand our sympathies so that they
both become world-wide in extent, we will see that what is needed
is a concerted action by the civilized nations of the world on the
subject of Race Betterment. World movements are not so rare to-
day as one hundred years ago. International conferences are in this
day, indeed, quite common, and it is with this belief in the urgency
of the matter, and in the practicability of the scheme, that I offer
you this suggestion, to- wit :
That this Conference set in motion machinery for the calling to-
gether of delegates from all the leading nations of the world for a
conference to discuss ways and means by which such nations, each
acting for itself but for the good of all, can, through governmental
action, or otherwise, better the ra^e of man from the standpoints of
physical health, mental attainments and moral stamina. This would
be more than a Eugenics Congress, although eugenists would be, it
is hoped, delegates: it would be more than a Health Congress, al-
though doctors would be in attendance ; it would be more than an
Ecumenical Conference, although spiritual leaders would be there;
it would be more than a Peace Conference, although peace advo-
cates would attend. It would be a gathering of statesmen, scien-
tists, humanitarians, and government officials, all optimists, with
national and international barriers knocked down, interested in
the welfare of each because the welfare of each is inseparable
from the welfare of all. Prison reformer, social and unemploy-
ment insurance advocate, child labor expert, the missionary, the
teacher, the doctor, the social worker, physiologist, psychologist —
they would all be present to discuss the relationship of syphilis, alco-
hol and tuberculosis to racial betterment, and the direct and indirect
bearing thereon of medicine, education in matters of sex, proper
care and treatment of infectious and communicable diseases, mental
deficiency, housing and living conditions, city planning, hours of
labor and recreation. And above all would such a Conference dis-
278 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
CUSS tlie positive side oL' Race Hettenuent; eufj:eiiics and not dys-
genics ; constrnctive work as opposed to destructive ; perfectibility
and not deformity or defjeneration or disease.
Discussion.
Baby Saving
Edward Buxxell Phelps, New York, N. Y.
I believe that I am to be allowed five m.inutes in which to discuss
the problem involving in this country the annual birth of possibly
two and a half million babies and the annual death in this country
of probably approximately one thousand babies a day. It is rather
a larg-e subject for rather a short time.
One of the basic principles of race betterment is "The Saving of
Babies." In the investigation by the Interdepartmental Committee
of the British Government on physical deterioration in 1904, a most
expert testimony from all over the British Empire was taken. I will
summarize in three or four lines the conclusions regarding a very
important phase of the whole subject.
The deliberate conclusion of the specialists who testified was,
briefly stated, that, ' ' as though Nature were giving every generation
a fresh start, something like eighty-five per cent of all children born
in the world are born physically healthy," notwithstanding the ex-
ceedingly popular notion to the contrary, and. furthermore, that
these children would be capable of living a normal physical exis-
tence were it not for neglect, poverty, and ignorance.
It seems to me that is an encouraging start. If Nature apparently
wipes out the so-called slight of degeneration and with that wonder-
ful kindliness of Providence, of God, or Nature — call it what you will
— gives the child at least for a moment after birth a fair start, an
equally good start with all the other babies, what remains to be
done? Why simply give that baby what God intended it should
have, — that primary article of food for which alone its little diges-
tive organs are adapted, — mother's milk, — plenty of air, plenty of
water, plenty of sunshine, and keep out of its stomach for the first
six months as you would a virulent poison any semblance of solid
matter. I finally believe, after some years' study of the statistical
side of this subject, that if we could accomplish this much, we could
cut the w^orld's infant mortality rate in the middle.
The milk stations and the various other agencies that have been
employed for the betterment of infant mortality have done ad-
mirable work and are lowering the rate. But why bother with
CHILD LIFE 279
minnows when whales are right within reach? Twenty million
children are regularly attending the public schools of this coun-
try. At least one-fourth of that number, or five million children,
eventually become mothers. Why not systematize the teachings of two
or three or four fundamentals of motherhood in the public schools
for the girls between, say, eight or nine and fifteen or sixteen years?
Why not properly put before them moving pictures, manikins, illus-
trations, as you please, and teach them the fundamentals of mother-
hood, and thereby insure, at least for the next generation, proper
motherhood for our two and a half million babies a year.
Discussion.
Adolescence
Dr. E. G. Lancaster, President Olivet College. Olivet, Michigan.
There is one thing that has interested me particularly — because
I am interested in child study, both professional and otherwise —
the adolescent period, as some of you know. Something was
said here about the study of adolescence. I had a brief moment
with Doctor Hoffman in regard to the adolescent suicide. Much has
been said here about the care of mothers and the habits of fathers
and the importance of good breeding of children. But it does not
make any difference how w'ell the child is bred if you are going to
rear that child to be fifteen or eighteen years and then let it commit
suicide because of lack of sympathy, because no one understands it,
because the child feels that it has tremendous power and possibilities
and yet no opportunity for self-expression.
This has been brought home to me within the last month in a
very appalling way. A young woman of great promise, whom I knew
very well, committed suicide in a neighboring city this vacation.
I do not know the cause, and presume she gave none — no cause is
usually assigned for the adolescent suicide. But as nearly as I can
find out, it was lack of appreciation.
We have talked a great deal about feeding and care for babies.
After quite a little study of the adolescent period, I am convinced
that the period from twelve or thirteen to about twenty or twenty-
one, or possibly later, is quite as delicate a period for the child to
pass through as the first year and a half of its life. It needs the
mother's and father's sympathy more at that time. Only about half
of them are alive then, as you know, of those who are born, but
there is far more likelihood at that time that that child will do
something that will either destroy its physical life or its moral life
280 FIKS^T NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
or its intellectual life than there is at any other period of its ex-
istence. I know of no more terrific arraignment of our present ig-
norance and civilization than the fact that we allow a large number
of our most promising boys and girls to commit suicide in the ado-
lescent period and in almost every instance, as I have said, because
no one understands them. They have no friends to whom they can
go and really speak out their heart.
THE AMERICAN INSTITUTE OF CHILD LIFE
Dr. Miller, Philadelphia, Pa.
During the Rooseveltian administration a call came from the
President for a Child Welfare Congress to be held at Washington,
D. C. Educators, and those interested in the welfare of the child,
came from all over the country in response to this call.
As the result of that meeting. Child Welfare has become an es-
tablished fact. There have been two practical expressions of this
interest. First, the organization of the Children's Bureau, under
the leadership of Mrs. Julia C. Lathrop in the Department of Labpr
in Washington ; second, but not as generally known and recognized,
The American Institute of Child Life.
The American Institute deals with the normal child, almost ex-
clusively, and the work is formative rather than reformative.
The purpose or end for which the Institute is working includes
two things: Equipped Childhood and Efficient Parenthood. It is
the one institution which exists "for the individual parent, for help
for the time in the home, drawing parents and children together.
The greatest asset of the nation is the child, and it is the
bounden duty of the home, the school, and the state to conserve
this asset, and make life worth while.
The Juvenile Court Record of July says: "When you save a man
or woman, you save a unit, but when you save a boy or a girl, you
save a whole multiplication table."
The American Institute of Child Life affiliates with over sixty
other organizations concerned with childhood, from which the In-
stitute continually draws counsel and help, and with which it is
working in sympathetic cooperation.
As representative of the American Institute, I am here with
you to join hands in every constructive movement for Race Better-
ment.
Edward J. Ward, advisor of Civic and Social Center Develop-
ments, says, ' ' The American Institute of Child Life is the expression
CHILD LIFE 281
of a grand idea. It aims to tell the future what we expect of it."
One of the leading problems of the hour is the twentieth-century
child. So much does it occupy the thoughts of men that nine na-
tions of the world are busy with the solution, and are taking giant
strides to open ways and means to produce "future good citizen-
ship, future right relations between individuals and Nations, be-
tween human entity, societj^ the state and the Godhead."
The hardest task before us today is parenthood. We need train-
ing to study and know our own child.
Plato said: "The best way to train the young is to train yourself
at the same time."
The pertinent question, "How shall Ave put the results of child
study into the home in a way that will be helpful and practical to the
busy mother?" is being answered through the work of the Ameri-
can Institute of Child Life. A practical educator says of it: "Here
is an educational institution which is undertaking in a very definite
and practical manner to establish an understanding between Ameri-
can parents and American children which will improve the stand-
ard of the home, enrich its resources and contribute in a large and
important way to the culture, efficiency and moral status of the
coming generation."
No one person can be said to be author of the movement, but
the late Doctor Canfield, of Columbia University, Dr. Melvil
Dewey, State Librarian of New York, and other equally well-known
educators, saw visions and dreamed dreams over this inspiration
until they finally interviewed Mr. John D. Morris, of Philadelphia,
a practical educational worker, and asked him if it were possible
to bring the ideas before parents in a usable, common-sense manner.
Thomas R. Patton, of Philadelphia, a wealthy philanthropist, fur-
nished the money to make it practical. Doctor Brumbaugh, the
Superintendent of the Philadelphia public schools, says the Ameri-
can Institute of Child Life is one of the greatest and newest ideas
in home education.
It is an endowed corporation chartered under the laws of the
state of Pennsylvania as an educational institution, without profit,
to interpret the best that is known about children to those who
love and care for them, and to give children and young people an
appreciation of the best things in life, and to equip them with just
the right material for their individual needs.
The scope of the plant is such that it is believed the Institute
will mean as much to the individual parenthood of Americans as
the Children's Bureau at Washington hopes to be to the collective
parenthood. The Institute will not attempt the social interests
282 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
of the Bureau. The Bureau cannot undertake the personal en-
deavors of the Institute.
The American Institute of Child Life approaches the work of a
university. A competent board of trustees holds the funds. Its
work is directed by an Administrative Board of sixteen organized
scholars, among whom are President G. Stanley Hall, Judge Ben
B. Lindsey, Mary E. Woolley. Joseph Swain, Ex-President David
Starr Jordan, and Martin G. Brumbaugh.
SEX QUESTIONS
PUBLIC REPRESSION OF THE SOCIAL EVIL
Graham Taylor, President Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy,
Chicago, Illinois.
Under the conspiracy of silence and secrecy there has come to pre-
vail a system of commercialized, segregated, police-protected vice, the
results of which so deteriorate and demoralize the very stock of the
race that there is little use of thinking of race betterment without at
least reckoning with these sinister and everywhere present evils, the
elimination of which must be a primary condition for any formative,
constructive policy for race betterment. The magnitude of this system
is little imagined. It is only guessed at. Its proportions are estimated
by wild guesses of numbers. They can be measured to a degree by
the areas in towns and cities deliberately given over to it. Here and
there, now and then, we have a chance to estimate the magnitude of
this evil by the diseases which come directly from it in our hospitals,
under our child welfare and public saving efforts, schools for the blind,
institutions for the feeble-minded, in the infirmaries for the insane, and
by the victims of vice whose gruesome, never-ending procession files
through our police stations and courts. We have some chance to esti-
mate the financial investment in this commercialized vice by the forms
of those investments, the profits that are made, the blackmail that is
levied, the bribery of public officials — all counting up into the millions
in our large cities. The clandestine type of this evil can never be esti-
mated and possibly can never be directly dealt with. More and more
nowadays a larger and larger number of men and women who have
looked to see and know, have made up their minds that commercialized,
police-protected, segregated vice can and must be suppressed.
The Mayor of Chicago, by the authority of the City Council, ap-
pointed thirty citizens to inquire into the conditions of vice in Chicago
and to report to the City Council recommendations as to public policy.
At the head of that committee was Dean Sumner, at whose suggestion
the appointment was made, backed up by resolutions of the United
Ministers' Meeting of the city. The commission was very representa-
tive. It had upon it .judges and lawyers and doctors and business men,
men of affairs, public officials and teachers and social workers, clergy-
men and two women. They worked for nearly two years as an official
body. I shall not try to tell you of its statistics, but I will of its
methods.
28-1 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
None of us knew how the others thought of it. If we had any
theories, we kept them to ourselves. We were an investigating, not a
prosecuting body. We had our sub-committees, one on the relation of
the liquor traffic to the social evil, another on the sources of supply of
\'ictims of the vice, another on the relation of amusements to the social
evil, and so on. Each sub-committee prosecuted its own inquiry, of
course, under the direction of the central organization and the chief
investigator. Investigations were made fearlessly and absolutely with-
out regard to consequences. Official investigators were employed.
Th«y were carefully and conscientiously checked up by investigators of
a different class. When the evidence was gotten in, it was laid before
the sub-committee in typewritten form with affidavits, and sometimes
supplemented by personal interviews with the victims with whose
careers or destinies the facts dealt. These sub-committee reports were
turned in to the main committee. Every word of every sub-commit-
tee's report was heard by the main committee and then given back to
the executive committee and — only after the most careful correlation,
challenge, checking up, and verification — was published. I do not
believe up to that time in the history of the world any such frank,
fearless report of the grim and terrible facts was ever dug up out of
the common earth and held up in the light of the common day where
everybody could see it and where a large proportion of the citizens of
Chicago had to see it. At last we had a body of authenti-
cated, verified, authoritative facts that no one, not even the police,
could gainsay. Then we published those facts in that awful volume,
concealing nothing except the names and the means of identification of
the people we referred to. Those i-eferences remained in cipher and
that cipher was locked up and placed in a safety deposit vault in the
custody of two of our members, and has not been and will not be sur-
rendered even at the demand of the City Council of the city of
Chicago. If we surrendered it, we would make the most atrocious
breach of confidence. W^e gave our word that much of this informa-
tion was confidential. There was in it, moreover, the basis for black-
mail that would last a quarter of a century. The report must stand
for what it was intended to be — an investigation of conditions.
Now, how to discover and deal with the sources of the supply of this
system, and what hopes there are of suppressing by public means, sup-
plemented by private effort, the commercialism and the semi-public
recognition of this infamy, is of direct concern to every one of us, I
am thankful to say that for all the toils and risk and perils and hell on
earth through which we passed, we have this to show, that across the
continent to the westward slope and to the Atlantic coast, the high
note struck by this commission has found echo in city after city, In
SEX QUESTIONS ' 285
town after town, in village after village, which has started upon the
eradication of the local phases of the same persistent, prevalent evils —
present everywhere and absent scarcely anywhere.
This was the note that startled the land : ' ' Constant and persistent
repression of prostitution, absolute annihilation the ultimate ideal."
Now, it was almost a psychological miracle that brought that setitenee
abroad. I presume that there were very many of those thirty com-
missioners who really believed that some form of prostitution was an
absolute necessity. I am very sure that some of the commissioners be-
lieved that the segregation of so much of that social evil as could be
segregated and placed under police surveillance was the least of two
evils. But the facts from Chicago and fifty other American cities and
from abroad, the facts from tlie cities where it was licensed, where the
city became a partner in the infamous traffic, the facts from the
armies and the navies, the facts from police records despite police
opinion, were simply overwhelming, and drove us together and brought
us out a psychological and moral and spiritual unit. And not a man
or woman of us has gone back on that declaration. To this day, there
is scarcely a chief of police or a to\\Ti marshal who would- not stand up
in this presence and say, ' ' That is a false conclusion. ' ' I will, however,
deal with the police phase of it a little later. I wish first briefly to
spfeak of the occasions rather than the causes, the occasions which ac-
count for the victims of this evil. There were over twenty-four hun-
dred life stories studied by one of the sub-committees of this commis-
sion. These stories were gotten from the girls and women themselves
or from the records which they had left in public tribunals and institu-
tions. It was a wonderful panorama, tragic, pathetic, heart-breaking,
thought-begetting. The most of them were so young, they seemed
so much more victimized than guilty. A woman of twenty-nine
came before us, angry at having been ejected from the house which
she managed. ' ' When did you enter this vice life ? ' ' With a far away
look the poor thing said, ' ' It was when I was very young, sir. It was
the summer after I made my first communion. ' ' I shall never forget
that answer. "How did you come to do it?" "What was your first
experience?" "Well, you know% sir, I married." "What had that to
do with it?" "When my husband married me, he put me in a resort
and I worked for him so many years, and then I worked for so and so,
so many years, and then I worked for myself. We w^omen have to
bear all the risk of disease and suffering, and give the profits to the
men. The police have driven me out of one street and forced me into
another, out of a house that I can rent on my own terms, into a house
that I have to rent on a vice king's terms. Is that a manly thing to
do ? " she asked, and then she told us nameless things of the indignities.
286 FlUST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
the .iti'Ot'itios. the inispeakable desecration of uU the sanetities of life.
Now she is only one of very many. Most of these girls fell before
they knew what it was to stand. Because of that term "white slave"
there is a eurrent belief that a great many of them are absolutely
eoereed by physical force. A comparatively small proportion are :so
eoereed. as far as we eould find, and yet, those that were, made you
blush for your civilization. This was the story of the United States
District Attorney of the district centering in Chicago :
A little Italian girl was brought up before the United States Court,
as having been imported for immoral purposes. The District Attorney
said that she had the most frightfully disfigured face he ever saw,
though there were traces of original beauty in the little thing. That
child told this man, representing the Federal Government, this story :
She was playing in the streets of her native village in Italy when a
well-dressed American woman, who spoke Italian, came through and
said, ' ' "What a pretty little girl you are. Wouldn 't you like to come to
America and be my daughter?" And the child said, "You will have
to ask mamma." And she went and saw this poor peasant mother and
offered to educate the child. She sent the mother one hundred dollars,
and the child was given her little bundle of belongings and put on the
great steamship, and on arrival was seized and outraged in New York,
put into a resort, shipped and sold to Chicago, charged eight hundred
dollars for the toggery-finery with which they decked her when they
stole her clothes away from her so that she could not be seen on the
street. Then, when she had supposed she had earned that, charged her
four hundred dollars more for something else. Then her Italian blood
arose, and she made a dash for her liberty. There stood a cruel, in-
fernal scoundrel with a razor, and he just slashed her face as she went
out of the door. Of course, the District Attorney took possession, of the
child, tried to find out where her home was in Italy, tried to return her
to her family. That is the kind of traffic that has been given the name
of the White Slave Traffic. But it includes the least pro-
portion of the victims that have thus been caught like wild animals by
people that go out gunning for them.
But then, there are conditions of life and labor that are almost as
powerful. Don 't go on saying that little people subjected to these con-
straining conditions are wilfully wicked, "ruined." God forgive us
for saying that awful word, "ruined." Why don't we say it against
the men ? We counted fifteen men for every tw^enty-four hours, with
every inmate. Talk about your fallen girl. There are fifteen of your
brothers and husbands and fathers, to every one of those, and equally
ruined. They may be dangerous purveyors of disease, of demoraliza-
tion, just because of the double standard. Children really have been
SEX QUESTIONS -^ (
literally stolen from their homes by offers of employment or by the
temptation to deck themselves a little more gaily ! Hair ribbons and a
new hat, a pair of shoes, is an offer that the child takes without know-
ing where it is going to lead to at all. There was an awful case, not
long ago, where a man of forty years of age had for ten years, per-
sistently and by every diabolical device that you could imagine, tried to
debauch two as dear little children as you ever laid your eyes on. A
lawyer turned to me and said, after the infamy of this wretch had been
testified to by these little girls, "How strange it is," said this man,
"that girls that are so pretty and so bright should be so depraved."
"Depraved," I said, "they are not depraved. The man is the de-
praved wretch and he stands acquitted by a jury of men."
Now these constraints are impossible to define. They are subjective,
but they are subtle and strong. It would take a stronger will than maybe
your daughter has or a greater experience than she ought to have
had to extricate herself from the network that is insidiously and by
prolonged efi'ort woven around the victim. There are groups of men
called "cadets" who do nothing but betray and marry young girls and
deliver them to houses of ill fame. One of those scoundrels wdll have
twelve girls and go round regularly and collect their blood money.
They are known to the police, they are known to the keepers of these
places, and some are officially recognized. That awful durance vile
has been tolerated under this conspiracy of secrecy and of silence, and
without warning the unwary of the dangers into which they are going. _
Now, beyond that, there is the love of innocent pleasure. There
are also the economic pressures, since low wages have considerable
to do, not only directly but indirectly, wdth opening the life to tempta-
tion— if not directly because of economic want upon the part of the
victim, then because of the overcrowding in tenement houses, or per-
haps because of the lack of a due amount of innocent pleasure.
In addition to all else there lies underneath the mysterious fact of
the unnecessarily strong passion upon the part of the male which is
like the surge of the sea, always everywhere, like the awful atmos-
pheric pressure. There is an artificial stimulation, by the allowance
of these segregated districts and by the connivance of the police. In
those bad old days when the international trade first was attacked in
Chicago, Federal Secret Service men were needed to prevent the police
from "tipping" off the cases of the United States District Attorney.
"When he got his own detective from Washington he routed those gangs
and had men jumping twenty-five-thousand-dollar bails in four weeks'
time. He cleaned out the whole mess almost as by magic, demon-
strating the fact that with an honest police force, the commercialized,
segregated vice could not exist.
288 KIKST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
Tlu'ii we have ^'ot to hinnani/.e our eourts, and we will liavc to have
women jurors, and we will have to do what Judge Piekney of the
Juvenile Court has done — see to it that a woman assistant judge hears
the eases of delinquent girls in chambers with no one present except the
children's parents and the witnesses. "We will have to enlist all the
agencies that lie back of the family life. The investment of twelve
millions of dollars in the public playgrounds and field houses and
recreation centers of Chicago is the best investment of public money
that I have ever seen anywhere. Thousands and thousands of young
people are innocently amusing themselves, and making amusement and
pleasure a source of education. The great segregated districts were
broken up by one determined effort of the State's Attorney. The
houses were closed and darkened and silenced. Now and then, here
and there, one opened up.
I say that the guilt for the consequences of disease and deaths and
demoralization and temptation and advertising and of flagrancy of
these nameless and shameless groups of evil, lies with the people who
persist in the declaration that there must be silence and secrecy about
it. One of the recommendations of the vice commission was not only
better police, not only stronger spiritual forces, but a safe, sane train-
ing in sex hygiene. It was begun with the parents and it was con-
tinued last year by authority of the Board of Education with about
tw^enty-one thousand high school pupils, by forty carefully selected
.physicians in very carefully supervised and censored lectures, under
the masterful and sane and visioned leadership of Ella Flagg Young.
She is holding still the fort. I hail Chicago, the first great city
to have taken such a strong, aggressive, affirmative, formative, con-
structive policy toward one of the greatest shames and most unspeak-
able and unnecessary evils of civilization — segregated, commercialized,
police-protected vice, w^hich should be immediately repressed and ulti-
mately annihilated, as it can be, if you and I will stand up to the job.
Discussion.
Scattering Prostitution
Dr. S. Adolphus Kxopf, New York, N. Y.
I should like to ask one question of our distinguished guest, Doctor
Taylor. Will he kindly tell us what has become of all the women who
have been driven out of these houses? I am in greatest sjinpathy
-^-ith his work. I don 't believe anyone has ever done any better work in
behalf of social w^elfare, and of redeeming the unfortunate. But there
are thousands and thousands of our unfortunate sisters — sometimes
called fallen because we men caused them to fall — for whom I believe
something should be done along the line of race betterment. We are
SEX QUESTIONS 289
doing some very modest work in New York compared with that done
in Chicago, but we have done something. I should very much like to
know of Doctor Taylor whether there is something similar done in
Chicago, or of anyone here who can tell me of anything similar being
done in other cities. We have established a house. "We do not call it
a Magdalene Home, but simpty "Waverly House," located at 11th
Street, in New York, near the Night Court. There, any poor girl,
tired of that life, w^ho wishes to leave it, is received with open arms,
given instruction, taught some kind of trade and, if possible, returned
to her family or given an opportunity of earning an honest living.
Some girls are sent there who have committed an offense for the first
time, sent there by the judge and a probation officer. A noble-minded
woman, Miss Miner, is at the head of it. I do believe we can do a
great deal for them, and I want to repeat here, we have done some-
thing. We have thirty -three per cent of cures, and that is a good per
cent, I believe. Thirty-three per cent of those unfortunate women
have been returned to their homes, have been returned to society as
useful and noble women. We have also looked after their physical
welfare and have tried to make them healthy as future mothers, for
they are entitled to the same privileges that we are.
Discussio7i.
Vice and Mental Defect
Graham Taylor.
About thirty-three per cent of the women studied by the vice com-
mission were found to be feeble-minded through retarded develop-
ment. That ought to be taken into account from the start.
When a drastic sudden raid was made, which none of the social
workers or the vice commission had anything to do with, I had circu-
lated a notice all up and down the red light district that a hotel had
been procured and that any person ejected from a disorderly resort
would be taken into that hotel. Not one single applicant applied for
shelter, not one, and I suppose there were 600 thrown out without any
notice at all that night. Every one of them was taken care of by her
manager.
We have houses, but not quite up to the standard of the
"Waverly House," which Miss Miner presides over. There are
very few Miss Maude Miners. I think those women, especially
those who have any indication of retarded development, should l)e
taken possession of, just as the feeble-minded girl is, and should be
segregated and kept under the protection of the state until fit, if ever,
to be at large. There is nothing short of that kind of long-distance
championship that will ever win out.
(11)
290 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERKNCK ON RACK BKTTKRM KNT
Discu.^sion.
Race Degenerates
Dr. Ja^iks T. Searcy^ Tuscaloosa, Alabaitia.
I started to rise a minute ago when the statemerit was nia(h' that a
large number of the women who occupy houses of ill fame are imbeciles
or weak minded. That is a fact, and the commercialized part of the
business largely deals with that kind. They can be coiinnercializcd.
bought and purchased and shipped.
Two elements enter into immorality, as I find it in my institution,
as I have observed it. One element is the inability to hold to the right
and avoid doing wrong, inherent in the person, a sort of imbecility, if
temptation and opportunity offer. The other element is a perverted
morality, which delights in doing wrong. These are two extremes, in
the cpiestion of immorality, illustrated in police courts all over the
country. They are race degenerates who come into the police courts
continually. Any mental discipline, any instruction, any effort put
upon them, and they come back.
Discussion.
"Waverly House"
Dr. S. Adolphus Knopf.
I have been watching throughout this Conference to hear just one
word said by the women about a large number of your sisters. I refer
to the thousands and thousands and thousands of poor girls who have
been led astray and who are now what is wrongly called "fallen."
If anybody caused them to fall I presume it was a man. Now, Mr.
Chairman, ladies and gentlemen, I want to ask you whether they ought
not to be included in race betterment. I want to ask the women here
today, to do as we have done in New York, to open a house and to call
it anything but a Magdalene Home, and to try to get into it those un-
fortunate sisters who are willing to leave that life voluntarily, who are
tired of it, and give them another chance.
Now I want to tell you of our statistics and show you what can be
done if you women and we men hold out a helping hand to those poor
sisters of ours. We have thirty-three per cent of cures. That means
out of 100 women who voluntarily came to us, or who were sent to us
by the judge of the Night Court, to give them a trial, we have thirty-
three per cent of cures. We watch them for a year or two after they
have returned to their homes. Many of them have become mothers and
I hope good mothers. As our little movement, which we call the
"Waverly House," has also added a little bit to the betterment of the
race, I ask that you going out, going home, will try to start such a
movement and give your sisters another chance to be mothers also and
thus help in the betterment of the race.
SEX QUESTIONS 291
Discussion.
The Florence Crittenton Mission
Dr. Charles G. Pease, New York, N. Y.
If you are not able to start that work of salvation at home, a
rescue home for women, then you can assist the Florence Crittenton
Mission. They have eighty homes for girls in this coimtry. You
can assist them and they need your assistance. I am identified closely
with both those organizations in New York City and about 80 per cent
stand true. They have a league that i\\ey join afterward. It is a
wonderful work and it needs more support.
Discussion.
Prostitution and the Cigarette
Miss Lucy Page Gaston, Chicag-o, Illinois.
I want to give you one incident of my experience. A call came to
the Woman's Temple the other day pleading for rescue. It gave the
number, 34 Custom House Place. This was before the red light dis-
trict was moved down to the 22d Street district. I called up the Chief
of Police. He Sent two of his trusties down to that place and within
an hour that girl, bag and baggage, was at our Anti-Cigarette head-
quarters. A man had told her, when he found her crying on the stairs,
that there were women at the Woman 's Temple who would help her if
she would only make the appeal. They gave that poor, persecuted
child my name. She told me her story. It is the story of thousands
of girls who are going wrong. She was not an immoral girl. She was
simply a silly, foolish girl. Here in a little city of Michigan she
entered upon a flirtation with a traveling man. That man was a pro-
curer from Chicago. She was a seamstress. He offered to pay her as
much per week for se\Wng in his own home as she was maldng and
offered to give her board. She very naturally accepted the offer. She
found herself a prisoner with her clothing hidden and unable to make
her escape.
I know hundreds of those girls. They have told me stories that
have stirred my very blood. It seems to me that the people in all these
little villages and country places ought to be warned of this sort of
thing. I tell you, before High God, that the churches and the good
people are to blame because there are not organizations that will take in
hand every boy and girl and pledge them to total abstinence.
Doctor Taylor will bear me out, that it is not the girl who is a
temperate girl, who never touches beer or liquor or cigarettes, it is not
that kind of girl who goes wrong, but the girl that has loose notions
upon these lines.
292 FlUST NATlOXAh CONKKKKNCK ON RACK HKTTKKMKNT
Oil. tViciuls. W(* outi'lit to do more in the Wiiy of pt'cvciilioii. It stirs
my lu'arl wIumi ^-ootf Doctor Knopf gets ui) to appeal for tiiese girls
who liaxc gone wrong. Here we are, seeing them going the route tli-it
has led to ruin, and we are doing so very little. In a dance hall last
winter in the city of Chicago I saw the boys and girls there, not one of
them 21 years of age. The boys were drinking, not beer, but whiskey,
and smoking cigarettes. Those young people were on the road to ruin,
if they were not already ruined, and they were school children.
I tell you the conditions today in our high schools, yes, and in our
grade schools, call for a much greater amount of attention than we are
having. You have got to have heart interest as well as head knowledge.
I do not know that I Dught to say this here, but I feel it to the depth
of my being — who today knows more of the effects of drugs, of cigar-
ettes, of drink, than do the doctors, and yet in every community Ave
have doctors who are not above suspicion on these things.
DiscnssioH.
The Girl Who Goes Right
Dr. Luther H. Gulick, New York, N. Y.
I had hoped in telling you of the Camp Fire Cirls that I had
aroused some interest in the girl who is going right, but nobody
seems to have followed my cue. So I want to follow my owti trail
for a moment more and make about six definite suggestions. The rank
of a Fire Maker is the first real rank a girl makes. We try to be pretty
careful not to run foul of prejudices, hence we do not use the word sex
hygiene or sex instruction nor anything of the kind. But to become
a Fire ^laker one of the requirements is that the candidate must know
what a girl of her age ought to know^ about herself. That is enough
for the guardian and for the mother and for the teacher.
I should like to ask you to ask yourselves these questions, filling in
the name of your ow^n city. I will put in Battle Creek because that is
where we li-ve for the present moment. AVhat chance is there for a
girl to go right? I do not know the answers; there may be good
answers to all of these — what chance is there for boys and girls to go
swdmming in Battle Creek under good conditions? That is a right
of childhood. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness — I have
heard those w^ords somewhere !
Second, What provision do you make in Battle Creek whereby
groups of girls. Camp Fire girls or others, or groups of boys, or groups
of boys and girls together wdth guardian or chaperon or whatever
you choose to call them, can go off for a tramp of five miles and find
a good place to make a fire and a place to bake some potatoes and have
a good time together and come back home again, normal, good kinds
SEX QUESTIONS 293
of things ? Is there anybody in Battle Creek who will furnish that kind
of an opportunity to be right outdoors?
Third. Do you laiow that the love of Nature, I'm not now re-
ferring to knowledge about Nature, to scientific knowledge, I am re-
ferring to just plain liking flowers and the stars, and the birds and
the bees — this love of Nature is established before ten? Very few
people establish it later. What chance do you people in Battle
Creek give to the children under ten to come in contact with real
Nature at first hand with somebody that loves and understands it?
I do not mean a pot in school or a window garden. I mean plain
outdoors. I understand you have some outdoors near here. What
chance is there for your children under ten to get it down into
their souls so they will have it as a precious possession all the
rest of their lives? What chance is there for yotir boys and girls to
spend a week or a month out camping under proper conditions (where
you will know there won't be tramps or any other improper people
coming around) within a radius, a tramping radius, of Battle Creek,
where it is beautiful, where they can swim, where they can build a
fire and where they can do the things that every human being ought
to do in their teens? If there is not such an opportunity, get up a
committee and get such a place and administer it and see that Boy
Scouts, Camp Fire Girls, or any young people at proper times get
the chance to establish this neuro-nuiscular habit of wholesomeness.
[Voices, "Good!"]
When young people want to have birthday parties, can you get
the use of a room in a school building for that purpose ? If not, why
not ? These buildings belong to the taxpayers. They ought to pay for the
extra expense for light, janitor service and the like, but there is no
reason why the schools should not be used by the citizens for their
social purposes. People say sometimes that it is undemocratic to give
the use of the school room to one group and not let everybody come in.
That is a false notion of democracy. Let me illustrate. There is room
for 40 baseball games going on at one time at the playground in
Prospect Park in Brooklyn. Now by application your baseball team
can have the use of one ground at 2.00 on Saturday and you are pro-
tected in that right and it is not called undemocratic. If you allowed
everybody to use that ground all of the time the result would be there
would not be any baseball at all. Now, social life cannot be carried on
without the recognition of the fact that clean life and social grouping
has got to be recognized. W^hen my daughter has a birthday and I
want to surprise her and get her and her friends and their friends and
form a party, it is not probable that I have got a room big enough in
my house for it. It will be better for the entire community if I can be
2*14 KIKST NATIONAl; CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
allowed to use a school room for that purpose and it will be better for
the school.
Are there men and women in Battle Creek who love boys and girls
enough to give their time to go with them ? I do not mean as a duty.
Young people hate to have other people do their duty to them. Are
there any men who remember how to make kites and bows and arrows
and push-mobiles, who like to work with tools and who have a tool
bench and will work Avith boys ? You can do anything if you have such
men and women here. If you haven't, then you haven't that kind of
parenthood which is large enough to reach beyond your own children.
It is easy for us to get up in this room and talk about race better-
ment. The real thing happens w^hen we get right straight at it with
the boys and girls and we can shape them as we please if we like to do
it. Is there any chance in Battle Creek for boys who have a mechanical
turn of mind to make things with tools and benches? There ought
to be. It will be to the advantage of Battle Creek, and every other
place is going to employ skilled labor later on. A great many boys
and a great many girls will have tools and a chance to work. During
all the ages they have had it in the home, because the tools used to be
in the home. But the tools have gone from their home. Are there
any places where boys can do things who are motor mindied, who love
tools and who want to make engines and automobiles and bicycles and
steam boats and all those things ? If not, it is too bad. Do you have
any appreciation of those instinctive feelings that lead boys a great
deal and girls somewhat to compete in athletics, that is, do you have a
sane public school athletic league? I do not mean an athletic league
that merely takes the biggest interest in boys and trains them hard
for public exhibition. I mean an athletic league that gets 80 per cent
of all boys into action who love it. If you have not, you have not
one of the most important social inventions. Is there anybody here
who realizes that all of this conquering of air has grown out of our
knowledge about kites and that boys love kites and that a kite flying
contest in Battle Creek or the model aeroplane club would occupy the
time of some hundreds of boys probably ? It does at New York, en-
thusiastically, earnestly and they are learning things. Are there any
men and women in Battle Creek who realize that to think up things
of this kind and put the machinery back of them to make them happen
is the kind of thing that will really deliver the goods?
Discussion. The Single Standard
Prof. Samuel Dickie, President Albion College, Albion, Michigan.
I confess to being taken somewhat by surprise in being called to the
platform. All Lneed to do and all I can do is, after good Methodist
SEX QUESTIONS ' 295
fashion, to say Amen to everything I have heard. It is a trite old say-
ing that the time to make a man what he ought to be is to begin at
least with his grandfather. Some advocates of race betterment think
possibly that the great grandfather would be the proper point of be-
ginning. I want to emphasize if possible the sentiment set forth in
Doctor Taylor's address demanding the wiping out of this double
standard of morality. And may the time soon come when men and
women will be judged by precisely the same standard.
I attended, several years ago, a great gathering of women in the
city of Buffalo. Unexpectedly called to the platform immediately
following a very eloquent Baptist minister who had been giving the
ladies great compliments, I said, at the outset, to a vast audience of
women, "Ladies, if the time ever comes when the women of this coun-
try are as good as the men, we shall have made considerable progress."
And you could just have heard all those women drawing in their
breaths. I feared that the roof of the opera house would descend
upon us, and made haste to explain. I said, "Of course, ladies, with
the prayer meeting full of women, and the penitentiaries full of men,
I am not talking about the question of simple conduct, but," I said,
' ' let me tell you what I sincerely believe : If the time eiver comes, God
grant that it comes speedily, when the women of America, and the
young women, and the marriageable women, demand as high a stand-
ard on the part of the men who are to walk through life by their
sides, as even we men now demand of the women, great progress will
have been made. ' '
Do not think me criticising womankind, for I believe in woman,
and I trust woman, and I want to give woman the ballot, and I want
woman to do everything that a woman can do, but I want to say to
you that the women of America can do more to wipe out the double
standard than the men can do.
Discussion.
The Boy's Temptations
Dr. Amakda Holcomb, Mount Pleasant, Michigan.
I Avant to speak for the benefit of our boys who become men
who do not get a square deal. When we talk about the one stand-
ard of morals, give them an equal part. As a school-teacher I
taught boys and girls together for seven years. I found my boys just
as square and clean as my girls — and a little more to be trusted. I am
raising boys and girls in my own home. My children, my boys, have
just as good a standard of morality as my girls. In my work in
Chicago I met a woman who, when her child was born, said, "Oh, I
29(5 FIRST NATIONAIi CONPERENCP: ON RACE BETTERMENT
am so o-lad it is a l)oy/' T didn't like that beeause I like girls and
boys, too, and 1 said. "Why?" ''Well, if this boy does wrong he
won 't be blamed, ' ' was her answer.
That is the beginning of the double standard — in the minds of the
mothers, at the birth of children,
[Voices: "Oh, no. No."]
I find it so in my experience. Our girls are kept in the home,
are watched over, are taught and they are protected by every wo-
man and by every man. I had my eyes opened firs't at the age of
twenty-four when I was a medical student in Chicago. The President
of the social purity work of Iowa said to me, "You girls think you are
mighty fine, and you are, but I want to tell you that when young men
stand straight and clean, at this time of the world, they are a hundred
times better than you are. ' ' That is what he said, and I thought of it
for weeks and months, and I found it was true. He said, "You girls
can w^alk these streets of Chicago and there is not a man who dares to
offend you — he would be brought up in the courts ; but we boys can-
not go one block from this college without being invited. We are
tempted from within and from without. If we stand firm we shall
have no credit, while you girls have few temptations within, and no
temptations without, and you consider yourselves better than we."
Doctor Taylor said these girls were so young. I have had more con-
fessions from the young men in Michigan than I have from young
women, in my practice of medicine, in the state of Michigan. In
w^riting up their cases they turn pale and they say, "Doctor, I was
only 17." And a boy of 17 is only as old as a girl of 14. Why haven't
we laws to prosecute the women who desecrate our boys of 16 and 17 ?
It is only the older women who do that. We should have laws. We
cannot demand an equal standard until we give our boys an equal
chance.
Discussion.
Real Meaning of the Double Standard
Dr. Luthee H. Gulick.
It seems to me there is much misunderstanding with reference to
the double standard. During all the ages those women who have been
true to their children and their husbands have been in the line of se-
lection, because their children survived. We men have not been in
that line, ever. The men were eliminated who could not stand for the
tribe and fight. Next there arose two kinds of morality : The ability to
stand together whether life was involved or not, team work. That is
masculine, and the man who cannot do that is not a man. Then the
ability to love one's children, and to be true to the home. And that is
SEX QUESTIONS 297
feminine. We each are true to our kind. Naturally the world is de-
manding of us men that we be clean. We are finding- it hard. But we
are going to learn. And the world is demanding of you women that
you stand by one another, and you are finding it just as hard as we are.
And it is a new kind of morality, for the women of the world, who
have never stood by one another. What chance is there to abolish
prostitution when young men and young women do not have a chance
for wholesome relation to each other day by day. That is the thing
that is in the hands of women and not in the hands of men.
Discussion.
Educating the Child Regarding the Secrets of Life
Mrs. D. W. Haydock^ Missouri Fedei-ation of Women's Clubs, St. Louis, Mo.
The point of this convention has been education or at least I came to
this convention feeling that that was why I came. At 65 I need more
education. I believe the most of the rest of us do. As a 65-year-old
mother I want to tell you I began with my boys and my girls when
they were three years old to tell them parables, as the Lord taught,
trying to follow in His footsteps regarding the secrets of life. I was
a city missionary for years before my marriage, and I know how those
poor girls want to come back into life. There is nothing that can be
done for them that will not bring its reward eventually. Before my
marriage one of these poor girls said to me, "If ever you are married
and God gives you children, see that you teach them. That is why I am
here, because I did not know."
After my marriage I felt that the one thing that God had given me
to do was to see that no city missionary was needed for my child.
When my son was a little over three, not quite four, and my daughter
six, I had given those years to the thoughts of how I should at last tell
those children. One night I had gathered by my side a bird 's nest, the
softest thing that I could find, and a chestnut burr with its coating of
velvet inside, a fern with its folded and unfolded fronds, and I told
those children that in the body of every woman there was a nest softer
than this because God made it, God built it. I also had a plant with
the seeds ripening on the outside. I told them that in the body of this
woman, whom God made some day to be a mother, there was something
like these fairy fingers.
To my little boy I said, "Some day in this world God will have
for you a woman. Do not dare offer her a life less pure than that you
demand of her. ' ' All of my life my boys and I have been comrades.
They can talk to me, the immarried boys or the third, a married boy
who is younger — they can talk to me as if I were a young man.
There is nothing concealed.
298 FIRST NATIONAL CDNFEHKNCE ON KA(;E BETTKKMKNT
For a time, of course, this parable satisfied. Later otliers began to
instruct, but I told them not to listen to others, that mother knew all
and would tell them the truth. At ten the boy with whom I bad begun
came to me and told me that an older boy had begun instruction. At
ten that boy of mine knew because his mother told him. At thirty he
said to me, "You don't know what you did." He then had charge t,f
several groups of young engineers. He said, "I have wished sixty-five
thousand times that I might send for you to come and talk to my boys"
—but he did it himself. That is one of the things of my life for Avhich I
Ijave never wished I had taken another way. If today, even about some
little matter of the nursing, if I have anything to say to these boys of
mine, it is because somew^here in the world there is some woman and
they must give to her what they ask of her.
Discussion.
The American Mother
Mrs. F. F. Lawrence, Columbus, Ohio.
Of all titles that have ever been given me, I am proudest of the
one, ' ' The American Mother. ' ' I believe that the world itself depends
upon the American mother and therefore my interests are principally
centered on the American girl or future mother. "While I have taken a
deep interest in the boys, I have felt a little closer to the girls and have
wished that I might protect them more. I believe in that old adage,
"An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure." You know all
over this country it is dotted with institutions for the unfortunate
girls. Did you ever hear of a home for the fallen men ? Right there
is where you are going to get your protection through the girl. Every
fallen man, married or single, should have an institution that he can
get into and he should be committed there according to his crime, and
in that institution he should have the crime itself brought right up be-
fore him, so that it wall really be a remedial work. If he is a young
boy, we pity him, and we pity him because he is ignorant, so it is
with the young girl ofttimes. For that reason I say, give the young
boy nine months, and the old criminal ninety-nine years.
Discussion.
Vocational Education
Professor Robert James Sprague, Massachusetts AgTicultural Colleg-e,
Amlierst, Mass.
I should like to make just one suggestion. I should like to preface
it with this: It seems to me that in much of this discussion we are
trying to deal wdth remedies. We are trying to deal with appearances.
"We are not getting at causes. There has been quite a little said here at
SEX QUESTIONS 299
this convention with regard to prostitution and all these other things,
but very little said about a situation in the country that will produce a
system of real, easy home living, of ideal homes.
For a moment, look at some of the cities of Germany, where they
come out and take the land round about the city, put in the public
utilities, the street cars, transportation, loan the money for building,
prescribe the kinds of ideal dwellings, etc., make it easy for the normal
home to develop. Ladies and gentlemen, there is no cure for the prosti-
tution evil until we get the normal home. There is an economic basis
for this whole business. We may drive the bad houses out of one
street and drive them out of another for a while and they Mdll turn
up somewhere else. We have got to get the normal home.
Another point right along that line : In the United States the most
of our criminals come from the roving bachelor class of the twenties.
In this country we have an enormous number of young bachelors, who
come out from all parts of the country, who have had no opportunity
to learn a trade — along in the twenties without a trade — with all the
impulses of manhood. They struggle through those twenties and
come to the cities before they get settled in life. Gentlemen, an effi-
cient system for vocational education in this country will do many of
those things that the German system of education is doing. It will give
boys an earning power at the age of 22 or 23 so that they can marry
at 23 or 24 or 25 and support a family. That will do much for the re-
duction of our criminal classes, a large majority of which come from
that zone of life. It will do much toward abolishing prostitution in
this country, because every time a wage-earning boy marries a girl and
establishes a home under the right conditions, he removes the material
for all of that kind of thing.
We have got to work on a sounder economic basis for the preven-
tion of these things that we are trying to get rid of. When we get the
normal home, so that the boy can have a normal life and a normal
•earning power, and can marry the normal girl with a normal educa-
tion, and when the state and the city come in and establish conditions
so that he can make a normal home and get a dwelling under easy con-
ditions, we have solved — not solved, but w^e have relieved — a very great
social problem of society.
Shall we not go home and try to get into our state establishments
for charities a little more of a constructive eugenic program? The
state associations in which I have been more or less interested are
dealing largely with the negative side of eugenics. I think that there
is good opportunity for getting in a little more of the constructive
eugenics into those programs. I think there is a chance for large
things, because those things have the interest, they have the prestige,
300 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
tlu'V hold llu' atti'ution of the i)('()i)k'. I believe that by doin<;' that,
by getting into the directory of these establishments, we can get into
those programs matter which will have a great deal of influence in
arousing the people to think along these lines.
Discussion.
Use of Newspapers
II. A. Burgess, Chicago, Illinois.
This world is getting better. The newspapers of today are getting
better. I have heard talks about patent medicine advertisements.
You would be surprised how they are being eliminated out of
the newspapers today. The great agencies in Chicago and. New York
have hard work placing these advertisements in a great many papers.
Here is my suggestion : Why not, in every community, each week, have
a column given to the newspapers, which I am sure they would gladly
print, in reference to just such suggestions as are being made in this
convention ?
THE SOCIAL EVIL
(A Special Address to AVonien — Illustrated by Stereopticou.)
Dr. J. H. Kellogg, Battle Creek, Mich.
I made up my mind a good many years ago that there are three
things in the world that are especially bad : One of these is the slavery
of animals to men, because of the brutality sometimes involved. Even
worse than this is the slavery of men to men. But the worst thing in
all the world, the most dreadful thing, is the slavery of women to men.
By and. by the ballot will give women freedom. When women get
the franchise, I believe the white slave traffic, and all other kinds of
slavery of women to men, will be abolished, and' the world will be
freed from this greatest evil.
Now, ladies, in our chapel, and down at the Congregational church,
some views are being thrown upon the screen to give to men a picture
of some of the terrible things for which vice is responsible. I have
selected just a very few views to throw upon the screen here, that you
too may be informed. You have a perfect right to be informed with
reference to the physical aspect of such diseases, since they are more or
less prevalent in nearly every community. We need to get the same
dread and the same repugnance for these diseases of vice that we have
for smallpox and other communicable maladies. If you know there is
smallpox in the house, yon are afraid of it. If there is a red flag put
out, people are alarmed, and yet there isn 't any very great danger, as
smallpox is not very readily communicated. If the nurse who has
care of the smallpox patient will simply keep his whole skin covered
with a little carbolated vaseline, nobody wall get the disease from him.
Syphilitic S.-lfrosis of Ton^iu
I>:xamples of Heredit;iry .Syi)hilis.
..^^-^vf
Syphilitic Caries of Cranial Boii
Syphilis of the Fetus
SEX QUESTIONS 301
Not very long ago, in a hospital, smallpox patients, measles patients and
scarlet fever patients were all kept together in the same ward in the
same room, and the disease was not communicated from one to another.
It is now known that these diseases are not nearly so communicable as
we used to think they were. Reasonable care will prevent their ex-
tension. But suppose there is a house in town where the loathsome dis-
eases produced by vice prevail, to serve as an incubator. In unthought
of ways this disease may be communicated every day. For example,
here comes the milkman and sends in a bottle of milk, receives his pay
at the door — a dollar bill, or a silver dollar, or a quarter, or a half dollar
or a dime. That money may be smeared with the virus of vice. It goes
into his pocket, mingling with the rest of his cash, and in the next house
he passes out the same vile quarter to a little girl who, having both
hands occupied, puts the quarter in her mouth. She has an easy chance
of getting an impure disease. This is only one of many ways by which
it is scattered about the town.
Public sentiment has got to be changed with reference to the
brothel. Clergjnnen and doctors must be willing to speak out
and arouse the whole community to rise up in arms, to protest^
and say: "We will not tolerate one of these unlawful houses in
our midst." If the women of this tovim w^ould say to themselves. "We
Mali not have a brothel in this town," — there would be none.
The brothel is a rendezvous of criminals. The laws of the
state of Michigan, as of every state in this Union, make licentiousness
a crime. No man can visit such a house without committing a crime.
Every person in that house is guilty of crime, and the laws upon the
statute book of the state of Michigan expressly forbid the conduct of
such places, and the only reason why they exist is because the officers
of the law do not carry out and administer the laws upon our statute
books. We must protest against these horrible incubators of crime and
disease.
But the stereopticon is ready. First I will show you some
beautiful flowers. Here are two or three things you may think are not
so very beautiful. They illustrate the slavery of woman to fashion.
Men are the makers of fashion. To increase their gain they are con-
tinually changing them, thereby making a demand for new clothes.
You know that. The fashion plates have debauched the taste of
American women. They have put false ideals into their minds, until
they actually believe that physical deformities are artistic and beau-
tiful, and so they are committing crimes against their bodies which, in
the end perhaps, are responsible for as much race degeneracy as these
vice diseases we are talking about. Now, my women friends— I like
the word women better than ladies ; it is a stronger word — my wo-
302 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
iiuMi friends — I beseech you to think of that. How can you expect thivt
men are going to respect the laws of God which relate to their bodies
unless you respect the laws of God which relate to your bodies? This
debasing, abusing and danuigiug the body, degrading the body in obey-
ing the mandates of fashion, is perhaps, on the whole, as harmful antl
as damaging as the evils that can be traced to vice. I just want you to
look at these splendid figures, strong as God made them. They are two
daughters of a king from the Congo region. They have splendid
bodies, strong, vigorous and well, capable of performing all the func-
tions of womanhood. Here are two more good, strong, well-made
bodies, ignorant and debased by savagery, but splendid bodies.
Now, isn't civilized woman entitled to just as good a body as a savage
woman ? We are all born savages and have to be tamed. The taming
sometimes goes so far as to spoil us. Now look at this Venus of Milo.
Here the liver, colon and stomach and kidneys are right where tln^y
belong. Every organ is where it belongs, all above the lower border
of the ribs. Here is the figure of a woman who had worn a conven-
tional dress. She could not be convicted of tight lacing. No woman
ever did admit that she laced herself tightly but this woman wore
what she called a health corset and you see the liver is way down out
of place. The stomach is entirely out of place, as is also the colon.
Both kidneys are displaced and the organs which lie naturally above
the lower border of the ribs were in this case nearly all below the
lower border of the ribs and of course there was an ugly prominence
of the lower abdomen that had to be held in by some sort of corset
to give it shape.
Some diseases and weaknesses are hereditary. A boy is a chip oft'
the family block, not oi¥ the father block alone. It is fortunate that
this law exists because by means of this law it is possible to breed out
evil qualities and to breed in good ones. When one parent is defective,
feeble-minded, the children of the first generation may not show this,
but in the third generation the children may show it, but if both par-
ents are feeble-minded, then all the children are feeble-minded. This
is well shown in this genealogy here, the Kallikak family. A man in
a state of intoxication had a child by a feeble-minded girl. He after-
vizards married. All of his lawful descendants were strong-minded,
splendid people. From the descendants of that feeble-minded girl,
you see a whole line of feeble-minded and criminals. After awhile, you
see, a feeble-minded grandson married a feeble-minded girl. Then the
children were all feeble-minded.
Now the diseases of vice are particularly hereditary in char-
acter. They are also communicated in more ways than one, not
simply by immoral acts but in other ways. Let me tell you of a
Died 1735
Q
O
Q
■O
O-
Died 1770
LAWFUL WIFE Q-
O-
Q
O
NAMELESS FEEBLEMINDED
Q— T — •girl
O
a
BLACK SYMBOLS
INDICATE FEEBLEMINDEDNESS
□=MALE O" FEMALE
O
1913 ^
Feeble-mmdi-dness tends to be. transmissible, but
so dce«'. normality'. Tliv:^ gr^xi and the bad branch
of the KallJkak famiiv
SEX QUESTIONS 303
little tragedy that happened not long ago. A man, a public servant
of a city, married a young wife. Presumably he had been
wandering around in haunts of vice and had become infected with
a nameless disease. With a kiss upon the lips of his wife he in-
oculated her with that same disease. In a few^ months a child was
born to them. It had an eruption when it was bom, a primary
eruption of this awful disease, and it wasn't very long before other
symptoms appeared, the so-called secondary symptoms. That is
what that man had in his mouth, a mucous patch, and when he
kissed his wife that is what infected her. He had no sores upon his lips
but the disease had become systemic and little white patches were found
in his mouth, virus of syphilis, the protozoa, the animal parasite that
communicates this disease, which looks for all the world like a vinegar
eel when it is magnified. It bores its way all through the body and
produces a deadly poison and infects and contaminates the entire body.
This man's mouth was swarming with these horrible, wiggling para-
sites, his saliva was alive with them and some of them were deposited
upon his wife's lips and made that awful sore. Thus the disease was
communicated to her body and to her unborn son. By and by these
secondary eruptions appeared.
I was called once to the hospital to see a case in consultation and
found a young woman covered all over with an eruption such as you
have just looked at. She was a girl of good character, a stenographer
employed in an office, but she had been keeping company and had
become engaged to a young man who had unsuspectingly inoculated
her vnth this vile disease and her life was ruined.
Here is the more advanced stage of the disease. This shows
the disease on the top of the skull eating its way into the very
brain. Those spots here, when they disappear, leave a copper-
colored stain upon the skin. That is one of the characteristics
of this disease. The eruption at certain stages leaves behind a copper-
colored spot and the doctors learn to recognize these very readily.
Here is another form of the disease, rather an unusual form. I have
seen similar cases more than once. Some of you have seen persons just
like that upon the street, men going about with horrible evidences of
vice right upon their countenances. In the third stages of the disease
you see the bones and the harder parts of the body are undergoing de-
struction. That poor boy I was telling you about a little while ago that
Avas born with this awful eruption, his whole body infected, that poor
little boy has gone through all the stages of that disease and at the
present time his nose is almost destroyed. The roof of his mouth is al-
most entirely gone and that awful disease is slowly eating him up and
30-1 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
iu two or tluve years more he will be dead. He was rol)l)('d of the life
he was entitled to.
Here is tlie skull and you see the disease eating down through the
bones into the very brain. Here is a syphilitic sore upon the tongue,
one of the later forms, a sclerotic form of the disease. Here is another
of the hereditary forms of the disease also, in the hand here, and this
is the characteristic appearance of syphilitic teeth — ^the hereditary ef-
fect of syphilis upon the teeth. This is not the ordinary notched
appearance of the teeth that is natural. It is a different kind of
notch, first described by a great English surgeon, Doctor Hutchinson.
Here is a syphilitic baby. More than one baby I have seen bom into
the world with the characteristics you see here. I want you to look
at that but a moment. Look instead at this baby and carry its
picture of sweet innocence in your mind (the Minnesota Baby).
My friends, we must fight this evil and every other evil that is attack-
ing the vitality of the race so that these beautiful, innocent human
flowers that God gives to us may be preserved intact.
VENEREAL DISEASE
(A Special Address to Men.)
Mr. F. 0. Clements, Representative of the National Cash Register Com-
pany, Dayton, Ohio.
Unquestionably a great many in this audience will wonder why an
industrial concern should deal with this subject, venereal disease. The
President of The National Cash Register Company, from its earliest
inception, has devoted a great deal of time and attention to health sub-
jects.
We find after careful analysis that the elements requisite for suc-
cess are : health, honesty, ability, industry and a thorough knowledge
of the business. Health first. So you will find in our very earliest
publications frequent excerpts and short sayings dealing with the
underlying principles of good physical well-being. Later on these
publications were supplemented by graphic methods of presentation,
including lantern slides, and still later the moving picture film.
Quite a number of years ago, the need of some sane instruction with
reference to sex hygiene became apparent. Two very unfortunate
occurrences were brought vividly to the attention of the officers
of our company. One of our very much honored and respected em-
ployees, who had served the company faithfully and well for many
years, the father of a clean family, contracted gonorrhea of the eye
and lost his sight. This was definitely proved to be the fault of a
fellow-workman affected with gonorrhea, who endeavored to remove
'lip Mi;inesota Biiby — ;i splt-iulid ty]).- of linaltl
SEX QUESTIONS 305
a small particle of metal from his friend's eye. Still later one of our
trained nurses contracted syphilis in a dental chair, due to the tools
not being properly sterilized. At least the dentist recognized his re-
sponsibility in the case and paid all the bills incident to the medical
attendance required.
These two \erj unfortunate occurrences answer the question as to
why an industrial concern should spend the money necessary to collect
and arrange this particular talk of the evening.
Still again, many of the officers of the company keenly felt the
need of instruction along this particular line, for fathers of this and
the preceding generation failed to tell their children the things that
they should know.
Improved machinery moved the world during the century. We
believe that the improved human machine will give evidence of the
greatest progress in the century to come.
Much of the welfare work of The National Cash Register Com-
pany has to do with the boys and girls of the coming generation, and
this type of lecture should, without question, be presented to the par-
ents so that they can bring this most difficult subject to their children
in the proper manner.
It is indeed gratifying, in view of the long-continued and mis-
taken policy of silence with reference to the functions and relations
of sex, that a Christian church would receive a talk of this kind, and
permit the same to be made a .regular part of the church program.
This has been partly due to certain medical discoveries which have
contributed, to a very large degree, in changing public opinion.
The material to be presented hereafter and the arrangement
thereof was done under the personal supervision of Dr. F. M. Loomis.
of the University of Michigan.
After the talk was completed, and in shape for presentation, we
were actually afraid to utilize the results. This was due to the fact
that we were so ignorant on the subject, and had no conception of the
severe penalties coming from violation of Nature's laws. Neither
could we understand how sadly society was affected by venereal dis-
ease, nor even the danger to the innocent person. We felt that the
statements made could not be true, and we arranged for a representa-
tive audience of Dayton citizens, particularly selected because of their
association with the boy and girl problem. We had several leading
physicians of our city, the superintendent of schools, the judge of
the Juvenile Court, several church men, social workers, and a little
gathering that totaled some twenty persons. Our entire idea at the
beginning was to secure suggestions and criticisms so that none of the
facts included in the talk would be subject to exaggeration or inae-
306 FJUST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
curacy of stutenieiit. For the same reason, later on, the talk was yivon
before two of the Ohio State Medical Societies, meeting in annual con-
vention in Dayton. Still later, the presentation was made before the
Ohio State Board of Health, and before The American Medical Society
in annual convention at Atlantic City.
The entire idea was to put up a scientific, well-founded talk, in
simple language, divested of all medical terms, so that a boy fifteen or
sixteen years of age could readily understand every single word or
reference, and this, you will readily admit, is a difficult problem. To
have big ideas and express them in simple terms is one of the elements
of real greatness in men.
After this subject had been presented a number of times to
technical societies and technical men, largely from a desire for con-
structive criticism, we decided that we would present same to our high-
grade salesmen, fearing somewhat the outcome of the venture. Much
to our surprise, the subject has provoked very little criticism, during
its entire history ; and the talk has been given to all of our appren-
tices, to the younger men of the organization, to the girls (number-
ing about 700), in modified form, to all of our salesmen, and the vari-
ous training schools for salesmen, and to the members of our Officers'
School. Some of the letters, expressing appreciation for the knowledge
afforded, have been particularly gratifying, and have repaid, many
times, for the money and efforts spent in preparing the talk. ]Most
of the men were glad for this type of • instruction mainly because of
their children. If the community is to be protected, the policy of
silence, and the concealment of vital facte must cease, and what better
way of teaching is there than teaching through the eye. The larger
proportion of our knowledge comes to us in this manner. The im-
pressions made are lasting, particularly with the young. jNIincing of
words is unknown in this talk, and so we say gonorrhea is clap, and
clap is gonorrhea.
The germ which causes gonorrhea is as easily recognized as any
criminal in the Rogues' Gallery. "We know that this germ and no
other causes this disease, because it is always present in the body of
a person suffering from gonorrhea. It can be grown outside like a
plant, and, if placed artificially in a healthy man. will immediately
cause the disease.
Quite a number of diagrams are shown, illustrating the simple
physiology of both male and female reproductive organs. We partic-
ularly consider these diagrams necessary so that the growing boy can
be told that the sexual organs do not suffer by non-use, and to illus-
trate the fact that the medical faker scares the boy by undue refer-
ence to emissions which might be occasioned by an impacted bowel
SEX QUESTIONS ' 307
producing pressure on the seminal vesicles, making said emissions a
perfectly natural process.
The man who says that clap is no worse than a common cold is an
ignorant and a dangerous liar. Thousands of sightless babies, sterile
women and rheumatic men owe their condition to the-clap-no-worse-
than-a-cold lie. Unquestionably, the time for hinting at unpleasant
truths is past.
There would be but little need for the discussion of gonorrhea if it
were not for the fact that innocent women and children suffer so
keenly the wrongs of society. A man may think himself cured of
gonorrhea, and still be capable of giving it to his wife. "Whatsoever
a man soweth, that shall he also reap," but in this ease the innocent
wife and babies are often the reapers. Blindness from gonorrhea costs
America $16,000 a day. Not long ago doctors thought gonorrhea a
mild local disease. Now all good doctors know better. Beware of the
one who laughs at it : he does not know his business.
Comparative slides are shown, illustrating the normal female re-
productive organs, and the same organs infected with gonorrhea. An
innocent bride may be infected by her husband. The germ makes its
way up through the womb, and out through the Fallopian tubes, where
it is impossible to reach it by injection or medication, and where it
rapidly increases in number. The result is that the pain constantly
becomes more severe until finally an operation is necessary. It is
said that 60 per cent of all pus operations on women's abdomens are
caused by common clap, and so the surgeon finds the tubes and ovaries
bursting with gonorrheal pus. They must be removed and her hopes
for children are blasted forever.
Syphilis, the second form of venereal disease, occurs in three
stages — primary, secondary and tertiary.
Primary syphilis. The germs shown on the screen enter through a
break in the skin, even though that break be microscopic in size.
Several weeks later the first real symptom is noticed. There is no gen-
eral disturbance in the health or appearance of the infected one. We
would ask you to particularly study the moving picture film, giving all
of the characteristic life movements of this spiral-shaped germ which
causes so much of disease and suffering in the world. The film was
made in Paris, and wonderful patience and perseverance were required
to secure the results depicted here. The film is taken through an ultra-
microscope, an instrument particularly adapted for such difficult work.
Also consider the possibility of education by means of moving picture
films. It has only been a comparatively short time that the scientific
world has known the exact cause of syphilis, and in a few short years
such progress has been made that we are permitted to pry into the in-
308 F1K8T NATIONAIj CDNFERENCIO ON RACE BETTliiRMENT
lU'i-most siH'ivts of Xiituiv. As in the case of gonorrhea, syphilis never
develops until its seed (the germ) is first planted. Wheat never
grows unless wheat is planted.
This subject is of the utmost importance to every living being, due
to the fact that it is possible to accidentally infect the innocent. Treat-
ment for other contagious diseases is adequately provided for, but
thus far little attempt has been made to regularly isolate or control
these most destructive diseases. We propose showing you a few cases
of accidental infection. One, a roller towel case. The roller towel is
ruled out. by law, in a number of the states. On the other screen, an
innocent infection from a telephone transmitter. Here, a boy of
twelve years of age, an employee of a shoe factory, the innocent victim
of the common drinking cup. These cases readily explain the legisla-
tion, which has spread all over America, calling for the abolition of
the common drinking cup. Two men infected by a careless barber;
every man w^ho patronizes a cheap barber shop, where no precautions
are taken with reference to sterilization of tools and towels, runs a
chance of acquiring this or some other disease. Even the doctors are
subject to accidental infection. This, of course, is not to be wondered
at. Here are two doctors, one infected while examining a woman
whose body showed no exterior signs of the disease, the other infected
while delivering a child given in birth by a syphilitic mother.
Secondary syphilis. Poison distributed throughout the entire body.
Enters the blood stream. Glands enlarge, skin erupts, general con-
dition of health fair ; usually little or no pain.
All of these various illustrations are taken from actual subjects,
colored to perfection by an expert artist.
Public opinion has been moved strongly by this subject, largely due
to former ignorance, and by the further fact that refusal to consider
the cjuestion spells the physical deterioration of the civilized nations
of the world. Syphilis is poisoning and slowly but surely undermining
the very fountain of life, sowing the seed of death among our people,
and gradually deteriorating the national health. It is estimated that
5,000,000 people in the United States are or have been tainted with
syphilis, and yet up to a few years ago a question of this kind could
not be discussed in polite society.
Tertiary syphilis. There is no definite line between the secondary
and tertiary periods. This stage is characterized by the formation of
soft tumors, which may attack any portion of the human body. Is it
right that diseases that are causing more suffering, more expense and
more deaths than any other disease should ])e allowed a free course, and
that there should be no efforts to control them ?
SEX QUESTIONS 309
Syphilis and gonorrhea make more sokliers in the United States
Army unfit for service than any other disease. A marked change has
taken place in the United States Army and Navy since instruction in
sex hygiene has been instituted. The Navy Department reported
publicly that the crews of the sixteen battleships that went around
the world returned with a better record in respect to veneral disease
than was ever noted before. This M^as due to the instruction of our
sailor boys in this very vital subject. The Prussian Army and the
Bavarian Army have presented sane instruction along this line for
many years, and their total average of venereal cases is about eighteen
per one thousand, about one-tenth as many as w^e had according to the
statistics of the American Army prior to the introduction of similar
education.
One of the most important questions before tHe Race Betterment
Conference is what force can be put into effect to deal with these
formidable evils which greatly threaten family ties, human happiness
and the very life of the race. Until recently it was impossible to dis-
cuss fearlessly and openly the question of prostitution. The original
source of most of these infections is in that of irregular commerce be-
tween the sexes, known as prostitution. There are no other diseases
whose absolute prevention lies so wholly in human power as these. We
believe that the fellow who steals, cheats, robs and even murders is not
so injurious a character to the community at large as the person wlio
distributes syphilis.
"Prostitution is a commercialized business of large proportions,
with tremendous profits, controlled largely by men and not women. ' '
This is the statement made by the Chicago Vice Commission, an epoch-
making report of utmost value to the entire nation. These conditions
are with us. To pretend that they do not exist is hypocrisy, far-reach-
ing in its harmful effects, and yet it is hardly fair to let the boy find
out for himself. Many have to their sorrow.
Prostitution leaves in its wake sterility, insanity, paralysis, the
blinded eyes of little babies, the twisted limbs of deformed children,
degradation, physical rot and mental decay. ,We can show the dis-
figurements and sores, but we can't show the suffering, mental agony,
divorces and ruined homes caused by syphilis and gonorrhea.
Can prostitution be abolished? Not entirely. The history of the
world demonstrates the existence of this vice in all ages and among all
nations, since the day the first pages were written, and yet we can-
not admit that prostitution, as a commercialized business, or anything
akin to it, is necessary. The old way of handling the question was to
exterminate with statutory enactment, with the result that vice is
usually driven into seclusion, thereby aggravating the evil. The new
310 I'lKST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
way must l»c a caiuijaiiiii of ediu-atiou. dealing' w illi the parents ol' the
next yeueration. Cliristianity and Denioeraey have failed, signally,
thus far to cope with these evils, which are sappiug the vitality of
civilized society. It is clear that no one force or agency can be relied
upon to bring to pass the remedy. We do believe, however, that there
is a public conscience, which, when aroused to the truth, will instantly
rebel against the social evil in all its phases; and so it is incumbent
upon all right-thinking men and women to raise social life to the high-
est standard of righteousness, and to teach the youth of our land
loyalty and honor to womanhood.
Since this is an audience of men, I would say that the one thing
that we can all do is to live cleanly. Some poet of the past has aptly
said, "Your actions speak so loud that I cannot hear your voice."
"We all have greaf influence over the younger life of the nation by our
example. The man who tells dirty sex stories should be suppressed.
Let him tell them to his own son and daughter.
The finest crop that this nation raises is its crop of American boys.
Ever)'' year nearly one million reach manhood. Many of these, at the
present rate, will acquire gonorrhea and syphilis, a very large number
ignorantly. These young chaps are the flower of American manhood,
our owTi younger brothers, the boys who will grow up and marry our
sisters and daughters. We believe that they have a right to this
type of Imow^ledge, and that they should be forewarned as to the be-
setting dangers of life. You remember that to be forewarned is to be
forearmed. Such instruction should be given preferably in the home
and by the parents. Unquestionably, this type of lecture is particu-
larly suitable for the enlightenment of parents. It would be folly to
introduce sex hygiene in the schools until the teachers are suitably
trained to impart this knowledge in the proper way. Intelligence re-
garding sexual matters, if discreetly imparted, is a safeguard to the
youth of the country, yet the indiscriminate circulation of sex infor-
mation among children by means of books and pamphlets is dangerous.
We realize also that the reformer, so-called, can do a great deal of
damage in handling this subject. For that reason a sane presentation
of the subject is much to be desired, and I think you will agree with me
that it has been sane.
The greatest menace to the girl is the man without a spark of either
bravery or honor. Fathers and mothers should be companions and
comrades with their children, far more than is customary, and there
would be very little prostitution. Today, mothers teach their daugh-
ters nearly everything except the things they most need to know.
Why not place sexual matters on the same basis as any other natural
function of life ? It can be readily accomplished, utilizing some of the
SEX QUESTIONS 311
beauties of Nature, for instance beautiful tiower slides and films.
These, especially in natural colors, permit opportunity to mention the
botanical and zoological side of reproduction, and also call attention to
the beauty of Nature methods of reproduction of kind.
No father or elder brother has a right to look his little boy or
brother in the face if he is letting him grow up in ignorance of this
most vital question. As we learn, let us teach, preferably through the
eye, and little by little the results will surely come. Venereal dis-
eases are not theories but facts. The only way that we can save our-
selves is to tell the coming generation what we know, and practice
Avhat we tell. An ounce of prevention of these diseases is worth a
hundred pounds of cure.
A MAN'S PROBLEM
(A Special Addres^s to "Women.)
J. N. HuRTY, M.D., Commissioner of Health, State of Indiana. Indianapolis,
Indiana.
p]arly in my work as Secretary of the State Board of Health of
Indiana I took up this problem that we have before us tonight.
Two members of the Board were specialists in the cure of social dis-
eases. Early in my experience in medicine. I had served as an assis-
tant to a specialist in that line. As a young man. I was astounded to
discover some of the truths that came out of those offices. I will not
attempt to tell you of the things that I saw there, for they would make
your blood run cold. That is all I have now to say of this matter.
But it started me to thinking early in life. Can the human race
possibly be saved from the terrible social diseases ? Is it possible ? I
believe it is possible. Oh, but what a long, hard road the human race
must travel before it is rid of the social diseases.
But where lies the battle ? What is the cause that these terrible
sexual plagues should so continually and so horribly plague the human
race ? What is at the bottom of it ? I think the principal reason lies
in the very strong, exceedingly strong, sexual appetite of men. AVe
know full well that that appetite was given for a purpose by the
Creator, and, at the same time, He gave us freedom of will and gave
us power of free will to exercise and to control it. The social evil is
largely a man's problem.
Let me tell you what we have been trying to do to check this evil in
Indiana through the Health Department. We have given a great
deal of time and a great deal of work to the prevention and cure of
tuberculosis, but I believe this is more important. Now that we have
the laity going upon the subject of tuberculosis, the state health
:W2 I'lUST NATIOXAl, CON Kl'iUKNCl', ON' IJACK lil'VI'Tliini lONT
autlun'itics arc \vitlulra\viii,u' from that (ii^lit llial is. I'r-oin the foiv-
fi'oiit of the liiiht, to take a place in the ivai-, to |)usli fi-oiii l)ehmd.
Now we are trying" to start a ])iibli(". oi)eii light against these horrible
plagues, which, to me, seem more horrible and of more importance
than the conquest of consumption.
How to attack them, how to get at them, that is the question. It is
obvious and plain that if men were but virtuous, we would have none
of them ; that in proportion as we can make men virtuous, in that
proportion will we get rid of them. I think that is reasonable.
How shall we do it? Shall we commence with adults? Shall we com-
mence with grown men that have not restrained themselves, have not
acquired that control over themselves which they should have acquired
in youth? Shall we begin there? Will it do any good? I think not.
We must begin with the child. I want to read to you some of the little
documents and writings that we send over the state in order to pre-
pare the public mind to receive the bare truth. We send out a circu-
lar that is now in its third edition of 115,000. It treats of this
subject plainly, squarely, straight out. It was at first denied by the
rule of postal authorities the privilege of the mails because it
spoke so plainly. When we presented this circular to the United
States postal authorities and got a reply it would not be admitted
to the mail, we appealed to a man whom we all know, Theodore
Roosevelt, and he put it into the mails. I want you to Imow of that
one service, for I do think it w^as a great service. Now that
circular may be sent in the mail. We are glad to send it to anyone
who will write for it. It tells the story from the scientific standpoint.
It appeals to manhood and to w^omanhood. It is intended more for the
young than for the developed, but nevertheless, we find it is read with
interest by all. That circular has gone around the earth. That is one
thing that we have done. Now I beg your indulgence to listen to one
or two or perhaps three of the little sketches we send out, hoping
thereby to prepare the public mind, for we get letters condemning us
for taking hold of this subject at all. In tracing back and finding the
names of some authors of these letters, w^e found that in three instances
they were officers in churches, protesting against any rational effort,
any kind of effort to check the social plagues. So we have had to
try to prepare the public mind, and of course, it is not yet prepared.
The first sketch is entitled the Diseased Child or rather Diseased Chil-
dren :
"A weak, sickly child is indeed a sad sight. The putty complexion,
the lack-luster eyes, the thin hands, arms and legs, and the weary look
make our hearts bleed. But why is the child diseased? How came
SEX QUESTIONS 313
it to be diseased? Have the sins of the father descended? If they
have, why is he not arrested and punished? If he were to slowly
poison the child with a poison bought at the drug store, he would be
promptly arrested and punished. What is the difference? Ask the
child which poisoning he prefers. He will certainly tell you when he
has suffered and salved his sores for a few years that arsenic poisoning
is preferable to blood poisoning. Why does not society class as dis-
graced him who bears syphilitic poison in his blood, having wickedly
put it there? And what a strange, inconsistent thing is society, any-
how. It has one standard of morals for women and another for men.
And, so long as this condition prevails, so long will the blood sins of
husbands descend upon their wives and children. In the Orphans'
Home at Indianapolis are seventeen innocent children all suffering
from the hereditary malady which is worse than leprosy. They can-
not develop into strong, useful members of society. The disease pre-
vents. They will be a burden to themselves and to the state all their
lives, and possibly produce more like themselves. Why does society
permit such conditions? We strive to prevent fire, for it destroys
property. Why not strive to prevent that awful disease that bums up
human beings? Is it our high intelligence which keeps us silent and
inactive in this matter?
"The law should require the prompt reporting of cases of the
social plagues. They are. excepting in certain instances, ac-
quired in sin and self-disgrace. Why should we speak of the matter
in a whisper? Is our silence strength, or weakness?"
This was sent to three hundred papers in the state of Indiana six
years ago. Only six of them would print it. Do you think there is
anything horrible about it? Anything terrible? But since then,
numbers — I don't know how many — have printed it and since then
much editorial comment has been heard. Let me give you another one,
simply entitled, ' ' Her Baby Died. ' '
"The hour for the funeral had arrived and neighbors were com-
ing in to the services. The dead baby lay in a little white coffin lined
with white satin, was dressed in white, and flowers in profusion
decorated the room and testified to the sympathy of the neighbors.
"The preacher made a short prayer, uttered a few comforting
words, a song was sung, the little baby was borne to the white hearse
by four young girls in white, and the procession moved toward the
cemetery.
"The baby had died from intestinal disorder induced by wrong
feeding, yet the preacher had said — 'The Lord giveth and the Lord
has taken away. ' The doctor told how it all happened. ' That baby, '
said he, 'was born strong and healthy. The mother nursed it for
;n4 FJK8T NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
weeks, but finding that nursing interfered with bridge i)arties and
other social affairs, she provided a bottle, and when she was absent,
her aunt, who lived with her, fed cow's milk to the baby. This irregu-
larity of breast-feeding soon lessened the amount of the mother's
milk, and she concluded she would cease nursing altogether. The child
seemed to do well on the bottle for a while, but it soon became
evident that something was wrong. One time I saw the mother give a
piece of rich pie crust to her baby, and I warned her against doing
so. She told me she found the infant liked coffee, and a little was
frequently given to it. And so, despite my medicines and my warnings
in regard to feeding, the child's digestive apparatus gradually broke
down. An old grandmother told the mother it was natural for babies
to throw up. Another one prescribed soothing syrup which contained
morphine. Another one recommended anise seed cordial — and so it
went, the young mother being willing to depend upon drugs and
remedies, but not to practice 'prevention' by feeding rationally.
When the digestive machinery was put to the bad, the baby finally took
dysentery and died.' Continuing, the doctor said: 'I had three in-
fants die of pneumonia last winter, simply because their mothers
would not give them air enough. In spite of my instructions that
plenty of air made babies strong and protected them against colds and
coughs, still they would cover their babies' faces with veils and nap-
kins, keeping the life-giving air away. The foolish idea,' said the
doctor, 'which seems to exist everywhere, that fresh, cold air is in-
jurious, must somehow be extracted from the minds which hold the
same, or else pneumonia and dead babies will always be wdth us.' "
There is another entitled, "The Ladies and the Alley Children:"
"A very rich lady who owned a beautiful garden concluded to
spend the summer at the seashore. While contemplating the pleasure
she would have, the thought suddenly rose in her mind, 'What shall
I do about my flowers ? The gardener will look after the garden, ' she
said to herself, 'but the flowers which must be picked to keep the
bushes healthy and productive, what of them? They must not be
wasted. Oh ! I know, ' she said, after a minute 's thought, ' I will tell
Mrs. Scottmann and Mrs. Wharfington to help themselves, and, graci-
ous knows, they will pick them close enough.' She told these ladies
(who also had gardens) to help themselves to her flowers while she
was away.
' ' One day, the ladies went in Mrs, Scottmann 's electric cab to the
beautiful garden and entered by the wrought-iron gate opening on the
side street. They carefully clased the gate, and almost immediately the
wan faces of two ragged alley-children appeared between the bars.
In silence, their longing, lack-luster eyes looked upon the scene. Both
SEX QUESTIONS 315
ladies were richly dressed, and the alley-children thought the ladies
were quite as beautiful as the ilowers. Finally their curiously wrought
ornamental baskets were filled with beautiful flowers, and Mrs. Scott-
mann and Mrs. Wharfington started for their handsome homes, think-
ing how lovely their flowers would look upon their mantels and tables.
They saw the wan faces between the gate bars, but upon their ap-
proach the faces disappeared.
* ' The ladies placed their baskets in the cab, and were about to drive
away, when they remembered they had left their silver scissors used for
cutting the flowers, on the seat near the fountain under the pergola.
Neither was pushed for time, and both re-entered the garden to get the
scissors, leaving the cab door open. The alley-children returned and
glanced into the cab. They viewed the handsome, rich, blue interior
for a moment, then each snatched a rose and fled down the alley. A
policeman witnessed the theft, but he simply looked away. The rich
women returned, but did not notice that two of their roses were gone.
They could not possibly miss them where there Avere so many.
' ' The alley-children ran directly home to the bare room where their
mother lay upon a bed of rags, dying of consumption. 'See what we
have brought you. Mamma, ' said the girls. ' How beautiful ! ' said the
mother in a whisper; 'but where did you get them?' 'Two lovely
ladies, who had each a basketful, gave them to us for you.' 'How
kind, ' whispered the mother ; ' did you thank them ? ' The girls placed
the roses in a small, cracked pitcher at their mother's bedside, and
she greatly enjoyed their beauty and their fragrance. And just as
she fell into her final sleep, the ladies who sent the roses appeared to
her as two angels in her vision."
This method of approach we think is doing good. We are getting
the thought into people that something must be done in regard to
dealing with these certain problems. That is the first idea that it
seems to me should be executed. That was the whole object of this
series of papers.
We have more of them, but I shall not burden you, but shall ask you
to think of this point : That diet has a good deal to do with the per-
petuation and the transference of the sexual plagues. I know it from
experience, such as no one except those can know as have either been
specialists in this question or been assistants to one, as I have. A young
man, a bank cashier, of good birth and with pure blood in his veins
at one time, came to our office with a sexual disease. My principal
said, ' ' How did this happen ? " " Oh, " said he, ' ' don 't ask me. " " But
I want to know, ' ' he said, ' ' that I may have better information in re-
gard to it. He said, "I was down town. We had a great feast, wine,
cocktails, champagne, thick beefsteak, a whole list of stimulating foods,
316 FIKST NATIONAL OONPERKNCE ON RACK HKTTKKMENT
and tluMi tliore eanie up some stories of a sexual nature. Had I stayed
at home and read and had I taken a frugal meal at night, I would not
have found myself sexually stinnilated. It was the stimulation and
that association that put into my mind the sexual act, and I went off
Avhere I should not have gone." And he said, "I was a fool." He
Avas a fool and he knew it, but you see how he was influenced.
So it is true that if we could hut change the diet of mankind,
abolish stimulants of all kinds, keep them out of the human body,
it would be best for the brain and for our brawn, best for our success —
to keej) stimulating foods away, and keep drugs out of the human
body. Surely this appeals to everyone. But the idea is abroad that
we must have meat. We know what resistance against meat will do
when we look at the numerous patients who come here. We ask them
to try it,- but the cry is, ' ' Oh, you are a crank. ' ' But experience shows
that diet has something to do with it. We must reform our diet. The
great work that is being done by this great institution, in teaching peo-
ple how to keep themselves healthy, is working against the sexual
plagues, which have so terribly cursed us.
I doubt very much if the discovery of salvarsan, or 606, for
the cure of syphilis will be beneficial to the race. I doubt it ex-
ceedingly. Several men were at a club. They asked a doctor who
was present, "Doctor, is this a sure cure?" Said he, "I believe
it is." Then they said, I'Why take care of one's self?" But,
they don't get a cure. The syphilitic poison has its effect finally
upon the race, degenerating it slowly, ever so slowly, degenerating the
germ plasm that is carried by every human being. Wliat effect will
this other poison called ' ' 606 ' ' have upon the human race ? It, too, is a
poison. It kills the spirocheta, the animal, for it is an animal, a pro-
tozoon that causes syphilis. It kills it, but how and with what? The
poison of the spirocheta is not neutralized. The organism itself is
destroyed and it makes no more syphilitic poison ; we have introduced
another poison, so I doubt very much whether this discovery will be
beneficial to the race. That it will be beneficial to individuals is
certainly very plain to us all.
My whole refrain is that of prevention. At the risk of your having
read it, I want to read an Indiana poem, and then close. It is pre-
vention, not cure, to which we must give attention. We must finally
let all mankind know that to be sick is a sin. Of course it is. I have
been sick, and I know how I became so. When we get typhoid fever,
we know why. An individual can protect himself absolutely against
typhoid fever ; an individual cannot protect himself absolutely against
consumption, but he can do a great deal, and the state must do the
rest. Let me read this poem to close. As I said, it is an Indiana
SEX QUESTIONS 317
product, and I do not want you to forget that, for I am proud of it.
It is entitled "The Fence or the Ambulance," and has been printed
abroad.
FENCE OR AMBULANCE
'Twas a dangerous cliff, as they freely confessed.
Though to walk near its crest was so pleasant;
But over its terrible edge there had slipped
A duke, and full many a peasant;
So the people said something would have to be done
But their projects did not at all tally.
Some said, "Put a fence 'round the edge of the cliff,"
Some, "An ambulance down in the valley."
But the cry for the ambulance carried the day
For it spread through the neighboring city ;
A fence may be useful or not, it is time,
But each heart became brimful of pity
For those who slipped over that dangerous cliff,
And the dwellers in highway and alley
Gave pounds or gave pence, not to put up a fence
But an ambulance down in the valley.
"For the cliff is all right if you're careful," they said,
"And if folks ever slip and are dropping,
It isn't the slipping that hurts them so much
As the shock down below when they'i-e stopping;"
So day after day as those mishaps occurred,
Quick forth would these rescuers sally.
To pick up the victims who fell off the cliff
With the ambulance down in the valley.
Then an old sage remarked, "It's a mai-^^el to me
That people give far more attention
To repairing results than to stopping the cause.
When they'd much better aim at prevention.
"Let us stop at its source all this mischief," cried he,
"Come, neighbors and friends, let us rally;
If the cliff we will fence we might almost dispense
With the ambulance down in the valley."
"Oh, he's a fanatic." the other rejoined,
"Dispense with the ambulance? Never!
He'd dispense with all charities, too, if he could.
No, no! We'll support them forever!
Aren't we picking up folk just as fast as they fall?
And shall this man dictate to us? Shall he?
Why should people of sense stop to put up a fence
While their ambulance works in the valley?"
But a sensible few, who are practical too.
Will not bear with such nonsense much longer;
They believe that prevention is better than cure.
And their party will soon be the stronger.
318 FIRST NATIONAl. CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
Kii('(iui;il;(' IIumii. tlicii, with your luirsc, Noicc jiiid \)vn,
Ami (while uther piiilanllirupists dally)
Tlu-y will scorn all pretense and put a stout fence
On the cliff that liani^s over the valley.
Better yuide well the younji' than reclaim them when old.
For the voice of true wisdom is callini>';
To rescue the fallen is good, but 'tis best
To prevent other people from falling;
Better close up the source of temptation and crime
Tlian deliver from dungeon or galley ;
Better put a strong fence 'round the top of the cliff.
Than an ambulance down in the valley.
Prevention is the thing, not cure. "We are obsessed with the idea
of cure. Let us get away from it. Ijet us tell those who are sick, A
law has been violated. We are all obsessed with the idea of keep-
ing men out of hell. Let us reverse this, and by prevention, keep hell
out of men.
A WOMAN'S PROBLEM
(A Special Address to Women.)
Dr. Carolyn Geisel, Shorter College, Rome, Georgia.
Wha.t I have to say is just this, to remind you, my sister, that he
who spoke before me said it is a man's problem. Well then, if the
problem be a man 's — hear me with patience when I say it in my own
way — if the problem be a man's, why then it is all ours, for the man
is ours. He is yours, because you bore him ; he is yours because you
loved him ; he is your son first, lover afterwards, your husband by and
by ; he is yours. This problem is woman 's, because the man, your son,
was yours by the gift of Almighty Grod.
What are you going to do about it, then ? Have you a part in the
solution of the problem ? I said the problem was yours. Wait a minute
then. First, as individual woman, can you help solve the problem"?
If you can, how? By standing straight, but that does not sound like
much. Let me emphasize this. Are there some things always right —
are there? Oh, of course. Are there some things always wrong? Of
course. Then hear me. As an individual woman, you can help solve
the problem by standing straight every single time, no matter what
the occasion, for the thing that is always right. Oh, you waver so!
I, you, we waver so ! We believe deep down in our souls that something
is wrong — this thing that someone is talking about ; it is wrong.
In some little corner, when a group of some kind of people are talking
about it and condoning it as though perhaps it wasn 't so wrong after
all, we keep still. Ah, you have lost your influence, and your influence
SEX QUESTIONS 319
as an individual from that time is naught on that point. Stand square,
and say a thing- is right when it is right, and say it is wrong
when it is wrong.
I am saying to you, then, be strong ! And I have backing from a
Holy Book when I bid you be strong. Read it yourself, the command-
ments of the living God, Hear me read it to you, ''Be strong, quit
you like men. " To whom did He say that? Oh, to the men, of course,
and to us who are mothers of men. Be strong, and quit you like men —
if you would be the mother of a man and not the mother of a degen-
erate. You can stand squarely for a thing that is always right and
squarely against the thing that is always wrong, by your actions more
than your words.
Now, come on ! Is your door ever opened to admit a man whose
character you know is sullied? Were you ever guilty of inviting into
your home the man of reputation because of money, the man of so-
called family standing, the man of position or influence, or because of
money the inan who had trailed his soul to shame in the red light dis-
trict ? Were you ever guilty of that ? Then you did not stand square.
If you ever admitted to your parlor by invitation or consent, whether
invitation or no, the man whose reputation was to your knowledge
sullied or unclean, then you have not stood true to the things that you
have applauded at this Conference. If you ever intend to solve this
problem, which is the greatest, almost the greatest, of the race better-
ment problems, be true to the thing that is always right, and stand
always against the thing that is always wrong. That means, shut your
door in the face of the unclean man, no matter how much money
he has. Will you do it? That's another thing. The Race Better-
ment Conference is of no purpose whatever if it bringeth not forth
results, and if you go back to your homes today to do what you have al-
ways done — some of you have always done right, God bless you, but
some of you have been uncertain in your standing for the things that
are rights — if you go back to your homes then and continue to be un-
certain, I say the world will get no benefit from your delegateship to
this particular Conference,
Hear me then I He who comes into your presence accompanied by
the enameled-faced w^oman of imcertain reputation ; he who comes into
your presence and comes under your roof accompanied by such a one,
what will you do with him ? What will you do with him ?
' Will you say, as I heard a woman say a few days ago, " Oh ! a man
must drink a little for the sake of company." Now are you as un-
certain as that, believing as I think you do, that alcohol is the tap root
of this fearful problem of the social evil?
What about the places to which you go ? Young girls, I want your
320 FIKST NATIONAL CONFKHENCK ON RACE BETTERMENT
attention. Young women, I am talking to you. now. What about tlie
places to whieli you go ? What about the company you keep ? What
about tlic man whose invitation you accept?
Oh: closer yet, what about the color of your hair? I'croxidc?
Stand squarely there, if the thing is not right, if it be not right, against
putting on the label of sin. If you put it on, you are inviting dis-
aster. What about the color of your cheek? Unnatural, or is it the
badge of the underworld? What about the arrangement of your
gown ? What about it ? He said, he whose quiet voice you listened to
with such rapt attention, standing here but a little while ago — he said,
the indecent gown of the twentieth century woman drives many a man
to the place that is questionable. Plear me. my sisters, hear! You
know, you do know% that the fashions of today are not of your seeking.
You did not make them, but I call upon you in the strength of your
united M;omanliood, that we arise in our power and demand that decent
clothes be put upon the market for us to wear, or else that we remain
in our homes until we can get gowTis that will be seemly. A little
matter, is it? Not a little matter, if by the mighty power of sugges-
tion, that hardly a man can resist, he is driven by it — that power of
suggestion — to the place that is ciuestionable, the results of which are
not questionable.
Next, then, let me ask you to think of yourself as a business wo-
man. Oh no, I didn't mean in the shop, I am not going to take time
for that. I am not thinking of you as women in commercialism, but
as just plain women, that 's all. I want you to think of yourselves just
for a minute as being business women. Oh. I fancy you would like to
fling back to me that you said you were not going to talk business.
Ah ! I mean the business which we call the majestic, holy, blessed,
sacred business of motherhood itself. Oh, my sister! Nothing, nothing
in all God's world should appeal to you as the helpless babe that lies
against your breast ! Oh, how I love it ! I was wdth a woman a few days
ago who had her baby lying across her Imee. I said, ' ' Do you love it,
honey ? ' ' And looking into my face, her own radiant with a light inde-
scribable, she said, "Love it, love my baby?" — Then, taking a very deep
breath, she said, ' ' I love it so that if Christ had not gone to Calvary to
give my l)oy life eternal, if by so doing I could secure life eternal for
him, I would go to hell that he might go to heaven." "Oh," I said,
' ' daughter, that would hardly be love. The real kind of love for your
baby, ' ' I said to her, ' ' would be to take his little hand in yours and go
with him to heaven. That is mother love. " I want to ask you to con-
sider yourself now, I am asking you to see how you can solve the
problem. Consider yourself now as a business woman in the business
of raising a man-child. Can you raise this man-child so he will live
SEX QUESTIONS 321
with God through all eternity? Have him give you the first seven
straight, uninterrupted years of his little life, hold him to your breast,
keep him close to your knee for seven years, then hear me ! I believe I
am speaking the truth, if you are true to God Almighty and to Jesus
Christ, His Son, your boy will be safe through all eternity.
I honestly believe it, I don't believe that my Lord died in vain; I
don't believe that salvation is of no avail. I believe with all my soul
that the knowledge of Jesus Christ saves from sin. It is written in
Matthew. Read it yourself. "And thou shalt call his name Jesus:
for He shall save His people from their sins. ' '
Now women, close attention for just a minute. How is a boy to
be saved for all eternity or kept from falling in the world if he knows
not Christ? I cannot tell you how the blood of Jesus Christ saves,
cleanses from sin ; I cannot tell you how the knowledge of Jesus
Christ keeps from sin. Lots of things I don't know. I don't Jmow
how breathing air into your lungs keeps you alive. I know it does, but
I don 't know how. Explanation does not explain it alL I know that,
by some mysterious alchemy of a power that is divine, the knowledge of
Jesus Christ does keep from sin. But how is the boy to be kept who
is not introduced to his Saviour ? Then I am asking you to be business
women. If the blood of Jesus Christ will save your son from the
stain of sin, then give him Christ. Talk about 606 for your boy ? But
his body is stained with sin ! Send him to Vienna that he may be
treated by 606 ? I don 't believe that there is no remedy for syphilis.
There is a remedy, the remedy that God sent. He came. I am not
even talking religion, I am talking plain business with you. It is not so
much health certificates ; it is not so much a remedy for syphilis that
we need, it is God and His Son, Jesus Christ. I am not trying to
preach, I am only trying to talk business. The Catholics know that for
truth. They say, ' ' Give me the boy till he is seven years. ' ' Then let
me say, "You keep your boy for seven years and let him get acquainted
with the Holy Book and his mother's God; let him see his mother on
her knees, and you have got your boy and Satan cannot get him."
Let me say it now from someone wdser than I by far, ' ' If virtue be in
the blood — and that is the way to get it in the blood — if virtue be in
the blood, vice is not so much alien as it is impossible." What you
want, oh, my sister, you who are a mother, what you want for your
boy is to make vice impossible to your baby when he becomes a man.
The impossibility of vice is the thing you want.
Now come away from that, from the child on your knees, nursing
from your breast, from the salvation and knowledge of salvation as it is
in Christ Jesus — come away from that now to your business, again,
your business of home-maker. Let me repeat w^hat Doctor Hurty
(12)
322 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
said. "I am speaking to you now wholly as a physician." Ji'or seven-
teen long years I have had the great honor, blessed privilege indeed,
to be associated with this wonderful institution. The most of you
know that I spent some years of my life in rescue work away down
there in the slums. The harlot women who presided over what might
well be called the ''little hells," wherein were girls exploited, as Dean
Sumner said, "for the mad passions of indecent men" — those women
said to me over and over through the years that I did rescue work,
"Oh, we couldn't keep our girls here if we didn't feed for it. We
always serve plenty of meat three times a day, always, and we always
use coffee and we always use pepper. " I am not saying that because
you are at the Sanitarium. I am talking to you as individuals, out of
my experience as a rescue worker and a medical woman. I want to tell
you that is true. They could not keep them down there if they did
not feed for it. The harlot who presides over a house of sin knows her
business, the business of sin, and feeds her victims to keep them in the
business. No, that is not a fairy tale. Not one, but dozens of these
women told me that: Then let me say to you, You are not in that
business, but you are presiding over a home, not a house. Why
not study your business. You are feeding to keep men safe in
the world and to get them into the Kingdom of God, and why
not study how to feed them so that their feet may take their hold
of the straight and narrow way and lead them up to His King-
dom? If it be true, and there is absolutely no longer question
about it, if it be true that some sorts of food waken the very
demon of passion in human life, and I say it is true, it is your business
to find out what those foods are and never to serve them on your
table. Study your business. Then, you know — and it is quite well
proved — that vigorous, physical exercise out in the open air quiets the
hot blood of the individual. Oh, my sister, when by and by, the roll is
called up yonder, and the hard task of rearing a family and keeping
them from sin is all over, and you are up there close by the great white
throne of the living God, and your children are with you, won't it be
worth all the price you paid, if the price meant effort? Won 'tit? Ah,
and what of the other ? If some day she comes back to you with her
baby in her arms, all despoiled and broken, because of the shame of
her life, the awful mistake of her marriage, the heartbreak is yours
and, in a way, you will almost deserve it, if you have neglected your
business.
Something more. And this is my final word — it is about our posi-
tion as citizens in the United States of America. You say, ' ' Why, we
are not citizens." But it says so in the constitution, anyhow, and I
am just waiting until somebody has courage enough to test the eon-
SEX QUESTIONS 323
stitution of the United States. All persons born -or naturalized in the
United States are citizens ; it is so in the constitution. Well, aren 't
you a person, my lovely ? Then you are a citizen. Are you ready to
do your duty as a citizen ? Are you ? I believe in peace, but what of
him who says peace, peace, when there is no peace ? Is there peace in
your woman's eyes tonight, you who have listened to the tragedies that
have been detailed from this platform concerning the white slave
traffic ? Is there peace in your soul ? I sat there just last night and
groaned aloud while they were talking of the white slave traffic. I sat
there this very afternoon and could hardly keep my place while they
talked again of the white slave traffic and little women, our sisters,
imprisoned through a nameless torture of shame. I am talking to
the citizens of the United States of America. Back in the yesterday,
not so very long ago, not much more than fifty years, our daddies
took off their coats and went to war, went to war to strike the shackles
of slavery from the wrists and ankles of the black men. What sort
of slavery ? A slavery to honest toil, a slavery to clean manual labor.
And no one lifts a hand to strike the shackles from the souls of help-
less little white women. I don't know, I don't know, but sometimes
there comes into my soul such a cry of rebellion against this fearful
outrage to our womanhood, as well as to our liberty and peace, that
I would God would call me to take a sword in hand and to lead you,
a literal, veritable army, to make war, literal, actual war, until this
thing be stamped out. Vicious, am I ? Were they vicious who would
free a black man from labor ? Sensational, am I ? Was he sensational,
who declared that all men are born free and equal, with the right to
life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness ? Was he sensational ? Then
let me say it again — all women under God were born free and equal,
and because of the precious blood of Jesus Christ, we are called to
liberate our sisters. "But," you say, "Doctor Geisel, you really don't
mean it. You wouldn't have us go to war?" Hear me, then. There
may be a peaceable way out. There will be thrust into your hands
before very long, you cannot escape it, that little piece of paper
called the ballot. It is as surely coming as tomorrow is coming,
wanted or not. It doesn't matter — it is coming. Will you use it for
the liberty of your sisters ? Or will you say, ' ' Leave politics to men. ' '
If you must go into politics to liberate helpless little girls who are
enslaved now, then do it. Do it as quickly as ever you can. Done
noAv, am I, when I have asked you to bow your heads where you are,
and let your hearts say with Kipling :
"Lord, God of Hosts, be with iis yet,
Lest we forget, lest we forget !"
324 l-MKST .NATIONAL CONFERKNCK OX HACK HKTTKKM KNT
THE RELATION OF -EDUCATION IN SEX TO RACE BETTERMENT
AViNFiKi.i) Scott Hall, Pii.D., M.D., Profossof oT IMiysiolo^y, Northwcstcni
rnivei'sity Medical School, Chicaiio, Illinois.
By race betterment we mean the increase not only of the physical
health and eflficiency of the race, but also of the psychical solidity and
nobility of the race. The first question which one naturally asks in
this connection is, ' ' Hoav may this race betterment be accomplished ? ' '
In seeking- an answer to this question, we turn naturally to the lower-
animals and ask how they are modified in race development.
Those species of the lower animals that have been most closely
associated with man — for example, the horse, the ox, the sheep, the
hog- and the dog — have been very greatly modified and very greatly
improved in modern times through the influence of factors which are
very largely under the control of man. As we classify these factors
of race betterment among the lower animals, we find that they natur-
ally fall into two groups : first, environment ; second, heredity.
These two factors are the universally recognized biological factors of
race change. It is through them that all changes in living things
have been accomplished as the millenniums of the past have rolled by.
In comparatively recent times man has consciously and designedly
modified and controlled both the environment and the heredity of
these domestic animals with which he is so closely associated. He has
secured for them the finest possible heredity through careful choice of
the animals who were to breed the young. He has insured for them
the most hygienic possible conditions from the day of the birth of
each animal until its complete maturity. It has been kept in clean,
comfortable surroundings and provided with wholesome and nourish-
ing food. The result of this care in the domestic animals has been
to produce horses, cattle, sheep, and hogs so far superior to those that
existed in the days of our grandfathers that they could be classified
almost as different species.
Thoughtful men are now everywhere asking if it is possible to ac-
complish for the human race changes anything like as profound as
those already accomplished for the lower animals. If such a change
is possible, it is generally agreed that it is possible only through the
combined influence of the two universally recognized biological factors,
— e7wiro7mient and heredity.
The various conditions of environment are largely comprised in
the more familiar popular term, hygiene, while the essential elements
in heredity are practically covered by the popular term, eugenics. We
must therefore look toward hygiene and eugenics as affording our
sole hope for race betterment.
SEX QUESTIONS 325
Now, hygiene accomplishes two things. These are in two direc-
tions. They may be classified as toward the positive, on the one hand,
and toward the negative, on the other-^or, perhaps better, toward the
positive, on the one hand, and away from the negative, on the other.
In other words, hygiene seeks to accomplish certain things that are
agreed to be good, and- to avoid certain things that are agreed to
be bad. It seeks to promote, in the individual, habits of life whose
influence is to steady, to stimulate and to strengthen both physical and
mental powers. On the other hand, hygiene seeks to avoid, in the in-
dividual, habits of life whose influence is to derange, to deplete, and to
destroy.
In a similar way eugenics presents a double phase : namely, a
positive and a negative. First, it seeks not only to promote the
propagation of the fit, but furthermore to advance the efficiency of the
fit. Second, it seeks to avoid the propagation of the unfit. Among
the domesticated animals, eugenics is accomplished easily by the arbi-
trary will, guided by judgment and experience, of the owners of these
lower animals, so that the mating of these animals is more or less
absolutely controlled by the will of the owners. In the human species,
no such arbitrary control is possible even if it were admitted to be
advantageous. What is true of the control of eugenics is also, in a
measure, true of the control of hygiene. The state and the munici-
pality may arbitrarily quarantine such contagious diseases as scarlet
fever, smallpox, etc., as it may arbitrarily refuse marriage license to
the seriously diseased and palpably unfit. To such an extent the in-
terference of the state will be generally welcomed, but we must recog-
nize at the start that the influence of that interference at the very best
can accomplish but little, important though that little may be, to-
ward general race betterment. It will decrease the percentage of
imbeciles, insane, criminals and degenerates, but important as this is,
it can hardly be looked upon as accomplishing race betterment; at
best it can only stay race degeneration. Race betterment or actual
improvement of the rank and file of the race in physical and mental
quality can only he accomplished through positive hygiene and posi-
tive eugenics.
But positive hygiene and positive eugenics can be brought about
in the human race only through education. Education should lead
the youth to adopt a regime of hygiene that would develop in him the
highest possible degree of physical and mental efficiency. Education
should also lead him to choose as his mate a life partner who possesses
similar physical and mental qualities, besides possessing a blemishless
heredity, as good as we will assume his own to be.
The study of social conditions reveals the fact that a large ma-
326 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
jority of those conditions which are inimical to race welfare are the
result of ignorance and of distorted mental attitude regarding the sex
life. These distorted mental attitudes can only be rectified and this
deplorable and dense ignorance can only be dispelled by education.
Those who have given attention to this problem of education agree
with one accord that the distorted mental viewpoint possessed by so
large a proportion of the population dates back to early childhood and
is to be attributed solely to the fact that parents do not implant in
the minds of their children the wholesome and inspiring viewpoint
of the great fundamental truths of life.
The first lesson regarding life should be taught by the mother
to her questioning child. It is practically a universal custom of
childhood to ask the mother how the baby came, or where they got the
baby. The thoughtful twentieth-century mother accepts the question
as indicating the psychological moment to teach her child the first
great lesson and to give it a wholesome viewpoint regarding life. So
she answers the question of her child truthfully and not as the
mothers of a generation ago did, through evasions and fantastic fic-
tions.
The twentieth-century mother recognizes the fact that when her
child comes asking this perfectly natural and perfectly fair question,
she has one of the great opportunities of motherhood— namely, an
opportunity to implant in the mind of the child the feeling that
motherhood is a sacred relationship and the mother a sacred object.
One twentieth-century mother answered her child's question in these
words, "Baby sister came out of mamma's body. She was formed
Mdthin mamma's body. She was formed from materials that were
drawn out of mamma's blood; and that is the reason why mamma's
cheeks are so pale and mannna's hands so thin and white." The
little boy's eyes opened wide with wonder. This story, told in such
a matchlessly simple way, \^'as incomparably more wonderful to the
child's mind than the stork story would have been and he looked in
his wide-eyed wonder from mamma's pale face down to little baby
sister — back and forth — trying to comprehend it all. Then he asked
this question: ''Mamma, was I formed within your body, too?*'
And the mother answered, "Yes, my boy, you were and that is the
reason why mamma loves her boy so — because she gave her own life's
blood for him." The little boy's wide-open eyes now took on a far-
away look and he seemed to be trying to comprehend the great truth
of mother sacrifice. Presently, he seemed to catch a glimmer of the
truth and his eyes welled full of tears as he turned toward his mother
and threw his arms about her neck, saying, "0, mamma, mamma,
I never loved you so much before. ' '
SEX QUESTIONS 327
When the mother in whose experience the above episode had oc-
curred, related it to the writer, he asked her what her boy's attitude
had been toward motherhood and she replied, "Since the day I told
him how baby sister came and how he had come, he has seemed to look
upon motherhood as a sacred relationship." It is the uniform and
universal testimony of parents who have been telling the storj'- of life
in this frank, sympathetic, earnest and serious way to their children
in answer to the instinctive questions of childhood, that the children
accept these truths as sacred, that they are drawn into a much closer
and confidential relationship to the parents, that they are protected
against contamination of the mind by associates of low ideals, and
that they are also protected against being misled by older, low-minded
associates into deleterious and depleting personal habits.
While, as intimated above, the primary responsibility for this
teaching in early childhood must naturally rest upon the mother, a
responsibility no less real and serious, though less urgent and imme-
diate, rests also upon the paternal ancestor and the teacher of the
young child. The father should reinforce the mother's teaching and,
in the same spirit in which the mother tells the story of life, the
father should confirm it whenever the child comes to him seeking con-
firmation. In no way can the father more positively teach the sacred-
ness of motherhood to his children than by uniformly showing toward
the mother the spirit of affection and tender solicitude for her well-
being and happiness. Such an attitude speaks much more loudly and
impressively than any words which the father could utter, his personal
feeling of the sacredness of motherhood. The children instinctively
catch the spirit of the father and it confirms and fixes indelibly the
attitude which the mother herself implanted by her story of life.
The teacher of the child, before that child reaches the thirteenth
to the fifteenth year, should not be called upon and should not feel a re-
sponsibility for imparting to the child these great fundamental truths
of life which it is the inherent right of the child to hear from the lips
of his parents and which it is the natural privilege of the parents
to impart direct to their own offspring. However, the teacher does
carry a very definite responsibility and one which may not be evaded.
This responsibility comes very naturally with the teacher's relation
to the home. When we consider that the school is an extension of
the home and the teacher, so to speak, an extension of the parents, or,
we might say, ^'vicarious parent," it is easy to understand how
natural and essential this responsibility is. The teacher is respon-
sible for two very definite things in the education of the young child
between his fifth and his fifteenth year. First, the teacher should
show the same vigilant watchfulness that a mother shows to protect
328 FJKST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERME^^T
the child against the dek^tcrious iiitluenee' of the occasional pupil that
is found from time to time in every school, namely, the pupil whose
home influence has been weak or bad and whose associations have per-
haps been vicious. Such a child is quite likely to be physically pre-
cocious and mentally backward and thus be thrown into association
with children from one to three years younger than himself. The
influence of such a pupil in a school may be most unfortunate and it
requires the greatest vigilance and tact on the part of the teacher to
protect the children against such an influence. First, then, the teacher
must show all vigilance and tact in protecting the children of her
school against bad influences. As a rule, this can perhaps be best
accomplished through such an administration of school sports and
recreations as fully and completely to occupy the minds of the pupils
during the hours when they are on the school grounds but not in the
school room. Thus, again, turning the mind toward the positive and
away from the negative.
Second, the teacher should accept every opportunity which pre-
sents itself to implant in the mind of the child, or we may perhaps
better say, to confirm in the mind of the child, the same wholesome
attitude regarding the sacredness of life and the sanctity of home re-
lationships which she herself holds in her own mind and which she
may assume has been implanted by the parents in the minds of the
children. Many an opportunity will be offered the teacher for drop-
ping a word in harmony with this mental attitude in the course of
the nature study work. Even in the kindergarten, it is a very common
thing for the teacher to have a little family of baby kittens, of baby
rabbits, or baby birds, for the children to take care of and to love.
While the thoroughly ecjuipped and tactful teacher, who under-
stands the psychology' of youth, will not make opportunities repeatedly
to impress "morals" about maternal and filial relationships, the
teacher may. not infrequently, drop some remark that leaves an in-
delible impression upon the child regarding these relationships. The
social ethics of the robin's family, housed in a nest that may be
watched from the schoolroom window, may set forth in compelling con-
viction the whole law and gospel of social ethics of human society.
While, in this teaching, we must take care not to attribute to the
robins a degree of consciousness and discernment commensurate Avith
that of the human species, the most conservative biologist must admit
that the same kind of sentiment which prompts parental care on the
part of the human mother prompts it on the part of the robin mother
— that maternal altruism in the human species, while possessing a
greater element of emotion and a smaller element of the automatic,
is, from a psychological standpoint, the natural and necessary out-
SEX QUESTIONS 329
growth in man of the same thing which prompts the sacrifice and love
of the robin mother.
The Nature Teaching, therefore, in the public school affords the
teacher an opportunity to make an atmosphere about life that im-
presses the child with the sacredness of all life and with the special
sacredness of human life and of human parenthood.
We have now set forth in sufficient detail the character, if not the
whole content, of the teaching regarding the sex life that the child
should have up to the threshold of adolescence, which may be taken as
about thirteen years for the girl and about fifteen for the boy. Just
before the crossing of the threshold from girlhood into womanhood,
or from boyhood into manhood, the first lesson regarding the in-
dividual sex life should be taught to the girl by her mother and to the
boy by his father. This first lesson is the lesson of womanhood or of
manhood respectively.
I. Womanhood or Manhood
The parent should seek a favorable opportunity for a heart-to-heart
talk with the youth who is approaching the threshold of adulthood and
should explain what it means to grow into womanhood or manhood
as the case may be. The mother, for example, explains to her daughter
the phenomena of physical and mental development of the girl into
the woman and pictures womanhood in such vivid and glowing terms
that it fills the whole soul of the girl with a consuming desire to grow
into the highest type of womanhood. Then the mother explains that
this wonderful development of the physical, mental and spiritual
qualities of womanhood is dominated and controlled by a wonderful
and magical substance that is prepared in the ovaries of the girl,
absorbed into her blood and distributed throughout the body from the
threshold of womanhood, throughout midlife and until the beginning
of old age. The natural influence and result of this story of woman-
hood, told to the girl by the mother in the same spirit in which she,
years before, told her the story of motherhood, is to impress upon
the mind of the girl, so strongly that it is never effaced, the feeling
which amounts to a dominant conviction that: HER PERSON IS
SACRED TO HER WOMANHOOD.
'This teaching fortifies the girl absolutely against the malevolent
influences of low-minded, older girls with whom she might, by some
ill chance, be thrown into association in the school.
In a similar way, the father should tell his twelve-year-old boy the
story of manhood and arouse in the youth a consuming desire to grow
into the highest type of manhood. As a part of this lesson, he should
reveal to his boy the new-found truth that the development of manly
330 FIRST NATIONAL CUNFEKENCE OX RACE BETTERMENT
qualities is caused and ooutrolled in body and mind through the in-
fluence of an Internal Secretion prepared by the testicles, absorbed
into the blood and distributed throughout the body. This substance,
carried into the muscles with the blood, causes these muscles to grow
big and hard, carried into the brain and spinal cord, lights the fires of
manhood in the young man's brain and these fires shine through his
eyes and illuminate his face. When the boy realizes that a substance
made in his testicles holds the secret of manhood, he is fortified
against any evil influences to which he may be subjected by his asso-
ciates. A boy thus instructed is absolutely protected against being
misled by low-minded associates into destructive, and depleting habits.
He learns that great lesson of life: HIS PERSON IS SxlCRED TO
HIS MANHOOD.
II, Periodicity
At the time that the youth crosses the threshold from youth into
womanhood or manhood, respectively, the parents should impart the
second lesson concerning the sex life. This second lesson consists of
an explanation of the periodicity of the sex life upon which the youth
is entering. It is little short of a tragedy in the case of many a girl to
enter upon womanhood with no explanation of the experiences to
which she is introduced incident to this new phase of life. Many ques-
tions crowd into her mind, demanding answer. When no answers are
forthcoming, we cannot wonder that her heart is filled with rebellion
at life and its unexplained mysteries. Society, therefore, demands
that mothers answer frankly the questions that come into the minds of
their daughters at this period of life. The mother Avill therefore ex-
plain to her daughter adequately the periodicity of the sex life and
will further explain that this experience to which the girl is intro-
duced is her Creator's preparation of her for future motherhood.
This explanation will control the girl's mental attitude toward woman-
hood. Instead of rebelling against the experiences of womanhood,
she exults in its wonders and its possibilities.
In a similar way, the father explains frankly to his boy the
periodicity in his life and, in thus explaining, forestalls the worry
and dispels the fear that would surely come but for the explanation,
III. ■ Social Relationships
Early in the adolescent period, say the fifteenth or sixteenth year
for the girl and the sixteenth or seventeenth year for the young man,
there should be some very definite instruction on the part of parents
regarding social relationships. This lesson might very properly be
given when fifteen-year-old Margaret and seventeen-year-old John are
SEX QUESTIONS 331
seated with mother and father about the family hearthstone. It
will be a very wholesome experience for John to hear his mother in-
structing Margaret regarding the social relationships, because he is
just beginning to enter with zest into society.
The mother will explain to Margaret that in all her social relation-
ships with her young gentlemen friends, she should have a jolly good
time, but should permit no familiarities. The mother may well ex-
plain to the daughter somewhat in detail the reasons why the parents,
from their broader experiences in life, make these rules for their chil-
dren, and explain that it is not to debar the children from the enjoy-
ment of any legitimate pleasure ; that these rules are given rather
to insure the greatest ultimate joy in life.
As John hears this instruction from his mother to his sister, he
very naturally thinks to himself, "My girl friend, Jennie, must have
received just such instruction from her mother, so it's up to me, if I
am to be the chivalrous young man that I shall not be ashamed of, to
treat my girl friend, Jennie, in the way that I would have the other
fellow treat my sister."
The parents explain to their children that such common familiar-
ities as putting the arm about a girl's waist or kissing her — familiari-
ties which many young people look upon in a frivolous way and carry
off with a jest — are unfortunate and dangerous familiarities because,
harmless and innocent though they may be in themselves, they break
down the delicate self-respecting reserve of the girl and in many
cases, by insidious advances, lead the way to other familiarities which
eventually compromise the dignity of the girl's womanhood, perhaps
even compromise her character. The young people should have it
very clearly set forth that the only absolute safety for the girl is not
to permit the beginning of familiarity.
Let the young people be taught that the embrace is Society's
Sacred Symbol of Protection and that the kiss is Society's Sacred
Symbol of Affection. Once that lesson is clearly impressed, we may
trust the young people to guard even the threshold of familiarity.
Young people of this age are living over again the impulses and
the instincts of Chivalry. Instinctively, they acquire a code of honor
inherited from days of Chivalry : The honor of wommi and a square
deal among men. Every knight stood ready to drop in his tracks,
shedding his blood or laying down his life to enforce this code of
honor. So, the youth of today can be very easily inspired to adopt
this code of honor and to be ready to fight for it. Most of his in-
struction in this lesson No. Ill should be positive in its char-
acter and should seek to inspire in the youth the spirit of chivalry
and of altruism.
,>.>L' KIKST XATIONAI- CONFEHENCE l)N RACE BETTERMENT
The neyjitive side oi" Social Kclatioiisliips should call Ihc attention
of the young people to certain utiroitunate things in human society
that must be avoided. Departure i'rom the high ethical standards set
forth above is uniformly punished. This natural retribution may.
take various forms, but as the laws of Nature are immutable, so the
punishment that Mother Nature metes out for the one who breaks her
law follows absolutely. One of the forms is found in those con-
tagious diseases which are disseminated largely through illicit social
relationships. Enough should be told every young person by mother
and father so that the daughter and the son will realize that the
breaking of Nature 's laws is sure to bring a punishment in some form.
This method of instruction puts the matter in its proper perspective
and links it up not only with the physical and intellectual life, but also
with the moral life, thus being an important element not only in the
formation of character, but in the solidification and fortification of
character.
IV. Eugenics
The relation of education in sex to eugenics is a most important
one. As alreaciy intimated above, , in the introductory paragraphs,
state laws guarding the licensure to marriage may help some in
eugenics, but at most, little can be accomplished through state inter-
vention. Most that may be hoped for in race betterment through
eugenics must be accomplished through education. This education
should begin in the later teens, in the case of both the young woman
and the young man, and, like the other lessons in life, should em-
phasize, first of all and most strongly, the positive side, though not
omitting the negative side.
A — Positive Eugenics
That young woman who has come to the estate of ripe young
womanhood at twenty-one to twenty-three years of age, having
learned all the lessons set forth above from the lips of a loving, sympa-
thetic, clear-visioned mother, having in many a heart-to-heart talk
wdth mother received full and adequate answers to the hundred and
one questions that crowd into the girl's mind, is in a mental attitude
toward mother easily to be led and guided as to her choice of a
future life partner. "We may also assume that such a young woman
sees in her father and her brothers men who help her to accpire a
high ideal of manhood. Mother and daughter will discuss manhood
and the elements of ideal, perfect manhood — perfect physically,
mentally and morally. A girl who has acquired such a high ideal of
manhood can be trusted not to fall in love with and marrv a man who
SEX QUESTIONS 333
falls far short of this ideal. Of course, we must recognize that
"love is blind." which is simply another way of saying that a young
woman may be led to ignore many a shortcoming in the man who
showers attentions upon her and protests undying love and volubly
promises to reform. The days, however, of the ill-advised mating of
a perfect woman with a grossly imperfect man, with the hope of over-
coming his imperfections, are rapidly passing. Her instruction in the
elements of manhood enables her to analyze, and she instinctively
stops to analyze before she permits her heart to go out to a man.
In a similar way, the young man should be taught to recognize
ideal womanhood and, having made himself worthy of a perfect wo-
man, to look for one for a wife.
B — Negative Eugenics
The preparation of young people for a wise choice of a life partner
is not complete until they know some of the things assiduously to be
avoided in this choice of a life partner. Every young person should
know that there are certain serious impairments, physical or mental,
that may be transmitted from parent to child, and that there are
other such impairments that positively will be thus transmitted.
Among such impairments must be noted INSANITY, FEEBLE-
MINDEDNESS, DEGENERACY, CRIMINALITY, especially when
such serious impairments are noted to occur in successive generations,
— several individuals in each generation. Even though the individual
in question may seem to be ciuite normal, if he has tAvo or three im-
paired brothers and if one of his parents and perhaps one or two of
their brothers and sisters and grandparents, wdth great uncles and
aunts, have the same impairment sent down two or three generations
and perhaps more, then the individual in question would make a dan-
gerous life partner, because without any reasonable doubt the germ-
plasm of the individual has been impaired, and his children would be
very likely, and some of them certainly, to show the impairment in
some degree. If, now, there is a taint on the side of the mother, as
well as on the side of the father, it is hardly likely that one of their
children would escape being marked in some way with one or the other
or both of these family taints.
Another serious impairment that must not be omitted is venereal
infection or hereditary venereal taint. Every person choosing a
life partner should know about the possibility of these above-men-
tioned taints and should avoid them as they would avoid poison.
Some have asked how this information will influence a young
person in the choice of a life partner and will it not destroy senti-
mentality and old-time love. It is to be hoped that instruction in
334 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
eugenics will destroy that sentimontalisiu which leads a woman de-
liberately to mai-ry a man who is absolutely unworthy of her and can
only bring disease, degeneration and death, and that maudlin, so-
called love which is blind to imperfections that are so glaring that
they might be seen through opaque lenses. What instruction in
eugenics will accomplish is to establish psychic inhibition at the thresh-
old of love, so that on meeting a young person of the opposite sex,
however attractive and agreeable that person may be, the one in ques-
tion does not at once go out in unquestioning, blind love-at-first-sight
that was so common in the days of our fathers, but will experience a
"psychic inhibition;" in other words, there will be an instinctive hold-
ing back or hesitation on the threshold of love to ask if all within and
beyond is favorable. Is the admired one in good health and does he
(or she) possess the qualities of ideal manhood (or womanhood), and
has he (or she) a parentage free from hereditary taints. These
questions answered affirmatively, the questioner steps boldly across
the threshold and enters into an unreserved love.
Summary
Race Betterment depends upon the two biological factors:
Heredity and Environment. One of these is as important as the
other; and each is all-important. Both of these factors may be
guided, assisted and controlled by two forces: State Lav^s and Edu-
cation.
Important as is legal control of marriage licensure, that control
can hardly accomplish more than to forbid marriage to the grossly
unfit; but stopping the breeding of the unfit can never uplift the
race; it can, at best, mily arrest race decadence.
Race Betterment can be accomplished through Education only.
While this education culminates in a course of instruction in Eugenics
during the mid-adolescent period, the foundation of this education
must be laid in Childhood and Early Youth.
The object of this teaching is: (I) To give a ivholesome viewpoint
of the great, sacred truths of life; and (II) To give high ideals to-
ward which to strive. This teaching is Home work and for the parents
to do.
But, as the school is an extension of the home, and the teacher an
extension of the parent, so the teacher must cooperate tvith and
supplement the honne instruction and in the school must foster the
wholesome viewpoint and must establish HIGH ideals.
Education should cover the following lessons: Motherhood and
Fatherhood; Wotnanhood or Manhood; Periodicity; Social Rela-
tionships and EUGENICS.
SCHOOL AND INDUSTRIAL HYGIENE
SOME CHANGING CONCEPTIONS OF SCHOOL HYGIENE
Ernest Bryant Hoag, M.D., Ijecturer in Leland Stanford University and
General Director of Child Hygiene in the Long Beach City Schools, Cali-
fornia.
School hygiene, as an organized scientific study of the school child
and his environment, has engaged the serious attention of school ad-
ministrators for a period of less than fifteen years/**"
We are accustomed to say that health work in schools began when
the schools of Boston, New York and Chicago organized so-called
''Medical Inspection" between the years 1894 and 1897; but this Is
not strictly true, for sporadic attempts to improve school health con-
ditions had been made in various places at periods much earlier than
this. For example, in Minnesota, where the secretary of the State
Board of Health encouraged a study of the eyes, ears, periods of sleep
and general physical appearance of university students, normal school
students and pupils in certain public schools, as early as 1878; in
Boston, where studies in anthropometric measurements were long ago
instituted by Doctor Bowditch; in Elmira, N. Y., where the health of
children in the schools is said to have received some specific attention
as long ago as 1876 ; and in Minneapolis, where Dr. Frank Allport
organized systematic examinations of eyes and ears of school children
in 1888. Doctor Allport 's work was unquestionably the most impor-
tant and far-reaching in its influence of any of the early attempts in
school health supervision, and it is a matter of considerable interest
that to this day he is in the vanguard of school hygienists.
Most of the early efforts to improve the health of pupils in the
schools were directed toward the recognition and control of the trans-
missible diseases of childhood, with the notable exceptions of those,
of Doctor Allport and one or two other pioneers in the field.
After 1898, however, a broader conception of Medical Inspection
developed and it was soon recognized that important as is the control
of contagious disease among pupils, as a matter of plain fact this is the
least of the many problems of school health. Children who under the
old method of inspection were passed as satisfactory were found
in many instances, under the new health conception, suffering from
serious defects of sight and hearing; from defects of the nose and
throat; from nervous disorders and nutritional disturbances; from
defects of the mouth and teeth; from functional and organic heart
330 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
disturbaiu'es; and last, but far fi'oni least, from tlic various dcji'rees
of actual mental deficiency.
At first the medical officer in schools was an appointee of the
local Board of Health and his function was naturally regarded largely
as that of a public health official or inspecior. Today the health
ofificer in schools is, in the most enlightened communities, looked upon
as a Specialist in Child Hygiene and School Sanitation, and his func-
tion is therefore regarded as that of a school official interested in im-
proving the personal health and health environment of the school
child. To this end his interests are related to those of Boards of
Education rather than to those of Boards of Health, although there
must be, of course, a close relation and effective cooperation betM^een
these two important bodies.
Formerly, and to a considerable extent at present, school health
officers were chosen without any particular regard to special fitness.
In many instances they were, and are still, men who have passed the
age of active usefulness in practice or men who w^ere beginning their
practice and therefore had abundant time to devote to the work; in
both instances the schools usually received ineffective service for
reasons which require no special elucidation.
THE MEDIC.VL OFFICER IN SCHOOLS
There is no general agreement in respect to the qualities necessary
for school medical officers. Many communities appoint almost any
physician who has a fair standing, without reference to his special
training or aptitude. In some places men or women have been ap-
pointed as school health officers who have had no medical training of
any description.
As a matter of fact the position of school health officer in the
United States has never been standardized. As conditions now exist,
we find the following types of health officers in schools: (1) well-
trained, full-time medical officers; (2) well-trained, part-time medi-
cal officers; (3) well-trained, emergency medical officers; (4) in-
adequately trained medical officers in divisions 1, 2 and 3; (5) hy-
gienists without medical training on part or full time; (6) physical
directors who include health examinations as part of their duties,
and who may or may not possess medical training; (7) full-time
nurses who make examinations; (8) part-time nurses who make
examinations; (9) principals or teachers who make partial tests of
physical conditions.
Whether a community employs a medical officer for part or full
time is a matter of secondary importance compared with competency.
In England school health officers must show preparation for their
SCHOOL AND INDUSTRIAL HYGIENE 337
work; but very few physicians in this country have had any special
training in school hygiene. Well-trained physicians may, however,
easily acquire the special training necessary. A physician whose
preparation has included the usual academic branches and thorough
work in biology, general hygiene, physiology, chemistry, physics,
pathology, and bacteriology, need find no special difficulty in rapidly
acquiring the details of child and school hygiene; nor will he in
every instance need for this purpose attendance upon special courses
of instruction, desirable as the latter undoubtedly are.
Such a physician must, first of all, possess aptitude in handling
school children ; second, he must understand and be in sympathy wit'i
modem pedagogical problems ; third, he must possess diplomacy in
handling all sorts and conditions of people.
The special knowledge of school hygiene and of pedagogy he may,
if need be, acquire through an acquaintance with the now abundant
literature on these subjects; the other qualities he must naturally
possess, for he can never acquire them through study alone.
A community, then, in selecting a school medical officer, should
seek a cultured physician whose training in the fundamentals of
medical science has been adequate and who, in addition, possesses
aptitude and enthusiasm for the work and a willingness to suppl>'
any deficiency he may have along special lines. Having standardized
these general qualifications, most other matters will be found to con-
sist of small details of administration.
Large communities, requiring full-time men at adequate salaries,
have a right to demand special and somewhat prolonged training, for
child and school hygiene is truly a specialty. Ordinarily such training
will not be acquired in less than one year in addition to the usual
four-year medical course, or six-year "combined courses." The
possession of a Doctor of Public Health degree, such as has long been
given in England and is now given at Harvard, the University of
Michigan, and the University of Wisconsin, \^'ill furnish evidence of
the highest specialized training and is certainly most desirable when it
can be obtained, for school hygiene is after all only one phase of
public hygiene.
Having agreed on the main principles which should underlie the
appointment of a school health officer, certain details of administration
should be considered.
1. The school health officer should in the larger places be con-
trolled by the board of education.
2. A cooperative plan whereby the board of education and board
of health jointly control school hygiene may be desirable for special
local reasons. •
338 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
3. School health officers may be provided by conibiniiii^' the posi-
tion of town or small city health officer with that of school health
officer, in Avhieh case the expense may be shared by the board of
health and board of education ; the appointment may be made by the
former board with the approval of the latter. This is an excellent ar-
rangement for large towTis and small cities. It has worked out
admirably in the city of Rochester, Minn.
4. County health officers, if properly qualified, may be appointed
as school officers as well, and in this joint capacity supervise the school
health of a village or a whole county, according to the population and
distance involved. This will often solve the problem of hygiene in
rural schools.
5. The compensation for a school health officer maj^ be based upon
the time required of him and upon the amount of his responsibility.
A full-time officer should receive from $2,500 to $5,000, according
to the size of the community.* A part-time officer may be paid for
one-half of every school day from $900 to $2,000. In some instances
where, for example, one man is responsible for the entire health super-
vision of a rather large community, as in Pasadena and San Diego,
Cal., the salaiy should be from $1,600 to $2,000.t Where less than
half of everv' day is required, it is advisable to base the remuneration
upon the number of pupils examined, and not less than 50 to 75 cents
should be paid for each examination. At this rate a town with a school
population of 600 pupils should pay from $300 to $450. Any com-
munity^ with less than 1,800 pupils would do well to adopt the per
capita plan of payment as a basis for salary. Voluntary or cheaply
paid ser\ace is never advisable. It invariably fails after a com-
paratively short trial.
6. Large cities should employ a director of school hygiene and
several assistant directors on full time. A few half-time men may
be required, but in general the work of half-time men in large cities
will be better done by full-time school nurses.
7. School health officers should familiarize themselves with the
following divisions of school and child hygiene: (a) Transmissible
diseases; (b) school sanitation; (c) physical defects; (d) mental
defects; (e) dental hygiene; (f) the teaching of hygiene; (g) ju-
venile delinquency; (h) retardation; (i) school hygiene literature;
(j) the elements of school architecture.
* Oakland, Cal., pays $3,600 ; St. Louis, Mo., pays $3,500 ; Milwaukee,
Wis., pays $3,800; Minneapolis, Minn., pays $3,500. All of these salaries
are too low for the service given.
t Pasadena pays $1,700; San Diego pays $1,800. Each of these cities
should pay $2,000."
SCHOOL AND INDUSTRIAL HYGIENE 339
The position of the health officer in schools must uo longer be re-
garded as a cheap job for a cheap man. Schools which are satisfied
with inferior officers and teachers will no doubt be satisfied with in-
competent medical officers. Progressive schools will appoint only
well4rained medical officers who are worthy of the respect of the
communities in which they live. American school communities may
well study the subject of school health supervision as carried out in
England, Germany, Denmark, and some other European countries
where the matter has long ago passed the experimental stage. There
a school health officer is treated with at least as much deference as the
school superintendent or head master.
The new conception of the school health officer, then, is that he
shall be a specialist carefully trained in the problems of child hygiene
and particularly as this applies to the school child; one who can
command the full respect of the community in general and of the
medical profession in particular.
The child hygienist occupies a new field and his work makes neces-
sary the recognition of a new profession. Until this idea is fully
grasped by those in authority in schools we shall continue to have, as
in the past, a very large number of more or less incompetent medical
and other health workers in our schools; we need not experience sur-
prise if under these conditions school health work often fails to secure
the support of local communities and the medical profession in them.
The modem school health officer must be in a position to demand the
same degree of professional respect which is accorded to other special-
ists in either the medical or educational professions, and only those
who have properly prepared themselves may justly make such de-
mands.
SOME OP THE FUNCTIONS OP THE SCHOOL HEALTH DEPARTMENT
The division of school hygiene should include in its functions not
only the health supervision of school children and the maintenance
of a healthful school environment, but also such subdivisions as the
following :
1. Supervision of the teaching of hygiene.
2. Supervision of the health of teachers.
3. Supervision of physical education.
4. Maintenance of a central office for special examinations and
consultations with parents.
5. Maintenance of a central laboratory for the study of excep-
tional children, especially those who are retarded and mentally sub-
normal.*
3-10 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
6. Supervision of a i)iiblie lecture ilepurtiiient for i)arents, wlierc
topics ou the home and school hygiene of the child may be presented.
7. Instruction of teachers on the subject of the physical and
mental observation of children.
A school department of hygiene organized on a basis such as this
will be recognized as one of unquestionable general utility instead
of one of restricted and often questionable usefulness. In such a
department all factions in a school community may discover work
with which they can sympathize and cooperate, while in the narrower
work of mere medical inspection there will always be many who are
either apathetic or positively antagonistic. It will be recognized by
all that work organized on such a basis is primarily educational in
character and designed to directly promote the educational oppor-
tunities of the entire school system. In such a plan no one function
is emphasized at the expense of another, but to each is accorded only
its legitimate field of usefulness.
The latest and perhaps the most important development in school
hygiene is that which relates to the study of the "Exceptional Child."
Children who belong in this somewhat vague classification may for
purposes of convenience be grouped as follows :
1. Retarded children of all classes (including defectives).
2. Unusually nervous children.
3. Dull children (not necessarily retarded).
•4. Precocious children.
5. Delinquent children.
6. Peculiar children who cannot always be specifically classified
(border-line cases).
The proper study of children included in the above list requires
some special training in psychological procedures, which cannot at
present be required of every school iiealth official. Every large,
well-organized school health department will, how^ever, include this
division and provide a well-trained person to carry out the work, as
is now done in Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Milwaukee, Minneapolis,
Grand Rapids, and a few other cities. Smaller places nnist usually
content themselves wdth a less comprehensive plan.
In every community, however, which essays serious health work,
some provision should be made for a study of exceptional children.
This may often be accomplished by placing the work in charge of a
teacher who has had previous opportunity to follow courses in child
study and applied psychology under competent and experienced
teachers.
SCHOOL AND INDUSTRIAL HYGIENE 341
The Vineland School under Doctor Goddard has for some time
offered limited courses along these lines for teachers, and many have
already availed themselves of the special privileges it holds for them.
That there are many defective children in our schools, most of
whom are unrecognized as such, has become apparent since the Binet
intelligence tests have come into common use. Not less than one per
cent and probably nearly three per cent of the children in the average
school system are beloAV normal in intelligence as evidenced by the
use of the Binet Scale, and this to a degree which unfits them to profit
by the usual school methods. It is of the greatest possible importance
to clearly distinguish between the merely dull and the defective child ;
between the morally delinquent and mentally defective ; between the
mis-fit or specialized defective and the intellectually subnormal; yet
this is rarely done in our schools today. About forty per cent of our
twenty million school children are retarded one or more grades, and
fifty per cent of our children never pass beyond the sixth grade ; yet
comparatively little is being done to discover the real underlying
causes. That to a considerable extent this situation is due to mental or
physical peculiarities, or both, no one of much experience in school
hygiene has any serious doubts.
The new conception of child hygiene involves the adaptation of
the school to the child instead of vain attempts to force the child to
fit the school, as has been the usual custom in the past. When this
new field in child hygiene becomes well established in our public
schools, they will not only be relieved of a tremendous drain upon
their daily efforts, but a large sum of money will be saved every year
in avoiding the expense of carrying over hopeless repeaters. This
sum might well be expended for the special education of certain sub-
normal pupils who at present receive no profit in school and go out
into life to become the wards of society.
School health work needs standardization and standards ought
to be furnished by the state. Minnesota, and to a limited extent,
Virginia, are the only states which up to the present have attempted
to furnish such standards. This state work in school hygiene ought to
be carried on either by the State Department of Public Instruction or
State Board of Health, or by the cooperation of these two bodies.
The latter plan is probably the most desirable and was found to work
out admirably in Minnesota under the able management of Dr. H. M.
Bracken and Superintendent Schulz. ]\Iichigan has (1914) under-
taken a limited amount of work along similar lines by the employment
of a specialist to make a tour of some of the most important parts of
the state, in connection with the Department of Public Instruction.
342 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
This is iu fact the ''Century of the Chikl," and the phrase—
"the child is our greatest natural asset" is fast becoming recognized
as one of fundamental truth instead of one of rhetorical effect. The
public schools are in some respects, as has been recently said, guilty of
more wastefulness and less effective results than any other public in-
stitution. Yet there is no real cause for alarm, for the evils of our
public school system have come to light and no class of people appre-
ciate them fuller than the school people themselves. Our public
schools will indeed become the real as well as the rhetorical ' ' bulwark
of the nation" just as soon as the public will grant the officials and
• o;?.che!.^ the power, privilege, and financial support which they so
n'hlv ...eserve.
THE RACE BETTERMENT MOVEMENT IN WOMEN'S COLLEGES
Dr. Carolyn Geisel, Shorter College, Rome, Georgia.
If Race Betterment is to mean anything at all to the great, wide
world, it must begin with education for her who has to do with the
race in its infancy. Allow me to put to you a conundrum. Let me
put it in approved twentieth century phrasing. Why is a college?
Now let me answer my own conundrum. - A college is for the same
reason as is a grindstone, if you please, just to sharpen the instrument
that touches it. The college should make fit for use, make fit for its
place in the world, that which comes in touch with it. Do the colleges
do this? All the colleges in the world? Please understand I am not
making a sweeping statement. I do not mean that colleges as a whole
are inefficient, but I want to ask this audience, if, generally
speaking, the colleges do what the colleges are expected to do? Let
me illustrate. Do you know Mr. Tilden ? I knew him when he was a
boy and I a short-skirted girl. He said, ' ' I am going to do something
before I die, ' ' and I answered, ' ' If you are, get about it. ' ' Later when
as college woman I met him, the college man, I asked, ''What has be-
come of that you intended to do?" He answered, "I am doing it. I
am getting ready, just wait."- And she is in this audience who was
with me at the Streator Illinois Chautauqua when there was put in
my hands a long newspaper excerpt, detailing the work this man
Tilden had done. In eleven years of time in one of the largest uni-
versities of this great world, a university backed by millions of money,
he had pursued an idea. Curious to know what he did ? Then let me
ask you, Are you fastidious? Would you like just one stripe on the
backs of your potato bugs ? Well, Tilden can tell you how. And you
SCHOOL AND INDUSTRIAL HYGIENE 343
don 't care ? You are willing to leave ten stripes on yours ? All right,
Tilden can tell you how. In other words it took him eleven years of
time with the backing of one of the world 's greatest universities, which
in turn was backed by millions of money, to find out how to vary the
stripes on the backs of potato bugs. I read it all, and this leaden
thing in here you call a heart went away down in my shoes with a
thud, and my woman's soul cried out to the God of things as they are,
for eleven years of time and for the backing of some great university,
with millions of money, to teach us women folk, wh© are mothers of
men, how to vary the stripes on the backs of the two hundred and
forty thousand criminals in these United States of ours. They are our
sons, born of women — ours. A woman goes almost to the door of
death to bring back a man child and then the world takes him, and at
the end of twenty-one years, when a mother's part of the work is over,
he is already marked for the penitentiary mayhap and a man 's place in
life is vacant and a mother 's heart is broken. Could she have changed
his stripes, and saved her own soul from sorrow, if she had had eleven
years of college training? Is there some possible wrong when a
college no better prepares for real life or teaches that Avhicli concerns
real life than the problem I have just presented to you? Was the
world ever robbed of a man, and a criminal made from an innocent
babe, because some mother woman lacked that education which made
wise Tilden able to change stripes?
Of the colleges for women here in America it is but a few years
since these were of two sorts, two only, and neither one paid any par-
ticular attention to preparing the real woman for a woman's real
life. Again I am not making sweeping statements. Bear with me.
I do not wish to be understood as saying that all women in all col-
leges receive no education that is adequate, nor yet am I saying that
all colleges for women are inadequate. Speaking generally there are
two sorts of colleges for women in these United States of America
(away back in the years women had some difficulty getting into any
at all). The first of these colleges is the co-educational institution
which gives to women folk the same kind of education our brothers
receive. What shall we do with this education when it is finished and
we have our degrees ? Do with it what i did, of course. You know
what they used to call us at Ann Arbor? Some of you are here from
Ann Arbor. You know perfectly well that my Alma Mater used to
speak of us as "female medical men." We cut our hair short and
strode up and dow^n the great big world, burned our books upon home
and motherhood and let the problems of race betterment be handled by
someone else than the mothers of men. We would have none of it.
Why not ? — Because we were educated for commercial life ; the kind
344 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
of (Hluciitioii our brothers received, sent us wlici'e our brothers went,
into tlie connuereial tield and nowhere else.
The second kind of school for women was familiarly known as the
"finishing school," the "female seminarv^" Now don't you mis-
understand me, again, I am literally quaking in my shoes lest you do ;
all the colleges for women are not of the "finishing school" sort, but
there does exist in this great United States of America, as in other
countries, a so-called finishing school, of a rather superficial sort, to
which we send our girls, some of us, sometimes. They learn to dance,
oh, yes. of course! Learn to jibber French and German, of course!
Learn to read Greek and Latin limitedly, to sing in Italian, to paint
on china, on canvas, and on flesh; and decorate their bodies after
the approved fashion, and when you get your daughter back from
that school, my brother, she is finished, indeed. xVt medical banquets,
which you sometimes attend, you repeatedly hear this one toast of-
fered to women, "Woman, God's greatest gift to man and the chief
support of the doctors. ' ' Is she so prepared for her holy place in life,
the place of motherhood, which is the very tap-root of all race better-
ment? Prepared! Of course not. She may give her life with the
first attempt at motherhood, and if she gives not her life, she some-
times brings back from the grave, which she so nearly entered, a
weakling child which for one transcendent, rapturous minute she holds
close to her woman's heart. Holds it there with feeble hands that
tremble with ecstatic joy, then lets it slip away into its little grave.
We buried in the United States of America last year so many little
wee new babies that their graves, if brought together, would carpet
this beautiful state of Michigan. One out of every two of all the
children born of woman, die before they are fully mature. Tell me,
if one out of every two of the hogs that come to be — let me say that
again so you will hear me — if one out of every two of all the hogs
that are bom were to die before they matured, would not every man in
the stock-raising business go squarely out of the hog business?
Of course he would. He would be simple and nothing short of it to
remain in a business which promised him such limited returns. Are
we, then, of less mental capacity than our brothers that we are simple
enough to continue in the business of race nurture when the whole
world taunts us because of limited returns ? Woman did not get her
life-work by her own choosing. She was appointed by the Great I
Am to this business of raising men. It is a stupendous task! An
awful job ! It takes twenty-one years of a mother 's life ; then when
the mother's part of it is over, she surrenders the unfinished piece
into the hands of a wife. It takes at least two women to raise one
good man, his mother and his wife. Sometimes it takes more than
SCHOOL AND INDUSTRIAL HYGIENE 345
one of the latter. What has all this to do with the race betterment
movement? What has it all to do with colleges for women? I shall
have to talk rapidly now.
It is well-lmown to all of you that many schools and colleges where
women go to get learning have for some years been teaching Domestic
Science, Physical Culture, Sanitation, Hj^giene, and here and there
one is teaching Eugenics, and in the fall of 1913, Bryn Mawr is said
to have declared for health as of first importance. But this, good as it
is, is not enough. As the agricultural college prepares the farmer for
a farmer's life, the business college prepares the business man for
business, so should the woman's college first of all prepare a woman
for a woman's life. All or any education added thereto can in no way
be injured by such firm foundations.
Ninety per cent of all the women in the world marry.
Marriage should mean home-making. Marriage and home-making
should mean motherhood. Countless and pitiful are the tragedies of
the unprepared.
For more than ten years I have gone up and down this land of
ours, in schools, colleges, Chautauquas and wherenot, crying out for
a college that would definitely teach a woman her own business. Why
not?
Two years ago this month I went to Shorter College, in Rome,
Georgia, to fill an engagement which Doctor Kellogg had made. I
was to talk Health and Eace Betterment to the women students as I
had talked it to hundreds of others. The president, faculty and
trustees listened, then the president said, "Come with us" and the
trustees said, "You belong to this college and the college belongs to
you." So was established in Shorter College, at Rome, Georgia, the
first endowed Chair of Health in an American college for women.
Then the title ' ' Chair of Health ' ' seemed not comprehensive enough.
We decided to make it a Chair of Health and Home Economics with
the avowed purpose that I have stated. Mr. Chairman, I do not in-
tend to die until this movement for definite education which means
Race Betterment is put into every college in the United States of
America.
The plans for procedure, the purposes and aims of the department,
are two: First, to build a strong body for the student herself, to
definitely establish her in health so firm that when she leaves college
she will not be the "chief support of the doctor" but instead, a
balanced, strong unit in the support of this liberty-loving government
of ours, of which, we trust, she will by that time be a full-fledged
citizen.
346 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
The second plan of procedure in llie work of the department is
to give the student such complete knowledge of Health and Home-
making as will secure strong bodies to her family.
The first — the establishment of the student in healtli — is to be ac-
complished by systenuitic living of health principles during the four
years of her college life. The second by scientific study of Health and
Home-making, which study is definitely recjuired as part of the curricu-
lum. She will be expected to follow six practical lines which lead to
health.
1. Scientifically ordered diet — arranged by a graduate dietitian.
2. Systematic exercise and a due amount of rest — directed by a
physical trainer.
3. The out-of-door life.
4. Healthful dress.
5. Avoidance of self-drugging; the use of rational remedies for
diseased conditions under supervision of a resident physician and
trained nurse.
6. Freedom from worry which comes from a living faith in a
loving God as taught and encouraged by the daily life of the college.
Does the diet of a young woman of college age need the attention
of educators? Look you! I can speak feelingly on that subject. I
went through college on chocolate creams and coffee, and when college
days were over it took Doctor Kellogg and this institution months and
months to bring me back from the grave. There are so-called colleges
in existence right now which daily serve a~bill-of-fare that is just as
bad as can be. No attempt made at balance and little intelligent
attention given to nutritive value of the day's rations, while much
thought appears to be put upon so-called economy. More than one
girl away from home in school tonight is subsisting on dill-pickles,
saratoga-chips, chocolate creams and what-not that she buys from the
little store around the corner. That little-store-around-the-corner takes
no small part of her money and as a result some doctor among us
makes a vacant-looking place in her Daddy's bank account later.
Correct the diet then.
This department will encourage the out-of-door life. Put the
student out-of-doors for physical exercise. This does not mean delsarte
and calisthenics; it does not mean the fancy work of physical exer-
cise. It means downright hard work — riding, driving, ninning, living
out-of-doors, studying lessons out-of-doors, deep breathing exercises
out-of-doors, staying out-of-doors nights as well as days, encouraging
the out-of-door life.
Did you notice that I mentioned, as a third maneuver for establish-
ing this young woman in health, the matter of dress? Awfully sensi-
SCHOOI. AND INDUSTRIAL HYGIENE 347
tive point just now. The next-to-notliing with which the twentieth
centur^^ American girl gow^ns herself is not a poem. We propose by
the work done in this department to correct a girl's ideals of dress.
There will then be displayed upon the screen no more such pictures
as you saw last night with the visceral organs displaced because of
mischievous constrictions around the middle of the body. There will
be no more coughs, colds, or pneumonia contracted because of the
uncoveredness of her — neck.
When she enters college the student will be examined; examined
from the cro^Ti of her head to the tips of her beautiful little toes. In-
cipient disease can sometimes be discovered and corrected by the resi-
dent physician. Flat-chest, spinal curvatures and other deformities
of habit will be sent to the gymnasium and trained out. Dyspepsia,
anemia, and other mischiefs consequent upon indigestion, malassimi-
lation or malnutrition will be sent to the dietetic department and my
lady be fed away from disease.
All that in this four years of college life she is asked to practise
for health sake, she is also required to study ; and in addition she
must study sanitation, civics, household management, everything in
short that is covered by that word Euthenics. The last year in college
she will spend much time in the model cottage in actual management
of a household, for a bit of practise helps to make perfect.
You with much gray in your hair, and you with no hair on top of
your head — plain proof of life that is passed in part — have talked
much and wisely of Eugenics, but why not talk all this to her? To
her who is yet to be wife and mother ? Why tell her when her head
is bowed in shame over a sacred defective child. All this cannot avail
to save her after the fatal mistake has been made. In this new depart-
ment the seniors will study Eugenics.
And now let me tell you something which she won 't tell. This is the
girl who will marry, of course she will. You are all acquainted with
my club? I have the great honor to be president of the A. M. K.'s.
You know what the club is by the letters ' ' Antique Maidens ' Club. ' '
The major number of college women who recruit mj^ club come from
the co-educational colleges, from the colleges which have educated the
woman in the same direction or along the same lines of thought as
the man. Of course this woman is able to live her bachelor life quite
independently and "she does not care." But the girl educated in the
college for women alone will marry, if she be educated for the home
and marrying ; she will be a helpmeet indeed, a mother indeed. All'
because she has a strong body ? No, not entirely, but because she was
trained in every single little bit of a thing that can help to make her
an efficient wife and mother. This is her husiness. Oh, vou are wast-
348 FIKST NATIONAL CONFKRKNCE ON RACK HKTTKRMENT
iiig- time! [Applanso] AVon 't you plrasc krrp slill now aiid Id iiic talk?
I have only a minute more. Hear me! A woman's business to keep a
home and rear eliildren, that sounds badly coming from an old
maid who campaij?ned the State of IMiehigan for suffrage last year;
but in spite of suffrage, let me say it to you again, it is a woman's
business to attend to that that the Master of Tiife called her to do,
and God called her to motherhood. Why is she not a mother? Is it
because, lacking training, she fears her inefficiency? Why is it that
of one hundred women visited a few weeks ago by my friend, Miss
Gearing, of Texas, there was found one and one-seventh of a baby for
each little wife? In New York City I met with a club of fourteen
women, wives they were, and one baby for the whole fourteen. This
is the answer given to me when I asked a little woman in that club
why she was not a mother. She said, lifting her shoulders with a
shrug. "Why should I tie myself to the drudgery of rearing chil-
dren ? ' ' Let me answer that. Drudgery goes out when science comes
in. They called the farm drudgery when it, the farm, could not pro-
duce corn enough to support the family, but when science with the
help of this government said to the boys, ' ' Back to the farm, back to
the farm," and the boys came from the agricultural college back to
the farm, drudgery disappeared, was swallowed np by science in the
full joy of returns. So also will science in home-making turn drud-
gery into delight. WTien she has learned the science of child-culture
she will return to her own wdth eager joy.
But the government pays ninety millions of dollars — hard-earned
tax money, yours and mine — to call the boys back to the farm. When
has it paid ninety cents to call the woman back to the home? You
can make a fuss about that if you want to. But unless we call the
woman back to the home the very foundations of government will
dissolve away. How^ shall we better the race without home? And
how shall there be a home without a "female person around."
The home is dependent upon a w^oman, the children are dependent
npon her. why the very master of the house himself is dependent
upon her.
There died last year fifty-six thousand more middle-aged men than
ever before, so saith the man of statistics. I don't want all the
middle-aged men to die. I shall be lonesome. Whose business is it to
take care of a man? Why the business of her who vowed she loved
him, the business of her who spends his money. Oh women, listen ! If
he is nothing in the big world but a money-making machine, it still
will stand you in good stead to take care of him. You cannot get
good, efficient work out of a money-making machine unless you have
first learned what feeds him best, and he has a right when he gives you
SCHOOL AND INDUSTRIAL HYGIENE 349
his money to spend, to ask, "Do you know how to spend it wisely?"
This Race Betterment movement in woman's colleges will teach a
Avoman the value of a dollar as well as the value of a man, the value
of things as well as the value of babies, and we dare hope to so reduce
the high cost of living.
And now I am done when I have said to you this one thing more.
Man is not all mind and a college is inefficient so long as it tries to
train either man or woman in his mental capacity only ; and man is not
all animal and a college still is inefficient though it train both mind and
body, for you were created. Oh, friends of mine, in the image of a
Triune God, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost,
and you the mental man, the physical man, and the spiritual should
be nourished by another who loiows Him, whom to know aright is
light eternal. Hold, then, the babe to the breast of a Christian mother.
The world may need penitentiaries, but praying mothers keep men
from penitentiaries and so diminish the need for them. The world
may need law, but the Law of the Lord converteth the Soul, and
needs not to be enforced by the police. Let a Christian mother hpld
her child close to her, as the Catholic church would keep him close to
itself through the first, malleable, impressionable seven years of his
life, then let him go from his praying mother's knee out into the
school, out into the world, and by and by to his place as man among
men. He will have nursed from her breast that which will bind him to
God and thereby shall the Soul of him be kept. Give us then colleges
for women that shall teach a woman all that pertains to her oaat:i busi-
ness and you have solved the Race Betterment problem.
Oh, I thank you. You have behaved beautifully. I thank you.
College Courses in Euthenics
Mrs. Melvil Dewey.
Discussion.
We are told that the educational forces pull up from the top ; the,y
don't push up from the bottom. Mrs. Richards' idea for Euthenics,
this right living, should be in the course of study in the colleges and
universities under this name. Then we will have these college-trained
people, and they will be fitted for teaching in the normal schools.
What has been done today in the normal schools to prepare teachers
for this kind of instruction ? That is the place that we are going to
get it, if at all — ^j^our colleges, universities and normal schools, and it
will come down and pull them right up.
350 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
FACTORY degeneration-
Rev. Newell Dwight Hillis
Pastor Plymouth Church, Brooklyn, N. Y.
I hnve been asked to speak on the causes of tlie deterioration of our
factory classes. ]\Iore than one hundred years have now passed by
since tools and machinery began to influence the physique of the in-
dustrial Avorkers. During this century the handful of operatives has
become an anny. With the increase of tools has come the congested
populations, crowded about the great centers of Manchester and
Birmingham, of Lawrence and Lowell, Fall River and New Bedford,
and of the tenement region of New York. Now that long time has
passed, the experts and physicians have had time to assemble the facts,
and to find out what is the influence of the factory life upon the
American physique. From time to time scientists have lifted up the
voice of warning and alarm. The most striking portrayal of the
perils of the English and American physique was that made by
Prof. Alfred Eussell Wallace, who has just celebrated his ninetieth
birthday. Sharing with Charles Darwin the honor of discovering
evolution. Professor Wallace has lately received many and signal
honors from scientific societies. At the dinner given him in London
his address Avas largely made up of reminiscences. He reviewed the
progress of civilization during the last century and made a series of
brilliant and startling contrasts between the England of 1813 and the
world of 1913. He affirmed that our progress is only seeming and not
real. Professor Wallace insists that the painters, the sculptors, the
architects of Athens and Rome were so superior to the modern men
that the very fragments of their marbles and temples are the despair
of the present-day artists. He tells us that man has improved his
telescope and spectacles, but that he is losing his eyesight ; that man
is improving his looms, but stiffening his fingers ; improving his
automobile and his locomotive, but losing his legs; improving his
foods, but losing his digestion. He adds that the modern white slave
traffic, orphan asylums, and tenement house life in factory towns make
a black page in the history of the twentieth century.
THE ENGLISH REPORT
Professor Wallace's views are reinforced by the report of the
commission of Parliament on the causes of the deterioration of the
factory class people. In our own country Professor Jordan warns us
against war, intemperance, overworking, underfeeding of poor chil-
dren, and disturbs our contentment with his ''Harvest of Blood."
Professor Jenks is more pessimistic. He thinks that the pace, the
climate and the stress of city life has broken down the Puritan stock,
SCHOOL AND INDUSTRIAL HYGIENE 351
that in another century our old families will be extinct, and that the
flood of inuhigration means a Niagara of muddy waters fouling the
pure springs of American life. In his address in New Haven Professor
Kellogg calls the roll of the signs of race degeneracy and tells us that
this deterioration even indicates a trend toward race extinction.
From every side come warnings to the American people. Books
and magazines, fresh from the press, tell us plainly that our people are
fronting a social crisis. Scarcely a single city in our land that is not
conducting an investigation of the police and exposing the social evil.
A wave of immorality has swept over the country. It is the subject
of conversation in the street cars, in the office and store, and at the
family board. Such authorities as Doctor Kelley, of Baltimore, and
Dr. W. W. Keen, the great surgeon, of Philadelphia, find the ex-
planation of this singular breakdown in and decay of morals, first, in
the incoming of the Huns and Vandals, with the low ideals of the Old
"World, and second, in the breakdown of character among our wealthy
classes, with their debauchery, their divorces and their unending
scandals, that lie like a black stain across the page of each morning,
paper. To all other causes we must add the influence of a group of
degenerate authors and, worst of all, of authoresses. Sinclair says:
"What we call prostitutes are not the worst, but generally the best
of the poorer classes ; people of fine physique, who cannot get their
true match in the sphere where they were born, and must, by the
holiest of all instincts, that of truth, seek upward by any means."
A popular American actor has had so many wives that he now speaks
of them by number, and recently defended American women against
an attack of a Frenchman by saying that ''in his experience nearly
all American women made good wives." He calls this loose and in-
discriminate epoch ' ' a new experiment in living. ' ' Stanley found in
Africa a brilliant spider that spread itself out like a flower, and
beauty-seeking insects, lighting upon it, found, not honey, but fetters,
pain and death. In every American city there is a black quarter and
above those streets should be written Dante's words, "Abandon hope
all ye who enter here. " The time has fully come for the public school-
teacher, the editor, the lecturer, the physician, the parent and teacher
to end this guilty silence and to lift the wreath from that diseased hag
named Lust, that has so long masqueraded as an angel of light. For the
individual and the nation it is true that "he who soweth the wind
shall reap the whirlwind."
SIGNS OF RACE DEGENERATION
The wise man always studies the signs of his time. Our experts
are our ph^^sieians and scientists who have had an opportunity for
352 FIUST NATIONAL CONFEUENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
observation. 'Phe Knylisli author, Prof. Watt Smith, tells us that
in ]8i;5 the English standard for admission to the army was si.\ feet;
in 1845, the standard was dropped to five feet six inches; in ^SS'^,
it was lowered to five feet three inches, and in 1901, to five feet. The
connni.ssion of the English government, appointed to study this sub-
ject, says on page 177 of its report: "In England degeneration is
especially manifest in Manchester and other manufacturing districts.
The police force is largely recruited from country districts, it not
being possible to find men who are large enough in Manchester and
Salford." Now comes the report from the recruiting department of
England that "sixty per cent of the young men who offered them-
selves as volunteers for military duty were rejected because of physical
unfitness." In our own country, the condition is no better. The
New York Bureau of Municipal Research has published its examina-
tion of 1,500 school children in the Bowery district, and only seven
per cent of these children had perfect sight, hearing, teeth and heart
action. One of the first signs of the breakdown of a race is the in-
crease of digestive disorders and the birth of children with, poor
teeth. When the mother has all the life and blood she needs for her-
self, the excess goes to build a perfect babe. In Cambridge, England,
only one per cent of the children of eleven years of age had perfect
teeth, yet the teeth taken from a plague pit into which the bodies
were cast after the black death of two centuries ago show^ed that the
deterioration is not only marked, but appalling. Another sign of the
breakdown of our people is the alarming decrease in the birth-rate,
and even of the women that bear children Doctor Holt says "three
out of four born in the homes of the well-to-do classes must be fed at
some other fount than the maternal breast."
THE INCREASE OF INSANITY
More alarming still is the increase of nervous diseases. Modern city
life is very taxing. The fast pressure breaks down the heart and the
arteries. Unable to keep up, young men stimulate, and this excited
condition of the young father reappears in the nerves of his babe.
Dr. Forbes Winslow, one of the great authorities on the brain and
nerves, tells us in an article in the London Times, that, in his opinion,
' ' the entire English race is destined to become insane. ' ' Doctor Kellogg
quotes from the report from the superintendent of the insane asylum
in Austin, Texas, and shows that both in New York State, at the one
extreme of the country, and Texas, at the other, "every time the
population doubles, the insane and defective people quadruple," so
that it is oi^ly a question of a little time when the crazy people will
"break out of the asylums and put us in." Constant excitement and
SCHOOL AND INDUSTRIAL HYGIENE 353
oyerwork are breaking down that wonderful engine named the human
heart. Three times as many people die from diseases of the blood-
vessels as died ten years ago. Life insurance men have made a
singular discovery. It has been found that during the last century
the average life has increased from thirty-three years to forty-two
years, that singularly enough the gain has been through the saving of
the lives of children, while the expectancy of life after forty years,
instead of increasing notably, decreased. But Doctor Kellogg tells us
"that the real measure and the physical vigor of a race is not the
age at which the average man dies, but the proportion of individuals
who attain great age." The time has gone by when Ave can any
longer say that race degeneracy is simply a bugaboo created by pessi-
mists and alarmists. The simple fact is, a tide of degeneracy is rolling
in upon us, and the time has come to recognize the fact that unless
drastic measures are taken, the whole standard of civilization will
have to change in order to avert race extinction.
THE NEMESIS OF NATIONS
History is God's judgment day. Our earth is the graveyard of the
races. In terms of the eternity of God, great nations fade like a
leaf, to be blown up and down the long aisles of time. Witness
Germany and England ! More than 1.200 years ago alcoholic liquors
were discovered by the forest children. These early people did not
know how to drive out the fusel oil with other poisons. Nitric acid
bums the hand and fusel-oil whiskey the stomach. The law of the
survival of the fittest began to work. Historians believe that nine
families out of ten went to the wall. Our forefathers had nerve so
sound, digestion so firm, that they could not be killed off— no, not
even by filth diseases and fusel-oil. The result was a generation im-
mune. But the Indian had never had the test until the last three
centuries. Under the influence of whiskey, nicotine, passions, only
125,000 remain of several millions. All of these Indians have now
been charted and an overwhelming portion have one of four diseases
— they are a vanishing people. The condition in Mexico is even more
dreadful. Witness the Mexican colony in San Antonio, Texas, dev-
astated by tuberculosis, Bright 's disease, and the two unmentionable
diseases. Of the 41,000,000 living in South America, 21,000,000 are
native Indians, and under the stress of these terrific tests they are
dissolving like red snow flakes in a river. The colored people are
fronting the same problem. So long as they live on the Southern
plantations, leave stimulants alone, they reproduce, but bring them
into the great city, put them into competition with the white race,
and they suffer beyond all words. The white man has had centuries
(13)
354 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE IJETTERMENT
of oivilization in wiiieli to liartlon his nerves and to hceonic inuunnizcd.
The colored man is now having his tost throiigli alcohol, nicotine and
morphine and deadly drugs. When a horse is tired the spur in the
bloody tiank is fatal. "When a colored man is tired the stinudant is
as deadly as a dagger. In the city the colored race is not only not
increasing in population, but is steadily losing. One-tenth of the
white race survived, and if one-tenth of the colored prove immune to
these modern stimulants, they will do well. IMother Nature is kind
and tender to the obedient, but she is a stern mother to the disobedient,
and she gets rid of the mifit as a form of social pity and mercy. Not
that she immediately bows out of existence the youth that has one of
the two diseases that make up the Red Plague. More often she
shortens the life of the child of the diseased man and in the next gen-
eration gets rid of the stock altogether. The physicians of New York
have published a report of the number of men ; 225,000 cases of the
worst of these two diseases, and three times as many more have tw^o
other diseases. In terms of three generations this large group will be
wiped out. Only those who have sound nerve, rich blood and the
strong heart engine can keep up the pace, and their descendants will
people the earth.
THE CAUSES OF RACE DETERIORATION
One-half of our physicians and scientific experts tell us that the
race is growing taller and stronger and healthier; the other half of
the scientists, headed by men like Dr. Forbes Winslow, of London, tell
us that the race is degenerating, steadily losing in stature, beauty and
health ; that it will wane to the point of extinction, begin once more
on the edge of the forest, and perhaps, by obedience to the laws of
nature, once more spread over the earth. Both statements are true.
One-half of our people are God-fearing, law-loving, pure-living, and
their children and descendants are growing taller, handsomer, health-
ier, happier. The other half is living for pleasure, the body and
animalism, and their descendants are deteriorating in health, and will
finally drop out of the world. Our climate is exciting, being dry, full
of ozone that stimulates the nerve and heart. The undeveloped re-
sources of our country make a powerful appeal to ambition and lead
to overwork. Modern life is very complex, its details infinite, and
men break down because of the pace. The new chemistry has dis-
covered' new stimulants. There are drugs for the heart and brain,
and drugs for the nerves, until whiskey, wine, beer, absinthe, nicotine,
opium, morphine, are among the gentler drugs. In a damp atmos-
phere stimulants are more easily expelled from the human body. In a
dry atmosphere like ours, stimulants that would be harmless in Scot-
SCHOOL AND INDUSTRIAL HYGIENE 355
land or Holland are deadly in America. In such a climate and under
such conditions, the young father rearing children and who stimulates
during the twenties and thirties reproduces the stimulated and ex-
citable nerv'ous sj^stem in his babe, with the result that defective chil-
dren are one of the most alarming facts of our era. But above all
other causes is the influence of the Red Plague.
THE GREAT RED PLAGUE
A wave of terror has swept over this country. These infectious
diseases have spread with such rapidity in the last ten years that
whole states have become alarmed, and are passing the most drastic
laAvs. So many diseased men are now on trains that the Pullman
palace car is not allowed to furnish a glass drinking cup for ice water.
In many states the law forbids the hotel permitting a public towel, and
in some states only paper towels are permitted in hotels. One even
finds warnings in depots to safeguard little children from infection.
In a through train from California the other day, the passengers
signed a roundrobin, asking the conductor to confine in a stateroom one
man whose condition Avas obvious, and to prevent two others from
entering the dining car. The physicians of New York, Chicago,
Philadelphia and Baltimore have sent out warnings covering the fol-
lowing points. Of the great plagues afflicting humanity, the Great
Red Plague is the most serious.
No man doubts for one minute but that a man of iron nerve and
will could end this era of lawlessness and anarchy. Either he must
end the anarchy or the lawlessness Mali end our great cities and our
republics. On the slopes of Vesuvius there are cracks through which
the sulphur issues, and the stench of hell mingles with the perfume
of orange blossoms, and therefore the recent burial of a village under
ashes and lurid lava. Just now our city is pouring forth passion in
fiery waves, and our physicians and scientists are alarmed. But better
days are coming. The people are waking up. There is to be an elect
group, an aristocracy of health. Instead of the race breaking down,
there is to be a new stock, taller, stronger, healthier, handsomer. But
meanwhile it is for the people of this nation to remember that he who
sows to the flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption. But the individual
and the city that sow through the school, the home, the library, the
factory, the sound business, shall of obedience to law reap health, hap-
piness, peace and social prosperity.
356 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
INDUSTRIAL WELFARE
F. 0. Clemkn-ts, K'epresfiitativo of The Nalioiial Cash K('<>ister Co., Day-
ton. Ohio.
A great many industrial concerns practice welfare work, and it
requires no extended argument for justification. It is right and fair.
For that reason, the subject is of interest to every one in this audi-
ence. It means the addition to business of convenience, comfort,
healthful surroundings, in fact, anything that will assist in securing
the prosperity and happiness of the worker. Incidentally, it tends, of
course, to produce harmonious relations between men in the organi-
zation.
Several large industrial concerns located in England have been
pioneers in the application of welfare work abroad. One of them, the
Cadbury Company, chocolate manufacturers, has made a very enviable
reputation for itself by introducing a great deal of educational work
into its general scheme of operation.
The efforts of Port Sunlight, an English concern active in welfare
work, have been particularly noticeable along the line of proper hous-
ing for their people — at least, this is one of the noteworthy fea-
tures of their work. Many industrial concerns in the United States
might be cited, like the United Shoe Machinery Company, Interna-
tional Harvester Company, United States Steel Corporation, and many
others have instituted welfare work.
In 1892 we found that our people had no heart in what they were
doing. They did not seem to care whether the business succeeded or
not. As fast as employees were trained to the point where they would
be of real service, they would leave and go to positions elsewhere.
There was no special inducement or encouragement offered to keep
them with us, because our factory was no better than the average
American factory of that time. Five women left. They realized
that they could secure equally as pleasant and remunerative employ-
ment elsewhere, and consequently they had no interest in our business.
Our President, Mr. Patterson, in going through the factory one
day, noticed a woman heating coft'ee on a radiator. Later he saw a
group of girls eating cold lunches at their workbenches, and so a
kitchen was installed and they are now sensed a warm lunch at a
nominal fee. The lunch furnished consists of a bowl of soup, one
vegetable, bread and butter, milk and fruit- — all at the cost of five
cents.
In the early days of the business, the men and women came to
work at the same time, while now the women arrive later than the men.
In the evening they are well on their way home before the men leave
SCHOOL AND INDUSTRIAL HYGIENE 357
the factory. In the old days all employees were compelled to climb
the stairs to the various departments. Today, elevator service is pro-
vided in advance of working hours for all employees, with separate
elevator service for the women. The uncomfortable stool has been re-
placed by the high-back chair and foot rests. These cost very little
more than the old-style stools, and result in greater comfort, health,
and efficiency.
The National Cash Register Company have installed every type of
convenience, sanitation, and safety wdthin the factory. A great deal of
time and effort have been devoted to the boys. The particular lo-
cation of this manufacturing plant in 1892 was regarded as the most
undesirable part of Dayton. It was called Slidertown, and it lived up
to everything that its name implied. Much of the vileness and evil of
the city seemed to center there. The yards were full of rubbish and
refuse. Rents were low. Employees were ashamed to say that they
worked at the factory. In addition, Slidertown was infested with what
were believed to be bad boys. They broke the windows of the factory,
pulled up the shrubbery and were constantly in mischief. A picket
fence ten feet high was erected around the factory to keep these
youngsters out, but even that was unavailing.
The President of the Company was convinced that if given an
opportunity, a boy will do what is right and that a boy is bad in pro-
portion as his mind is unoccupied. This theory was put into effect by
giving them a meeting-place and by establishing classes in what today
would be called manual training, and the setting apart of a plot of
ground for garden work. The boys were supplied with seeds and tools
and put to work. We were much surprised to find that the ring-
leaders in" the evil were also the leaders in the good. They were very
enthusiastic when they found that they were going to do something
that was really worth while. It was much better than replacing win-
dow-panes and repairing other damage. It taught the boys industry
and perseverance. It improved their physical lives and had a lasting
moral influence upon them. Many of these boys have entered the
factory and have made the very best kind of apprentices and work-
men. Others have gone out into the world as journeymen workmen,
and most of them have been successful. We have followed their ca-
reers carefully because we early believed that there were great possi-
bilities of making useful citizens out of mischievous boys.
To clean up the unsightly surroundings it was found necessary to
do a great deal of neighborhood work. Due to vileness and unsightli-
uess and bad surroundings, it was impossible to procure the class of
help needed to manufacture a finished product of high grade. Skilled
358 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
labor would not come to Slidertown. To overcome the difficulty,
neigliborhood houses, or as we would call them today, social centers,
were provided. Lectures illustrated by crude slides were ni.ulc up to
illustrate the proper and improper way of beautifying the f^urround-
ings.
Good housing and beautiful surroundings have a whole lot to do
with the Avelfare and health of people. A backyard was improved
by a boy twelve years of age — just a little seed and a little bit of
hard work on the part of the boy. Furthermore, it stimulates
outdoor life. Efficient work unquestionably depends upon the
physical condition of the employee. From early days we have always
PLANT OF THE NATIONAL CASH REGISTER COMPANY, DAYTON, OHIO
believed that the efficiency of the worker is based upon health. As a
consecpience, for many years much of our type of instruction has had
to do with the general question of health, and I wish to say in this
connection that much of our finest inspiration has come from the
Battle Creek Sanitarium — First, Health.
You know the other slogan that the industries are using so much —
Safety First. They are both good. We do not believe it will be
necessary to produce many arguments as to the value of fresh air.
You would not think of putting an athlete into the basement of a
building to train for some athletic event and expect him to excel.
Fresh air is absolutely essential, of course. In our older type of
SCHOOL AND INDUSTRIAL HYGIENE
359
buildings, air is drawn in through a ventilating duct from the top
and distributed throughout the building. The aii* is changed evei^y
fifteen minutes. Some of our more modern buildings wash and
humidify the air and a very close regulation of temperature is, possibly.
One man spends his entire time regulating the -heat. of the buildings
and controlling ventilation. In our Polishing Departinejit ^nd
metal working rooms there is au exhaust system installed for carrying
away the metal dust. This dust is discharged into large bins. About
one week's accumulation is represented by nine barrels of this dust.
AN EXERCISING CLASS
This would have injured the eyes and lungs of the men if it had
not been removed by some such device.
The Company makes every effort possible to keep every department
just as clean and healthful as possible. The factory, in a sense,
is really located in a garden. Doctor Read said yesterday "that
flowers upon the table really produce a sort of psychic gastric
juice." Unquestionably, beautiful shrubbery and floAvers have a
somewhat analogous effect on our product. At least, we believe
better working conditions are closely related to good business.
360
FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
Shrubbery hides the foundations and walls, makes a hi-eak in the
line of the wall, adding very much to tlie beauty of the stirrouiidinji^s.
We are great believers in exercise. At ten o'clock in the morning
and at three in the afternoon, the windows in the office departments
are thrown open and the men and women indulge in light exercises.
"We have a gymnasium and health classes for increasing the
efficiency of the office force and the women employees. At the
TENNIS COURTS ADJACENT TO FACTORY
present time, these classes are under the direction of a Battle Creek
Sanitarium graduate.
The office clerks meet three times a week in the gymnasium after
working hours. The athletic fields surrounding the factorj^ are used
by employees before and after work and during the noon hour. They
consist of tennis courts, baseball grounds and gun club grounds.
About three miles south of the factory is located the country club,
which was established as a further incentive to outdoor exercise.
It is located on a portion of Hills and Dales, a 1,100-acre estate
owned by the President of the Company, which has been thrown
open as a playground not only to the employees and their families,
but to the citizens of Dayton as well. The club is nearly self-sup-
SCHOOL AND INDUSTRIAL HYGIENE
361
pointing, and every employee is eligible to membership. The member-
ship fee is $1.00 per year.
All kinds of athletic sports are particularly fostered for the sake of
the exercise and fresh air. Scattered throughout Hills and Dales are a
number of Adirondack Camps. These are fully equipped with big fire-
places and water supply, fuel supply, and potatoes are to be found
in the cupboards for baking. These camps are very popular and can
be used by any employee on application.
THE EMERGENCY HOSPITAL
The Woman's Century Club is composed of the women employees
nt the factory. Any woman employee is eligible. Its object is to pro-
mote the intellectual and social welfare of its members. Meetings
are held twice monthly. Prominent speakers are engaged from time
to time to address the club members. A vacation house located in
Hills and Dales is used by the Woman's Century Club for entertain-
ments, week-end parties, etc. Its main object is to teach the women
how to manage a home. The house will accommodate thirty girls. We
have about seven hundred women in the factory, and most of them are
at this club for at least a few days during the summer time. A Battle
Creek Sanitarium graduate was in charge last summer.
The NCR Riding Club is eligible to any employee owning a horse.
362 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
i
In fact, the company eneouragcs horseback riding because it l)rings
the men ont into the open air and gives tliem the exercise they need.
In order to encourage employees to take part in this exercise, the horses
are boarded in the Company's stables at cost.
Few people in the city are acquainted with the many beautiful
highways and lanes which are to be found in the neighboring country.
Nature study classes and walking classes make one realize that they
have neglected one great branch of education ; namely, that which
Nature teaches. If time would permit, a great deal of attention should
be paid to the various types of schools connected with all depart-
ments in our business. The future of any business is based upon
teaching.
The National Cash Register Company early brought the school
idea into the business, in order that merchants and business men
throughout the world might learn the best way for handling their
cash accounts. The company maintains training schools in various
parts of the world for its agents. They also have advertising, account-
ing, apprenticeship, physical training, salesmanship, and other classes,
meeting at regular intervals.
\ The water supply is very satisfactory. The factory secures this
Water from deep wells, samples of which are taken every two weeks
and analyzed and submitted to a bacteriological test. The office build-
ing is supplied with distilled water and individual cup service.
, Two hundred and twenty shower baths are distributed throughout
the factory. Every employee is given company time to take two
baths a week, and can have as many more as desired on his own
time.
Treatment rooms have been provided, modeled very much after
the hydrotherapy methods of the Sanitarium. Tliis is also in charge
of two Sanitarium graduates. The benefits to be derived are not
confined simply to the men higher up. Men in the shop needing
attention can have access to the baiths. We have a good many
health classes intended to increase the efficiency, particularly of our
sedentary workers. Much attention has been paid to food. Quite a
number of men have adopted the low-protein diet. They believe in
the advantages derived therefrom.
Our Officers' Club accommodates about six hundred people at
lunch. We serve a very wholesome; well-cooked dinner, very simple
and very plain. Food is k;ept hot in chafing dishes and served on
plates holding hot water.
Brushes and combs are sterilized dailv and washed in benzine, then
SCHOOL AND INDUSTRIAL HYGIENE 363
placed in sterilizers. Roller towels have been done away with, sub-
stituting individual hand towels. The girls are provided with sleeve-
lets and clean aprons every week. Umbrellas and overshoes are loaned
on rainy days. They are issued on checks and are returned the fol-
lowing day.
All new employees must undergo a physical examination. This is
done as a protection to those already employed. After employees are
accepted, great care is taken to protect them. We believe in periodic
examinations, but have not done very much along this line to date.
The employees have a strong voluntary Relief Association which
pays sick, accident and death benefits.
We also have an emergency hospital wh6re accidents are cared for.
Our accidents, however, are reduced to a minimum. This is due to
the safety devices with which all machines throughout the plant are
equipped. We have a trained nurse who visits our sick employees, in
their homes, offering suggestions and advice. It is far more economical
to keep employees well than to employ new ones in their places. An
oculist examines the eyes of our employees and decides when glasses
are needed. Free examination is afforded and the company pays half
of the price of the glasses.
A new building, called our Hall of Industrial Education was
erected recently. It is capable of seating about 1,200 people and
has. besides a large auditorium, a number of small school rooms.
We are thorough believers in teaching through the eye. In fact,
about eighty -five per cent of the knowledge which we acquire comes
through the eye. Consequently these lecture halls and school-
rooms are thoroughly equipped with projection apparatus. In the
large hall the projection is done from the rear through a glass screen.
Noise is eliminated and there is no danger of fire, both very attractive
features. This hall is aptly called our Power-House, and really is
more distinctly a power-house than the one housing our turbines,
engines, etc. Much of our time has been devoted to educational talks
on health, and we have many lectures on many different subjects.
Even a class of salesmen coming in to spend six M^eeks in study is given
quite a bit of training in hygiene. We believe in health education very
thoroughly. We endeavor to make these talks very simple. We try
for short words and big ideas. It is a very difficult matter to put up
a talk in physiology so simple that everybody can understand it. We
have talks on bacteria, common cold, constipation, and a great many
other allied subjects. It was the school idea that saved the day at
the time of the breakdown in 1892. We had to do something to over-
come the inertia or lack of interest in the work, so we started the
school idea and have been at it ever since.
3G4 FIUST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
Tlu' slitlos used ill tlu' I'arly (l;iys were extremely eriidc Despite
their enideness, however, they were of considerable value. Today our
collection totals somewhere around fifty thousand different slides. Our
belief in health education is not a recent move on our part, but dates
back many years. Our early literature had little excerpts and short
sayings relating to health. Moving picture films, if they have any
educational value, are utilized for educational purposes. Our weekly
paper helps to disseminate this type of information.
A large number of our office employees asked for a vegetarian table
voluntarily. It is very difficult to get the average man to understand
what we mean by protein, fat, carbohydrate, balanced diet, etc. We
spend a great deal of time trying to simplify this particular subject,
believing it to be one of the most important.
You will probably agree with us when we say that welfare work is
right, but you may be just a bit skeptical when we repeat it is an abso-
lute necessity in our business. AVe feel that we could not build a good
reliable, accurate cash register without it because no system of in-
spection has been devised that will give us the accuracy we want.
When an employee is not feeling well, he does poor work, and when an
inspector is not feeling well, he passes parts that he would not pass
ordinarily. Welfare work supplies just that which is lacking in the
inspection system. It brings the best there is out of each employee and
results in cooperation and team play. AVelfare work does not take
the place of wages. It costs us less than six cents per day per em-
ployee. For that six cents, we provide healthful surroundings,
personal comfort, recreation, education and training. We receive in
return much more than six cents' worth of efficiency from each em-
ployee. So welfare w^ork is not philanthropy. It is nothing more
than good common sense, and it pays.
CITY, STATE AND NATIONAL HYGIENE
FUNCTION OF INDIVIDUAL, CITY, STATE AND NATION IN
RACE BETTERMENT
{Letter to the President of the Conference)
Sir Horace Plunkett, K.C.V.O., F.R.S., Ex-Minister of AgTieulture
for Ireland, Dublin, Ireland.
The work for which I suppose I was born, calls me home. I
had hoped that I might remain and make a modest contribution
to the deliberations over which those of us who were consulted upon
the program and arrangements of the National Eace Betterment
Conference unanimously agreed that you were the ideal presiding
ofScer. But, as you know, Ireland just now needs all her workers,
and I must go.
The program you will have to get through is — to saj'- the least —
full; and no one need regret that I do not crowd out any of the
absorbingly interesting subjects which are to be treated, nearly all
by real experts, and not by laymen like myself. Moreover, I feel
that, as I cannot be present, the particular question I intended to
discuss, "The Function of the Individual, City, State and Nation in
Bringing about Eace Betterment," would better be left over, until,
as the result of the Conference's deliberations, we know the scope
of the work which has to be done to attain the end the Conference
has in view. Then only can the responsibility be divided and the
tasks assigned to the effective agencies, educational, administrative,
and propagandist, which must follow up the conclusions at which
the Conference arrives.
Will you allow me to make one suggestion (which is within
the province of the layman), relating to a real issue not directly
raised in any of the subjects announced for discussion, and yet in
a sense germane to nearly all of them. (My own life's work relates
to the rural side of our civilization, which I hold to have been badly
neglected.) The people of my own country are predominantly rural,
and my experience in studying and dealing practically with its
problems has brought me into embarrassingly intimate relations
with a numerous body of social workers in the rural sections of
the United States. These workers aim at a complete reconstruction
of rural life — an improvement of its technical and business methods
and of its domestic and social conditions. For reasons of national
importance and urgency^ — reasons economic, social, and political —
the settlement of a much greater proportion of the people upon the
365
366 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
farm lands of the country, in healthy, happy, and progressire com-
munities, is becoming every year increasingly the aim and object
of philanthropic endeavor. These workers believe that the country
offers a far better hope of race betterment than the city. But in
the neglect of rural problems, in the urbanization of all thought
which characterizes this age, there is very little statistical or other
material on which the rural reformer can base this part of his case.
Speaking as one of these workers, may I ask the Conference to
bear in mind the countryside, and to give us any help they can,
by way of counsel and advice, as to how we may re-enforce our
plea that country life is better for the race than city life, and how
we may, by applying the wisdom of the Conference, demonstrate
that truth. I won't promise to preach eugenics, because the prophets
of that science tell me that I had no business to be born. But in
any other direction I will be guided by you and the other scientists
over whom you will preside.
May I say in conclusion how glad I am that the Conference is,
by the choice of its meeting-place, doing honor to and enlarging the
influence of an institution and a body of workers for humanity
whose services have not, I think, been fully appreciated. You will
doubtless express far more clearly and with tenfold weight my own
estimate of Doctor Kellogg 's and his staff's efforts in teaching the
ignorant among us how to live that we may do well the work we
are here for. In anticipation, may I associate myself with all you
will say upon this.
I regret more than I can say that I cannot stand behind the
venerable physician and public servant whose life is the best in-
spiration my imagination can conceive for those who wish, as I do,
that the Conference may mark a memorable departure in philan-
thropic endeavor.
Miss M. E. Bingeman, Board of Education, Rochester, New York.
The city of Rochester, N. Y., has just adopted a new point of
view in this matter of municipal responsibility. It is beginning to
see that as it suffers economically from premature death, from un-
necessary inefficiency and unnecessary sickness, and that because
these three things are due in a general way to ignorance, it is the
function of the city to place within the reach of every person in
Rochester the necessary Icnowledge. Up to this time, people have
obtained their knowledge about these things in a haphazard way. They
obtained it from hearsay; they obtained it from the newspapers and.
CITY, STATE AND NATIONAL HYGIENE 367
from magazines. At the same time, from these same sources they
obtained very mistaken ideas. In sorting it for themselves, they are
not in a position to do it intelligently. In Rochester, the Women's
Educational and Industrial Union sent a petition, signed by three
thousand pastors, to the Board of Education, asking them to furnish
instruction in physiology, hygiene, nursing, first aid, dietetics, and
things of that description. The Board of Education has agreed to
do this. Beginning next Monday, such a course is to be offered in
the high school of the city. There will be a course of twelve weeks,
two lessons a week, one by the doctor and one by the nurse, of an hour
each, and in this course there is to be taught physiology and the care
of the child from birth to two years, from two years to twelve years,
hygiene, psychology of adolescence, first aid, emergencies, causes of
disease, prevention and recognition of disease, rational principles for
the cure of disease, household and civic hygiene, motherhood, and
things of that description.
If the women of Rochester appreciate this course by attending,
this work is to be enlarged, and every school in the city in turn is
to have this instruction offered, so that by and by this instruction
will be placed within walking distance of the women of the city.
There are to be classes whenever the women can come in— forenoon
classes, and^ if there is a demand for it, afternoon classes from four to
five, and evening classes in the evening schools. We believe that in
this way, with two teachers, one a doctor and one a nurse, we can
reach six hundred women a year if the women are ready to do it.
There is no reason why that six hundred should not be sixty
thousand if every other city does likewise.
COMMUNITY HYGIENE — WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO
MEAT INSPECTION
Rev. Caroline Bartlett Crane, A.M., Kalamazoo, Michigan.
If we may speak of the ''birth of cities," it must be admitted
that thus far eugenics has played but an unimportant part in their
production. Cities are born of unions founded on love and propin-
quity— love of money and propinquity to the main chance. Cities,
by their forebears affianced from birth to "Business," grow up
to bring forth a brood of good and evil offspring. They are proud
(sometimes not till years after) of their good offspring, while the
368 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
responsibility for the evil offsprin"- they lay onto the mother, sayinj;-
"Business is Business." When the evils become too numerous and
fierce, so as even to interfere with beloved "Business," this tyran-
nical dame consents, perforce, to the espousal of Hygeia, as a sort
of supplementary wnfe, to clean things up a bit.
And here is where and how Community Hygiene begins — outside
of a few modern and "model" industrial-and-army-camps, which
are the only eugenically-&or/i communities we have.
The genesis of certain important items of Community Hygiene
is strikingly illustrated in a far Western state, where recently I
made a sanitary survey of twelve cities. At this moment, in a com-
munity of some seven thousand persons, a typhoid epidemic is rag-
ing which has laid low more than two hundred persons in the first
fortnight, out of which number nine are now dead. Fresh cases are
developing daily. This epidemic is the natural and to-be-expected
outcome of a domestic water supply taken from a stream polluted
by the sewage of another community. For years the State Board
of Health has endeavored to persuade the city to purify the water.
At the same time it has been endeavoring in vain to persuade the
State Legislature to pass a Water and Sewage Bill (similar to that
now in effect in Pennsylvania), which would make such an epidemic
from such a source practically impossible. Now, after the event,
the State Board has had to come in and take charge of affairs, be-
cause there is no city or county health organization worth mention-
ing. The State Board has installed an emergency hypochlorite plant,
a supervision over milk and food, an emergency hospital and home
nursing service ; a systematic case-reporting scheme, a compre-
hensive clean-up campaign for the whole town, and free vaccination
of all the well against the disease.
In another city in that state, where public health work in general
is of an exceptionally high order, some twenty persons, mostly chil-
dren, are daily receiving Pasteur treatment. More than forty human
beings have been bitten recently by rabid dogs. The chief concern
of the city council seems to be to prevent this damaging fact from
getting abroad. To pass an ordinance for suppression of the cause
of hydrophobia would be to advertise the damaging fact of its ex-
istence. The first mad dog ever seen in the state was brought from
another state about a year ago. Rabies is now well entrenched in
a dozen cities and in the rural districts all up and down the coast-
side of that second state. In the metropolis of this same state some
twenty-five plague-infested rats have been discovered within the
last few weeks. The original plague-infested rats came by ship
from Asiatic ports. The city has already burned dow^i some 1,100
CITY, STATE AND NATIONAL HYGIENE 369
old buildings in a but partially successful struggle to be rid of rats.
These illustrations serve abundantly to point out the fact that
no community lives unto itself alone ; that community hygiene may
depend in no small part upon the behavior of neighboring (but un-
neighborly) communities; upon state laws and their administration;
upon national control of the movements of persons, animals, and
things transported from one state into or through another, to the
possible injury of public health; and upon such international regu-
lation as may prfevent the introduction into any portion of our coun-
try of disease or disease-producing factors from regions of the
world beyond our direct hygienic control.
Therefore, a proper division of function, and proper functioning
in each division of public health work is of vital concern to every
community. The "leading citizen" in the fever-stricken little city
above referred to, who was not afraid of the water because he had
been drinking it for seventeen years, is now in the emergency hospi-
tal. But he was a leading citizen, and he led his fellow-citizens in a
successful opposition to a Water and Sewage Bill which would have
given the State Board of Health some warrant to interfere with
their heaven-born right to drink whatever water they chose. Be-
sides, to have sanctioned the requirement that the city higher up
on the stream should treat its sewage before discharging it into the
river, would be a pointed suggestion to the city below to require as
much of them. And a sewage-disposal plant would mean a munici-
pal bond issue ; hence, not to be thought of.
But to the wise and discriminating person, it is evident that
each community must not only do its own part, but it must main-
tain a partnership in public hygiene with other communities, under
supervision of the state, which grants to municipal corporations all
the rights and privileges they possess, and which may naturally
be looked to to maintain substantial justice between these corpora-
tions; also, that states, and communities within states, may justly
expect the national government to exercise strongly, in behalf of
the general welfare, any power it may possess ; as, for example, the
power assumed to itself by what is known as the "Interstate and
Foreign Commerce clause" of the Federal Constitution.
I have been asked by your Committee to speak this evening on
"Community Hygiene, with Special Reference to Meat Inspection."
In such a scheme as I have described for division of health ad-
ministration between city, state, and nation, where would one natu-
rally expect meat inspection to fall? Meat shipped abroad would
need to be inspected and certified by our Federal Government.
Meat shipped from one state to another, becoming an article of in-
370 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
terstate eommorce, wonld also fall naturally to inspection by the
federal government. Meat slaughtered for consumption within
the state might be inspected and certified either by the state or by
the municipality in which it is to be offered for sale.
In an agricultural region such as surrounds thousands of cities
and villages in the United States, one would naturally expect that
the meat supply, like the milk supply, would be shipped in from
the surrounding country, and that each city might protect itself
against diseased or unwholesome meat by a propel ordinance and
a proper system of inspection. I believe that the general police
power conferred upon municipalities by most states includes the
power to bar from entrance into the city any meat whose sanitary
character or condition fails to comply with reasonable standards
set by the city in question. Just as a city, before it grants a milk
dealer's license, may send its inspectors across state lines to inspect
animals and stables and milk houses and may even require the
tuberculin test to be administered to cows, so a city may (and a
few cities in this country already do) require that all meats sold
therein shall either be slaughtered under municipal inspection, or
the carcasses elsewhere slaughtered shall be subject to inspection
before they are admitted to sale in the city.
As a matter of fact, local meat inspection has lagged very far
behind local milk inspection, and federal meat inspection is gener-
ally looked to in this country as a protection against diseased and
otherwise unwholesome meat and meat food products. Federal in-
spection, however, was not instituted for the sake of protecting the
American consumer. Nearly thirty years ago foreign countries
which purchased enormous quantities of American meats, began to
put restrictions upon our meats, especially pork, because of evi-
dence of disease. These countries, which carried on a systematic
inspection of their own meats, demanded that American meats
should be inspected ai;id certified before they could be admitted to
their markets. Thus, federal meat inspection was inaugurated
twenty-three years ago, not as a protection to American consumers,
but to restore to American packers an enormous but rapidly van-
ishing foreign trade.
Federal inspection assumed to cover all -meat shipped in either
foreign or interstate trade, since inspection was instituted under
sanction of the "interstate and foreign commerce clause" of the
federal constitution. But we find by admissions of later years that
only a small percentage of interstate shipments was inspected. JHow-
ever. the government guarantee, "U. S. Inspected and Passed." was
found to be a valuable asset, giving the great packer yet one more
CITY, STATE AND NATION^U. HYGIENE 371
advantage over the local independent butcher, and from year to
year more and more of the meat shipped interstate has borne the
federal stamp. Both the Department of Agriculture and the pack-
ers have made strenuous efforts to instil into the American mind
the belief that the stamp, "U. S. Inspected and Passed," is a safe
guarantee of the entire wholesomeness of the meat.
Were this true, we might well prefer the guarantee of our na-
tional government to that of any city or state.
But it is not true.
We all recall the "Jungle"' expose of 1906, followed by a storm
of popular disgust and indignation, a new law, new regulations and
a new meat inspection appropriation of three million dollars granted
by Congress for the express purpose of protecting the American
consumer. Since that time, the Department of Agriculture and
the packers have redoubled their efforts to win the confidence of
the American people. Many official bulletins and popular articles
have been issued, describing and guaranteeing the inspection, and
it is argued that if the most particular and suspiciously-inclined
countries in the world accept our government guarantee, surely the
people of this country should do the same.
But the fact is that the ''most particular countries" do not ac-
cept our meat inspection certificates without reservation or without
requiring tell-tale organs and glands to be left in their natural
attachments for reinspection at the point of entry, and that we have
never regained the degree of European confidence which was lost
in 1906.
Furthermore, Americans should know that when a foreign gov-
ernment or purchaser does accept the meat inspection guarantee
of our government, it is a different and vastly better guarantee
than our government gives to the American purchaser. In the
very law of 1906 is a cunningly hidden clause which requires the
inspection of the animal while it is alive, as well as the inspection
of the carcass, of all meat which goes abroad, by virtue of the fact
that no vessel can get clearance papers if it has on board any meat
from this country unless there is a certificate from the Department
of Agriculture saying that this meat, and also the animal from which
it was taken, has been inspected by federal inspectors and has been
found sound, wholesome, free from disease, and fit for human food.
Now, for Americans, this is not required; there is no certificate
— nothing except the stamp upon the meat, "U. S. Inspected and
Passed." The meat which goes abroad is really above the Regula-
tions, because the Regulations themselves permit the passing of car-
casses of animals which on inspection proved to have tuberculosis
372 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
distributed in several different portions of the body. The same with
lumpy jaw; the same with animals which are affected with tape-
worm cysts and with other parasites ; the same with animals which
are affected by cancer, and many other diseases. The Regulations
require the cutting out of the visibly diseased portion before the
carcass is released for food. However, I fancy that I need not
argue Avith this audience the danger of this proceeding. Take
cancer, for example :
Since we do not know the cause of cancer nor its method of
transmission, we are entirely unable to say that there is any stage
of the disease in which any of the meat of such an animal could be
safely eaten. When we reflect upon the eft'ect of even a fourth of
a grain of morphine upon a human body of two hundred pounds,
upon the inconceivably minute quantity of tetanus toxin which will
cause death, think how small a portion of the cancer cells, or
toxins, or whatever it is, might suffice to cause death; when we
reflect upon the terrible nature and increasing frequency with,
which it affects the stomach, intestines, liver and other organs of
the human abdominal cavity, how is it possible that such a "Regu-
lation" as this shall be allowed to stand?
If you will procure the Regulations of the Bureau of Animal
Industry of the Department of Agriculture (which were issued May
1st, 1908, and are the latest Regulations), you will find that what I
say it true, that these very Regulations permit the passing of the
meat of animals which, from my standpoint, at least, are seriously
diseased. But the certificate which is required to be sent with meat
which goes abroad would preclude the export of such meat unless
it is acknowledged that the export certificate is false. Therefore,
Americans are discriminated against through the very law which
was supposedly enacted for their special protection.
Not only is it true that there exists this discrimination against
Americans in the law and in the printed Regulations, but, also,
this fact: Within a few months following the new law of 1906, the
Chief of the Bureau of Animal Industry began to issue special in-
structions to inspectors subversive of the Regulations and even of
the law under which the Regulations were drawn. These special
instructions were carefully guarded from public knowledge. This
is made evident, not only from the prefatory notes placed at the
top of these confidential circulars, cautioning employees against
giving or showing copies to outsiders, but, also, by the contents
of these circulars, which are such as discretion Avould naturally lead
the Bureau to keep from knowledge of the public. An instance
CITY, STATE AND NATIONAL HYGIENE 373
or two will best serve to illustrate the character of these circulars
called "Service Announcements."
The Regulations prescribe that any organ or part of a carcass
which is the seat of a tumor, malignant or benign, or of abscesses,
suppurating sores and the like, shall be condemned. But a ' ' Service
Announcement" authorizes cutting out "benign" tumors and other
benign affections, and passing the remainder of an "otherwise
sound and fit organ." However, about a year later, in another
"Service Announcements" (Oct. 15, 1909), Chief A. D. Melvin, of
The Bureau of Animal Industry, relates that some five hundred
and eighty (580) cases of livers, bearing the stamp "U. S. Inspected
and Passed," have been seized and condemned by port medical
officers in England, because from twenty to thirty per cent (20%
to 30%) of the livers were mutilated and were therefore held to be
diseased. Wherefor, Chief Melvin notifies all inspectors that they
are not hereafter to certify for export livers and similar organs
from which portions have been cut out. All these delicacies were
to be reserved for home consumption. If we are to run such risks,
have we not a right to be forewarned by knowing what the regula-
tion and practice really are ; and, also, it is hardly to be tolerated
that we eat, not only our own quota of diseased and mutilated
organs, but Europe's quota also. Dr. W. A. Evans, former com-
missioner of health in the city of Chicago, was asked recently in
his Chicago Tribune column, whether a fish which has a cancer
was fit to eat. He replied that no one would eat a fish which has
a cancer if he knew it. I doubt if the general public would be any
more willing to eat the flesh of cancerous cows and hogs. Yet the
federal Regulations permit the stamping of such carcasses "U. S.
Inspected and Passed."
The Regulations specify that the head and tongue of all lumpy-
jawed cattle shall be condemned. But secret instructions authorize
inspectors to cut out mild ulcers from lumpy-jawed tongues, and
pass the tongues ; and a veterinary inspector who followed me on
the witness stand at the Nelson Meat Inspection Hearing * told of
* The dates and full text of the "Service Announcements" and other
orders here quoted may be found in Mrs. Bartlett Crane's published testi-
mony in support of Nelson Resolution, 512, before the House Committee on
Expenditures in the U. S. Department of Agriculture, May 8, 9, 10, 11, 1912;
also in a series of articles on "U. S. Inspected and Passed" by her, pub-
lished in the March, April, May, June and July (1912) issues of Pear-
son's Magazine. Also, in an address delivered before the City Club of
Philadelphia and published in their March. 1913, Bulletin. A lengthy re-
view of the Pearson's Articles, by Mr. Samuel Hopkins Adams, appears in
The Surveij for Sept. 6, 1913.
374 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
being reciuirod to cut sucli deep ulcers out of tongues that great
gaping holes resulted. At the conclusion of an address last July
before the City Club of Tacoma, a leading local packer arose in the
discussion and emphatically challenged my statements about the
passing of mutilated organs and lumpy- jaw tongues. He was cer-
tain that nothing of the kind was done by federal inspectors. That
afternoon, accompanied by several persons, including the wife of
the Mayor and a state and a city food inspector, I found in the
leading market in Tacoma, mutilated "U. S. Inspected and Passed"
livers, and a tongue bearing the same stamp, with a large deep coni-
cal hole at exactly the point where lumpy- jaw erosions usually
occur. This tongue was purchased and when the Mayor introduced
me at a mass meeting that evening, he caused this tongue to be
placed where any curious persons (including the Tacoma packer)
could procure a free view.
Much stress is rightly being laid today upon the well-known
practice of adulterating sausages by a large per cent of kiln-dried
cereal which will soak and hold an immense quantity of water.
This is a fraud which greatly lessens the food value. And yet, I
fancy, if people laiew what else goes into federally inspected
and certified sausages, it might tend to reconcile them to bread-
stuffs and HoO. The "Service Announcements" give much new
and needed light on this mystery which has long enshrouded the
composition of sausage. In 1910 the Department decided that
cows' udders and hogs' lungs should no longer go into sausage. But
hog skins, palates, snouts, ears, ox-lips, hogs' spleens, stomachs, and
livers are specifically mentioned as permitted ingredients of sausage.
As to sausage casing: The Regulations condemn intestinal cas-
ings affected with worm nodules, but by a "Service Announce-
ments" of July 15, 1910, it is permitted to scrape off worm nodules
"which are in such a stage of development as to be readily re-
moved." In "Service Announcements" we also learn facts about
packers' wilful but unpunished breaking of government car seals and
the manufacture and use of government inspection labels on unin-
spected meats; and palpable evidence of the packers' hand in the
administration of the meat inspection service. At the same time,
we learn of a small offender (not a packer) who shipped seventeen
veal carcasses, some of which were immature, across state lines and
who was fined five hundred dollars and sent for a year to the federal
prison in Atlanta.
I have but given illustration of the general character of these
confidential circulars to inspectors; not only "Service Announce-
ments" but also other series of circulars and typewritten and mimeo-
CITY, STATE AND NATIONAL HYGIENE 375
graphed instructions which not even a demand from Congressman
Nelson could procure from James AVilson, when he was Secretary
of Agriculture. Then there are the ''summer school instructions to
inspectors" signed by A. D. Melvin, still, I regret to say. Chief of
the Bureau of Animal Industry. Among the "decisions" promul-
gated by him in this school in 1909 is that on the carcass of a cow
with tuberculous lesion in bronchial, mediastinal, and mesenteric
glands, and "several small nodules, size of a walnut, in each lung."
' ' Disposition — Food. ' '
The Department claims that its Regulations have the endorse-
ment of a commission of eminent scientists. I have fully answered
their claim in my testimony and published articles. It must suffice
here to say that the opinions of a majority of the commission were
ascertained before they were appointed by the Department under
investigation ; that several of them were or had been connected
with the Bureau Service : that a very strong preliminary statement
was made to them of the necessity of saving from destruction as
much meat as was safely possible ; that the packers knew of this
meeting and had their representative there ; that, apparently, no
one was. present to represent the people ; that this Commission drew
very fine scientific lines, presupposing a quality of inspection such
as, in fact, is never carried out, nor even alleged to be carried out,
in any packing establishment I have any knowledge of; that by the
skilful change and omission of a few words the recommendations
of the Commission were emasculated of their most vital safeguards ;
and, that, by numerous secret orders made thereafter, they were
further set at naught; notwithstanding which the Bureau goes on
quoting the Commission of 1906 as if it endorsed every practice of
the service up to the present hour.
How much, if any, real reform has taken place in this debauched
meat inspection service since the beginning of the new administra-
tion, I am unable to say. So long as the man who has allowed
things to come to such a pass is still Chief of the Bureau of Animal
Industry, I am wholly unable to believe that we will ever have a
federal meat inspection service in the real interests of the Ameri-
caji consumer.
But we are not necessarily dependent on federal meat inspec-
tion. The remedy is to make meat inspection a detail of Community
Hygiene. There is no advantage from a sanitary or economic view-
point in shipping cattle a thousand miles or so to a packer to be
slaughtered, then shipping the meat back, with all the attending
loss and deterioration and the increased prices. We want to foster
local packing houses and local stock yards. We want to build up the
376 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
sto(.'k-i-aisiiiii- industry around about our own communities. We must
not expect help by getting our meats from Argentina. The great
American packers having skimmed the cream oft* the beef-producing
industry in this country, have established themselves early in South
America, and today hold the balance of control in those countries
and are not going to ship meat to this country to compete with their
own prices here, as long as they have a good market for South
American meat abroad. We want to cultivate our own stock-rais-
ing industry, a commercial as well as sanitary benefit to all our
people.
Then we should let the label tell the truth, whether upon locally
or federally inspected meat. If there are people willing to eat meat
from tuberculous and cancerous carcasses, let them; but let them
also know what they are eating by the use of a special stamp or
designation which conveys that knowledge. However, let us de-
mand that persons who wish to eat meat — but only if it is from ani-
mals free from disease — may have the means of knowing how to ob-
tain such meat.
We should do all we can to bring about a reform in our disgraced
federal service; but, also, we should promote local inspection of
a high order. In Paris, Texas (the home of the first real municipal
abattoir in this country), in Montgomery, Ala., and recently in
Charleston, S. C, are three good examples of what may be done
through local inspection. It is for any community to put the stand-
ard just as high as it will. In the matter of a milk supply, each
city may decide for itself how many bacteria per cubic centimeter
will be allowed, and all other details of milk inspection. In the
same manner, a city can decide exactly what standards it will have
for its meat supply. Here is a department of "Community Hy-
giene" which has been long and most unjustifiably neglected and
one which I earnestly commend to this Conference, and to all mem-
bers who feel an interest in the purity of the public food supply, the
purity of governmental administration, and the prosperity of agri-
culture in this country.
THE NATIONAL DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH
Introductory Remarks
President Stephen Smith, M.D., New York, N. Y.
The history of what was called the National Board of Health
dates from 1878 to 1884. The agitation for it began as early as 1873,
and originated at the first meeting of the American Public Health
CITY, STATE AND NATIONAL HYGIENE 377
Association, which had been organized for the purpose of co-ordinating
all the diiferent boards of health of the country, as far as possible, in
general work, and the promotion of the public health.
During that period the opinion prevailed that there should be not
only a municipal authority and a state authority, but also a national
authority — very much on the plan of the organization of the general
government ; that is, a municipal board of health confining its activities
to the city, a state board to the state at large, and a national board to
those interests that affect the community generally, but with which
neither the municipal nor state boards deal. The first suggestion was
made by the then health officer of the city of Washington, who was
prominent in the first movement to organize a national board of
health, but it took no form, nor was there any organized plan of
securing a national board until considerably later.
The greatest obstacle to a National Board was the State Rights
idea. There was a disposition on the part of the members of the
Congress to ignore altogether the possibility of a board of health that
in any way should interfere with local boards, state and municipal.
The objection to the board was altogether wrong in that respect. It
was not intended by those who were in the original movement to in-
terfere any further than the national government noAv interferes with
the affairs of states and cities. Not much headway was made for
several years, but when the great epidemic of yellow fever in 1878
came, its ravages were so great that neither the municipal nor state
boards in the South could control it. There was a call for general aid,
not from the government, but from voluntary organizations. Among
the contributors to that fund was a Mrs. Thompson, of New York,
mth very large ideas as to her duty in the use of her wealth. She
contributed a very large sum to what was then known as the ]\Iarine
Hospital Service, the head of which at that time was Doctor Wood-
ward. He was deputed rather to use that fund in the South, as far as
possible, in relieving distress and promoting efforts to control the
progress of the epidemic. Through him there was a commission sent
out to visit the South after the epidemic had subsided, and to study the
question of yellow fever and its prevention. IMrs. Thompson made
prevention a special feature of her donation, urging that the cause of
.yellow fever be sought and legislation secured or such action as was
necessary to prevent the invasion of yellow fever from that time
forth.
The idea gradually took root in the minds of sanitarians that
there was a need of a great deal more thorough work, not so much
in an investigation of the results of the yellow fever epidemic, as in
378 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
methods by which control could be exercised over the quarantines
of the country in preventing the admission of yellow^ fever.
The first bill introduced into Congress was in 1879. I drew the
bill on the plan of the Agricultural Department, which was then a
comparatively new body and had as the chief officer a member of the
Cabinet. The plan fitted exactly the idea we had of what a national
board should be. It provided for a Minister or Secretary of Health,
who should be a member of the Cabinet, and provided that the organi-
zation should take the form of a Department of Government in the
general work of promoting public health, in coordinating as far as
possible all the energies of the country to prevent epidemics coming,
and to control all our quarantines. It was introduced into the Senate
by Senator Lamar, of Mississippi, but it went into the pigeon-hole of
the committee and never appeared again. Toward the close of that
epidemic the South became very much changed in regard to the State
Rights doctrine. The authorities found they had to call on the country
at large for help. The question arose. Why should not the national
government aid us in these extremities? State Rights — the
popularity of the old doctrine of State Rights — gradually subsided
under the pressure of the epidemic and its devastations all through
the South, and in 1879 the opinion had become very strong that Con-
gress should take some action. A bill was then prepared that created
a National Board of Health, but it was drawn in such form as to be of
temporary effect. It was rather a board for investigation, to study the
question as to whether there should be a National Department of
Health. It had the power of investigation and it had an appropria-
tion, I think, of $50,000 for this temporary work. It was at first
limited to one year of existence, but finally it was allowed a lifetime of
four years. It did a very great work in the way of general investiga-
tion as to the conditions of our quarantines, published a good deal of
matter on that subject and most of the quarantines were visited. I
visited a large number with the committee, and prepared a report that
proposed that all the quarantines of the country should be placed
under national authority and all should be organized on a like ef-
fectual basis. ]\Iany quarantines were useless. Perhaps the worst
managed in the list was the one at New York. The suggestion that
quarantines should be under the general government had considerable
force and has gradually been really carried out.
The Marine Hospital Service, naturally jealous of its powers — al-
though it did not have under this original construction any health
duties to perform — began to agitate the question. Why should not the
Marine Hospital Service control these quarantines? The Secretary
CITY, STATE AND NATIONAL HYGIENE 379
of the Treasury, in 1880, I think it was, recommended that the Marine
Hospital Service should organize and manage quarantines where none
existed. That was the beginning of a national authority governing
quarantines. It has now gone so far that they are very largely under
the management of the Marine Hospital Service, and are in infinitely
better condition than they ever were before. They ought all to be put
under a national authority, with such rules and regulations as those
that govern the quarantines of Great Britain, the best organized,
probably, in the world.
In 1882, the Marine Hospital Service applied to the Secretary
of the Treasury to have that fund of the National Board transferred
to its use. Under the direction of President Arthur, this fund was
turned over to the Marine Hospital Service, which act deprived the
National Board of all means of active duty. Practically that was
the end of the National Board.
THE NATIONAL DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH
Henry Bated Favill, M.D., Professor of Therapeutics, Rush Medical
College; Chainiian Committee on Health and Public Insti-uction of the
American Medical Association, Chicago, Illinois.
In discussing the proposition of a National Department of Health
before this Conference, I assume that it is unnecessary to occupy
any time in presenting arguments for the necessity or importance
of such an addition to the Executive Department of the Govern-
ment. It is equally unnecessary to present arguments in justifica-
tion of this movement or in refutation of the objections and criti-
cisms which have been advanced by its opponents, or to devote
any time to the discussion of a Bureau vs. a Department, or to
the exact details of organization or of subdivision of such a De-
partment.
As the Chairman of the Council on Health and Public Instruc-
tion of the American Medical Association, the only justification
for my appearance on the program on this subject is to present
the attitude of the organized medical profession. On this subject
there is not and never has been the slightest uncertainty. When
the records of the American Medical Association for the past sixty
years are reviewed critically, one cannot but be impressed by the
remarkable unity of purpose which has characterized the profession
through successive generations. The first important point, there-
fore, to which I wish to call your attention is that the American
IMedical Association, as representing the scientific medical profession
380 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
of the United States, has throughout its entire history stood un-
compromisingly and unequivocally for a National Department of
Health as a part of the executive branch of government. The first
mention of such a plan appears in the proceedings of the American
]\redical Association for 1871, shortly after the organization of state
boards of health in IMassachusetts and California, the proposal first
taking the form of a voluntary council made up of representatives
from the various state boards of health. In the following year,
however, a resolution was presented, asking Congress to establish
a National Sanitary Bureau. In 1873, the President of the Asso-
ciation stated that a bill for this purpose had recently been intro-
duced into Congress. In 1874 the question was discussed by the
Chairman of the Section on State Medicine under the title "The
Waste of Life," in which most of the subjects which would now
be regarded as coming under the conservation of human vitality
were considered and the organization of state and national de-
partments of health was urged. During the following years dis-
cussion of the questions continued, and various bills were intro-
duced in Congress, culminating, in 1879. in the adoption of a bill in-
troduced by Mr. McGowan, of Michigan, establishing a national
board of health, one of the duties of which was to report to Congress
a plan for a National Health Organization. This board, for various
reasons, failed to take advantage of its opportunities and, in 1883,
went out of existence, through the failure of Congress to make any
appropriation for its maintenance. In 1886 a bill was introduced
in the House of Representatives by Hon. Robert T. Davis, of Massa-
chusetts, providing for a Bureau of Public Health in the Depart-
ment of the Interior. In 1891 a bill was introduced in the Lower
House providing for a Department of Public Health to include the
Marine Hospital Service, the Bureau of Education, the Divisions
of Vital Statistics, Animal Diseases, and the Weather Bureau. In
1892 a bill was introduced in the Senate by Hon. John Sherman,
of Ohio, and in the House of Representatives by Hon. John A. Col-
well. In 1897, what later came to be known as the Spooner Bill,
was introduced in the Senate by Senator Spooner, of Wisconsin,
and in the House of Representatives by Mr. Otjen. None of these
bills went further than the Committee stage. At the 1907 session
of the American Medical Association, the Committee on Medical
Legislation reported that a preliminary draft of a bill creating a
National Department of Health had been drawn up by Doctor
Barshfeld, a member of the Lower House from Pennsylvania ; that
the American Association for the Advancement of Science had
created a Committee of One Hundred on National Health to consider
CITY, STATE AND NATIONAL HYGIENE 381
methods for establishing- a National Department of Health; that the
draft of Doctor Barshf eld's bill had been turned over to Prof. Irving
Fisher, President of the Committee of One Hundred, in order that it
might be redrafted by some legal member of that Committee. The
Reference Committee recommended and the Association voted that the
details of the plan be left to the Committee of One Hundred, to
which the Association pledged its support.
There was no further agitation on the subject until Feb. 10, 1910,
when Robert L. Owen, Senator from Oklahoma, introduced into the
United States Senate, S. B. 6049. This bill, the original Owen bill,
provided for a Department of Public Health, under the supervision
of a Secretary of Public Health, who should be a member of the
cabinet. In this department should be assembled all divisions and
bureaus belonging to any department, except the Department of
War and the Department of the Navy, affecting the medical, surgi-
cal, biologic and sanitary services, including the Public Health and
Marine Hospital Service, the Revenue Cutter Service, the Medical
Staff of the Pension Office, Indian Bureau, Department of the In-
terior, Old Soldiers' Homes, Government Hospitals for the Insane
and the Freedmen's Hospital, the Bureaus of Entomology. Chem-
istry and Animal Industry of the Department of Agriculture, the
hospitals of the Immigration Bureau of the Department of Com-
merce and Labor, the Emergency Service of the Government Print-
ing Office, and all other agencies in the United States Government
for the protection of human or animal life. This bill undertook the
organization of a Department of Health by assembling existing
parts of the government machinery in a new department, instead
of creating a department de novo. The Department of Public
Health was given jurisdiction over all matters within the control
of the federal government relating to human or animal health and
life. The establishment of bureaus of biology, chemistry, veterinary
service and sanitary engineering was authorized. This bill was
referred to the Senate Committee on Public Health and National
Quarantine, before which were held during the year following its
introduction a large number of hearings. It was never reported
on, and died in committee with the expiration of the Sixty-first
Congress.
The Second Owen bill (S. 1) was introduced by Senator Owen,
April 6. 1911. This bill provided for a Department of Health, pre-
sided over by a Director of Health and an assistant to be known
as the Commissioner of Health, both to be appointed by the Presi-
dent. The commissioner was required to be a skilled sanitarian.
The director was to be an executive officer. The Department of
382 FIRST XATIONAT; CONPERKNCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
Healtli was to foster and promote all matters pertaining to the con-
servation of public health, and to collect and disseminate informa-
tion relating- thereto. It was expressly provided that this depart-
ment should not exercise any function belonging to a state without
express invitation from the governor of the state, or enter any
premises in any state without the consent of the owner or occu-
pant thereof. These two provisos were to meet the objections of
the advocates of State Rights and personal liberty. To this depart-
ment were to be transferred the Public Health and Marine Hospi-
tal Service from the Department of the Treasury, from the Depart-
ment of Agriculture that part of the Bureau of Chemistry charged
with the administration of the Food and Drugs Act, and from the
Department of Commerce and Labor the Division of Vital Sta-
tistics of the Bureau of the Census. The President was authorized
to transfer at any time, either in whole or in part, any bureau or
division of the government engaged in work pertaining to public
health, except the Medical Department of the Army and the Bureau
of Medicine and Surgery of the Navy. Provision was made for the
organization of the following bureaus : Sanitary Research, Child
Hygiene, Vital Statistics and Publications, Foods and Drugs, Quar-
antine, Sanitary Engineering, Government Hospitals and Personnel
and Accounts. An advisory board of seven was provided for, and
provisions were made for cooperation with the health authorities
in the various states.
This bill was referred to the Senate Committee on Public Health
and National Quarantine, where it remained for almost a year, at
the end of which time it was reported on favorably, but with amend-
ments that practically amounted to a new bill. As reported out of
the committee, April 13, 1912, the bill provided for an independent
establishment known as the United States Public Health Service,
with a Director of Health as the head. Under the director were to
be three assistants known as commissioners of health, two of M^hom
were to be skilled sanitarians and one a skilled statistician. The
present heads of the Public Health Service, the Bureau of Chemistry
and the Division of Vital Statistics were constituted the three com-
missioners. The duties of this health service were practically the
same as those in the previous bill, with the proviso that the health
service should have no power to regulate the practice of medicine
or to interfere with the right of any citizen to employ the practi-
tioner of his choice, and that all appointments should be made with-
out discrimination in favor of or against any school of medicine or
healing. These restrictions were inserted in order to meet the ob-
jections of those who thought that the liberty of the individual in
CITY, STATE AND NATIONAL HYGIENE 383
selecting his medical attendant would be interfered with. The
bureaus created were slightly different from those in the preceding
bill, being bureaus of the Public Health Service, Foods and Drugs,
Vital Statistics, Child Conservation, Sanitary Engineering, Person-
nel and Accounts, and Publications.
Following the report of the committee, April 13, 1912, the bill
was placed on the Senate calendar as Calendar No. 561, where it
remained until Feb. 3, 1913, when it was called up on motion of
Senator Owen that the Senate proceed to the consideration of this
bill. On this motion the vote was a tie, 33 to 33. The bill was,
accordingly, not taken up, and died at the expiration of the Sixty-
second Congress.
April 7, 1913, in the opening sessions of the Sixty-third Congress,
Senator Owen introduced as Senate Bill 1 a third bill. This bill
was referred to the Senate Committee on Public Health and Na-
tional Quarantine.
In the light of this record I feel justified in advancing the fol-
lowing propositions as generally accepted :
1. The necessity of some central federal health organization is
agreed upon by all those familiar with the situation.
2. While recognizing the paramount importance of state activi-
ties, owing to our existing form of government, the importance of
federal activities cannot be overestimated.
3. The initiative of the present movement is largely due to the
activity of the American Association for the Advancement of Science
in the organization of the Committee of One Hundred, which move-
ment has been, from its beginning,. endorsed and supported by the
American Medical Association.
4. The American Medical Association is and always has been
fully committed, by its repeatedly expressed opinion and official
records, to the support of a National Department of Health.
While the direct results secured by the efforts of the past forty
years may not be entirely gratifying to the friends of this move-
ment, the indirect or reflex effect of the continued agitation for
better public health organization has been the stimulation of public
health functions, both of the federal government and of the various
states. It is safe to say that the present United States Public Health
Service would never have reached the present state of effectiveness
without the stimulation of the agitation and discussion of this ques-
tion which has been carried on. Organized in 1789, there was very
little change in its function or activities for nearly one hundred
years, its work being limited to the care of the sailors of the Mer-
chant Marine. In 1871 Congress placed the supervision of national
384 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
quaraiitiiie in the liands of the Service. In 1899 the name was
ehanoed to the United States Public Health and Marine Hospital
Service. The medical service was reorganized, the hygienic labora-
tories were established, and in 1912 the name was again changed
to the United States Public Health Service, and the medical officers
were placed on the same basis as those of the Army and Navy and
the functions of the Bureau were considerably widened.
The part which the American Medical Association has taken in
the campaigns and discussions of the past four years are too well
known to require recital.
Following the advent of the new administration and the calling
of a special session of Congress last April, a conference was held
in Washington on Monday, May 5, attended by the Council on
Health and Public Instruction, and the Special Committee on Na-
tional Health Legislation of the American Medical Association
and the Executive Committee of the Committee of One Hundred
of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. After
protracted discussion, Professor Fisher formulated a program which
was unanimously adopted. This program included the following
points :
First : Appoint a committee to see President "Wilson tomorrow,
May 6, at 10.45, and communicate to him the results of our confer-
ence and request him to decide upon an administration policy con-
cerning public health legislation.
Second : Recommend to President Wilson that he definitely advo-
cate the establishment of a Department of Health.
Third : That he cooperate with Representative Foster in attempt-
ing to secure a Committee on Public Health in the House of Repre-
sentatives during the present special session.
Fourth : That he call a White House Conference on Public Health
next fall somewhat similar to the Governors' Conference on Con-
servation called by President Roosevelt. The object of this confer-
ence is to promote the success of the President's policies and if nec-
essary to aid in framing these policies.
Fifth : That at the next regular session the President should send
a special message favoring public health legislation or else empha-
size it in his regular annual message.
Sixth: That the President should select for the first assistant
Secretary of the Treasury someone interested in public health.
Seventh : That in the next regular session we should support the
President in securing such public health legislation as he decides to
recommend.
I call your attention to the fact that the program adopted by
CITY, STATE AND NATIONAL HYGIENE SSij
the representatives of the American Medical Association and the
American Association for the Advancement of Science pledged these
two bodies to the support of such a program for public health legis-
lation as President Wilson may see fit to recommend at the next
regular session of Congress, and that the record so far established
by President Wilson in securing from Congress advanced and con-
structive legislation in accordance with a definite policy justifies
the conviction that when this subject is next taken up in Congress,
it will be as an administration measure having the support of the
dominant party in both Houses of Congress and the approval of
the general public. In the meantime and in anticipation of such
a situation, the Council of the American Medical Association is
going steadily forward in its campaign of public education on health
topics, recognizing the fact that an active and intelligent public
interest and support is of the first necessity in securing the estab-
lishment of this Department of Health, for which the Association
has steadfastly stood during its entire existence.
WHAT THE UNITED STATES PUBLIC HEALTH SERVICE IS DOING
FOR RACE BETTERMENT
H, W. Austin, M.D., United States Public Health Service, Detroit, Michigan.
I had no intention of reading a paper or speaking before this
assembly until a day or two ago. I was delegated to attend this
meeting. I was told at that time that I was not to read a paper,
but that I was simply to be here and hear what was to be said. But
one of your officers asked me a few days ago to write something
on what the Public Health Service is doing in the matter of race
betterment, and I could not very well refuse, although what I have
to offer will be very short and perhaps not very interesting.
The importance of eugenics to the welfare of the state or na-
tion was recognized by statesmen, philosophers, physicians and
poets in the early Grrecian civilization and has, since that remote
period, engaged the attention in some degree of the governments
and the people of various nations.
The measures that have been taken, or that have been recom-
mended for race betterment, are as numerous and varied as are the
opinions of the present day as to what is the chief factor in race
improvement. In the dialogues of Plato, in his construction of a
perfect republic, he provides for the improvement of the race by
requiring that perfect men shall marry only perfect women, and
the imperfect type of men shall marry only the imperfect type of
(14)
38G FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACP: BKTTERIvrENT
women. That the proper officers will take the offspring of the good
parents to the fold and deposit them with certain nurses in a sepa-
rate quarter, but the offspring of the infirm, or of the better class
when they chance to be deformed, will be put away in some mys-
terious, unknown place, as they should be. He further provides
that the j)roper genetic period for man is from twenty-five to fifty-
five years, tliat for women twenty to forty-five, and that children
born after these ages of the parents respectively, shall be kept sepa-
rate. These ideas would hardly meet with popular approval at this
time, any more than they did in the time when they were first
written, but there are intelligent men in this day who, with some
modifications, hold similar views as to race betterment.
As previously stated, opinions now differ as to the principal
factor in race improvement and any one of the following is fre-
quently offered: education, physical training, religious instruction,
medical instruction, temperance, chastity, proper mating, sanitary
environment during childhood, hygienic diet, clothing and housing,
social reform, especially in the way of amusements for all ages ;
proper marriage laws, laws to prevent the multiplication of the
weak-minded, criminals, and those who have been insane, by ster-
ilization. U/ndoubtedly all of these may be useful — at least under
certain conditions — and come within the broad scope of the term
eugenics, now usually defined as race betterment. However, in our
own minds, when we think of the urgent necessity of doing some-
thing in this direction, the foremost argument is the rapidly in-
creasing number of insane, feeble-minded, degenerate, and other
mental defectives that are becoming a heavy burden upon the
state or a menace to society at large. Then we examine carefully
as to the cause of this increase in the number of insane, feeble-
minded, degenerate, etc., and find evidence that leads us to believe
that in many of these mental defectives the cause can be traced
to some disease, inherited or acquired.
There is, however, no evidence of disease, acquired or inherited,
in very many similar cases, so that the preventive measures which
we would adopt in one class would not or might not be equally
serviceable in the other. Such diseases as chronic alcoholism,
syphilis, excessive venery or gonorrhea are frequentlj^ attributed
as the original or primary cause of the degenerate or mentally de-
fective. It is not always possible to trace inherited diseases; they
may not be evident in sfeveral generations and then reappear in
some form in some one of a later generation. The Mendelian laws
of heredity, I believe, are applicable to certain transmitted dis-
eases as well as to peculiar traits of character and normal physio-
CITY, STATE AND NATIONAL, HYGIENE ' . 387
logical development. While this is true, it is equally true that in a
large majority of the insane, degenerate, or other mental defectives,
we do not know the actual cause or origin of their deficiency. There
may be other diseases or nervous conditions that at present we
know nothing of, which retard mental or physiological develop-
ment. It is but recently that the cause of the mentally and phys-
ically indolent among the poor in some of the Southern States and
in Porto Rico was known to be due to uncinariasis, or hookworm.
I merely mention a few of these well-known facts with the view
of showing the complexity of the subject and of the difficulties in
the way of attempting to accomplish at once the ideal or desired
result by any single method or remedy. Uniform and proper mar-
riage laws that would prevent the innocent from contracting dis-
ease and that would tend to improve the offspring are desirable;
but syphilis and other venereal diseases may be, and often are, con-
tracted by men and even women who were free from the disease
prior to marriage. Therefore to eliminate syphilis as a cause of
mental and physical degeneracy, one must resort to education as to
the terrible results of this disease, to religious and moral education,
and to preventive medicine and therapeutics.
Special laws to prevent the propagation of defectives, such as
the chronic insane, the feeble-minded, epileptics, the degenerate
and habitual criminals, would accomplish much in the way of race
betterment provided they could be wisely drawn and wisely exe-
cuted. There are, however, many difficulties to be overcome before
the successful accomplishment of this end. I believe a few states
have laws authorizing the sterilization of defectives, and that these
laws have never been executed. The laws may be defective, or un-
constitutional, or public opinion may oppose the enforcement of
the same. Legislation has been enacted in many states for the pur-
pose of preventing the spread of venereal diseases by marriage,
but many of these laws have not been carefully or wisely prepared
and are faulty. In legislation, as well as in social reform work in-
tended for race betterment, in which individual liberty is con-
cerned, it is essential that we first have an actual knowledge or
some understanding of the evils which we are endeavoring to
remedy.
Further scientific investigations are necessary to accurately de-
termine the causes of the various forms of insanity and other mental
defects, and the cause of their rapid increase in number, and also
the best method to be adopted to prevent their multiplication. That
which is now actually known should be frequently published, and
the public educated in all matters relating to their physical, mental^
388 FIRST NATIONAI; CONFEKENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
ami moral well-boing-. Public discussion of the subject in which
men and women of national reputation take part, which may appear
in the public press, would do much to educate the public and ad-
vance the cause of race betterment.
As the wisdom and stability of the government rests upou the
intellig:ence of the people, the government should, in its legislative
and administrative functions, do everything possible to promot<?
race betterment, and it is doing much in this direction at the present
time. I have been asked to say something as to what the United
States Public Health Service is doing for race betterment, and I
will mention some of the public health work that is being done by
the officers of the Service which tends to race betterment. In fact,
it might be broadly stated that all public health work promotes
race betterment. Under the direction of the Surgeon-General, medi-
cal officers of the Service are constantly making investigations
throughout the country as to the cause of unusual outbreaks of
disease, publishing and distributing the result of their investiga-
tions. When the state or municipality in which the disease occurs,
requests it, they aid the state or municipal health authorities in the
suppression or eradication of diseases. As examples to illustrate
some of this work I will mention the pellagra investigation now
being made in several Southern states ; sanitary investigations as to
the prevalence of malarial fevers in certain Southern states; sani-
tary investigations as to the cause and prevalence of hookworm
diseases in the United States and Porto Rico, and the work of aid-
ing in the eradication of the same. Investigations are being made
as to the cause of various outbreaks of typhoid fever, diphtheria,
infantile paralysis, typhus fever. Rocky Mountain spotted fever, etc.,
in the TTnited States. Extensive examinations are being made of
the waters of the Great Lakes and the rivers of the United States
to determine the amount and character of their pollution. Com-
plete sanitary surveys are being made of all dairy farms, including
the production and transportation of milk, and the microscopic ex-
amination of the milk supplies of a large city. A report covering
several hundred pages on this subject was published and distributed
to the health authorities of the United States.
Under the National Quarantine Act the suppression of epi-
demics becomes the duty of the Service. In illustration of the work
I will mention that done by the Service in the suppression of the
yellow fever epidemic in New Orleans in 1905, and that done in
San Francisco in the suppression and eradication of plague in 1909.
Under the National Quarantine law the Service has established and
maintains quarantine stations at the large ports of entry, to pre-
CITY, STATE AND NATIONAL HYGIENE 389
vent the entrance of epidemic diseases, and international border
quarantine for the same purpose has also at times been established.
Almost from the beginning of this government, it has provided
marine hospitals at the large ports of entry, where all American
sailors could be cared for when they were sick or injured. The
administration of these hospitals is one of the functions of the
Service. There arc, I think, some features of this hospital work
that are closely allied with public health and eugenics, as, for in-
stance, the isolation and cure of many cases of syphilis and tuber-
culosis. The Service has established a tuberculosis sanatorium in
New Mexico, where tuberculous patients who have been received
in United States marine hospitals are sent. The result of this cli-
matic treatment is most satisfactory.
The establishment of the Hygienic Laboratory in Washington
some years ago was a great and most useful advancement of the
pubic health function of the government. In this laboratory there
are a large number of medical officers constantly engaged in scien-
tific research work in preventive medicine. Publication of their
work is distributed to those interested in public health matters.
The Public Health Reports, issued in weekly numbers by the
United States Public Health Service, contain morbidity and mor-
tality statistics of contagious or infectious diseases collected in va-
rious countries throughout the world, also much other information
relating to hygiene. These reports are distributed freely to all
health authorities and others especially interested in public health
matters.
The public health work of the medical officers of the Service in
the Philippines, Hawaii, and Alaska, includes laboratory investiga-
tions of the many diseases peculiar to those countries.
The function of the Service most closely related to eugenics or
race betterment (considering this country alone) is the exclusion
from this country of immigrants who are insane or feeble-minded;
those suffering from contagious, infectious, or loathsome diseases
and other physical or mental defectives. This is a tremendous work,
most difficult, and exceedingly important to the welfare of the na-
tion. I can only mention it in this paper. The medical examina-
tion to determine whether there are any mental or physical de-
fectives among the one million arriving immigrants at Ellis Island,
New York, during a year (occasionally five thousand during one
day) is, from the race-betterment standpoint in so far as it relates
to this country, most important. To detect the feeble-minded and
certain types of insanity without detention for observation is a
problem. It is well known that expert alienists take considerable
390 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
time to decide whether certain cases are really insane. The neces-
sary classification and sifting of those who are mentally defective,
among immigrants whose language and conditions of life are so
different from ours, is difficult, owing to the limited time allowed
for the inspections. However, the medical officers engaged in this
duty for a considerable period of time become expert in detecting,
during the usual rapid inspections, either mental or physical de-
fectives.
- Officers of the Public Health Service frequently address public
assemblies upon subjects relating to hygiene or preventive medi-
cine, and take part in popular campaigns against disease such as
tuberculosis, malaria, pellagra, etc.
I have but briefly outlined some of the functions of the United
States Public Health Service which are concerned in race better-
ment and which in general are along the lines of hygiene. Ad-
mitting that proper selection in mating is an important factor in
race betterment and that proper education of the people in this
direction would be useful, I believe that environment and all that
is included Avithin this term has very much to do with race improve-
ment.
THE COST OF HIGH LIVING AS A FACTOR IN RACE
DEGENERACY AND LIMITATION OF FAMILIES
J. N. HuRTT, M.D., Commissioner of Health, State of Indiana, Indianapolis,
Indiana.
I have to speak upon the subject of the high cost of living as re-
lated to race degeneracy. That it has an effect upon race degeneracy
or race betterment, whichever it may be, I have no doubt. I think if
we examine it carefully, if we go into it profoundly, we will find that
the high cost of certain things will prove a benefit to the human race
and not a disadvantage. For instance, if we could raise the diseased
meats to such a high price that nobody could buy them, what a benefit
it would be. If we could adulterate all whiskey only to such a degree
that it would not intoxicate, or there would be practically no whiskey
at all, and raise its price so high that no one could buy it, what a
benefit that would be. There is much virtue in the high cost of food.
We might apply this idea further. If the restaurants and cafes would
only raise the price of banquets so high that even bankers could not
have them, that also would be a very great benefit.
So we can well imagine that the high cost of living is not such
an awful thing, after all; that is, the high cost of some kinds of
living. Would it not be well if the government would take hold
CITY, STATE AND NATIONAL HYGIENE 391
of this subject? In every privilege of government the whole body
of the people has a part to play without doubt. Suppose a gov-
ernment should take hold of this problem and, by some of its legal
methods, which would be proper and reasonable, raise the prices
of those articles of food which we know are degenerative and disease-
producing in their tendency and lower the prices of those foods which
we know are beneficial to mankind, it would build up the bodies of
men as they should be built up, wholesome and well and strong. Would
not this be well? It obviously would. And so we can readily see
that the high cost of living, if it were only high enough in certain
directions. Avould result possibly in race betterment, and if it could only
lower the prices of the simple and plain foods so that they would be
more in demand, and, in fact, if they were the only food that certain
ones could get at all, how much better it would be.
We know full well that the European peasant is not to be pitied,
not at all. He has a better time than we. I was recently surprised to
find how much work men could do on plain food. I had occasion, at
one time, as health officer, to investigate a railroad camp where
there were a large number of "hunyaks," as they were called. I
was at the camp and saw their dinner. All they had in the world
was vegetable soup, some black bread and some raw cabbage, and
those men could wield great hea\y hammers all day long, could lift
heavy ties, place them in the proper position, lift the rails into posi-
tion, and work ten hours on that kind of food. And I thought that
possibly if thej^ had some of the higher-priced foods, how very likely
they would be to go down.
In this connection, it seems proper to consider briefly the position
of the doctors in this matter. In the matter of race betterment, we
place too much faith in the doctor and in medicine. We think that
medicines can undo the wTongs that have been done the body. Of
course they can do no such thing. They cannot renew or remake
broken organs. The physician does not know so much as the people
think he knows ; he is not so skilful as the people think he is, and they
rely upon him too much; they have too much faith in him. They
think. "Oh. I can overstep this little bound of right living this time,
and I can go to the doctor and he will give me a paper and with that
paper I will get a tablet and I can swallow the tablet and undo the
indulgence." A vicious cycle it is in realitj'-, and yet it exerts and
exists almost everywhere.
The whole situation is illustrated by a story. Once upon a time,
a young man had earned a high position from the great hospital where
he had been graduated in medicine, verv high, indeed, and the time
392 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
came Avhen he went to the hospital niul claimed his position. They had
a system. Down at the lower office Avas an expert diagnostitian —
Doctor Smith we will call him. He made a provisional diagnosis oi'
patients who were brought in at the lower office, then this patient was
sent to the particular ward where this Doctor Smith thought he be-
longed. This young man I am speaking of had "Ward A, where certain
classes were received. On a card Doctor Smith would make out the
name of the patient, if he had it, the age if he could get it. Then
he would write down the disease that he thought the man had. But
he always put it down in abbreviations — for instance, t. f. for
typhoid fever, pn. for pneumonia, etc. Our young man in the
upper ward did not want to show that he was ignorant in the slight-
est degree, so he tried to guess at all abbreviations. He did pretty well
at it, too. One time one of the cards had g. o. k. on it as the disease of
the patient. He looked through his books and his medical dictionaries,
thoroughly examined the man, but could not find out what was the
matter with him ; he could not make out the letters g. o. k. At last, in
humiliation, he went to the office below to see the expert diagnostitian.
Doctor Smith said, "Why, don't you know what that means, g. o. k. ?"
''No, I don't know what it means at all. I must give it up. Doctor. I
am humiliated, but I cannot work it out." Doctor Smith says, "Oh,
that is verv' simple. It means, ' God only knows '. ' '
And how very frequently this happens. We must not even trust
medicine. It is really a bad thing from certain points of view — and
oh, how glorious and beneficent from other points of view ! We must
have medicine, but we should view it from different angles. I think
the very best possible thing is to eradicate from man's mind that he
ever can experience perfect cure after disease or after injury to his
body. That knowledge w'ould work a great deal of good. I have
handled medicines and I have given them for over thirty-five years and
watched the processes, and I do believe that when we attempt to tell
people these truths and facts, — that they must not get sick and that get-
ting sick is weakness, it is not strength, that it is folly, it is not wisdom,
they turn upon their heel and go to the next doctor that will give
them medicine. Let us get away from that. I recently heard
a very witty man, in a speech, tell of another man who hated
him, "That man hates me with a curious tenderness." I thought
that perhaps in this matter of the high cost of living and clothes,
we might hate the high cost of living possibly with a curious ten-
derness or, better yet, with a curious regret.
CITY, STATE AND NATION-VL HYGIENE 393
GOVERNMENT
S. S. McClure, L.H.D., President S. S. MeClure Co., New York, N. Y.
Fundamental to reforms of all sorts is the machinery to carry out
the reform, and fundamental to the machinery are men. There
is no possibility of making proper laws or enforcing proper laws
unless we have men who are competent to make the proper laws
and who are able to enforce these laws. The great characteristic
of government in the United States is the absence of men who are
competent to make proper laws and the absence of men who are fit
to enforce these laws. The question of the proper organization of
government, that is, the securing of the proper personnel to carry
on the functions of government, to make and administer laws, is
one of the pressing problems of the United States, and is funda-
mental to all other reforms, because no reforms are of any serious
value in the long run unless they help the activity of all the people
working through the proper machinery.
"Wherever people have advanced in civilization, solving the va-
rious problems that have come into the world, especially as the re-
sults of inventions and developments, of wealth and knowledge of
the last years — whenever people have solved these problems, it
has been done by all the people working together by the proper
machinery. I suppose there has never been a body of printed
material so absurd and so far removed from actual facts and prin-
ciples as the body of material which constitutes the various charters
and constitutions under which cities and states and this nation are
governed. I suppose that no body of material of such importance
in recent times has been brought together other than by careful
investigation, scientific observation and deduction. The one single
important body of documents in the United States that is not the
result of observing the laws of men, is the body of charters and
constitutions under which we are governed.
Now, for about ten years, or perhaps longer, I have been study-
ing simply how people work to get good government. I have made
observations of it as a man might make observations in studying
the laws of bees, bats, trees, flowers, and, in the remaining fifteen
minutes, I am going to tell you exactly the result of my observa-
tions. It is this, in one sentence : When masses of individuals set
out to cooperate together to produce some given result or to carry-
on some given enterprise, it has been found that there is only one
successful method of organizing, and that method is by the election
of what corresponds in all cases, without any exception, to what a
board of directors is to a corporation. Now the plot of this form of
394 FIRST NATIONAL CONPEKENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
orgaiiization is this: That the people — whether members of a com-
pany, stockholders in a company, or members of a church, of a
hospital, or citizens of a city — elect only one kind of official, namely,
a director or a number of directors, and every official elected has
the same status as every other official elected. This body of elected
officials is not those who have the competence or the technical
knowledge, skill or training to exercise the various functions of
government, but who have the competence to select those who have
the skill to exercise the various functions of government. The
utmost electoral ability of the most highly civilized people today on
the globe is reached by the election simply of a board of directors.
And if this body of people endeavors to select experts, that is, to
elect mayors or judges or presidents or governors or any other
form of official, the government under that form of election fails.
Now that is the universal law of all history, of all contemporary
history, and there are no exceptions. You can see how it would
work if the stockholders of a great railroad system set out to elect
experts who should run that railroad ultimately, electing even train
dispatchers, perhaps telegraph operators, making plans as to who
should be appointed station masters, even working down to who
would be the section bosses, electing a president, etc. — how that
railroad would very soon become unreliable. The same is true ex-
actly with our ,city governments, because they are unreliable from
the standpoint of any proper test of efficiency.
Let me explain just how the proper form of government works.
There is only one proper form of government. Among the people
who govern themselves and get the things they want most abso-
lutely are the inhabitants of German cities. I will describe one
German city that I spent many weeks studying — the city of Frank-
fort, which is typical of Germany and of northern Europe. The
people elect simply a board of directors and no other official of
any kind. They elect by wards. They call these directors ' ' council-
men." The body is called a council. They are elected through
wards, not on a ticket at large. A man goes to the polls in Frank-
fort without any primary nominations, no previous official work of
any kind, and if he wishes to, he writes down the name of the man
he wants for his councilor from that ward. Now he can take any
man, not only in Frankfort, but within fifteen miles of that ward,
to be his councilman from that ward. He demands the same knowl-
edge and ability in picking out his councilman as you do in picking
out your dentist, your lawj^er, or your doctor. He wants the best
man he can get within fifteen miles. Second, he demands that he
himself shall have the right of primary nomination. No group of
CITY, STATE AND NATIONAL HYGIENE 39:5
men can come forward and print a sheet and say, "This is the offi-
cial ballot." Those men demand the right to make their own nomi-
nations, and five hundred voters may nominate five hundred differ-
ent individuals to be councilmen. That is the amount of freedom
they demand to begin with. It sometimes happens that no one has
the majority. Under those circumstances, and within eight days,
they take the two highest nam6s and vote between those two. That
is all the election activity that occurs, in selecting their govern-
ment in Frankfort. It is so simple that the people can get what they
want. Now then, they elect these men for six years. You see the
electoral activity of a properly governed people has about as much
to do with the life of that people as the electoral life has to do with
a well-managed club. It has almost nothing. These picked men
find a body of men which they call the "magistrat of experts."
One of them is mayor. This particular maj^or is just at the end of
his second twelve-year term. He came here twenty-four years ago
as a very distinguished officer and mayor, because no German city
ever experiments on its mayor. They begin with a man competent
for the job. beginning in a small way and gradually getting on up.
A man who becomes an engineer on the limited is always competent
for his job from the time he becomes an engine-wiper in the round
house. So these men are advanced according to their competence,
but no German city ever employs an official of unknown quantity.
So this man came here with this great record and became the mayor
of Frankfort. With him are twelve experts. I will describe one of
them:
Some years ago they wanted to sell out their street railway
system and they wanted an, engineer of extraordinary ability to
be a member of the magistrat to govern Frankfort, and they found
no one, even in Germany, they regarded as sufficiently competent
to take over this job. They found a man in England who was fit
for the job and they brought this man over and made him a mem-
ber of the city government of Frankfort and he has remained there
until now, and so they hired these twelve men who had a similar
history to the mayor and to this young man. Then these men, as
in all great concerns, organize down, each with his chief and sub-
chief, and on through from the mayor to the street laborer. They
are all organized efficiently and that is why Germany has gone
ahead by years and years of other countries in the march of social-
izing the new forces and ideas that have come into civilization.
There is a country not any bigger than California, with sixty-five
million inhabitants, increasing a million a year. Less than 20,000
Germans leave Germany each year. Emigration has almost ceased.
396 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
Now, 168.000 Americans left America for Canada last year. The
fact that even 20,000 leave is of no significance, but here is a coun-
try which is so well organized, that handles all these problems so
well. Do they have hookworm? Yes. What do they do? Does
Mr. Rockefeller go out and give a million dollars and everybody
shouting and calling conventions, saying, "Here is hookworm kill-
ing the people." No; they have an organized government; they
take up this hookworm question, they treat those people who have
the hookworm and this thing is finished in three weeks. Do they
have typhoid fever? Not much, but they have some. They remove
it by getting clean water, insuring clean water. In a small country
with two-thirds the population of the United States, not much
bigger than California, which we should think ought to be full of
typhoid fever, they have six cases to our forty-six. When I tell
you a thing, it is absolutely the ultimate fact. I have the docu-
ments, a trunk full of them. So much for the efficiency of German
government.
We govern by mayors, untrained people. We actually elect at
large our mayors, and oftentimes only mayors for two or three or
four years, then put in another, and a druggist, or a banker, or
sometimes a brewer, or what not, and do this often ; then another
man. Government is the only business in this country that is run
by men who are not trained for the job. You can see how it is
possible for a people to get self-government, also expert service.
The people who are elected, are elected for definite terms, and may
retire. The people who are the experts, are employed for life, not
necessarily in one city, but in the same work, in the same general
occupation. For instance, a mayor might be a mayor in this town
six years, then in another town six years, and so on, and so with all
the other officials. So they combine, the elective system, getting
people to carry out the wishes of the masses, who constitute the
citizenship of a city, and also the expert people. Is that a mystery ?
That is exactly the way that all businesses all over the world are
organized. That is exactly the way all successful governments all
over the world are organized. Just imagine what our electoral sys-
tem brings out in the way of long tickets. How impossible it is to
know for whom you are voting. I remember one ticket in Chicago
about a foot and a half wide and three feet long in solid type all
the way down. One item was eighty-three judges. I have some
friends who are lawyers. None of them knew any one of these
nominees. Imagine how the common man does. There has never
been an illustration of really successful administration of law
through the courts where the judges are elected. There has never
CITY, STATE AND NATION.UL, HYGIENE 397
been a successful administration of government where the executives
are elected by the people. The people cannot rule through that ma-
chinery. It involves an almost unworkable electoral system, which
itself becomes a business involving the passage of laws and then
getting on before the courts to find out whether they are legal or
riot. I think when you bring in the universal method of organizing^
how simple is the election system.
How does this system of government work? I will take just a
few illustrations. "We are, broadly speaking, behind most of the
other civilized nations in the various socialized laws dealing, for
example, with the compensation of workingmen, and so on, and in
methods of ameliorating the conditions of the poor, and of the
workers. We are, properly speaking, behind all other peoples, all
other civilized nations, but we will take some definite things. When
I was in Washington last year at the inauguration and saw those
police deal with the women's parade, I saw a spectacle that could
not be paralleled in the civilized world for inefiiciency and in-
competency, so I went down to the police station next day and asked
for the annual report. They didn't like to give it to me when I
told them my name, still I was entitled to it, and I got it.
I found, from their annual report, this one fact about Wash-
ington— there are a great many others, but this is significant — that
Washington city, which is the same size as Toronto, had ten times
the murders of Toronto; that Washington, D. C, had two-thirds
the number of murders as in all Ireland, more than double the num-
ber of murders in all Canada. They blame it on the negroes. Just
that day I received a report from Jamaica, where they have 800,000
negroes and an average of seven murders a year, nine times the
number of negroes in Washington, D. C, and less than one-quarter
the number of murders. Washington, D. C, is the most criminal
capital city in the world today, and it is simply a typical American
city. It has the average murder-rate of the United States. It is not
a place of foreigners : it is a manufacturing city governed by the
government of the United States very largely, and ought to be
almost a model city, but it is an average American city. It has
ten times the amount of murders found in the civilized countries
of northern Europe, and it is an average American city. Wash-
ington is governed by a national board of aldermen appointed by
Congress. Congress appoints commissioners to govern the districts
of Columbia, but that does not mean that Washington has the com-
mission form of government. That word, anyhow, is a silly phrase.
What we call the commission form of government, that is, the pure
form of government, is the universal form of government that I
398 KIUST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
have been describing. It is not exactly pure, because we are such
fools that we take it and exchange it. They have not had the com-
mission form of government in Washington. It is really a board
of aldermen appointed by Congress, a large and powerful board.
All the papers are discussing Dayton's wonderful experiment,
the working commission and a city manager. That is the universal
form of city government in other countries, only they call it there
the mayor. In Frankfort he would be there perhaps for life.
Take the matter of fires. We have men who are incompetent to
make proper laws dealing with fires because the laws of combus-
tion are the laws of nature and are universally and inevitable, and
if men are too ignorant to understand these laws and to make proper
laws for buildings, those buildings get burned. Yes, we have men
who are incompetent in enforcing these fire laws. Do you realize
that you could not burn down a European city? They never had a
conflagration in a European city. It is impossible. When they are
built, they are built to make a general conflagration impossible.
Nature has certain laws, and they recognize her laws. For that
reason I took twenty-one American cities and twenty-one European
cities, about the same size and status, and found seven times the fire
loss they had in the European cities — both of the same material,
during the same time, and under the same general economic condi-
tion, because they had competent men who made efficient laws and
competent men to enforce the laws. The same is true of accidents,
of all the operations of our civilization. Under this system of gov-
ernment, the loss of life is from four to ten times as much from
various forms of violence as in northern European countries. Take
New York City alone. I have the coroner's report for the last three
years, and the official report of the Boer War in South Africa. The
loss of life by violence in New York City for the past three years
is equal to the loss of life for the three years of the British armies
in the Boer War. That is, in the one Borough of Manhattan, the
loss of life by violence from daj^ to day, from year to year, equals
the loss of life there of the British armies during the South African
War on the battlefields of South Africa. That is one of those as-
tounding statistics. Always when I lecture on a subject, I have my
documents with me, because you cannot believe it. Any test you
will apply shows that we have just the result you would imagine
from the inefficient government and from our absurd method of
organizing government, because the inefficient form of our gov-
ernment involves a perfectly unworkable electoral system whereby
the people cannot get their will. Who gets his wishes in the election
of all these long tickets, tip-topped by men who have their own
CITY, STATE AND NATIONAL HYGIENE 399
ends to serve? We endeavor to correct this by going a step worse. ,
We think we can correct these things by the initiative, the referen-
dum and the recall. They must have direct participation of the
people in the elections, etc. People have never been successful other
than by a purely representative form of government, the board of
directors.
We think the recall is another thing and everybody gets it inta
their charters if they can. We think a new way and a cumbersome
way of discharging dishonest or incompetent officials is going to
help towards bringing about efficiency. Ask a business manager if
a new way of discharging an employee is going to help build up an
efficient organization. How can people determine laws of initiative
and referendum?
When I was in San Francisco, the women were very active and
very nice indeed, too. They had forty-five amendments to the
charter, including pensions for mothers, etc. They said, "Mr. Mc-
Clure, will you give us an address and give us your advice?" And
I said, "This particular minute, if I had one or two of my best men
to spend several months in making an investigation in several coun-
tries, then I would be willing to furnish my opinion in McClure's
Magazine." They were willing to put their opinions into the laAV
of the land, or forty-five of them, without any investigation.
Suppose that the stockholders of the Pennsylvania Railroad had
to decide whether or not this great river should be bridged by this
sort of bridge or that sort of bridge. How could they determine
that question ? They could not. They must have a method whereby
they can secure competent and skilled advice to determine those
questions, and the reason that Germany does all these things so
well is not because the people at large can vote on this or that ques-
tion, because they are incompetent to do so, but because they have
a system of government whereby they can get efficiency, skill, train-
ing, and scholarship for the work. Now all we have to do is to
throw away this bizarre stuff and adopt the only universal method
whereby men can organize efficient government. Then your pro-
hibition laws will amount to something, because you have men com-
petent to enforce them, but they will not under the present condi-
tions, which involve inefficiency.
In McClure's Magazine I have spent years, vast sums of money,
and able men. making an inquiry, and have shown the most strong
alliance between keepers of houses of prostitution and the saloon-
keepers or men who actually govern the city. I will give you one
story. This was a man whose name is known over the United
States, a town of 600.000 inhabitants. A young girl had been se-
400 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
dueed by a man who was a brother of a member of the city legisla-
ture of that city, and he had taken her around and used her as a
white slave in different cities, in Seattle, and so on. This girl finally
appealed to a man of wealth in that city, and this man, having a
heart, set out to rescue her. The case was brought up before the
magistrate, and this man went to the magistrate and said, "Now"
here comes up this case, and we want a verdict according to the
fact;" and the magistrate said, "I don't know as I can do anything
in this. You better see the mayor." And this man and another
man went to the mayor with the storj^ and the best the mayor would
do would be to agree not to thwart justice on account of the pressure
these men brought to bear upon him, but he would not prevent the
magistrate from rendering a decision in accordance with the fact.
When this girl w^as giving the testimony, she sometimes went be-
yond the question asked, when the judge said to her, "Kindly
answer the questions. Don 't go beyond the questions. ' ' And this
girl got justice only on account of these men going to the officials.
That is one of the simpler illustrations of inefficiency in the form
of organizing government. The resulting, unworkable, electoral
system of continual change of officials, with lack of any motive
for any man going into this as a life work, has brought about, not
only inefficiency and the immense increase of crime that everybody
deplores, but has brought about a thing that never before happened
to my knowledge in human history — a union of the lowest, meanest,
worst elements of a community with the machine that actually
governs the city. When I was younger and more forceful and less
rational and more worked up, I said w^e could have an article in
McClure's Magazmc based upon data that could be entitled, "From
the Whore House to the White House," because you could see how
they used all these places to get votes to enable you to carry the
precinct and the city, and you could see it very easily ; the organiza-
tion with a criminal element, those engaged in the most degrading
occupations, with men who were engaged in robbing the cities
by various forms of franchising, constituting the political machine.
It is the same formula in San Francisco, New York, Pittsburg, Chi-
cago, St. Louis — everywhere the same formula in this country, not
because w^e are the most criminal people in the w^orld, not because
w^e are the least competent for self-government, although at the
present time we are one of the least competent for self-government,
but because we have an unworkable system of government that
was devised, invented, adapted for certain theories evolved by the
French Revolution. But that is another lecture.
CITY, STATE AND NATIONAL HYGIENE 401
Discussion.
The Government of a German City
Professor Richard T. Ely, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin.
A great many people expressed interest in the remarks of Mr.
McClure, but I think he did not make it clear how a German city
is governed. Perhaps I can make a contribution of a practical na-
ture just at that point.
A German city is governed just as the University of Michigan
is governed. The people elect the regents; the regents elect ex-
perts who carrj^ out the directions and the policy of the regents.
The citizens of a German city 'elect the council. The council cor-
responds to the regents. When the people elect the council, they
have done their part. When the people elect the regents of the
University of Michigan, or when the governor appoints a regent
of the University of Michigan, then their part is done. Then the
regents do the rest. It is for the people to determine policies. They
determine policies in Michigan when they elect the regents. They
elect regents to carry out certain desired policies, then the regents
select experts. That is just the way the German city is governed,
almost precisely in that way.
Discussion.
High Cost of Living
Byron W. Holt, New York, N. Y.
I desire in no way to mar the harmony of this great discussion
of race betterment. I would not chill the ardor of anyone here.
Good cannot but result from the many able addresses that have
been made on subjects vital to health and morality; for the two
are really but one.
After listening to most of the speakers, I have, however, to
conclude that they have, in the main, discussed secondary, or still
more remote, causes of disease and race deterioration and have
largely considered remedies rather than preventions. Apparently
they were not searching for the ounce of prevention that would
make unnecessary the pound of cure. As modern scientists, we
should try to find first causes. When these are found, we should
endeavor to remove them.
It will hardly be denied that the two most important and fun-
damental caiises of preventable disease, as well as of crime and
race deterioration, are (1) ignorance and (2) poverty. As to which
of these causes is the more important, it is difficult to say. While they
usually overlap and run into each other, yet we frequently find
402 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
just as dense ignorance of, and indifference to, the first principles
of health and hygiene on the part of the rich or well-to-do as on
the part of the poor. It is also just as true that the poor are, be-
cause of their poverty, unable to obtain proper and sufficient food,
clothing, and habitations to carry out their ideas of right living.
It is perhaps true that the majority of the people of this relatively
prosperous country are unable to live properly, even if they knew
how to do so.
The fact that the cost of living has, during the last fifteen or
twenty years, risen faster than have wages, salaries, and incomes,
has lessened the proportion of those who can have proper food and
clothing and live in sanitary homes. That the most of our people
could, if they knew how to do so, greatly improve their present
ways of living is indisputable. It is, therefore, well that we should
do all that we can to banish ignorance. We should not, however,
overlook the fact that we cannot make great progress in race bet-
terment until we remove the most fundamental, if not the greatest,
cause of race deterioration — poverty.
The Pittsburg ]\Iorals Efficiency Commission took a .strong posi-
tion in favor of eugenic marriage legislation. It also reached the
conclusion that (as the New York Evening Post states it) "the one
most potent weapon in the reduction of vice the Commission be-
lieves to be early marriages, to encourage which it emphasizes good
housing, cheaper living, and even vocational education, as per-
mitting the easy conversion of youth into self-responsible, wage-
earning manhood."
But how, under present economic conditions, can we have early
marriages, healthy parents and well-nurtured and happy children.
Only a small proportion of our young men of twenty-one are finan-
cially competent to purchase and support a proper home. Our young
women are even worse conditioned. With most of them, it is less
a question of eugenic marriage than of marriage at all. Practically,
they must take the man offered when he offers himself. These con-
ditions will undoubtedly persist, in more or less modified form,
until our present economic system is changed radically — assuming
that a much more equitable system of distribution of product is
possible.
Living conditions, among the great majority of workers in our
homes, in our factories and shops and on our farms and transporta-
tion lines, are not conducive to eugenic marriages, sound parents
and healthy offspring. Infant mortality must necessarily be large
when the parents work long hours at hard labor, have inferior food
and live in close quarters and in poorly ventilated rooms with un-
CITY, STATE AND NATIONAL HYGIENE 403
sanitary surroundings. Parents of low vitality cannot possibly
rear strong and healthy children. Disease, vice, and crime flourish
in the tenements in our great cities.
I wish only to suggest to this Conference that poverty is one of
the greatest causes of race deterioration and that, while great good
may result from increased knowledge of the evils of improper liv-
ing, yet our fondest hopes for race betterment cannot be realized
until the economic base of our society is changed and the products
of labor are apportioned according to merit — as is certainly not
the case today.
I may say that, personally, I not only believe that a just
economic system of distribution is easily attainable, but that civiliza-
tion cannot progress much further without it. Our present unjust
system is breaking down. The evils of industrial slavery — disease,
vice, insanity, and crime — are greater today than were those of
chattel slavery fifty years ago.
segregation-
Hastings H. Haet, LL.D., Director Department of Child-Helping, Russell
Sage Foundation, New York City.
I wish to say a preliminary word which I feel is essential in
any discussion of social work, and that is, that we must never lose
sight of the fact that social work is a spiritual work, and the
worker should have the same definite consecration which we expect of
people who engage in religious or missionary work. The corollary of
that is that in any line of social work j^ou absolutelj^ fail unless you
produce a spiritual result. Of what good is it to feed a hungry
man unless you inspire in him the purpose to feed himself to-
morrow? What advantage is it to get a drunken man sober,
to shut him up for ten days and turn him out with a thirst, unless
you have inspired in that man's heart a purpose, a desire, to resist
temptation and to stand? What good is it to undertake to put a
man in prison or on parole or probation and to watch over him and
to guide him for a limited time unless you are going to produce in
that man the purpose and the courage which will enable him to go
through the hardness he must endure if he is to be redeemed? I
want to have what I say this morning divested of what will seem
perhaps to be rather a hard and mechanical study. I am to speak
this morning on the subject of "Segregation."
What do we mean by segregation? We mean the separation of
a group of people in a community from the rest of the community
404 FIRST NATIONAL CON^'ERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
that they may go apart and live by themselves for a longer or
shorter time in order to produce some result in a social way. Now
what are the purposes of segregation ? You may segregate people
in order to make a diagnosis, that you may discover what needs
to be done for them, or simply for temporary care until you can
determine what shall be the next step. You may segregate people
for the purpose of treatment and cure. Here are eighteen hun-
dred people segregated in this institution [Battle Creek Sanitarium]
for the purpose of recovering their health. You may segregate
people in order that you may give them the treatment which we
accord a criminal. Now what is that? We segregate people for
purposes of punishment, and we segregate people for purposes of
revenge. You will find that idea running through the legislation
of the states of the United States to this day. Thank God we are
learning that is not the best way. You may segregate people for
various purposes. You may set apart a portion of yovir town where
shall congregate the vicious elements, the gamblers and the saloon-
keepers and the prostitutes, set off in a corner by themselves in order
to make a public institution of those departments and put them
under the care and supervision of the police. You may segregate
people in order that you may simply care for them as an asylum, as
provision to care for those who are helpless, incurable, neglected.
Thus we have homes, houses, and asylums for certain classes of the
insane. You may segregate people for protection; you may segre-
gate people to protect themselves ; you may segregate people to
protect their family, or you may segregate people to protect the
community.
I want to speak a few minutes about these different forms of
segregation. The first form of segregation of which I spoke is seg-
regation for diagnosis and temporarj^ care. Now under this comes
the jail; under this comes what we call the detention home for
delinquent children; under this comes the detention hospital for
the observation of persons who it is thought may be on the verge
of becoming insane or whose sanity or insanity we desire to ascer-
tain. Now the jail has served all three of these purposes. The
most inconsistent institution in the world is the jail, which is de-
signed to be used on the one hand for the humane and comfortable
detention of insane persons, until recently for children brought to-
gether in the jail for temporary care, and also to confine accused
persons. The Constitution says. "Everj^ man shall be deemed inno-
cent until he is proved to be guilty." Now we use the same jail,
the same rooms, the same cells, and the same jailers, the same hor-
rible conditions in every respect, for another purpose, and that is
CITY, STATE AND NATIONAL HYGIENE 405
for the punishment or the reformation of certain offenders under
sentence. "What we call petty thieves or drunken persons or disorderly
persons are sent to jail to be reformed, and are given the same identi-
cal room, the same identical food, the same identical treatment
in every respect, with the purpose of making it to the one man
a humane and an easy detention, as comfortable as possible, and of
making it to the other a bitter and deterrent punisliment. You
say it is perfectly impossible — it cannot be done. It is; done
all the time. There is one trouble about it : we give the humane
and comfortable detention to the wrong man, we give the bitter
punishment to the wrong man. That is w^here it is unfortunate, but
it is an absolute fact. We are doing it in every jail almost in the
United States. In the state of Michigan some years ago, two men
w^ere traveling with a team of horses. It happened that those horses
answered the description of some horses that had been stolen, so
the men were arrested, tried, charged wdth horse stealing, and
had to stay in jail ten days before they could prove their identity.
There are thousands and thousands of insane people, sick people,
and they are put into jail. They are submitted to ignominy and
suffering and the rigors of the jail — in the name of what? Oh!
to protect the community from danger. Not one in ten is danger-
ous, but they are subjected to treatment that is perfectly horrible.
I have seen men shut up for months in a jail with absolutely no
other care than they could receive from fellow-prisoners in the jail.
Take a man accused of crime. More than half of all the people who
are accused of crime, are never convicted, whether guilty or not.
I am speaking literally ; I am not exaggerating. Put a decent man
into a steel cage and exhibit him like a wild beast in a menagerie at
twenty-five cents per head. Put a man where he cannot keep free from
vermin, and where he has no opportunity to take a bath. He is forced
into association day and night with the vilest people. Can you think
of a worse condition for a decent man this side of perdition? On
the other hand, you take the bum, the tramp, the man who is de-
graded to the last degree and who has no self-respect — what does
he want? Why, w^e take a man like that and give him a warm fire,
plenty of good food, the society of others like himself, a pack of
greasy cards and he is perfectly happy. He lacks nothing. He
has a pipe of tobacco. They will always give him that. He may
lack beer or w^hiskej', but in many jails he can get that if he has a
little money, through the jailer. That is the man who on a day
like this will go down town and steal something to get back again.
That kind of segregation is utterly illogical. It is never humane.
Isn't it amazing that we perpetuate it year after year and genera-
tion after generation?
406 FIRST XATIONAL COXKERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
I read a day or two ago the official report of the examiner of
the state of Illinois on the jails of that state. This was an official
report just as straight as could be. He said that during the past
year the number of jails in this state which have kangaroo courts
have increased from twenty-six to twenty-nine. A kangaroo court
is an organization within the jail by permission of the sheriff where-
by the prisoners administer a rough discipline of their own. It
came out in that official report that the prisoners in the jail are
accustomed to assign to a prisoner the work he has to do in the jail.
In some they are given a dark cell or dungeon in which they
punish persons who disobey the regulations of the court, and the
prisoners, if thej^ have money, are required to make contributions
for the benefit of their fellow-prisoners. If the prisoner has any-
thing sent to him by his friends, he must divide or he will be dealt
with. The inspector said he didn't think there was force employed,
but if a man refused to make these contributions, it would be made
very uncomfortable for him.
It was literally true in the state of Illinois that the prisoners of
the jail were allowed to take incoming prisoners and rob them and
abuse them physically v/ithout rebuke.
I saw in the city of St. Cloud, Minn., a boy of sixteen who was
lield as a witness against a man for a crime against nature, and
they didn't dare let the boy go because they thought somebody
would give him a few dollars and he would not be found. So
they put him in jail as witness and he was in the same apartment
with that man against whom he was to appear as a witness — and
the same thing was going on. I am speaking literally and of things
that are not done here and there, in a corner, but in many counties
in the United States. That kind of segregation is wrong.
I say segregation may be for treatment and care. You have in this
institution an example. These people are sent here for treatment and
care. Institutions of the class I speak of are the reformatories of the
United States, the juvenile reformatories, schools for boys, like the
one you have at Lansing of this state, schools for girls like the one at
Adrian, then reformatories for young men and women, such as
are now growing up in all parts of the country.
All of these institutions ought to be hospitals in principle — not
only hospitals in principle, but they ought to be literally hospitals,
because more than half the people that come into these institutions
of the state are in need of medical or surgical treatment. It is
only ver\^ lately that people have waked tip to the condition of
the people who are in these institutions. It is less than six years
ago that Miss Marv- Dusen and Mrs. Glendower Evans, in Massa-
CITY, STATE AND NATIONAL HYGIENE ^ 407
chusetts, thought that the}' would undertake au examination. They
had been impressed by the number of girls brought into the
Lancaster school who seemed to be deficient. They made a rough
investigation and they came to a conclusion that was perfectly
astonishing at that time, that probably twenty-eight per cent of all
the girls in that institution w^ere subnormal. That led to an ex-
amination in the reformatories, the prison for women at Bedford,
N. Y., in the Elmira reformatory for young men and the New Jersey
reformatory for young men, and in other institutions, until now it
is generally accepted that in our prisons and reformatories at least
twenty-five per cent of the inmates are defective, or in our juvenile
reformatories from twenty-five to fifty per cent. In one institu-
tion where I employed a psychologist to go in and examine the
girls, we found that sixty-five per cent of the girls a^ ere feeble-minded.
But the reformatory is the wrong institution for these chil-
dren, because the girls who are sent into that juvenile reforma-
tory do not need reformatory treatment. The girls are sent there
b}^ the courts as delinquent. They are put into that institu-
tion and people try to reform them. They proceed to educate
them, and to instruct them, and to control them, and to punish
them, and to pray over them, and to exhort them, but that is not
what these girls need. They need to be out in the open ; they need
to have fresh air ; they need to have natural recreation ; they need
a good time. There is absolutely nothing delinquent in the pur-
pose of these children. But what is the result? The result is that
all of our institutions for delinquent girls in the United States are
now so clogged up with feeble-minded girls it is impossible to do
the legitimate work of the institution for those who are not feeble-
minded, and these feeble-minded girls and boys in these juvenile
institutions are being cared for today in those institutions at almost
double the cost that would be necessary if we had proper institutions
built for them so that they could be transferred to institutions in-
tended for their care. "We have a very expensive treatment that is
not intended for them and not adapted to them. In the same way
we have many of the feeble-minded in our hospitals for the insane.
And we are spending at least fifty per cent more for the care of these
feeble-minded in the hospitals for the insane than we ought to expend
for them.
Now let there be adopted in each of our states a state program
for dealing with these subjects, such a plan as was adopted in
the state of Ohio, and let the people of the state begin to balance
these things up and see what is being done for preventive work
for feeble-minded epileptics, cripples, for dependent children, for
408 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
deliiuiik'iit I'hikhvii and let tlicse things lie ordered in some .systeni-
atie way. At the present time, this whole tiling goes haphazard,
especially with reference to children. It is often simply a matter
of impulse, of some man who is making a will. He makes a will,
leaving a sum of money for the creation of an institution for chil-
dren, but never stops to consult anybody as to whether it is needed.
I was consulted some time ago down in the state of Virginia.
A rich man there who had built an institution for girls sent for an
expert Avhose advice he did not follow. What he did do was to adopt
a charter whereby the institution should receive girls who were entire
orphans, who had lost both parents, native-born Virginians of good
character, between the ages of four and twelve years. Absolutely there
was no class in the state of Virginia that so needed such provision,
because an orphan girl who is a whole orphan of good character
can find a home any day of the week.
"We may segregate for education and training. We send our
children to boarding school. We establish schools for the deaf
and the blind. We used to use asylums for the deaf and the blind,
and orphan asylums. We do not build those asylums any more,
thank God! We build schools for the deaf and the blind, and we
lead them to realize that they are going out in the community to
care for themselves, and to become self-supporting and honorable
citizens. In 1876 the state of Michigan established a new school under
the name of the "State Public School" at Coldwater. What is that?
That is only a part of the name. It has confused people a great
deal. It is the State Public School for Dependent Children. All of the
children in the state of Michigan that used to be sent to the alms-
house are now gathered up and sent to the State Public School
to be kept until they can receive such treatment as they need
in a medical way or in the correction of bad habits or in the direc-
tion of teaching them the ordinaiy decencies of life. Then they are
distributed out into family homes throughout the state of Michigan.
It has been one of the most beneficent things that ever was started
in the United States.
I can never understand wiiy but three states have followed this
state in that respect — the state of Minnesota, the state of Wiscon-
sin, and the state of Colorado.
We may have segregation for punishment and revenge. Isn't
it a horrible thing at this day that we should be establishing
institutions with the declared purpose to get even with a man, to
give him what is coming to him. A man is brought before the court,
the judge sits on the bench, listens to the testimony which may last
an hour or two hours, possibly two or three days if the man has
CITY, STATE AND NATIONAL HYGIENE 409
money enough to employ lawyers to defend him, and when that
is through, the judge measures up the deserts of that man, two
years, five years, ten years, fifteen years, of life. Why, friends,
what does the judge on the bench or you and I know about the
deserts of a human soul? Who can measure evil? Why, it is only
the Almighty who sees the springs of human action, who knows the
history of that individual from the beginning of his life and clear
back to his grandfather and great-grandfather, who knows all of
the influences of environment and all of the temptations to which
he has been subjected and the injustice he has suffered. Only the
Almighty can measure human guilt, and yet up to this day we are
attempting to give men what is coming to them. That idea is
exploded. We got rid of it with children many years ago and
began to send children to the juvenile reformatories for care and
training. Then we got rid of it with j^oung men, and began to
send young men to the state reformatories, and gave them what
we call an indefinite sentence. In other words, to be taught,
trained, and cured, is the basic idea of it. Now just as soon as
there is reason to believe that a man, if dismissed from state's
prison, will lead an honorable, upright life, out he goes.
We are also learning that there is a better thing to do with men
or women, boys or girls, than to send them to prison ; so there has
come about the probation system, where if there is a person who
is not in any way confirmed in crime, and has given pretty good
evidence of reform, he is turned over to the watchful care of a
person who will care for him and guide him.
The most imperative duty of a community at the present time
is the custodial care of the feeble-minded girl. The work for the
feeble-minded began at the wrong end sixty years ago in this coun-
try with the young child. We let the older girl run loose, and she
is perpetuating and multiplying her kind. We have just discovered
that the feeble-minded woman is twice as prolific as the normal
woman. This is a scientific fact. If a feeble-minded woman con-
sorts with a feeble-minded man, the offspring is sure to be feeble-
minded. If she consorts with a normal man, the chances are more
than half that the offspring will be in some way defective. Yet
we are going on with that thing, gathering up these little children,
putting them into schools and training them and letting the girls
run loose. The thing to be done is to stop the admission of children
under twelve years old until we have gotten all the others taken
care of. We are taking care of the insane women, but not the
feeble-minded women. The feeble-minded woman is twice as dan-
gerous to the community as the insane woman. Why ? It was said
410 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
here yesterday that insanity is a disease of old age, and feeble-
mindedness is a disease of youth. Young women become mothers and
it is the highest economic duty to protect them. I do not know any-
body who is more deserving of fostering care than these girls of
fifteen, sixteen, and seventeen who have the mind of a child of seven
or eight and the body of a w^oman. They ought to have the same pro-
tection we give to a little girl, but instead they are pursued, hunted
doMTi. and destroyed like rabbits.
THE NEGRO RACE
Booker T. Washington, LL.D., Principal The Tuskegee Normal and In-
dustrial Institute, Tuskegee, Alabama.
I am very glad that those in charge of this Conference have seen
fit to consider the race to which I belong, in connection with the
subject under discussion. Before I begin what I have to say, I wish
to express my personal obligation to Doctor Kellogg and to the
teaching for which he stands, because of the benefit which I have
received as an individual.
Some three years ago I found myself almost out of commission
physically. Without any knowledge or consent, my wife in some
way got hold of a colored man trained here under Doctor Kellogg,
by the name of Mr. Crayton. He came to Tuskegee, he was in-
stalled in my home by my wife and for six months he had charge
of me. At the end of that six months, I was a new man, and not
only a new man, but I knew more about living and enjoying life
than I had .ever knownti before. And so I want to express to you,
Doctor Kellogg, my deep personal gratitude.
Some years ago I was traveling through a certain section of
the South with a friend. We chanced to stop over night in one of
the cabins which is common to that section of the country. The
next morning, when we went to the breakfast table, the good host-
ess asked us whether we wanted long or short sweetening in our
coffee. (I am aware that I am getting on tender ground when I
attempt to discuss the question of food here and especially coffee.)
But this good lady asked w^hether we wanted long or short sweet-
ening in our coffee. Neither of us had ever heard the question put
in that form before and each was puzzled. She looked at one and
then at the other for an answ^er. I punched my friend rather gently
and slyly in the side and suggested that he answer first. With a
good deal of courage he finally said he M'ould take long sweetening.
With that the good w^oman put one of her fingers into a cup of
CITY, STATE AND NATIONAL HYGIENE 411
molasses — that is allowable — and then she put that same finger into
his coffee. Now that was one sweetening. Then she turned to
me and asked what I wanted, long or short. I said I would take
short ! Then she put her hand into another cup, took out something
that resembled a lump of maple sugar, put it between her teeth,
bit it into two parts, put one part into her coffee and the other
part into my coffee. That was short sweetening. Now Mr. Chair-
man, I do not know what you want or expect of me in the way of
an address, but I wish to assure you in the beginning that both my
long and short addresses are rather disagreeable. Under the cir-
cumstances I shall have to choose short sweetening, if any at all.
Few races in history have been subjected to so many sudden,
violent, and trying changes as is true of the African Negro within
a short period of years. First there was a tremendous transition
from Africa to America, from free life to slave life, then from slave
life into free life, and then there has been a change which a large
proportion of my race has experienced of moving from the South
into the North. But in spite of all of these changes, the negro has
lived and is living and intends to live, in my opinion. Now I know
sometimes people get a little impatient with us because we do change
so suddenly and frequently. I remember that some years ago I
was in Jacksonville, Fla., visiting a friend of mine who had become
a prosperous lawyer. He had recently built a new house and he
took me into his rooms and showed me over the fine mansion, which
it really was — into his bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchen, and dining
room. When we went into the beautiful dining room, there was a
bell under the table (one of his truss bells), and he put his foot
on it and pressed it and a servant appeared at the door. He pressed
it again and the servant appeared the second time. Then a third
and a fourth time he pressed on the bell and the servant appeared.
And I said to him, ''My friend, why in the world are you calling
that servant through the medium of that bell so often when you
do not seem to have any need for the servant?" "Why," he said,
"Mr. Washington, the fact is only a few years ago I used to be
bell man to Colonel Porter myself and I always came when the bell
rang and I am trying to readjust myself to the changed conditions
in life."
So you have to be a little patient with a negro while he is trying
to readjust himself, through all these changed conditions — changed
conditions physically, industrially, socially, morally, from almost
every point of view.
We have in this country about ten million members of my race.
The number, in spite of predictions to the contrary, is not decreas-
412 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
ing. We are growing; at a reasonably healthy rate, not only from
within, but from without. Some years ago the United States began
to manifest an interest in the people of Cuba, Porto Rico, Hawaii,
and the Philippine Islands, and those people began coming over
here in pretty good numbers. I noticed that when they landed,
either on the Atlantic or Pacific coast, the White Man looked at them
very closely, critically : he examined their skin through a microscope,
felt of their hair, looked at their noses. He did not know exactly
how to classify those people, and he finally said, "We better be on
the safe side and give them to the negro." Now we are getting
most all of them, so that we are increasing at a reasonably rapid
rate. Nine millions of the families of black people reside in our
Southern states, one million reside in the Northern and Western
states. Eighty-five per cent of those residing in the Southern states
are at present to be found either in small towns or rural districts
of the South.
Now, in my opinion, these people are worth saving, are worth
making a strong, helpful part of the American body politic. They
have already indicated, within their fifty years of freedom, some
signs of being worth saving. In the first place, from a physical
point of view they have lived; that is, they have survived. That
is not an easy thing for any dark-skinned race to do when it is
near you. Now, my friends, study history and you will discover
that the American negro is practically the only race with a dark
skin that has ever undergone the test of living by the side of the
Anglo-Saxon, looking him in the face and really surviving. All
others that have tried that experiment have departed or they are
departing. Now we have lived. Not only that, but we have sup-
ported ourselves from a physical point of view. When Mr. Lincoln
said fifty years ago, or a little more, that he was going to free us,
some people said, "Don't free those negroes. They will prove a
perpetual burden upon the pocketbook of the nation." Somebody
said that from a physical and economic point of view they would
not support themselves, they would not clothe themselves, they
would not shift for themselves, they would not feed themselves.
If you will study the records of the American Indians — and I
have nothing but the highest respect and love for the American
Indian — you will find that Congress is called on to appropriate
every year between ten and twelve millions of dollars to be used
in providing food, clothing, and shelter for about three hundred
thousand American Indians. My own race in this country has been
free fifty years, and never, since the days of reconstruction, has the
CITY, STATE AND NATIONAL HYGIENE 413
American negro asked Congress to appropriate a single dollar to
be used in providing food and clothing for his people.
Absolutely, from a physical point of view, we have cared for
ourselves — and once in a while we have had a little something to
do in caring for somebody else. Some time ago in Dallas County, near
where I live, the white people were having a convention. There
was an old colored man who was janitor of the convention who
usually managed to find out what was the object of every meeting
the white people held in that court house. But this was a new
kind of convention and the old colored man could not seem to
analyze it. After it was over, he found the president of the con-
vention, Colonel Jones (who used to own him), and he said. "Colonel
Jones, you white people is up to something. You is having a meetin'
in this court house, and I can't understand what you drivin' at.
What is the object of this here meetin'. Colonel Jones?" He re-
plied, "Uncle Jim, it is simply an immigration convention. "We
are trying to devise ways and means by which we can induce more
white people from Europe and the West and North to come here
and settle in Dallas County." The old colored man scratched his
head and said, "Oh de Lord, Brother Jones; we niggers in Dallas
County have got just as many white people in Dallas County now
as we can support." We have had to support ourselves and we
have had a little to do once and again in supporting somebody else,
and while we have not paid a great deal of taxes directly to the
support of Government, we have made it mighty convenient for
somebody else to pay the taxes through our labor.
If you will study the economic life of the South, you will find
that a very large part of the expense of Government in the South,
as I said — and I say it, my friends, with regret — a very large part
of the expense of carrying on the Government comes from the labor
of convicts, a \evy large proportion of whom are black people.
That is, they have not yet gotten out from the condition ^vhere we
yield to the temptation of using the convicts for profit. Of course,
the more convicts, the more profit. That is something that the civili-
zation of the South is working away from gradually, but in my
opinion, slowly.
Some years ago we discovered that the people of Great Britain
were spending annually not far from fifty millions of dollars in an
attempt to rescue the drunkard, the gambler, the loafer and the
misfits of life ; in a word, they were spending not far from fifty
millions of dollars in an attempt to get people up out of the ditch.
Now, my friends, with all our weaknesses and shortcomings — and
I fully recognize what these weaknesses and shortcomings are sur-
414 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
ronndiug my race — we are not yet in the ditch. How much wiser
is it. how much more economical is it, how much more interesting
is it, for us not to wait till these millions of black people get into
the ditch and then have to spend millions in getting them out, but
to spend millions, if necessary, in saving them before they get into
the ditch. That, in a word, is a problem that is before the people
of this eountr3^
Then, in a word, I represent a kind of new race. You know
some races are so old. They have been where they are going. They
have their history behind them. Mine is before it. Some time ago,
I met an old colored woman on the public road at Tuskegee one
Sunday morning, and I turned to her and said, "Aunt Caroline,
where are you going this morning?" Quick as a flash she turned
and said, "Why, Mr. Washington, I's done been where I's goin'."
These black people in the South are tremendously interesting from
this point of view, in that they have not been where they are going.
They are just on the way, and if we deal with them wisely, intelli-
gently, frankly, sympathetically, I repeat that we .will make them
a strong, helpful part of our citizenship.
Now how? In the first place, we should use our influence, if we
would better the condition of my race, to keep the masses of our
people in the country districts and out of contact with the large,
complex problems of city life, either North or South. The negro,
as I have observed and studied him, is best off near the soil, near
Nature, in the rural districts — as a rule. He is worse off in contact
with large, complex city life. And I go further. The negro on the
whole (I know there are many fine exceptions) is better off in our
Southern states than he is anywhere else in this country. He finds
opportunities in the South for progress that he does not find in
lik;e degree outside of the South.
Those of you who would keep the body of my race strong, vigor-
ous, and useful, should use your influence to keep whiskey away
from the negro race. I am no professional advocate of temperance,
but I have observed the effects of the use of liquor on my people
in the South and I have no hesitation in saying that in the counties
and in the states where we have no open bar-rooms, the black man
— from every point of view — is fifty per cent better off than he is
in the counties and states where they have the open bar-rooms. I
know it is often said that shutting up the bar-room does no good,
because people get whiskej^ by other means. I am speaking of
conditions in the South where I know them. The difficulty in judg-
ing correctly grows out of the fact that you hear of a man who gets
whiskey in a closed bar-room, but you do not hear of the ten men or
CITY, STATE AND NATIONAL HYGIENE 415
nine men. who fail to get whiskey in these prohibition counties. In
my own county in Alabama — and it is typical of a large section of
the South — we have had no open bar-rooms for twenty years. A bar-
room in our county would be a curiosity to a large proportion of
children, white and black. That means that the people have be-
come weaned away from the love of whiskey, even from the taste
of whiskey. And so if you would help my race better itself physi-
cally, use your influence everywhere to keep the bar-room closed,
to keep whiskey away from them.
And then, with equal emphasis, I want to ask you to use your
influence to keep the patent medicines away from my race. Now
I suspect I am getting a little personal here in the North, because
most of these things are manufactured up here and the South seems
to be a kind of dumping-ground for them. When a patent medi-
cine is so vile that you cannot find a market for it in the North,
it is dumped down in the South on my race. Now keep the whiskey
and patent medicines from my race and you \^dll help make them
a strong and better race of people.
Now, I have said, in connection with that, keep them in the coun-
try districts, but, my friends, the negro has a great deal of human
nature, and he wants education for his children and he is not going
to stay in the country districts unless he finds as good school oppor-
tunities, as good church facilities, as he finds in the smaller towns
and larger cities of his country.
Again, from an industrial point of view — and this applies to all
sections of the country, North and South — those who would better
my race I hope will learn to reward the race more as individuals
and not so much as a race. There are certain opportunities in
industrial directions that are closed against the negro simply be-
cause he belongs to a certain race. You know what I mean. Now
that is unfair, my friends; that discourages and holds back some
of the strongest and best men of my race.
Now, my friends, more and more the American white man should
come to the point where he deals with my race as individuals, and not
so much with the race as a whole. That is the way other races are
dealt with. You will find that in proportion as my race is studied
and helped and encouraged, it will add to the strength of the
economic life of this country.
In that section of our country where the negro is dependent upon
others largely for work (I do not mean the discussion of the theory
of work or these economic theories, but actual work — I do not
mean the discussion of home economics and domestic art and do-
mestic science, but I mean only one thing), the negro woman is de-
416 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
peiuled upon for cookinji'. You know sometimes you get cooking
mixed up with domestic art and domestic science and have a lot
of trouble. Now doM'n there where the negro woman is depended
upon for cooking", where the black man is depended upon for work
in the field and in the shop, there is a tremendous waste of economic
life to the white man because of the weak and sickly bodies of thou-
sands of my race. I speak with care when I say that at the present
time there are — at least in the Southern states — two hundred thou-
sand black people who are sick, who ought to be well. And some-
body is paying the cost of that sickness. There are two hundred
thousand colored people in the South today who are sick from pre-
ventable causes, and your duty as American citizens will not be
accomplished until you reach this class of our people.
You cannot help the negro very much and you do not help the
white man very much by yielding to' the temptation of trying to
shut the race off in certain segregated parts of American cities.
The negro race is just as proud of associating with his race as the
white man is of associating with his race. I would not change races
or colors with the whitest man in America. No man can be more
proud of his race than I am of mine. No man can be better satisfied in
association with his race than I am when associating with members
of my race. But, my friends, according to our complex form of
Republican Government, when you shut the negro off in any cer-
tain section of a city or community, the negro objects, because he
knows that he is going to receive an unfair deal. Where? How?
In the first place, he knows that when you shut him off from the
rest of the population, he is not going to have a fair chance from
the health point of view, from a moral point of view, from a physical
point of view. He knows that the lights in that section of the com-
munity are not going to be so good as they are in the other section.
He knows that the streets are not going to be so well kept up as
is true in other sections of the community. He knows, above all
things, that the sewerage is going to be neglected in his portion
of the city. He knows that he is not going to receive the same
police protection that other people receive in the same city. He
knows that he is going to be kept out of churches, of the influences
of the Y. M. C. A., of the library, of the hospital. And he knows,
further, that he is going to be compelled to pay a tax that is equiva-
lent to the tax paid by the rest of the community who receive
the benefit of all the conveniences and comforts of civilization.
Now, my friends, our two races are going to remain in this
country together. We are going to touch each other at some points.
You cannot shut the negro away from the white man. If you would
CITY, STATE AND NATIONAL HYGIENE 417
4
build a wall around the negro, he would get over that wall and then
you would have to build five walls around the negro to keep the
white man away from the negro. We are going to live here in this
country together. In fact, we are more like you than any other
race, aside from the color of our skin, that comes into America.
We speak the same language that you do, we eat the same food that
you do, we profess the same religion that you profess, we have all
the ambitions and aspirations that you have, we understand the
genesis of your local institutions, we have the same local and na-
tional pride that you have, we love the same American flag with just
as great fervor as you do. We are American citizens and we are
going to stay here with you. That means we are going to help you,
or we are going to hurt you, and we want you to help us to get to
the point where we can help you. We want to help you and we
want to help ourselves.
I am interested ia the negro race ; I am equally interested in
the white race in this country. I used to be a hater of the white
race, but I soon learned that hating the white man did not do him
any harm and it certainly was narrowing up my soul and making me
a little bit of a human being, and so I said, "I will quit hating the
white man." I want to get the negro on his feet for his sake and
equally for your sake. I protest against the lynching and against
burning of human beings in the South, not only because of the
interest that I have in my race, but equally because I don't want
to see any of God's sons and daughters having their souls lowered,
narrowed, and embittered by inflicting unjust punishment upon
any section of the human family. As I said, I am interested in my
race, and interested in your race. We touch each other everywhere ;
in the South, especially when food is to be prepared, the negro
touches the life of the white man. When clothes are being
laundered, the negro touches the life of the white man. Often the
clothes in the South go from the rich mansion to the dirty and
filthy hovel of the ignorant colored woman who has had no oppor-
tunity to learn the lessons of health. We are bound together by ties we
cannot tear asunder if we would. In their most tender years thou-
sands and hundreds of thousands of little children in the South
spend their years in the presence and in the hands of colored
women, or rather colored girls. It is inunensely important, for
the sake of the colored women, and equally important for the sake
of the health, happiness, and upbuilding of your race, that that
colored woman or colored girl who plays such an important part
in the rearing of a large portion of the white people — it is mighty
important that she should be intelligent, that she should be clean,
(15)
418 FIRST NATIONAT, CONFERENCK ON RACE BETTERMENT
t.liat slio slioukl. tibovc all tliin<;-s, ho vii'tiioiis. We want you to help
us.
You can help the negTo in two ways — by being frank with him,
telling him about his faults, and by praising him just a little more.
The ne^o likes praise. I know him pretty well, and there are
few races that will improve so much under the influence of praise
as will my race. I remember when I Avas a young fellow, just about
the close of the War, I had a few dollars. I had said that when I
got enough money the first thing I was going to buy was a store
suit of clothes. So I went straight to the store, when I thought I had
cash enough. The man in charge of this store, when he found I had
the money and wanted to buy a suit of clothes, said he had exactly
the suit of clothes I needed, bought for my special benefit. He
began to describe the suit of clothes, and I looked it over. He was
looking at my pocket at the same time. The first thing I knew he
had the coat on. I began to feel around and the sleeves were about
six inches too short. Then the waist band came nearly up to my
neck so I could not twist about or move much. But the storekeeper
caught hold of the sleeves and began to pull them down and press
them and praise the coat. Then he went around and pulled down
the back part of the coat and began to praise that — said it was an
imported coat, bought for my special benefit. Before I knew it I
thought it was a pretty good coat. He got the pants on me and they
were about six inches from my shoes, but he praised the pants,
pulled the legs down, patted them, and pulled them down until I
thought it was a pretty good pair of pants and a pretty good suit
of clothes. He got my money and I got the suit of clothes. I went
home. The next day Avas Sunday and I went to church. While at
church a rain storm came on and the suit of clothes got wet. When
it dried out it was about the size of a fig leaf. Now it was a pretty
good suit of clothes, friends, so long as it had somebody to praise
it. I have found that you can make very often a pretty good man
of an indifferent man by praising him a little bit more. Whenever
you have an opportunity, praise my race. As you come in contact
with them as individuals, or in large numbers — whenever you can
honestly do so, praise them.
And, lastly, when you go "back to your own homes, seek an oppor-
tunity to actually get acquainted with my race. There are a lot of
people in this country who know about the negro, who hear about
him, who study him, who. have examined him at a distance, but,
my friends, very few people actually know my race. If you will
take the time and the trouble to go into their homes, to get into
the life of my'people. to go into their churches, into their Sunday-
CITY, STATE. AND NATIONAL HYGIENE 419
schools, in every one of your communities, you will find the negro
has virtues you never dreamed of. I was in Sicily some years ago.
I had always trained myself to hate the Sicilians and thought thej^
were the most lawless and hateful and dreaded people in the world.
I went away out into the country. I went among the peasant classes
in Sicily and I ate their food, lived in their houses, lived their life
for a number of days, and I came back loving the Sicilians a'nd
honoring them more than I had ever loved and honored any others
outside of my own country before. I found I had not known the
Sicilians. So when you go back home and find a negro, just one,
say to yourself, "I am going to know this individual, I am going
to put my life in touch Avith his life." I was in a college town a
few months ago where there was great interest in the education of
the colored people and after I had spoken to the students, as I
usually do, I said to the college president, "Now I want to go to
the colored church. I want to speak there," and he turned up his
ears and eyes and said, "Well, where is the colored church?" Now
there were seventy-five colored people right there in the shadow of
that college and yet the college president did not know where the
negro church was. So, my friends, every one of you, in your own
way, at your own turn, get into the life of the members of my race.
And finally, let me thank all of you, notwithstanding the fault that
I have seemed to find with you — let me thank all of you for what
you have done in bringing about race betterment among my race.
Despite all the faults of America, and despite all the shortcomings
of the white men and of the black men, when we look at this matter
in the large — not in the little — you cannot find ten millions of ne-
groes anywhere in the civilized or uncivilized world who have made
such tremendous progress industrially, educationally, morally, and
religiously as is true of the ten millions of negroes in the United
States, and a very large proportion of that progress is owing to the
fact that you have been more generous in helping forward my race
than was ever true in all the history of the world when one race of a
different history, of a different color, was dealing with the members
of another race.
And so, Doctor Kellogg, we thank you for this opportunity of
coming here and getting this inspiration, coming here and getting
opportunity to resolve again and again that each will go back home
and do our part in making our races better, more useful, more
righteous. In doing that we shall have to overlook the little things
that will be perplexing, the short-lived things of life. I was once
traveling with an old man in South Carolina. When we got to Colum-
bia, he went up to the city and stayed longer than he should. In
420 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERF^NXMi: OX RACK BETTERMENT
order to catch the last train by which we were traveling, and in his
haste to get to the railroad station, he went to the first hack driver
he saw and said, "Take me to the railroad station right away."
The first hack driver was a white man. He had never driven a
black man in his hack. He said, "I have never driven a black man
in my hack." The negro said, "Boss, I have just got to get to the
railroad station, that is all. I ain't got no time to discuss details."
Then he said, "Mr. Whiteman, I will show you how to fix it. Just
keep quiet. You just take the back seat and do the riding and I
will take the front seat and do the driving." Overlooking per-
plexities, overlooking all these details, in a few minutes the white
man and the black man, together, Avere at the railroad station. The
white man got his quarter and the negro got his train. Overlooking
all these little perplexing, tantalizing, short-lived details, through
the leadership of this great movement, let us go forward with the
surety that every day in the North and in the South and through-
out the country white people and black people together are moving
in the direction of the railroad station.
Discussion.
Sanitary Kitchens
Hastings H. Hart.
I have been impressed as much as by any other thing since I
have been here with the messages which we have had from Doctor
Searcy, of Alabama. I do not know how far you know the social
movement of the South. The South is awakening with extraordi-
nary force. In the state of Virginia there is a perfectly splendid
social movement which has as leaders a group of young physicians
who are going ahead and are doing things in the very finest pos-
sible social spirit. The spirit of Tennessee is waking up. The Na-
tional Conference of Charities and Correction is to meet in the city
of Memphis this spring and throughout the state of Tennessee you
find a struggling and a striving toward the best things. Even the
state of Mississippi is doing some fine things. I was perfectly
astonished to find in the city of Jackson last year the finest kitchen
I ever expect to see this side of heaven, a sanitary kitchen in the
school for the deaf. The school superintendent searched the world
over for ideas, then built an institution that may serve as a model
for at least the whole Southern country. Somebody gave him five
thousand dollars and he has established a sanitary kitchen which
is beyond our conception. I do not know^ of any sanitarium or hotel
in the United States that has such a kitchen as that and that is an
object lesson for the whole TTnited States.
CITY, STATE AND NATIONAL HYGIENE 421
The state of Alabama has been struggling with the prison ques-
tion and doing away with the contract system, which was a most
unfortunate thing. In the state of Florida there is an awakening
along the line of children's work which is magnificent. The whole
state has taken hold of the child and is developing in the state of
Florida ideas that are fine. I had occasion to say to a Southern
audience some time ago that the South has the greatest possible
opportunities, just as Wisconsin and Minnesota and some of the
other Western states have developed magnificent state institutions
by profiting by the experience of the older states. Now the South
has its opportunity to do the best things that can be done iii the
United States because it has the benefit of the experiments that
have been carried out by educational and philanthropic institutions
and social settlement and by the medical work of our great Boards
of Health throughout the United States in experiments that have
cost millions of dollars. The South can avail itself of them by
simply going and looking at them, and when Doctor Searcy's prede-
cessor, Doctor Price, built up in Alabama one of the most noble in-
stitutions for the insane in the United States and became a leader
in that specialty, he did for the South an incalculable good. When
he died, it was in the province of God that such a man was put at
the head of that institution. Now the South is entitled to all the
help we can give them. I am going from this place to Nashville
to spend a Aveek, by request, in lecturing in a very remarkable
school, because it is a school where there is established, side by side,
training for the white students and training for the colored stu-
dents and preparation for the social and Christian work in the
South.
THE SOCIAL PROGRAM
Luther H. Gulick, M.D., Mrs. Luther H. Gulick, New York, N. Y.
We are in substantial ag:reement as to the steps that ought to be
taken for race betterment, and we have been for years, but the
steps are not taken. What is the matter?
In the first place, I wish to call attention to the fact that the
program of society is mainly either to cure disease and evil or to
prevent it. I wish to affirm that that is not an adequate program
for society, any more than to keep a vessel off the rocks is an ade-
quate set of instructions for the commander of a fighting fleet.
This is the best conference which has been held on the subject
of race betterment, but let me read to you some of the titles of
the subjects discussed at this splendid Conference: "Apparent In-
crease in Degenerative Diseases," "The Prevention of Arte-
riosclerosis," "The Significance of a Declining Death-Rate," "Some
Efficient Causes of Crime," "Sterilization," "Hookworm," "The
Deterioration of Civilized Woman," "The Cost of High Living as
a Factor in Race Degeneracy," "Factory Degeneration," "The
Health Certificate a Safeguard against Vicious Selection in Mar-
riage," "Unbiological Habits," "Tobacco as a Race Poison," "Some
Suggestions for a More Rational Solution of the Tuberculosis Prob-
lem in the United States," "The Effect of Alcohol on Longevity,"
"Alcohol: What Shall We Do about it?" "The Effect of Philan-
thropy and Medicine upon Race Progress," "The Function of the
Dentist in Race Betterment," "Public Repression of the Social
Evil." I affirm that these things, and consideration of these topics,
are necessary, but properly fail as a program for society, and that
there has not been proposed any program for society as yet. These
are mainly steps to prevent race degeneration. We need measures
by which we may better the race. To get a load up a hill is not
identical with keeping it from sliding down hill: one needs power;
the other can be accomplished by blocking the wheels.
I cannot better illustrate the stupidity, the ignorance, of our
present method of dealing with social questions than to refer to
two specific questions.
Take the subject of dancing. There are no statistics on dancing,
because Ave all dance. During the last few years there have arisen
in the civilized world new forms of dancing. They have more com-
pletely broken the traditions of the past, concerning dancing, than
has ever been the case with the traditions of any other art; thej^
have completely shattered them.
Apparently society has objected. During the early stages of the
THE SOCIAL PROGRAM 423
dance craze, infatuation, hypnotism, movement — whatever word
you please — there was practically unanimous condemnation by
social workers, college presidents, w^omen's clubs, newspapers, maga-
zines, the Queen of England, the Pope in Rome, and all the rest of
us. It had not one atom of effect upon the progress of the dance.
That is, the measures which we directed, in the endeavor either to
check or to control the flow of this public desire, were completely
wide of the mark. We were stupid and ignorant of how to control
dancing.
As was told us so graphically and I think so truly last night, there
is substantial agreement on the part of all students of psychology
and students of medicine and among most all thinking men and
women that alcohol is damaging to the individual, to the home,
and to the race ; but seventy years of progressive warfare against
it have been accomplished with a rather steady increase in its use.
I was talking about constructive philanthropy not very long
ago and closed it by an appeal for what I called universal mother-
hood and universal fatherhood, the reaching out of every mother
and every father to feel responsible that all the children in the
community should have an opportunity for wholesome living. The
distinguished superintendent of schools, who was presiding, arose
and said he endorsed every word I said; that he believed that if
every father of that community would reprove every boy every
time he saw him doing wrong, the race would be greatly benefited.
Could anything better illustrate w^rong method? For if there is
anything that will as surely damn every boy and girl, it is to be
reproved every time they make a mistake or even do wrong de-
liberatelj'. We have as yet developed practically no devices for
the discovery of individual power or of community power or of
righteousness. We have developed great engines for the discovery
of weakness.
We do not succeed in the world because we have not diseases, or
because we have not weaknesses. We succeed in the world, and
are worth while and significant in the Province of God, in so far
as we have some power. Can this generation devise a way of find-
ing power?
Persons like ourselves are largely outside of the stream of hu-
man progress. What you and I do and think is interesting, but it
has as much effect upon what the world does as what we said and
did had upon how the world danced. It is well to remember that,
and that the world is not changed by "resolutions." The age of
specialization is making life stupid. The world will not tolerate
monotony, but to avoid it will, if more interesting ways are not
424 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTIOKMENT
provided, drink, dauce, smoke and chew, and take cocaine and go
on sprees. It will go on the street, and live in cities.
I speak now of the voice of the world-spirit. The human soul
is not a thing primarily related to food and shelter and clothing;
it is related to aspiration, and faith, and hope, and desire. The
thing that burns inside is not to "never do" things. It is for the
chance to do where there is adventure, where there is romance,
where there is something going on. That chance we are taking
away, and, so surely as that chance is taken away in one way, it
will be taken in some other way. Drink and all these things are
surely destined to increase unless there be ample opportunity for
the human spirit to reach out into the world of beauty, into the
Avorld of romance, into the world of idealism. That "push up"
which has made mankind is the thing that makes life worth living.
I am to speak of this subject specifically with reference to girls.
I am to endeavor to present to you an illustration — not because
"^^e think that this is any general solution of these difficulties, but
because it is an endeavor of a constructive type — the organiza-
tion which we know as the Camp Fire Girls. I have prepared a
brief statement of what we are trying to do.
More than one-half of all the men and women — more than half
is conservative — are going to have homes and are going to have
children. In this, the finest occupation of human kind, the most
Avholesome women have the responsibility, the primary responsi-
bility, of determining the character of the home and the character
of the children. In view of this fact, the first education of all
women should be that education which fits them to be good wives
and mothers. It is also true in regard to the other careers — teach-
ing, medicine, nursing, working in stores, and the like. It is also
true that these careers into which women are entering rest upon
those qualities which are developed in connection with the home.
Hence, again, all education for women should be based upon the
idea of her being a home-maker, and at least using the qualities
which are developed by home-making.
In view of the fact that educational, religious, recreational, in-
dustrial, and many other activities which used to be carried out
under woman's control in the home, are now carried out in the
community, it has become evident that social affairs, such as gar-
bage disposal and water supply, can no longer be handled by homes,
but belong to the community. The time is past when each man can
get clean water by going out and digging in his front yard. The
same principle applies to social life, because social life is in the
school, in the church, at the movies, on the street, in many other
THE SOCIAL PROGRAM
421
places than in the home. The same kind of organization and
finance and business administration which is demanded for a water
supply is demanded for a social supply.
Hence, while the Camp Fire Girls base their ideals and program
upon the home, they see that this ideal and program divinely in-
volves the entire community. The Camp Fire Girls, then, is an or-
ganization of girls and women for the purpose of preparing for
and carrying on what always has been woman's work, but which now
involves the entire community — that is, the making of the spirit
of the home dominant throughout the entire community. The Camp
Fire is a mode of organizing the activities of every day into a defi-
nite, interesting program, and of revealing it as the most romantic
and most desirable of anything there is in life. It is our aim,
through the use of poetry, through the use of costume, through the
use of design, through the use of ritual, of business, of ceremony,
to brush off from the acts of daily life those things which prevent
us from seeing that they are the things which are the most inter-
esting.
Now very much against her feelings, I am asking Mrs. Gulick,
Hiltini (for each Camp Fire Girl has a new name which expresses
her ideals), to tell you something more about this subject. I think
she will forgive me if I tell you what Ililtiid means. It means the
desire of accomplishment. Her sign is three points down this way:
I have asked her to put on her ceremonial gown, which is not
usually shown in public, and to wear her honor beads, which belong
to her own Camp Fire circle only, and to tell you, as she may, a
bit about how romance is expressed.
Mrs. Luther H. Gulick
Last evening a mother, who is also a Guardian of a group of
Camp Fire Girls, said to me that the movement was the first one she
had felt that she could go into and work, and at the same time be
true to her home. Some of our strongest groups of Camp Fire
Girls are conducted by mothers who have daughters of their own.
"We want these mothers in the movement.
426 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
The schools, and most organizations for girls, are taking
daughters away from the mothers. These organizations make things
center around themselves. In every way possible, Camp Fire
Girls are fostering the mother-daughter relation. And how the
mothers love it! I want to read you a poem from a mother. We
are getting hundreds of poems, and many plays, which are inspired
by the romance of this movement:
THE BEADS
It was a busy Saturday,
The day of all the week
When we of doing what we ought
Grow weary, so to speak;
I faced the dinner dishes, when
My daughter came with speed,
Saying, "Mamma, I'll do them all,
I want to earn a bead."
Surprised and pleased I went upstaii's
With dustpan, brash and broom,
Thinking I Avould her reward
By clearing up her room ;
She heard my steps upon the floor
And of my work took heed,
"Please do not touch my room, Mamma,
Or I shall lose a bead."
That night a sudden gale arose.
So softly as I could
I put one of her windows down,
As any mother would;
A sleepy voice came from the dark,
"It isn't going to rain,
Both windows must be opened wide
If I a bead would gain."
An air of interest now surrounds
The most prosaic task;
I scarcely dare my work to do
Till I permission ask,
Lest I should make my daughter break
Some rule which she should heed,
And so, though inadvertently.
Cause her to lose a bead !
But when her cord at length is full.
Its varied tints will tell
Of patient effort day by day.
And many tasks done well;
And as I realize how time
Rich fruitage brings from seeds,
I say, God bless the Camp Fire Girls,
And their quaint chain of beads!
THE SOCIAL PROGRAM 427
Another mother sent us a few days ago a poem which she said
was her: first attempt at writing in rhythm. What is beautiful about
this is that our ceremonies, costumes, beads and desires are awaken-
ing the imaginations of girls and mothers, and they are doing things
that they had no idea they could do. We are looking for beauty,
and it is surprising how it comes out. The "counts," the official
records of meetings, are written in as beautiful a form as possible,
and the girls are illustrating the good times they have together.
They draw because they have something to draw; they write be-
cause they have something to write about, and they are encouraged
in every attempt. It is surprising how easy it is for a girl to ex-
press herself in the Hiawatha rhythm, if you tell her that she can.
The writing in rhythm makes her see things that she would not
otherwnse see. She notices the sunsets, the birds, the shadows, the
beauty in the people about her.
Here is a letter from a girl:
"Camp Fire work has meant a great deal to me. It has made
me think of things that I would not otherwise have thought of.
For instance, it has made me want to do work around the house
which I used to think myself too preoccupied to think of doing.
Of course I did such things as make my bed, put my room in order,
make cakes, cook, sew, wash and iron, but when I did them to win
honors, I began to find out that I liked to do them and did them
afterward because I wanted to.
"Then again I was never very much interested in facts con-
cerning my health. Always having had good health, I had noth-
ing to remind me of little and sometimes big things which might
prove injurious, for mother always took care of my health for me
and when I wasn't with mother any more, I left my health to take
care of itself, but Camp Fire has taught me why I should think
seriously of these things and try to hold on to the good health God
gave me. .'>'fvj
"Camp Fire has given me many happy evenings. One thiiig
that I dearly love is for a 'bunch' of girls to get together and
laugh, talk and have a .ioUy good time. I love all kinds of out-
door sports and I love Camp Fire because it approves of all the
things I love and assures me that a girl has a perfect right to ancl
in fact should care for such things."
Another girl vrrites :
"I have become acquainted with a number of very nice girls
because when they see I am a Camp Fire Girl (which they see by
428 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
my ring), they begin to talk to me and we soon are carrying on a
very interesting conversation about our respective Camp Fires.''
I can't tell you much in the few minutes I have. Much of the
work of the Camp Fire Girls is difficult to put into words. It is a
viewpoint, a spirit. Some of the things that are happening can
be described, but the spirit that is binding girls closer to their
mothers and older girls to little girls through the new organiza-
tion of the Blue Birds is not on paper. There is a most beautiful
story to be told sometime about this part of our work which has
only begun. How the little girls love the attention of their older
sisters or their sisters' friend! Think of all that may grow out of
that relation! Older sisters like the excuse of helping to dress
dolls, for are they not going to have to dress their own little chil-
dren in the near future ! Girls love it and there is every reason in
the world why they should love it, only we do not give them half
a chance.
Dr. Luther H. Gulick
I wish to close with another illustration of a positive program.
During my own college days I made the usual number of good reso-
lutions and broke them. I would resolve to take exercise every
day, then days would come when I could not. I resolved to do so
much good reading every day, then days would come when I could
not, and finally I give up making good resolutions, realizing —
and it is a very bad thing to realize it, whether it is true or not —
that I was a moral weakling. Now the trouble with my resolutions
was that they were based on a twenty-four-hour program. We
cannot live on a twenty-four-hour day. We can live on a week's
program.
Now this program which is announced tonight for the first time
publicly, although it has been in print, is called the " straight-on "
program. It is a device to enlist custom and attention in favor of
the things that you and I have believed in since we were children,
but which have never been put together as a definite program be-
fore— the kind of custom that makes us men wear our hair short
or relatively short and you women Avear it long. Those are the
forces I am talking about. I am not talking about conventions or
resolutions. It is called the "straight-on" program. It is for per-
sons eighteen and over. A "straight-on" is a person who keeps
his body, mind, and heart fit for their most splendid work by living
straight-on. A straight-on refuses to be diverted from the main
business of life by opportunity or temptations. Opportunity is
THE SOCIAL PROGRAM 429
sometimes even worse than temptation. A straight-on refuses to
undertake more than her time and strength allow, for she sees that
this is foolish and short-sighted. She goes straight on, quietly,
graciously, steadily, but always straight-on. The pin is to be a
little half-inch bar of gold which may be worn here on the left
breast when one has lived the "straight-on" program for one
month. It may be taken off any moment. Then you are free. But
it cannot be put on again until you have lived it a month — and
you are the only judge. There is no promise, or oath, or resolu-
tion. This particular thing is a device for standardizing, and mak-
ing practical, ideal resolutions.
The program is as follows. It is divided into three parts : Physi-
cal, mental, and spiritual.
PHYSICAL : Sleep not less than sixty hours per week. Now if
you want to sit up, or stand up, or waltz up, at a dance till two or
three o'clock in the morning, all right, do it, but pay up. If there
is sickness in your family and you ought to stay up at night, get
up, but pay up, too : for that is required as much as the other. The
person who does not know enough to pay his debts has no right
to go on. Sleep sixty hours per week as a minimum. Many need
more than seven hours of outdoor exercise each week. Some days
you cannot pay up. That counts. Walk to your work, to school
and home a^ain. The great majority of us who lead sedentary lives
do not average one hour per day of outdoor exercise. Those two
things alone will alter the lives of most of the people in most com-
munities. Eat between meals only when it is socially necessary,
and then as sparingly as possible.
This aims to be a practical program, not one of these theoretical
things you can defend with eloquence but cannot really live up to.
You can live up to that. Keep clean inside and outside. Do it
regularly and thoroughly. Ideas spread curiously. In business,
in school, on the street, dress as quietly and simply as custom per-
mits. At other times, make it a point to add the charm of form
and color to social life. That is all there is under the head of physi-
cal. That is practical, isn't it? Isn't it more than some of you do?
MENTAL: Read, own and reread each year not less than three
strong books having thought new to you, not fiction or poetry —
not that fiction and poetry do not have their place, but they belong
in another place. Most people, as James says, "stop thinking before
they are thirty." No new social enterprise was ever carried through
by the change of public opinion in people who are middle aged.
There was practically not one prominent Englishman of science over,
forty who publicly acceded to Darwin's position. It involved too
430 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
great a mental adjustment. He had to wait for a generation. The
reason the Camp Fire Girls begin with girls, instead of with you,
is because girls are more susceptible of new ideals than we are. To
read three new books each year means permanently keeping out
of intellectual ruts. Carry on some course of study by mail or
otherwise, a course of lectures or anything that means going on,
going on, going on. There is no physiological or psychological
reason for stoppage of growths.
SPIRITUAL: Be alone and think out your own ideals toward
progress at least for four fifteen-minute periods a week. How fares
it with you, your ideals for the expression of affection in your own
home, your own brothers and sisters, your schoolmates? How about
that old misunderstanding? Is there some way of cleaning it up?
Be alone, face to face with your own soul, fifteen minutes four times
a week. Get acquainted with some great poetical message each
year.
That is the "straight-on" program. And I want to give a guess
that there are going to be tens of thousands of young people who
will say, "That is what I want to dp." And I think that is what
this Conference desires to do, to propose definite, concrete subjects
of a practical kind by which people may attain these large results
towards which we aim.
We have learned to take the genius of an Edison and organize
great corporations. The telephone and the telegraph form a net-
work over the entire world. The genius of the one man influences
the lives of all civilized beings. We have learned how to develop
and use the genius in the world of physics, in the world of chem-
istry, in architecture. Can we devise a social instrument by which
human combination shall be brought about so that ideals of beauty
and romance and adventure shall be given opportunity in lines that
make for wholesomeness of human living? That is the spiritual
again. ' We can get on with our diseases, we can get on with our
degenerates, we can survive with some insanity; but we cannot
survive without an opportunity for the human spirit to reach out
into lines that are good and wholesome. "Man shall not live by bread
alone."
EUGENICS AND IMMIGRATION
NEEDED — A NEW HUMAN BACE
J. H. Kellogg, LL.D., M.D., Superintendent Battle Creek Sanitarium^
Battle Creek, Michigan.
We have wonderful new races of horses, cows, and pigs. Why
should we not have a new and improved race of men?
When Boston Blue trotted a mile in three minutes and won a
prize of $1,000 in 1818, the world was more surprised than when
Lou Dillon made a mile in two minutes at Readville in 1903. A
century of breeding and training added fifty per cent to the effi-
ciency of the trotting horse. During this same century the appli-
cation of the laws of eugenics and euthenics to animal breeding
has produced many varieties of thoroughbred livestock which, in
some cases, are possessed of such superior and remarkable char-
acteristics as to virtually constitute new species. This has been
accomplished by breeding out defects and supplying through suc-
cessive generations environmental conditions the most favorable
possible for the development of desirable characteristics.
A new species of milch cow has been produced which shows a
continuous record for seven days of more than three pounds of fat
per day.
A new species of hen has been developed which lays 300 eggs a
year. Every animal which man has gathered from the forest and
the plain and domesticated, he has improved until they are more
efficient and in every way finer than their wild ancestors.
By the application of the same principles to the vegetable world,
even more marvelous results have been produced. From the little
sour wild apple has been developed the hundreds of varieties of
delicious apples which load our orchards every autumn. New spe-
cies of wheat and corn have been created which produce double
crops, that are able to thrive in deserts. The little tasteless watery
tuber found in the Andes has been transformed into the wonderful
potato, which gives us our most important vegetable crop. Insignifi-
cant desert weeds, by the magic hand of a Burbank, have become
the floral marvels of our greenhouses and parks. The United States
Agricultural Department has just announced the perfection of a
blueberry nearly three-quarters of an inch in diameter, which may
be cultivated the same as any other garden fru-it.
Man has improved every useful creature and every useful plant
432 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
with which he has come in contact — with the exception of his own
species.
The attitude of the average man toward the question of human
eugenics is well illustrated by the story told of a New York mer-
chant, who had four full-blooded dogs and two young sons. A
friend, observing that he employed a tutor for his boys while he
cared for his dogs himself, said to him one day:
"Mr. Smith, why do you give your personal attention to your
dogs and turn your boys over to a tutor?"
"Oh," said the merchant, "my dogs have a pedigree."
To one who has not given this matter special thought, the idea
x)f a new human race will probably seem absurd, almost ridiculous.
Isn't the genus homo the finest thing on earth, and isn't the race
making marvelous progress every year? Why talk about a new
race when the average length^of human life has doubled within two
centuries, and when greater progress in the arts and sciences has
been made within a century than in all the previous centuries of
human history?
Unfortunately, a careful examination of the evidences of human
progress discloses the fact that the upward trend relates exclusively
to art, science, ethics, and other matters pertaining to the intellec-
tual and social life of the race.
The idea that the human race is degenerating is very naturally
highly unpopular. Racial and national pride naturally lead us to
believe that the race is, in every way, advancing and improving.
The evidences of improvement through discovery, invention, and
especially the accumulative knowledge and' experience of all past
generations, are so numerous and striking that we naturally con-
clude that the progress, which is so apparent in many directions, is
equally great in all.
The fact that the average length of human life has more than
doubled in the last two hundred years has been accepted as con-,
elusive evidence that the vital stamina of the race is improving- —
that longevity is increasing.
Notwithstanding this apparent progress, for nearly half a cen-
tury the suspicion has been creeping into the minds of thinking
men that, after all, the human species may not be making such
real and permanent progress as might be supposed. As long ago as
1892, Prof. Ray Lankaster wrote :
"The traditional history of mankind furnishes us with notable
examples of degeneration. High states of civilization have decayed
and given place to low and degenerate states. At one time it was
a favorite doctrine that the savages were degenerate descendants
EUGENICS AND IMMIGRATION 433
of the higher and civilized races. This general and sweeping appli-
cation of the doctrine of degeneration has been proved to be errone-
■ ous by careful study of the habits, arts, and beliefs of savages ; at
the same time there is no doubt that many savage races, as we at
present see them, are actually degenerate and descended from an-
cestors possessed of a relatively elaborate civilization. As such
we may cite some of the Indians of Central America, the modern
Egyptians, and even the heirs of the great oriental monarchies of
pre-Christian times. While the hypothesis of universal degenera-
tion as an explanation of savage races has been justly discarded,
it yet appears that degeneration has a very large share in the ex-
planation of the condition of the most barbarous races, such as the
Fuegians. the Bushmen, and even the Australians. They exhibit
evidence of being descended from ancestors more cultivated than
themselves.
"With regard to ourselves, the white races of Europe, the pos-
sibility of degeneration seems to be worth some consideration. In
accordance with a tacit assumption of universal progress — an un-
reasoning optimism — we are accustomed to regard ourselves as nec-
essarily progressing, as necessarily having arrived at a higher and
more elaborated condition than that which our ancestors reached,
and as destined to progress still further. On the other hand, it is
well to remember that we are subject to the general laws of evolu-
tion, and are as likely to degenerate as to progress. As compared
with the immediate forefathers of our civilization — the ancient
Greeks — we do not appear to have improved so far as our bodily
structure is concerned, nor assuredly so far as some of our mental
capacities are concerned. Our powers of perceiving and express-
ing beauty of form have certainly not increased since the days of
the Parthenon and Aphrodite of Helos. In matters of the reason,
in the development of intellect, we may seriously inquire how the
case stands. Does the reason of the average man of civilized Europe
stand out clearly as an* evidence of progress when compared with
that of the man of the by-gone age? Are all the inventions and
figments of human superstition and folly the self-inflicted torturinir
of mind, the reiterated substitution of wrong for right and of false-
hood for truth, which disfigure our modern civilization — are these
evidences of progress?
"In such respects we have at least reason to fear that we may be
degenerate. It is possible for us — just as the Ascidian throws away
its tail and its eye, and sinks into a quiescent state of inferiority —
to reject the good gift of reason with which every child is born, and
to degenerate into a contented life of material enjoyment accom-
434 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
panied by ignorance and superstition. The unprejudiced, all (luestion-
ing spirit of childhood may not inaptly be compared to the tadpole
tail and eye of the young Ascidian : we have to fear lest the preju- "
dices, preoccupation and dogmatism of modern civilization should
in any way lead to the atrophy and loss of valuable mental
(jualities inherited by our young forms from primeval man.
''There is only one means of estimating our position, only one
means of so shaping our conduct that we may with certainty avoid
degeneration and keep an onward course. We are as a race more
fortunate than our ruined cousins — the degenerate Ascidians. For
us it is possible to ascertain what will conduce to our higher de-
velopment, what will favor our degeneration. To us has been
given the power 'to Imow the cause of things,' and by the use of
this power it is possible for us to control our destinies. It is for us
by ceaseless and ever hopeful labor to try to gain a knowledge of
man's place in the order of nature. When we have gained this fully
and minutely, we shall be able by the light of the past to guide our-
selves in the future. ' '
Scores of others have seriously raised this question of race de-
generacy. In a recent able work entitled, ' ' Is Mankind Advancing ? ' '
Mrs. John Martin strongly discounts our boasted progress. Indeed,
she offers ver^' strong proof that we are rapidly drifting in the op-
posite direction. She declares: "We have lost our way. Men are
headed ape-ward quite as frequently as angel-ward. Time runs an
elevator which goes both ways, down as well as up."
Then this able writer draws the following impressive picture:
"Looking back along the line of history, we can see that we
(Mankind) have been traveling a long, long road whose winding
way, rising and falling century after century, we can trace back
for a few thousand years until it enters a trackless desert and fades
utterly from our view in the mists of antiquity. Immediately be-
hind the spot where we now stand there seems to lie a downward
slope, that is to say, we seem to have been ascending since the eigh-
teenth, the seventeenth, yes, part of the sixteenth centuries. But
the Elizabethan era and the period of the Renaissance in Italy do
not lie below us. Life was very full and splendid then; man had
climbed to a higher point of outlook than that upon which we now
act out our little day. Behind those centuries the way becomes ob-
scure ; it seems to pass through deep and silent forests, over dim,
somnolent plains, in shadowy twilights and through deserted wastes,
until it falls away into a wide, cold swamp, noisome, dark, terrible,
abounding in reptiles and the horrid monsters of sick dreams. Be-
yond this deathbound stillness of the Dark Ages, the road ascends
EUGENICS AND IMMIGRATION 435
again into the upper air. Birds are singing, the sunlight touches
the grain fields; the bustle of human life appears, troops of soldiery
in glittering armor, citizens in gorgeous raiment, all the pomp and
pageantry of the triumphant Roman Empire. Behind Rome the
road drops away again suddenly, a deep sharp drop into a valley,
beyond which it begins to rise once more and, becoming steeper
and steeper, it lifts our gaze to the very mountain top, where among
the clouds against the deep blue sky, swept by fresh breezes, en-
throned amid snow-white temples, gleaming in the golden sunshine,
Greek civilization sits upon the pinnacle of human greatness."
It has been suggested that the real mental status of a people or
a generation may be judged by the proportion of men of genius pro-
duced by it. An examination of twenty-seven names of men of
transcendent genius, universally recognized as such, and represent-
ing all nations and all time, has shown, states Mrs. Martin, that
eleven were produced by one small district. Ten of them were
brought forth by one small city about the size of Fall River, Mass.,
or Paterson, N. J. ' ' The little city of Athens produced in a few years
more men of consummate genius than did all the millions of in-
habitants of China, Arabia, India, Palestine, Rome, Carthage, and
all of Europe breeding for two thousand years!" In the face of such
facts can we feel altogether confident that the race is gaining in
mental fitness and capacity?
Within the last ten years numerous scientific men of world-wide
renown have given thought to this question and have uttered warn-
ings of unmistakable import.
Dr. Mayer, of the Marine Biological I^aboratory of Tortuga, in a
biographical sketch of the late Prof. Alpheus Hyatt, of Boston
University, one of the leading biologists of this country, calls atten-
tion to the view held by this distinguished scientist — that the race,
like the individual, has only a limited store of vitality and that both
must develop, progress, decline and die in obedience to one and the
same law. Thus the growth-stages of the individual aetualh' re-
semble the stages in the evolution of the race to which it belongs; as
he puts it, "the cycle of ontogeny is an individual expression and
abbreviated recapitulation of the cycle that occurs in the phylogeny
of the same stock." "Phylogeny, like ontogeny, is first progressive
and thus attains an acme of progress." This acme is followed, how-
ever, by a stage of "retrogression ending in extinction."
He also believed in the inheritance of acquired characters, and
held that the organism is plastic and irritable and responds to ex-
ternal stimuli by internal reactions which manifest theimselves as
hereditary modifications of structure. It is interesting to see that
436 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
the recent researches of Tower and MacDougal have shown that
artificially produced changes in the environment may affect the
germ-cells and produce hereditary modification of structure.
Hyatt believed that he demonstrated through his researches in
fossil shells that acquired characters may become hereditary. Con-
cerning one feature to which Professor Hyatt called attention, Doc-
tor Mayer remarks :
"It is hard to escape the conclusion that this is actually an ac-
quired character which becomes hereditary, and finally appears at
a stage earlier than that in which it first developed. Indeed, it is
one of the classic instances of an acquired character, and one of
the best established cases of this sort in the whole field of zoology."
The view of Professor Hyatt, without some modification, is in-
deed pessimistic. It leaves no possible room to escape physical de-
generacy and race extinction. The race of man must become ex-
tinct as have already most of the races of higher vertebrates who
were the contemporaries of man in the Cave-dwelling period. The
only escape from this dismal end must be found in a recognition of
the danger and a race-wide struggle against race enemies. Through
his intelligence man has subdued many of the great forces of na-
ture, tamed and harnessed them, and made them useful servants.
Thus he is able to escape the natural operation of physical law, to
defy gravitation, to soar in the heavens like a bird, to dodge the
terrors of the thunderbolt and make it pull trains and propel ships.
Likewise, by an equally intimate study of the laws of eugenics and
euthenies, and by a whole-hearted effort to conform himself to the
biologic laws which govern his being, man may escape the destruc-
tive influences wiiich have exterminated other races of animals, and
which w^ith equal certainty will destroy man unless he intelligently
and persistently combats the exterminating cosmic forces to which
every living creature is amenable.
That the human race is actually degenerating, at least in spots,
can no longer be doubted. The late Sir Alfred Wallace maintained
that the race has not improved either mentally or morally since
old Egyptian times. He insisted, in fact, that considering our possi-
bilities and our opportunities, we are worse morally than were the
Egyptians or any other people who lived before us.
Mr. Charles H. Ward, in a paper read at the thirty-seventh an-
nual session of the American Dental Association, concludes that the
tooth-brush has not become a necessity because of the special de-
velopment of the human teeth, but is required because man's teeth
are old-fashioned, really out of date, and on the road to degeneracy.
"That a retrograde evolution or degeneration of these organs is
EUGENICS AND IMMIGRATION -437
at work in man is apparent to the student of physical anthropology.
To him each upward stride of civilization, of ethnic superiority, is
associated with indubitable evidences of structural inferiority; so
that the evolutionist's prophetic vision of the 'coming man' as a
bespectacled, bald-headed, and edentulous individual of infantile
proportions but preternatural intelligence, appeals to him as a not
impossible result of modern life."
Scott Nearing, Professor of Economics in the University of
Pennsylvania, in the Popular Science Monthly for January, 1911,
showed that the native-born population of the United States in the
year 1800 was doubling itself by natural increase every twenty-five
years. A continuation of this ratio Avould have made the native-
born population in 1900 about 100,000,000. The same rate of increase
continued would have made a population of 800,000,000 by the year
2000 A. D., and by the year 2100 A. D., the native-born population
of the Umited States, by natural increase, would have, reached the
number 12,800,000,000. The native-born population in 1900, instead
of being 100,000,000, was only 41,000,000. An examination of the
census figures from decade to decade shows a steady decline in the
rate of increase of the native population until, during the last
decade of the century, the native population of the United States
increased only 18 per cent. It has been suggested that at the pres-
ent rate of decrease the birth-rate will become zero within a cen-
tury and babies cease to be born.
Sir Ray Lankaster, in the London Telegraph, states :
"Civilized mankind appears to be very nearly completely in a
condition of 'cessation of selection.' It is the better-provided and
well-fed, well-clothed, protected classes of the community in
which the cessation of selection is most complete. Racial degenera-
tion is, therefore, to be looked for in those classes quite as much,
as in the half-starved, ill-clad, struggling poor, if, indeed, it should
be expected to be more strongly marked in them. These are facts
which tend to show that such anticipations are well foimded.
"Meanwhile, it seems that the unregulated increase of the popu-
lation, the indiscriminate, unquestioning protection of infant life
and of adult life also — without selection or limitation — must lead
to results which can only be described^ as general degeneration.
How far such a conclusion is justified, and what are the possible
modifying or counteracting influences at work which may affect
the future of mankind, are questions of surpassing interest. In any
case, it is interesting to note that the cessation of selection is more
complete, and the consequent degeneration of the race would, there-
438 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
fore, seem to be more probable in tlie hiylier propertied classes than
ill the barefooted toilers."
Prof. Karl Pearson, Superintendent of the Galton Labora-
tory, according to the London Standard, utters a grave warning to
the effect that population in civilized countries is recruited far
more extensively than formerl.y from the less fit elements of the
community. The world can be rescued from the control of the
decadent (physically, morally, mentally) only by rigid applica-
tion of the principles of eugenics. It is objected by opponents of
the theories of Galton that love can never be based upon a scientific
promise. Hence the eugenic marriage is not practical. To this
Prof. Karl Pearson replied in the words of the late Sir Fran-
cis Galton that it is possible to give to the eugenic ideal the force
and intensity of a religious idea.
Doctor Tredgold, an eminent English authority, writing on
eugenics in the Juty, 1912. Quarterly Review, presents a number of
new and convincing facts showing an unquestionable trend of the
English race toward race degeneracy.
First of all, Professor Tredgold considers the notable decline in
the death rate within the last half century and its relation to the
question of race decadence. In 1865 the death rate per thousand
persons in England and Wales was 21.4 In 1911 the death rate
was only two-thirds as great, or 14.6. Statistics show that there
has been in England a decline in the death rate in all ages under
55. Notwithstanding this, says Professor Tredgold, "it would be
extremely fallacious to conclude that a diminished death rate is
any indication of an increased power of resistance to disease and
an improvement in the inherent vitality of a people."
The writer has for more than thirty years maintained that the
death rate, or, in other words, the average longevity, is not a proper
measure of the vigor of a nation, but rather the maximum longevity.
The death rate has declined, as Doctor Tredgold well remarks,
"not because the nation is more resistant to disease, but because
modern science has lessened its incidence and modern skill in treat-
ment has diminished its fatality." The prevention of plagues by
quarantine, the suppression of smallpox by vaccination, the control
of typhoid fever by safeguarding water supplies, the better protec-
tion in infancy, and the marvelous strides which have been made
in medical science, have not improved the vitality of the race but
have simply served to keep alive a large number of feeble infants
who otherwise Avould have perished. The result is that the benefi-
cent activities referred to have actually served to diminish the
average strength and vigor of the race.
EUGENICS AND IMMIGRATION 439
Doctor Tredgold demonstrates by statistics gathered from va-
rious friendly societies having an aggregate membership of nearly
a million and a half that, notwithstanding all the advances made in
the prevention and cure of diseases, there has been a steady and
marked increase in the average amount of sickness at all ages as
shown by the Report of the Actuaries appointed in connection with
the National Insurance Act of 1911.
A careful study of the returns of the Registrar-General of Eng-
land shows, according to Doctor Tredgold, that out of every 1,000
children born today as many infants die from "innate defects of
constitution" as fifty years ago: and this notwithstanding that the
total death rate of infants has been diminished nearly one-third.
In addition to this, it is well known that a great number of feeble
infants are today kept alive by scientific feeding and improved care
in other respects who fifty years ago would certainly have perished.
It is evident, therefore, that the proportion of feeble infants born
into the world is at present very much greater than fifty years ago.
This has been made still more evident by reports of the Chief
Medical Officer to the Board of Education, which show that of the
six million children registered in the public elementary schools of
England and Wales, far more than half of the children show very
pronounced evidence of inherent constitutional weakness. This
terrible fact perhaps bespeaks more loudly than could any other
the presence of an active trend in the English race toward de-
generacy and ultimate extinction.
The increase of insanity is cited by Dactor Tredgold as another
evidence of race degeneracy. While the increase of the population
of England and Wales in 52 years has been 85.8 per cent, the in-
crease of the certified insane has been 262.2 per cent. At the pres-
ent there is one insane person to every 275 of the normal popula-
tion of England and Wales. This fact, as Doctor Tredgold says, is,
to say the least, "very disquieting." But, as the Doctor still fur-
ther shows, "there is even a more numerous class suffering from
a still more serious condition, inasmuch as their incapacity is not
possibly temporary, but is permanent and incurable. These are the
feeble-minded."
Of this class, there is now known to be in England not fewer
than 150,000, making a total of 290,000 mentally affected persons
in England and Wales, besides "a vast horde of persons dis-
charged from asylums, whose mental condition is decidedly un-
satisfactory; and an additional army of individuals who, although
they have not yet been committed to asylums, are nevertheless of
feeble and unstable mental constitution and may well be described
440 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
as potential lunatics/' Doctor TredgoUl makes the remarkable
statement tlmt in England and Wales the mentally infirm consti-
tute "well over one per cent" of the entire community.
Another evidence of racial decline presented by Doctor Tred-
gold is the proportion of paupers. The number of vagrants and
paupers is shown to be increasing, and this notwithstanding the
enormous amount of relief work afforded by the church, Salva-
tion Army, charitable societies, and committees, hospitals, homes,
refuges and other charitable agencies of a private character. It
is evident that in England and Wales there is a steady increase
**in the proportion of those persons who are unable or unwilling
to subsist by their own efforts," so that it costs Great Britain half
as much to support her army of paupers as she expends upon her
entire military establishment.
The foregoing and other indisputable facts lead Tredgold to say :
"It is impossible to avoid the conclusion that at present England
contains an increasing number of people who are failing to adapt
themselves to the exigencies of the times, who are not keeping pace
with the increasing demands which civilization entails, and who
are deficient in the capacity to carry on the progress of the nation
and of the race. It seems probable, in view of the history of na-
tions in the past, that much of the present social and industrial un-
rest and of the movements towards communism is also an expression
of the same increasing physical and mental incapacity, and of a wan-
ing spirit of grit and independence."
Tredgold shows that mental unsoundness, lunacy, idiocy, im-
becility, and feeble-mindedness may be traced to hereditary influ-
ence in 90 per cent of the cases. Mr. David Heron and others have
shown that while there has been a marked decline in the birth
rate in the population in general, the diminution is almost entirely
confined to the healthy and thrifty class. In a section of popula-
tion numbering a million and a quarter persons, thrifty and healthy
artisans, the decline in the birth rate in twenty-four years, 1880 to
1904, was over 52 per cent, or three times that in England and
Wales as a whole. Study of a large number of families of the work-
ing class of incompetent and parasitic character found that the
average number of children to the family was 7.4. while in thrifty
and competent working families the number was 3.7. In other
words, the incompetent and defective classes are multiplying far
more rapidly than are the competent and eiBcient.
Doctor Tredgold ends his very striking presentation of the
evidence of race degeneracy as follows: "Life on this planet is so
constituted that it can only progress by the survival and propagation
EUGENICS AND IMMIGRATION 441
of the biologically fit aud the elimination of the unfit. In the course
of man's evolution a stage has been reached at which this process
has been reversed, with the result that the race merely marks time,
while successive nations ebb to and fro in a ceaseless rise and fall.
I believe that this is but a phase, and that the time will certainly-
come when the antidote of eugenics will be applied, and man will
continue his progress; and I have no hesitation in saying that the
nation which first grasps and applies this principle will thereby se-
cure such an advantage in increased efSciency that it will rapidl^^
become the predominant power."
Numerous other writers have, in recent years, called attention
to the marked evidences of race degeneracy which appear at every
hand. An admirable summary of the situation was presented in
the form of an indictment in a paper by E. E. Rittenhouse. then Con-
servation Commissioner of the Equitable Life Assurance Society
and now President of the Life Extension Institute, read before the Na-
tional Conservation Congress, Indianapolis, Ind., Oct. 2, 1912, which
we quote as follows:
"With all its blessings modern civilization has introduced haz-
ards, habits and conditions of life which not only invite, but which
have increased in many ways, physical, mental and moral de-
generacy.
"Our birth rate is steadily declining, and at the same time the
span of life is steadily shortening.
"Twenty-seven per cent of our annual deaths are of babies
under age five ; 200,000 of them die from preventable disease ; about
150,000 of these are under age one.
"To offset this waste of life, large families are demanded. Would
it not be well to stop this needless destruction of infants before
asking for an increase in the supply?"
Degenerative Diseases Increasing at All Ages
Rittenhouse has shown by a study of the Massachusetts State
Registration Reports that between 1880 and 1909, a period of
thirty years, there was an increase of nearly 100 per cent in the
mortality from degenerative diseases. The increase at each age is
shown in the following table : p r c nt
Ages 1880 1909 Increase of Same
All 23.21 43.26 20.05 86.38
Lnder 5 7.92 10.36 2.44 30.8
5-9 2.95 3.95 1.04 35.7
10-14 2.85 4.72 1.87 65.6
15-19 3.10 5.43 2.33 75.2
20-29 4.95 8.09 3.14 63.4
30-39 10.13 18.79 8.66 85.5
40-49 19.70 37.84 18.14 92.1
50-59 39.01 91 . 30 52 . 29 134
60-69 102.05 212.93 110.88 108.7
70 and over 261.1 558.2 297 . 1 113
442 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
lu New Jersey betAveeu 1880 and 1910 the mortality rate from
organic diseases of the heart, apoplexy, aud disease of the kidney
increased from 16.5 to 34.3 per ten thousand poj)nlation, an in-
crease of 108 per cent.
The death rate of the total population, aged 40 and over, in-
creased in thirty years, between 1880 and 1910, in Massachusetts
and New Jersey 21 per cent.
In sixteen of the largest cities of the country the increase was
25 per cent.
Regarding the causes of this increase, Rittenhouse says:
"It would seem an entirely reasonable conclusion that while the
average length of life has advanced, the extreme span of life has
not done so ; in fact, the indications are that it has been shortened.
Our failure to adapt ourselves to the extraordinary changes and
strains of modern existence is commonly accepted as the cause for
this excessive mortality in the later age periods. Even though the
statistics indicated no increase, the urgent need for correcting our
living habits would still exist.
"We may agree that in the long run the trend of humanity is
ever upward, and that this is but a temporary reaction, but can
we afford to rest wholly upon the hope that race deterioration will
automatically cease when our people have had time to adjust them-
selves to modern conditions? Wise men doubt it. This problem
will not solve itself; this adverse tendency will be checked onlj'-
when our people are made to see conditions as they actually exist,
and are aroused to the need of correcting them."
"Of the 20,000,000 school children in this country not less than
75 per cent need attention for physical defects which are preju-
dicial to health.
"Insanity and idiocy are increasing.
"Diseases of vice, the most insidious enemy of this and future
generations, are spreading rapidly, according to medical men. So
far we have lacked the moral courage to openly recognize and fight
this scourge.
"Alcohol and drug habits are constantly adding new victims
to the degenerate list and to the death roll.
"Suicides are increasing and now reach the enormous total of
about 15,000 annually.
"Lynchings and burnings-at-the-stake continue and are common
only to our country.
"Attempts upon human life bj^ individuals aud mobs under
trifling provocation, or none at all, are obviously increasing.
"Over 9,000 murders are committed every year, and it is esti-
EUGENICS AND IMMIGRATION 443
mated that bnt an average of 116 mnrderers are executed for their
crimes. "We have the appalling estimated homicide record of over
100 per million population as against 7 in Canada, 9 in Great
Britain and 15 in Italy.
"In the United States the death rate above 40 has increased
steadily for years (about 27 per cent since 1880), while it has re-
mained virtually stationary in England and AA^ales.
"The important organs of the body are wearing out too)soon —
the diseases of old age are reaching down into the younger age
periods.
'"The death rate from the degenerative diseases of the heart,
blood-vessels, and kidneys, including apoplexy, has increased over
100 per cent since 1880. These diseases claim over 350,000 lives
annually.
"The doctors tell us that fully 60 per cent of these deaths are
preventable or postponable if the disease is discovered in time.
"Periodical health examination would detect these chronic dis-
eases in time to check or cure them. No public campaign to edu-
cate our people to this vital need is being carried on.
"All of our money, all of our energy, seem to be directed against
diseases that can be communicated. Is not a life lost from Bright 's
disease as valuable as one lost by typhoid fever?
"The annual loss from pneumonia aggregates 133,000 lives — a
large portion of which is due to weakened bodily resistance resulting
from degenerative affections.
"Cancer, a baffling disease of the degenerative class to which
our people in their present physical condition are highly susceptible,
claims 75,000 lives annually and is increasing verj^ fast. Deaths
from external cancer alone have increased 52 per cent in ten years.
"Pellagra, a deadly plague new to this country, is increasing
rapidly in some of our Southern states, and it excites but slight
public concern.
"Over 150,000 Americans are destroyed annually by tuberculosis.
We know how to prevent it, but our tax-payers object to the ex-
pense and leave the battle almost wholly to charity.
"Nearly a million afflicted people are spreading the poison of
tuberculosis to the w^ell, with virtually no official restraint or super-
vision because of the expense.
"Over 25,000 Americans are still sacrificed annually to the pre-
ventable filth disease — typhoid fever. About 300,000 suffer from it
and are more or less impaired by it.
"Other germ diseases are wasting more lives than typhoid and
tuberculosis combined. We are warring against them, but com-
444 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
pared to the lives still hoiiifj- lost, our efforts are feeble and only
partially effective.
"Over 90,000 Americans are killed annually by accidents and
various forms of violence. Our efforts to prevent the steady in-
crease of this waste have failed.
"The annual economic loss due to preventable disease and death
is conservatively estimated at $1,500,00,0,000 and our fire loss at
about $250,000,000.
"To prevent fire waste our cities spend through the public ser-
vice approximately $1.65 per capita, and to prevent life waste 33
cents per capita.
"It is estimated that 1,500,000 of our people are constantly suf-
fering from preventable disease, and that during the next ten years
American lives equaling the population of the Pacific Coast and
Eocky Mountain States (over 6,000,000) will be needlessly destroyed
if the present estimated mortality from preventable and postpon-
able disease continues."
According to the report of the Committee of the American
Prison Association, 10,000 murders are committed in the United
States every year — more than the aggregate number in any other
ten civilized nations, with the exception of Russia.
According to Doctor Hoffman, the world's greatest statistician,
a most conservative authority, homicide in the United States is in-
creasing. The rate for the urban population, 1881 to 1891, was 5 per
hundred thousand. From 1900 to 1910, the rate was 7.2 per hundred
thousand. In England the rate is only .9 per hundred thousand.
This condition, says Doctor Hoffman, "is not compatible with
the common assumption that actual progress is being made in the
United States in all that is summed up under the term civilization
and national welfare."
As regards the causes of race degeneracy, opinions are divided.
In general, two great causes are in operation — heredity and en-
vironment. Which of the two is the more active, it may be impos-
sible to say. There are those who maintain that environment has
little if any influence upon the germ-plasm, and that acquired
characters are not transmitted by heredity. The results of recent
researches, however, seem to indicate that the influence of environ-
ment may be much greater than some have supposed. McDougal,
for example, claims to have produced mutations, that is, created
new species by injecting chemicals into the ovary of a plant. Tower,
using heat as a stimulus, produced a beetle of a very light color.
EUGENICS AND IMMIGRATION 445
He proved that this character had become fixed by crossing with a
beetle of normal color. Starvation of insects in the larval stage has
been shown to produce dwarfs in later generations.
Hammerer, of Vienna, has conducted in the Laboratory of the
Institute for Experimental Evolution, a great number of experi-
ments for the purpose of determining the possibility of the trans-
mission of acquired characters, and with some most remarkable
results. Frogs have been produced which retain tadpole char-
acteristics and transmit them to their progeny, in a manner which
would be expected from Mendel's law, but this question is largely
technical and may be left for the biologist to settle.
Whether the results of bad habits are directly transmitted or
not, it cannot be denied that hygiene or euthenics is essential to
race betterment. All the advantages of the most desirable heritage
may be lost as the result of an evil environment. Heredity concerns
only potential capacity or genius. Environment controls develop-
ment. A boy born into the world with the capacity to become a giant
might be dwarfed and weazened hy wrong feeding. The blighting
influence of s.yphilis, of alcohol, tobacco, and other drugs, gluttony,
sensuality and other vices, cannot be questioned, and these de-
structive influences are multiplying. The daily poison dose, through
drug habits, has steadily increased from year to year until now
the average person living in the United States, including women
and children as well as men, swallows daily 368 grains of poison,
alcohol, nicotine, caffeine and opium. This alone would be enough
to produce profound symptoms of degeneration if no other causes
were in operation, but we have departed far from the narrow road.
We have long been cultivating disease instead of health.
Other races of animals have degenerated and disappeared from
the earth because of changes in their environment which made the
conditions of life to which they were subjected inimicable to them.
Man, the most complicated of all animal organisms, and hence the
most likely to be injured by unfavorable conditions, finds himself
at the present time subjected to an environment more dissimilar
from that to which he is naturally adapted than that of almost
any other race of animals. Naturally an out-of-door dweller, freely
exposed to the sunlight and bathed in pure air, man has become a
house dweller, secludes himself from the sun and the air, smothers
himself with black clothing and spends the greater part of his life
as a prisoner within air-tight walls, exposed to a vitiated atmos-
phere and the disease-producing germs which thrive under such
conditions. Man is naturally a low-protein feeder, like the chim-
panzee and the orang and other primates. In recent timCnS he has
446 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
adopted a high-protein diet, the diet of the dog and the lion, ani-
mals -whose digestive machinery is adaptetl to such a dietary, which
is hostile and damaging to the human constitution.
Primitive man, living in a tropical climate, required no more
clothing than that provided him by Nature. Civilized man has in-
vented clothes, but wears them not simply to protect himself from
extremes of temperature or other injury, or to satisfy other bodily
needs, but to meet the demands of fashion. Naturally fleet of foot,
agile and muscular, supple and enduring, by sedentary habits civil-
ized man has become puny, rheumatic, gouty, short of wind, hob-
bled by flat feet, and is beginning to lose his toes. Lack of exer-
cise has diminished his chest capacity until he has lost one rib and
is losing others and has become an easy prey to consumption, pneu-
monia and other lung diseases. Man has acquired a hunting in-
stinct, but has no natural capacity for either hunting or killing, so
when he goes in quest of a quarry, he must take along a dog to
find it and a gun with which to kill it. Through neglect to use
his teeth, he has begun to lose them. His third molar is practically
gone and other teeth are often lacking, and all are subject to very
early decay — one of the most certain evidences of constitutional
weakness and race degeneracy.
In his haste to become civilized, man has neglected to provide
compensations ■ for the departure from normal conditions of life
which civilization necessarily involves. We need not return to sav-
agery to be healthy, but we must see that the air we breathe is as
clean as that which the savage breathes, that the food we eat is as
wholesome and pure as the water we drink. We must give our
pale skins more contact with the sun and air and we must keep the
inside of our bodies as clean as the outside. We must cultivate
clean blood, instead of blue blood. Society must establish laws
and sanctions which will check the operation of heredity in the
nmltiplication of the unfit. Eugenics and euthenics must become
dominant matters of study and concern.
We possess knowledge enough of euthenics and eugenics to
create a new race within a century if the known principles of
healthful living and scientific breeding were put into actual prac-
tice.
According to Karl Pearson, "In the tenth generation man has
theoretically 1,024 great-grandparents. He is eventually the prod-
uct of a population of this size and their mean can hardly differ
from that of the general population. . . . If we could remove the
drag of the mediocre element in ancestry, were it only for a few
generations, we should sensibly eliminate regression or create a
EUGENICS AND IMMIGRATION 447
stock of exceptional men. This is precisely what is done by the
breeder in selecting and isolating a stock until it is established."
Movements of all sorts which seek to promote the physical wel-
fare should be encouraged and unified. Eugenics and euthenics
should be magnified before the people until their paramount im-
portance is appreciated and legislatures become willing to appro-
priate funds as liberally for these essential means of race better-
ment as they are noAv doing for the improvement of crops and farm
animals through similar means.
Prizes should be offered for the finest families and the best
health and endurance records.
Through State Life Insurance, the whole population might be
brought under government medical supervision. By periodical ex-
aminations the early beginnings of chronic diseases might be de-
tected and thus arrested by timely instruction in regard to neces-
sary changes in habits or occupations and every such case would
become an object lesson by means of which relatives and friends
should be influenced to adopt preventives in time to avoid the same
maladies. The new science of eugenics founded by Galton, supple-
mented by the now 'nearly perfected science of euthenics, when they
come to be comprehended and put into practical operation, will
result in the creation of an aristocracy of health, in the develop-
ment of a new race of man. Every board of health and official
health agency will be actively engaged in the battle against dis-
ease and degeneracy, in all its forms, chronic as well as acute.
Why should this work be left to individual initiative. Nothing
could be more profitable to the state and nothing more prolific
of satisfying results to those engaged in the effort than a thorough-
going campaign for race betterment through eugenics and sane
living, combined with scientific sanitation. The establishment of a
national department of health will provide a central bureau by
which to unify the work and collate its results and interpret them
to the people.
A Eugenics Registry Office is needed to establish a Race of Hu-
man Thoroughbreds.
It takes only four generations to make a thoroughbred when the
principles of eugenics have a fair chance to operate. Intelligent
men and women everywhere throughout the civilized world are
becoming aroused to the race significance of these great biologic
laws and are anxious to become informed in relation to eugenics
and euthenics, and to conform their lives to the principles of phys-
iologic and biologic righteousness.
We have registers for horses, cattle, sheep, pigs, and even cats
448 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
and dogs. If a lady wishes to establish the standiiio; of her pet
poodle as a thoroughbred she can do so by appealing to an official
record and the pnny canine may lift its head above its fellows, a
born aristocrat and prove its claim; but nowhere on earth, so far
as the Avriter knows, is there to be found a registry for human
thoroughbreds.
The hope is entertained by the promoters of this Conference that
one of its results may be the establishment of such a Registry. In-
deed, it seems that the time has fully come when a Eugenics Reg-
istry Office should be established in which may be recorded the
names of infants born under eugenic conditions and perhaps also
the names of persons who in person and pedigree are able to mea-
sure up to eugenic standards.
The United States Government has supplied every farmer in the
United States many times over with literature telling how to raise
the best crops, how to produce the fattest pigs and the finest
horses and cattle. How much more important that not only every
farmer, but every family should be instructed in the principles of
right living — how to produce strong, sane, healthy, and efficient
human beings!
At the present moment degeneracy is rampant in the earth.
Every day this upas tree is planting its roots deeper and spread-
ing wider its death-dropping branches, but, though at the present
time the prospect may seem dark and the future outlook forbidding,
the new science of eugenics and the old but sadly neglected science of
euthenics rise like a light-tower in the darlmess and cast a flood
of light and hope over the coming years. Following this beacon, the
outlook is most optimistic. Eugenics and euthenics, applied with
liberal intelligence, will save the race from the destruction which race
degeneracy threatens. Other races of the animal kingdom are
helpless to combat the influences which produce environmental
changes inimicable to their existence, hence every one. sooner or
later, must succumb to the destructive action of these cosmic forces.
The same fate must necessarily await the human race unless man,
through his intelligence, finds some way to avert the disaster.
He can do this if he will. Unfortunately he has to a large
extent neglected to recognize the necessity for preserving, so far
as possible, the essential conditions of his primitive life. He has
allowed himself to drift. He has formed habits by chance. In-
stead of laboring to preserve amid the conditions of civilized life
the essentials of his primeval environment, he has done the very
opposite. He has allowed his fancy and his impulses to lead him
into by and forbidden paths and has undertaken to compel his
EUGENICS AND IMMIGRATION 449
body to adjust itself to impossible conditions; and the result is,,
instead of lessening he has intensified the evil effects of environ
raent. The same forces ' which have destroyed other creatures,
other animals and species, and which are preying upon man as a
member of the animal kingdom, instead of being mitigated and neu-
tralized by the intelligence of man, have actually been increased
and exaggerated. Man has thus forced upon his body conditions
which are so far removed from his biologic and physiologic re-
quirements that, at the^ present time, he is actually accentuating^
by his daily habits of life the influence of those destructive forces
which have wiped out generation after generation of living beings.
But we may reverse the situation by the intelligent application
of eugenics and euthenics. By a careful study of our biologic needs
and our physiologic requirements we may reverse the process and
compel the cosmic forces which are dragging us down, to lift us
up, so that each generation may be superior to that which preceded
it. The greatest opportunity and the greatest duty which lies be-
fore civilized man at the present moment is the study and con-
sideration of the great questions which 'it is the purpose of this
Congress to discuss. The intelligence of the world should be set
to work to create new agencies and to multiply existing agencies for
the betterment of the. race. A biologic survey should be made of
every civilized community and of savage communities as well for
purposes of comparison. The laws of eugenics and euthenics should
be taught in every school and preached from every pulpit. Every
teacher, every leader of human thought, everj^ publisher, all profes-
sions, all serious-minded men and women should join in making
known to every human being in every corner of the globe the fact
that the human race is dving, and in seeking to discover and apply the
r ' .
remedies necessary for salvation from this dismal fate.
That there Avill sometime be a new human race, a race far supe-
rior to the present, is believed by many scientists.
It is within the power of man so to modify his environment and
so to control the evolutionary forces which are working upon him
as to eliminate the degenerative, destructive tendencies and to pro-
mote, encourage and intensify the forces which work for race bet-
terment, and thus to improve desirable qualities and eliminate de-
fects and undesirable characteristics and in time produce a race of
human thoroughbreds which will be as much superior to the average
existing man as is the thoroughbred horse to the average horse of
the farm.
The coming man will rank far above the man of today in intel-
ligence, in stamina, in endurance, in length of days, size of body,
(16)
450 FIRST NATIONAT- CONB'EBENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
bigness of brain and in all the Ciiaracteristics which make up hu-
man excellence. He Avill be, in every way, a bigger man. He will
be a real aristocrat. In his veins will course, not bine blood, but
the red blood of abounding health and vitality, polluted with no
disease or hereditary taint, equipped with alexins and anti-toxins
capable of resisting every infectious disease, and teeming with life
and vitality.
Just how this new race is to be ushered in, no man is today wise
enough to say. The object of this paper is not to offer a formula
for bettering the race, but rather to urge the need of race better-
ment and emphasize the importance of making a practical applica-
tion of all the knowledge relating to race betterment which we
now possess and undertaking such researches and investigations as
may develop more light and knowledge.
It is hoped that this first Conference on Race Betterment may
prove to be the beginning of a world-wide movement, the result of
which will be a great enlargement of our Ivuowledge of how to live
for personal and race betterment, and a more general and thor-
oughgoing application of such knowledge.
THE IMPORTANCE TO THE STATE OF EUGENIC INVESTIGATION
Charles B. Davenport. Ph.D., Director of the Carnegie Station for Ex-
perimental Evolution and of the Eugenics Record Office, ( old Spring-
Harbor, Long Island, New York.
Perhaps I may remark that we may hope in the future to have
a Conference President of the age of one hundred, provided we may
find one who has the good sense that Dr. Stephen Smith has had
to select parents who have lived to an old age. With the purpose
of enabling people to do this, there has been established at Cold
Spring Harbor, on Long Island, an institution for the collection of
data respecting human inheritable traits. At the suggestion of some
people, I have decided to change the title of my address and speak
upon the origin and aims and ideals of this Eugenics Record Office.
The beginning was far back in 1904, shortly after the opening
of the new era in the study of heredity, which starts with the re-
establishment of Mendel's law. On the first of January, 1904, there
met a body of persons interested in the breeding of animals and
plants at St. Louis and formed an American Breeders' Associa-
tion. During that meeting, and the meetings that followed, mar-
velous tales were told of successes achieved by these breeders in
working with plants and animals. We saw there what rapid de-
velopments were made in the production of new combinations of
EUGENICS AND IMMIGRATION 451
features, new and valuable strains of carnations and chrysanthe-,
mums. We saw how by the application of heredity we could pro-
duce heat-resistant watermelons and other disease-resistant plants.
Among the properties of animals, it was shoAvn how races of hogs
immune to cholera could be thus produced, and how rapid advance
could be made in the improvement of different animals.
The question kept constantly coming to those who attended,
"If such great achievements can appear in the application of the
laws of heredity to plants and animals, why cannot something be
done in the case of man?"
The need for studies of the inheritance of human traits was seen
on every hand. On the one hand, states were groaning under ah
ever-increasing burden of defectives. In the state of Massachu-
setts, during the past decade, an average of thirty-five per cent of
the total budget applicable to state purposes was spent in the care
of defectives. In the state of New York, for twelve years, from
one-quarter to one-sixth of the total of the state budget has been
spent in this care. There has been a steady increase, also, in the
total amount expended by the state in the care of these classes,
and the pressure for still greater increase cannot be withstood. On
the other hand, there was coming home a realization that the high
hope that had been entertained for the cure of the feeble-minded by
placing them in institutions where they would be trained along:
manual lines and others, was not to be realized, that the feeble-
minded child, one who was born feeble-minded, would remain feeble-
minded, despite all that could be done for his intellectual improve-
ment; the realization, also, that insane tendencies are in the stock,
that in the ordinary cases of epilepsy, we find a repetition of them
in special families and that crime and pauperism have an inheritable
basis. The recognition of all these points also helps to bring home
the importance of the consideration, at least, of the possibility of
improving the human race through the application of the new laws
of heredity.
The American Breeders' Association organized a committee on
heredity in 1907, and this was later raised to the position of a sec-
tion of the Association and now forms one of its three principal
research (Committees.
In order that studies in human heredity might be made on a
satisfactory scale, it was necessary to get some assistance. Now
the matter of heredity is not one that appeals to the ordinary phi-
lanthropist. The ordinary philanthropist will respond to the poor
man who is in immediate need of assistance or to an institution that
provides for the relief of immediate pain and trouble, but the idea
452 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
of improving the human race tlirouf>li deteniiining the laws of
heredity is such a long-range proposition that it takes a person who
is capable of seeing far into the future to appreciate its need.
The matter was laid before Mrs. E. II. Ilarriman, and in her was
found a person with this range of vision. She decided at once that
the work should be supported. It was started in October, 1910,
at Cold Spring Harbor. At the present time we have there an in-
stitution, now housed in a practically fire-proof building, with its
records kept in steel cases and every precaution taken to secure
permanency. Our first work and up to the present time, perhaps,
our major work, has been in cooperation with states, especially
through the state institutions.
We needed, first of all, to collect data. The need seemed great-
est in the case of the defective classes. The superintendents of
state institutions were very desirous of assistance. We were able
to give it to them, and they to us.
As a result of these studies during the last three or four years,
it has been found that truly the trouble is that the state bows under
a needless, heavy burden, which has a hereditary basis. We have
found that a large proportion of the feeble-minded, the great ma-
jority of them, are such because they belong to defective stock.
Similarly the majority of epileptics have been demonstrated — ^Doetor
Weeks has shoMii it in his studies — to belong to strains of epileptics.
The same thing has been shown for the insane by Doctor Rosanoff , at
Kings Park Hospital on Long Island, and at similar institutions in
New Jersey by Cotton. These results have since been confirmed in
different countries of Europe, and we are now in a position to give,
for certain classes at least of these defectives, very definite informa-
tion as to the result of certain matings.
Studies have also been made upon the criminalistic strain, espe-
cially upon wayward children, and to the greatest extent upon the
wayward girls of whom we have heard so much. We have been
appalled by the ignorance possessed by superintendents of these
institutions, officers of the state, regarding the real basis of the
trouble of the individuals with whom they have to do. This ig-
norance has led to procedures on the part of these institutions of
the most appalling sort. Thus at one institution where we visited,
we found that the superintendent maintained that seventy-five per
cent of the girls in his institution, after having been released, as
they all are, made good. On further inquiry, it appeared that
seventy-five per cent of those released from the institution married,
and further inquiry brought out that these were the seventy-five
per cent who "made good.'' The twenty-five per cent who did not
EUGENICS AND IMMIGRATION 453
marry went into lives of prostitution or of bad conduct in different
directions. Now we know from our studies that the highly erotic
girl, and this is especially the type that gets into the institutions,
Avill have at least one-half of her children with the same lack of
control over their passions that she has. One wonders at the blind-
ness that will permit these girls to go forth and marry, to have
children to double perhaps the burden which the state will have
to carry in the next generation.
Other studies that we have made have been in quite different
fields. Thus we have studied the method of inheritance of skin
color in crosses between negroes and whites, a matter of great social
importance. We were led to this study from receiving very pa-
thetic letters from men who were trying to marry, but had learned
that way back some generations before they had a great-grand-
parent, perhaps, who was colored, and they feared thus they might
have colored children if they married a white person. In order to
see if there were a practical basis for this feax, extensive studies were
made upon something like two hundred families in Bermuda and
the island of Jamaica. We discovered, first of all, the interesting
law of heredity of skin color, which shows that it is no exception
to the ordinary method of inheritance. We found, namely, that
there are four factors for the production of black skin color in the
negro, and it is because there are so many factors that the in-
heritance appears to be simple and is really so complex. We found
also in a large number of families we studied not only that the off-
spring that passed for white, of an octoroon with white or even an
octoroon with another, that no such offspring — that passed for white
— produced brown children. We could find no well-authenticated
case of that sort. We think we are justified, in view of this interest-
ing fact, in the assertion that that result has never followed from
the mating of two white persons, even though one or the other had
a remote ancestor who was black.
A special study of this subject has interested us very much, a
form of chorea or Saint Vitus Dance that occurs in old age, so-called
Huntington's chorea. We find that this is inherited, just as brown
eye color is inherited, that whenever a parent has it, half the chil-
dren at least will have it. and any normal descendant of such a par-
ent cannot transmit it to his offspring. The method of inheritance
is as definite as bro"UTi eye color. There is nothing that can be done
to prevent the progress of this dire disease. We recall one incident
found in our state which shows the ignorance or blindness of the
average person toward the fact of heredity : A girl wanted to marry
a young man who belonged to a strain such that, his father having
454 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
been affected, it was probable that he also would be affected. He
already showed some signs of nervousness. Her parents realized
the danger and Avarned her against such a inarringe. but in the
blindness of advanced stages of love, she said: "Though John were
ill, I would marry him. He is not ill, and if he should fall ill, I
should wish to marry him in order to care for him." She did care
for him, and also for four of her seven children, all of whom were
affected with this terrible disease.
Our studies have also led us to the consideration of degenerate
communities. TVe have found them in almost evein- eoimty where
careful studies of the population living in out-of-the-way places
have been made. That it behooves each state to know something
about its population is our conclusion, because from such degener-
ate communities, so far removed from social influences that their
existence even is not known to most of the people in the county,
certainly in the state — from such localities where the degenerates
are bred, go forth a stream of people who constitute ein-tainly
a large proportion of the paupers, beggars, the thieves, burglars and
prostitutes who flock into our cities.
But we are not interested only in the degenerate part of the
population. We seek to awaken an interest in heredity among our
best stock, so that in marrying, the old ideals of marriage into good
stock may be restored. For this purpose we have issued schedules
upon which a person may record his family traits, not only his own,
but those of his brothers, sisters, parents, grandparents and other
closer relatives. Many a person who has taken the trouble to fill
out these schedules has first come to see vividly what an important
part heredity has played in the production of the mosaic, which he
is. of the traits which are found distributed elsewhere in his family.
Over twelve hundred of these records filled out, many of them with
the greatest care, have been deposited in our institution. Thou-
sands of others are now distributed in the general population and
many of them, no doubt, are in process of being completed. We
believe that it would be an excellent thing were students who ap-
pear in schools able to present to the teacher such a record of
inherited capacities or performances of close relatives in order that
the teacher might have, when the pupil appears, something more
than a blank face and a suit of clothes, some idea of the probable
potentialities in that child, that his teachings might be directed
in such a way as to develop them and that he should not have to
wait for a year in order to find out what the capacities of the
pupil are.
In order to assist young people who believe irf the importance of
EUGENICS AND IMMIGRATION 455
inherited traits in the selection of mates, we have issued also an-
other schedule, and have distributed one hundred or more of them.
This is called an index to the germ-plasm. It is intended as a pre-
liminary record for young men and young women who are think-
ing of getting married. We doubted, perhaps, whether there would
be any call for this schedule, but there has been a considerable
call. A fair number of people have returned these schedules filled
out for the two with inquiries asking whether any judgment could be
rendered of the desirability or undesirability of the proposed mar-
riage. We never give very definite advice, but we are in a posi-
tion to set forth the facts in such a graphic form that if they are ob-
vious they can be made so to the people themselves. We know oi
t^vo cases at least in which, as the result of our findings, persons
themselves concluded that the marriage would not be desirable and
so informed us. In the majority of cases, however, there is noth-
ing on the face of the returns which would enable one to decide
in any respect against the proposed marriage.
We have also undertaken the study of America's great families,
to see if we could find in what way the combinations were made
which resulted in those who have done the great work of this coun-
try. We have been surprised in these families to find how persons
that we did not know to be related have acquired their genius
from the same source^thus for example : William Evarts and Sam-
uel F. .Hoar, one of our great Senators, the present Governor of
Connecticut, and his father, Simeon E. Baldwin, and William T.
Sherman and John Sherman were all cousins and all came from
the same grand stock. So I might speak of the Lowell family, the
Lee soldiers, the Hutchinson family of singers, and the Wilkinsons,
as well as of manufacturers and inventors. Thus we find, after all,
a rather limited number of strains which have supplied in the past.'
and — insofar as they are fecund — will, in the future, still supply to
this country her great stock upon which she must depend for ser-
vice in emergencies.
One word more. In this very matter of our great stock must
we depend upon the persistence of them. How we regret to see
the testimony that the best of that grand old New England stock is
dying out through failure to reproduce. A century and a quarter ago
there was graduated from Harvard College John Lowell, who be-
came a judge. At the time he was graduated he declared that he
would not marry, as many another Harvard graduate has declared,
because it would interfere with his professional success. As a matter
of fact, he did marry. He married tliuee times. One of his sons,
John Lowell, founded the Academv of Arts and Sciences, one of the
456 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
leading: academies in the country, and was also prominent in the
establishment of the Boston Atheneum. From him also descended
Lawrence Lowell, now President of Harvard University, and Per-
cival Lowell, the astronomer; also the Lowell Avho founded Lowell.
Massachusetts, and the cotton industry of Massachusetts, and his
son, who founded the Lowell Institute of Boston, which has for a
greneration or more provided lecturers for the people of that town ;
also from him descended Charles Lowell, a well-beloved martyr to
his country in the Civil War, and his brother, James Kussell Lowell,
whom we all know as a poet, professor and ambassador. What a
terrible loss to this country if John Lowell had carried out his
plan of never marrying.
So we wish to bring home to the American people the importance
of heredity, but above all. the importance of marrying, marrying well
and having healthy, effective children — and plenty of them.
RELATION OF EUGENICS AND EUTHENICS TO RACE BETTERMENT
Maynard M. Metcalf, Ph.D., Professor of Biology, Oberlin College, Ober-
lin, Ohio.
The privilege of claiming your attention for a few minutes is
doubtless given to me as a biologist, and I shall speak chiefly of
the biological aspects of the sub.ject. leaving to others to discuss
its sociological aspects.
There are three phases of the problem of human betterment —
culture, eugenics, and evolution — and these need to be carefully
distinguished. They are commonly confused in the minds of those
who have given little thought to the biological aspects of the
problem, and such confusion is likely to lead to misdirected effort.
The biologist who makes no claim to be a sociologist may make a
few suggestions to which the student of social problems may well
give heed.
Human betterment may be secured thru work for the relief of
distress, thru education of the individual, also by inspiring him to
action upon a higher moral plane. By the cumulative effects of
such culture, generation after generation, great social advance
may be made. It is by this method that our great advance in civili-
zation has been secured. This is, of course, work of the greatest
value, promoting profoundly human happiness and social progress.
It needs no defense. It makes a strong, natural appeal to every
normal man. If effort for the comfort of domestic animals is rec-
EUGENICS AND IMMIGRATION 457
ognized by us all as of worth, how much more must we approve all
intelligent endeavor to advance human welfare. In nothing that I
shall say would I wish to be interpreted as lacking in appreciation
of and enthusiasm for such individual and social culture. Con-
tributing to the happiness of one's family and neighbors, promo-
tion of normal living among them, is a life motive worthy of any
man, and when we realize that the betterment thus effected need
not cease with the present generation, but may improve the social
conditions under which all following generations shall live, this
ideal becomes glorified.
But in all the centuries of known human history, while wonder-
ful advance in individual conduct and social relations has been
secured thru the cumulative effect of the cultural effort that has
been made, there has been little, if any, advancement in innate
human character. There has been thru all the centuries little, if
any, improved inheritance for the race as a result of the many
generations of culture. I have before written: "We have no reason
to believe that the progress in culture, secured by education in one
generation, will directly improve the innate character of the chil-
dren of the next generation. Were the effects of education inherited,
human evolution should be rapid, but it has been slow; how slow
perhaps few of us realize. We speak with pride of the advance of
human civilization, of our progress in the arts and in useful knowl-
edge, of the improvement in morals and the growth of altruism, and
this all makes us blind to the fact that since the dawn of history
there has been no clearly recognizable evolution of mankind. We
reach larger results in the problem of life than did our progenitors
five thousand years ago, but we are able to do so because we build
upon their experience and that of all the generations between.
"Have we much greater innate powers! Are we at birth en-
dowed with characters having much higher possibilities and much
higher tendencies, physically, intellectually, and morally? Have we
today men of much greater physical prowess than the ancient con-
querors of the world, than the builders who constructed the monu-
ments of Egypt? Have we more adventurous spirits or more success-
ful explorers than the Phoenicians, who, vidthout compass, sailed the
ancient seas, reaching the whole Atlantic coast of Europe and the
British Isles, also passing southward even around the tip of Africa ?
Are there among us today men of keener inventive genius than
the one who first used fire, or the inventor of the lever or of the
wheel, or than the man who first made bronze or smelted ore?
Our modern engines have been invented, screw by screw, by suc-
cessive builders, each building upon the others' work. Have we
458 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERiMKNT
today men of much larjsier legal and social iinderstauding than the
ancient law-fjivers who forged the legal systems which still are
the basis of our most enlightened governments? Have we poets
whose genius greatly transcends that of Homer, or of the authors
of the books of Job and Ruth? In esthetic appreciation, and in
the power of artistic expression in sculpture and architecture, we
are degenerate compared with the Greeks.
"Even in innate moral character have we greatly advanced?
We are learning the lesson of altruism, but are we horn with a
sturdier moral sense? If we could take a hundred thousand infants
from London or Chicago and, turning back the wheel of time, place
them in the homes of ancient Babylon, w^ould they reach a higher
standard of righteousness or of altruism than their neighbors?
How little evidence we have of real evolution of mankind since the
first emergence of the race from the darkness of prehistoric
times!"* ^^|
But tho -we accept the statement that innate human character
cannot be improved by the direct inheritance of the effects of cul-
ture, there still remains to us the eugenic method of procedure,
which, if it can wisely be applied, may result in improvement in
the stirp, in the real essential innate character. This is an ideal
that fires the imagination — the breeding of a race that shall be
strong and wholesome, physically, intellectually and morally; men
who shall be decent because they are inherently decent, not because
by training they restrain their evil tendencies; a race from whose
fundamental character the evil tendencies are actually removed.
This is a social ideal higher even than was apparently present to
the mind of Jesus.
Is this ideal — of a race of inherently wholesome men — utterly
chimerical, or is there a way of approaching it? No positive, in-
dubitable answer can now be given to this question, for scientific
study of heredity has not yet given us extensive knowledge of the
biological, especially the psychological, phenomena of inheritance.
This second part of the problem of human betterment, real race
betterment, is a problem of good breeding, not one of culture.
This problem of good breeding has two somewhat distinct aspects
that are seldom clearly distinguished. There is first the problem
of bringing the race ^yerage^nearer Jto its present best by eliminat-
ing the less desirable and breeding from the best. This is the prob-
TemfoTlen^enics as ordinarily considered. But there is the added
* Metcalf. "An Outline of the Theory of Organic Evolution." 3d
Edition.
EUGENICS AND IMMIGRATION 459
problem of securing further true evolution of the race, raising the
present best to a better.
We see thus the three aspects of the problem of human better-
ment: First, human culture, whose effects are cumulative thru
training from generation to generation, the not inherited; second,
race betterment thru breeding from the best and eliminating the
more undesirable, thus raising the general average toward the best
type of manhood as we know it ; third, the problem of securing true
evolution beyond the point of the best yet experienced among men.
The problem of human culture is social, not biological. The
problem of eugenics and evolution are primarily biological, but can
be approached • only if social conditions allow the application of
biological method. It is necessary to emphasize cultural effort, for
it is essential that the good breeding of the future human race be
in the midst of a controlling atmosphere of highest altruistic ideal-
ism. Let us note for a moment some elements of the biological
problem.
I cannot stop to describe the microscopical structure of germ
cells and their nuclei; the fact that the nuclei contain chromosomes
in definite number which are the instigators of physiological action
and the controllers in heredity; that the chromosomes in each nu-
cleus fall into diverse categories physiologically, there being two
chromosomes of each physiological type, one derived from the male
parent and one from the female parent; that the different regions
of a single chromosome may have different physiological values,
and that in the division of nuclei the chromosomes split in such a
manner that each daughter cell receives half of each specialized
bit of each chromosome; that before fertilization one chromosome
of each physiological pair is thrown away, and that in fertilization
the full double character of the nucleus is restored. Of course,
without knowledge of these structures in the germ cells and of their
behavior in reproduction, one is not ready to begin to think of
problems of inheritance. Familiarity with these fundamental facts
not only helps one to escape many errors into which so many of
the uninitiated fall, as, for example, the belief in the inheritance of
the effects of culture, that is of acquired characters, but it is essen-
tial as a guide to every step of one's thinking in this field. But
I must assume that these are familiar matters to you all.
Recent studies in heredity have demonstrated that there is a
sharp, distinction between qualitieis that are heritable and others
that are not heritable. We name the former stable characters, the
latter unstable, or fluctuating characters. New qualities are arising
from generation to generation thru variation. These variations
4G0 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
may similarly be classed as stable variations, or mutations, and
fluctuating, or unstable, variations. No result can be reached by
breeding with reference to unstable variations or qualities, for
they are not inherited. Qualities belonging to the unstable type can-
not be fixed by breeding. They are, therefore, vvdthout significance
in the problems of eugenics and evolution. It is impossible, how-
ever, to discern whether an observed quality is of the stable or un-
stable type until one follows its behavior in inheritance.
Another fact of the greatest importance to remember is that
there is probably no such thing as inheritance of vague general
resemblances, but that inheritance is apparently always particular,
definite so-called unit qualities being the things inherited. The
character of any individual is built up of a complex multitude of
such unit qualities, each heritable separately, and the character of
an individual depends up.on the combination and interaction of the
unit qualities that have been passed down to him from his parents,
grandparents and other progenitors.
In the light of these facts, what is the essential problem, first
in eugenics, then in evolution ? The eugenics problem is to determine
accurately the desirable unit qualities, M'hich must be of the
stable type, and to combine and fix them in the race by breeding,
eliminating at the same time the undesirable unit qualities. It is
the problem of finding the exact units of inheritance, and of so
fixing and combining, by breeding, these valuable units in the indi-
viduals of the coming generations that we shall have a more whole-
some innate character in mankind. The evolution problem is to
find among the multitude of diverse human traits, new desirable
unit qualities of the stable type, often only in their beginnings,
and to perpetuate these by breeding.
The Galton-Pearson school of English students is willing to
waive accurate analysis of inheritance units, but the real problem
will not be solved until w^e know whether the human qualities with
which we wish to deal, the intellectual and moral as well as the
physical, do follow the Mendelian principles in inheritance, and
until we have analyzed the iMendelian qualities to their units. We
have a notable example of failure to secure permanent valuable re-
sults in attempting to breed from individuals whose valued char-
acter had not been analyzed to its unit qualities. At the Agricul-
tural Experiment station in Orono, Me., many years of efi'ort
were given to securing a strain of fowl which would lay an un-
usually large number of eggs. Mere breeding from hens which laid
many eggs was not found to be einough. The quality of high fecun-
dity could not be fixed in the strain. Selection had to be continue(J
EUGENICS AND IMMIGRATION 461
in each generation or reversion to the general average would oc-
cur. It was only after Raymond Pearl's masterful experimental
analysis of fecundity in fowls into its three physiological unit char-
acters, and his combining of the three units into one individual, that
it was possible to secure a strain in which high fecundity was a
fixed character. In breeding humankind, the manipulation of un-
analyzed qualities might prove as futile as the earlier experiments
at the University of Maine. On the other hand, Burbank, in his
breeding experiments, has reached some permanent results, tho he
has never scientifically analyzed into their units the desirable quali-
ties he has succeeded in combining and fixing. But in each case
he has dealt experimentally with many thousands of individuals
and has reached success in but a small proportion of his attempts.
His methods offer little chance of success in human breeding.
Even one wholly unfamiliar with the subject can see at once
that the mere outlining of the biological problems of eugenics and
evolution is wholly impossible in a limited paper such as this. Yet
this very fact points the chief moral I wish to urge.
We are at the very beginning of our knowledge of heredity.
Few of the myriad of unit qualities in mankind, or other animals,
have been identified and defined. We know some, perhaps all, the
units of hair color and eye color, we know some of the units of
shape of hair, and a few other such comparatively simple qualities.
But, as yet, we are merely entering the pass that opens onto the
broad fields of knowledge of inheritance. We have analyzed a
mere handful of the simpler physical unit qualities. We know
nothing, as yet, of psychic unit qualities. We cannot even be posi-
tive that the inheritance of psychic qualities is by definite units
which follow the so-called Mendelian laws of inheritance. That
intellectual qualities, and moral stamina, are heritable seems indi-
cated, but the parallelism between their mode of inheritance and
that of such a thing as hair color, however probable, is as yet not
definitely demonstrated. It is possible that most psychic qualities
are too complex ever to be successfully and completely resolved
into their heritable units.
How much progress, then, may we hope for? We don't know,
and we cannot know, until we have had decades, perhaps centuries,
of further study of these most intricate problems. By the biologist,
trained thru the study of evolution to think in geologic epochs
rather than years, the dawn of a new day for mankind is foreseen.
But to the sociologist, whose chief business is to apply our knowl-
edge to present conditions, the whole subject is of much more lim-
ited interest. Aside from a few very limited aspects of negative
462 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
practice of eugenics, the whole subject is, as yet, of little social sig-
nificance. The prolonged labor of hundreds of special students is
needed before this matter, which already is of the keenest biological
interest, can become of the greatest social moment. We must culti-
vate a little of the patience of God. It is perhaps unfortunate that
so much attention from laymen is focused upon this great field of
research. The man of science needs to work quietly, patiently,
doggedly, without too much thought of so-called practical value to
follow from his studies. He is painting the thing as he sees it for
the god of things as they are, and he is fortunate, in a way, if he
can find a separate star where he may work undisturbed by the
too eager interest of the crowd who clamor to know the significance
of each brush-stroke.
Shall we then attempt no practical application in eugenics of
the little knowledge of inheritance which we have already attained !^
For myself. I am in doubt. A number of states are making laws
for the sterilization of certain undesirable classes, and are making
the enforcement of these laws subject to the "expert" advice of a
board composed generally of physicians. As a matter of fact there
are very few states in this Union w^hich have among their citizens
men capable of exercising expert judgment in these matters, and
these men are not physicians, but biologists engaged in studies of
heredity. Furthermore, in but few individual instances are there
genealogical inheritance records which can serve as the basis of
such expert opinion.
One thing, however, of the greatest practical value we can do.
We can promote in every possible way the gathering and safe filing
of human inheritance records, which in the future will serve as the
foundation of such practice of eugenics as shall prove wise and
practical. I can in imagination see the day when the compilation
of inheritance data for each citizen will be compulsory, and when
the files of these records will be the most valued of all state docu-
ments; when no marriage license will be issued except after the
most careful scrutiny of the inheritance records of each contracting
party by trained students of inheritance, and when the state will
debar from marriage those whose children will be a burden to the
state. The bearing of children is. of course, not an individual
right, but a social privilege, and in time it must come to be so rec-
ognized.
With eugenics as our goal, with a hope of ultimately greatly
improving the fundamental character of the race, let us Cultivate
patience, allowing time for the ^sure grasp of the phenomena and
I'elations in heredity, before attempting by law any but the most
EUGENICS AND IMMIGRATION 463
limited applications of its principles to human marriage. Let us
promote the view that social welfare, not individual comfort, is
the ultimate criterion in marriage, and meauAvhile let us actively
promote the gathering and preserving of inheritance records for
all persons, thus providing data for intelligent practice of eugenics
in coming generations. We can at once insist upon the gathering"
of such data for all persons in our state penal institutions, alms-
houses, hospitals, asylums, etc. I am told that the city of Rochester
is gathering similar data as to its public school children. AVe can
urge the same practice in privately controlled institutions of simi-
lar purpose. "We can urge right-minded individuals everywhere
to supply such data as to themselves and their families. But this
will still fall far short of our need, for those who are contributing
the most children to the coming generation will be the last volun-
tarily to supply the desired data. Nothing short of a state system
of compulsory gathering of data for all individuals can serve as
an adequate basis for such negative eugenics as it may in time be
wise to enforce by law. But such compulsory gathering of data
cannot now be had. There must first be much education of general
sentiment, and there must be trained students to take the records.
That observant naturalist, Oliver Herford, speaking in the sup-
posed person of a crab, recently said: "Be sure you are rights
then go sideways for all you are worth." I am asking for more time
for the man of science to do his work before we insist upon applying
too widely his results, lest in such application of uncertain scientific
data we find ourselves making crab-like progress.
But I cannot close with such a negative word. There are posi-
tive aspects of the matter which deserve the chief emphasis. Let
me again urge that among the great needs must be recognized scien-
tific study of the principles of inheritance, and for this liberal finan-
cial support should be had ; and the cultivation of the realization
that in marriage it is ignoble to seek the happiness only of the man
and wife and to forget the character of the children and thru them
the welfare of society. Our poets and prophets, as well as our men
of science, must open men's eyes to the beauty and worth of the
social ideal in the family. Tho we have advanced so short a way
in the discovery of the phenomena and principles of inheritance^
and tho we have accurate inheritance tables for so few individuals,
we can still clearly discern that marriage of certain individuals is
unsocial. To what extent the state can now intervene to prevent
such marriage is a question which needs careful detailed study, and
is not an appropriate question for discussion in this brief general
paper. But aside from this question of the limits of state action,^
4()4 KIRST XATIOXAL COXKEHENCK OX RACE BETTERMENT
we must emphasize the vital need of cultivation of the social point
of view in this most vital of social institutions, the family, and the
need now to gather the data upon which eugenics may in the future
be based.
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL LIMIT OF EUGENICS
Herbert Adolphus Miller, Ph.D., Professor of Sociology, Olivet College,
Olivet. Michigan.
There has been a good deal of difference in opinion at this Con-
ference, but nobody has yet called anybody else names. This is a
peculiar form of sport, however, in which I shall indulge. I was
asked to have a sociological paper for this Race Betterment Con-
ference, and though I Imew nothing about it, I presumed there would
be something of eugenics in it, so I started with criticism of the
celebrated eugenist who preceded me. When I found that he came on
the program before me, it embarrassed me, but rather stimulated me,
so I wdll leave out nothing.
The rapidity with which the eugenic idea has spread is little
short of wonderful, and its value cannot be overestimated. How-
ever, this value has been not only, and not chiefly, for what it has
claimed for heredity, but for the attention it has turned toward
sanitation and hygiene.
This is a time of great social unrest, and any panacea which
offers to solve our problems is eagerly embraced. Eugenics has
volunteered for the service, which accounts in part for its rapid
spread.
A second reason is its simplicity. Only one principle is required
to dispose of all problems. As Dr. C. A. L. Reed says: "So vigor-
ous, aggressive and all-pervading have become the demands upon
the 'science of being well born.' that many have come wrongly to
think that there is no problem other than heredity in the great
problem of race culture. ' ' *
It is the object of this paper to show that even if a perfect
eugenic system were in vogue, practically every social problem
which we are now trying to solve would still remain, and I wish
also to urge that in spite of Avhat good it may have done, it has also
done a very great harm in diverting attention from the really fun-
damental problems which underlie the question of race improve-
ment.
The cocksureness of the eugenist is illustrated by the following
* Lancet-Clinic, Jan. 3, 1914.
EUGENICS AND IMMIGRATION • -165
quotation from Alexander Graham Bell: "The individuals have
the power to improve the race, but not the knowledge what to do.
We students of genetics possess the knowledge but not the power;
and the great hope lies in the dissemination of our knowledge among
the people at large. " ' In similar strain but more comprehensive
and more confident we find Davenport saying in a magazine article :
"To the eugenist, heredity stands as the one great hope of the
human race, its savior from imbecility, poverty, disease, immor-
ality."" Let me quote further from Davenport's book, "Heredity in
Relation to Eugenics": "Man is an organism — an animal: and
the laws of improvement of corn and of race horses hold true of
him also. Unless people accept this simple truth and let it influence
marriage selection, human progress will cease."* Again: "Per-
haps the best definition of feeble-minded would be : ' deficient in
some socially important trait,' and then the class would include
also the sexually immoral, the criminalistic, those who .cannot con-
trol their use of narcotics, those who habitually tell lies by prefer-
ence, and those who run away from home and school."* Again:
"A settlement worker in New York City inquired into the meaning
of a particularly unruly and criminalistic section of his territory
and found that the offenders came from one village in Calabria
known as the 'home of brigands.' "^ The implication here is that
the germ-plasm in Calabria is bad. Finally comparing the influ-
ence of the criminals who were sent to Virginia from England, he
says: "Soon better blood crowded into Virginia to redeem the
colony. Upon the execution of Charles I. a host of royalist refugees
sought an asylum here and the immigration of this class continued
even after the Restoration. By this means was enriched a germ-
plasm which easily developed such traits as good manners, high
culture, and the ability to lead in all social affairs — traits combined
in a remarkable degree in the first families of Virginia. ' ' '
Please remember that I am not denying a great deal of good in
this movement, but too little attention has been given to either
psychology or sociology, and unjustifiable conclusions have been
drawn. The vogue of these conclusions is likely to delay progress
by putting our thinking back twenty years, since which time the
sociologists have been patiently building up the data of social
psychology.
After the theory of evolution had been pretty thoroughly under-
stood, the Speneerian idea of its universal application was eagerly
^ Journal of Heredity, January, 1914, p. 1. - C. B. Davenijort, Pop. Sci.
3Ion. 3 p_ 1, 4"p_ 9_ 5 p_ 3_g3_ « p^ 207.
4:66 FIR^T NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
appropriuteil. It was simple ami eoniprehensive. If we found a
condition of social inferiority, the answer was, "a lower stage of
evolution." A race was less enlightened and thus proved its bio-
logical inferiority. It was a fine case of reasoning posi hoc, ergo
propter hoc. In my opinion the reasoning in the quotations I have
just given is of the same sort. "A band of brigands, a bad
heredity." No one would be more glad than the sociologist to find
a simple explanation of social phenomena, but there is none, and
to the minds of most sociologists. I venture to say that instead of
being the one hope, eugenics barely touches the problem of funda-
mental race improvement, although it has a definite place.
In 1893, Huxley, in his lecture on Evolution and Ethics, sounded
the warning against making too close connections between the
physical and the social values. He said: "There is a fallacy . . .
in the notion that because, on the whole, plants and animals have
advanced in ^lerf ection 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 check-
ing 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. ' '*
The eugenist would say that he is in full agreement with that
statement, but he seems to think that the inheritance of these ethi-
cal 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 dwarf or giant peas tasted the better. Much 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 appre-
ciation 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 betM^een "the rules of sanitation and the commands of
morality. ' 't
* D. Appleton and Company, pp. 80, SL
t See The Survey, Oct. 25, 1913.
EUGENICS AND IMMIGRATION 467
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 Doctor Davenport's catalogue
I will .not grant. Consider some of .them: "poverty, sexually im-
moral, criminalistic, those who cannot control the use of narcotics,
liars, and those who run away from home and school, good man-
ners, 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 abnormals, and yet they represent conditions that
seriously handicap race improvement.
Please keep this list in mind while we turn to another considera-
tion. There are two technical terms in sociology which are gain-
ing 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 i^ 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 inheritance. Professor Ames, of
Chicago, indicates something of the process of its acquirement:
"Every hiiman being, if he is to live at all, is, from infancy, sur-
rounded and cared for by persons. These persons fit into and help
constitute a social group. The child is nourished, sheltered, guided,
and disciplined by this human environment. All objects and influ-
ences are mediated by the persons near him. His very sensations
are determined and modified by them." * The old-time evolutionist
and the modern eugenist alike make little of social control in their
effort to make clear the biological control of social processes.
Now we will return briefly to the list of characteristics.
Poverty is a serious problem, but in popular terms we must
change the "system," and then only a small percentage will be
in poverty for biologically pathological reasons. Syndicalism and
other problems of class consciousness are psychological facts.
Take sexual immorality: according to their o'v^ti confessions, we
Avould need to begin with the elimination of the greatest moral
teacher of the early church, St, Augustine, and the greatest stimu-
lator of modern social ideals. Count Tolstoy. The sex mores of
Russia today are very different from those of America, and from
those of Tolstoy's youth, and from what they will be a generation
hence — all without the slightest help from eugenics, solely by the
psychic force of social control.
* Psychological Bulletin, VIII., p. 407.
468 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
To be sure, a part of the prostitutes are feeble-minded, but even
they are prostitutes largely as a result of the mores of their group
and the commercial demand for their services.
As to the criminalistic, Lombroso with great pains made an
anthropological description of the criminalistic type, but scarcely
a criminologist in Europe or America today accepts his conclusions,
and the modern science of penology is based on the system of social
control.
The same is true of the use of narcotics. With the exception
of the few diseased who need special care, drunkenness is the prod-
uct of group mores. The most drunken people in the world are un-
doubtedly the husky Russian peasants and factory workers.
"When it comes to lying by preference, I fear that none of us
would escape, though most of us have painfully learned another
way, but our yellow newspaper reporters still remain.
As for running away from home and school, we might say that
every normal boy has the tendency, and there are excessive cases,
like that of Mr. S. S. McClure, who tells us in his autobiography
that he barely escaped being a tramp, in spite of which fact he
has done some things for race improvement.
We need no germ-plasm to explain the difference between ''the
first families of Virginia" and the poor white trash. That is ex-
actly the sort of thing that mores explain.
But there are much more fundamental obstacles to race progress
than these, and I can see no way in which eugenics can help them.
Such forces as social classes, race prejudice, industrial strife, the
social and economic position of women, are psychological problems
of fundamental importance.
Social classes are not born ; they are made. In this connection
Lester F. Ward, the leading American sociologist, said: "A certain
kind of inferiority of the lower classes to the upper is admitted.
There is a physical inferiority and there is inferiority in intelli-
gence. This last is not the same as intellectual inferiority. Their
physical inferiority is due entirely to the conditions of existence. As
a subject race, as slaves, as overworked laborers or artisans, as an
indigent and underfed class, their physical development has been
arrested and their bodies stunted. . . . Their unequal intelligence
has nothing to do with their capacity for intelligence. Intelli-
gence consists in that capacity, together with the supply of informa-
tion for it to expend itself upon. We see, therefore, that both kinds
of inferiority of the lower classes are extraneous and artificial^
not inherent and natural."* And again in this same connection,
* Publications of the American Sociological Society, pp. 7, 8.
EUGENICS AND IMMIGRATION 469
showing the intimate relation of classes to improvement, he says
that Avhat we need is not more ability, but more opportunity, and
he estimates that if the opportunity could be made for existing
ability by the abolition of social classes, the increase in the effi-
ciency of mankind would be at least a hundredfold.
It is hardly conceivable that the breeding of the race-horse type
of man will accomplish such a multiplication.
Race prejudice belongs in the same category as social classes.
The existence of a race is primarily caused b}" accidental signs
which serve for identification, plus the prevailing attitude towards
the people bearing the signs. As Professor Ross says: " 'Race' is
the cheap explanation tyros offer for any collective trait that they
are too stupid or too lazy to trace to its origin in the physical en-
vironment, the social environment, or historical conditions."^ In
the discussion today I should like to substitute "heredity" for
"race" and let the quotation read: " 'Heredity' is the cheap ex-
planation tyros offer for any collective trait that they are too stupid
or too lazy to trace to its origin in the physical environment, the
social environment, or historical conditions."
When in a Battle Creek restaurant I saw the sign, "Colored
Patronage not Desired," my sympathy for the Negro enabled me
to feel something as he feels, and I can assure you that the depress-
ing force of a public opinion that approves of such a position is
more influential on the race expression than a very large variation
in the germ-plasm. A¥. E. B. DuBois has described this from the
inside in his ' ' Sonls of Black Folk, ' ' where he says : ' ' They must per-
petually discuss the Negro problem, must live, move, have their
being in it, and interpret all else in its light or darkness. From
the double life that every American Negro must live as a Negro
and as an American, as swept on by the current of the tw^entieth
century, while struggling in the eddies of the fifteenth — from this
must arise a powerful self-consciousness and a moral hesitancy
which is almost fatal to self-confidence. . . . Today the young
Negro of the South who would succeed cannot be frank and out-
spoken, but rather he is daily tempted to be silent and wary, politic
and sly. . . . His real thoughts, his real aspirations, must be
guarded in whispers ; he must not criticize, he must not complain.
Patience and adroitness must, in these growing black youth, re-
place impulse, manliness and courage. ... At the same time,
through books and periodicals, discussions and lectures, he is in-
tellectually awakened. In the conflict, some sink, some rise. ' ' *
t "Social Psychology," p. 3.
t "Souls of Black Folks," p. 203. McClurg, 1903.
470 FIRST NATIONAL CONPEKENCE OX RACE BETTERMENT
When, we remember that more than ten per cent of the population
of the United States belong to this class, we can feel that human
progress cannot proceed without limit until we have modified our
race mores. The sad thing about it is the popular view that the race
question is to be explained on biological grounds, and that any
race except that to which we have been born is on a lower stage
of evolution. We condemn them without trial. AVherever there is
white contact wdth Indians, the whole attitude is permeated with
the idea that there is no good Indian but a dead one, and their
efforts to change their conditions always come face to face with this
prejudice.
Much of our immigrant problem is of the same sort. We con-
demn them in toto, as the brigands of Calabria were condemned
in the quotation given. Lord Byron expressed the force of other
men's opinion when he said: "I made men think I was what I was
not, and I became what they thought me." We cannot escape the
great and unjustified discouragement that will come to those we
suspect do not belong to the race-horse type. The door of hope
is closed to them, while the race-horses cannot fail to get a self-
satisfied snobbishness that will make the discouraged plow horse
stop in the middle of the furrow. In the same way, registered hu-
man pedigrees will inhibit the common stock from making its con-
tribution.
The eugenists have a good deal to say about immigrants. Among
the Polish immigrants in America we have a great disproportion of
criminals. In the Cook County jail in Chicago they are altogether
out of proportion to any other nationality, and the same thing is
true in the Detroit House of Correction. The Bohemians who be-
long to the same race stock and live in adjoining territory in
Europe, have very few criminals, and in Austria there are fourteen
cases of litigation among Poles to one among Bohemians. The
Polish immigrants are 31.6 per cent illiterate, and the Bohemians,
3 per cent. The Poles are probably the most devoted to the church
and the Bohemians the most rabid freethinkers of all our immi-
grants. The social problems arising from these facts have nothing
whatever to do with biological inheritance.
Now let us consider the classic example of bad heredity, the
Jukes family. Almost everything that is said about the Negro can
also be said about them. They lived in New York in the nineteenth
century, but they were not a part of it. They were socially ostra-
cized, and built up the mores among themselves that had no part
in the current civilization. It is barely possible that they averaged
mentally inferior to their more socialized neighbors, but the sociolo-
EUGENICS AND IMMIGRATION 471
gist does not need the inheritance of base characteristics to explain
their criminality, prostitution and poverty.
If Eugenics succeeds in establishing in the popular mind the
tremendous social value of heredity that it is trying to establish,
it will overthrow a mass of valuable work of the last decade which
has been pointing the way to a fundamental solution of many of
our social problems. What if certain people do stand higher on the
Binet tests than others, it is yet to be proved that that indicates ele-
mental social value. Psycho-ph.ysical parallelism may prevail, but
that does not necessarily include ps^'cho-physico-social parallelism.
The position of women has been created in much the same way
as races and classes. Alfred R-ussell Wallace in his last book, ' ' Social
Environment and Moral Progress," puts the cart in this eugenic
matter where it belongs. He says that when social justice shall have
been established and women are free to choose their mates with-
out the artificial conditions that now prevail, then natural selec-
tion will take care of itself. I myself am convinced that as a move
for race improvement, the equal suffrage of women, with the even-
tual consequent assumption of intellectual and moral responsibility
and economic independence, would be infinitely more valuable than
all the eugenic laboratories in the world.
We should use all the forces of science in dealing with patholog-
ical conditions, but an attempt at artificial selection of mental and
moral characteristics is aiming in the wrong direction.
Discussion.
Relative Effects of Heredity and Environment
Dr. Charles B. Davexport.
One rejoices to see the progress which the sociologist is making.
I think three or four years ago he would not have admitted the
possibility of the origin of feeble-mindedness from any hereditary
defects, but now that is admitted. HoAvever, there are some other
things still unproved about which we have dealt. In regard to the
mores, one feels like asking, first of all. What determines the mores?
The relative influence of mores and heredity is an important matter,
and we do seek to get light upon it. In my OAvn study I have tried
to get some criterion by which we could differentiate the relative
effects of hereditary and of environmental conditions, including
the mores.
I have been interested to see how frequently, in studying these
families in which these prostitutes arose, one gets this condition:
One sister a prostitute ; another sister, born within two years, reared
under the same bad conditions, becoming secretary of an educa-
472 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
tioiial institution in Boston. There are two cases of that sort in the
city of Boston. Such a condition is found very commonly. Why
is it that one sister goes wrong and the other has all the inhibi-
tions of a normal person, though brought up under exactly the
same conditions, by the same parents?
We have another test for this. That is, the result of the mar-
riage of one man with two wives in succession. This is illustrated
in the Kallikak family. I have been very much interested to com-
pare the sets of children that arose from these two marriages. In
both circumstances the environmental conditions are very apt to
be the same, perhaps more so when the husband is common and
the wives are different, and one sees that just as the one variable
factor, the other consort, varies, so does the fraternity vary.
We have been also interested to see the consequences of remov-
ing a child from bad conditions under which he is reared in his
home at a very early age, two years, three years or even earlier,
to a good home or to an institution. We find, in the majority of
cases, that the child goes through fundamentally much the same
course of development and shows eventually the same traits as his
brothers and sisters who remain behind.
Finally, we have been interested to see the consequences of the
removal of persons from a locality like that in which the Jukes
or the Nam family was raised to another part of the country, to
the Middle West. We found that certain members of the Nam
family in New York State removed to Minnesota forty years ago
as pioneers, farmers. We wrote to a field worker in Minnesota
and inquired, "Do you know of any people of this name in the
state?" The answer came back from the field worker, "Yes, this
family is well known to all the social workers in this state. It is
one of the great problems of our state."
THE IMPORTANCE OF HYGIENE FOR EUGENICS
Irving Fisher, Ph.D., Professor of Political Economy, Yale University,
New Haven, Conn.
There are two factors which cooperate to produce vitality;
namely, heredity and hygiene; and there are two corresponding
methods of improving vitality; namely, by utilizing the science of
eugenics on the one hand, and by utilizing the science of hygiene
on the other. The question arises: Are these two methods in con-
flict with each other? It is charged that hygiene prolongs the
lives of unfit and defective classes. It is reported that in Indiana
EUGENICS AND IMMIGRATION 473
institutional care of the insane has prolonged the average insane
lifetime by some eight years. Referring to the insane. Dr. Charles
Dana says :
"For twenty-live years the explanation of this increase in sta-
tistics of insanity has been that more cases were observed and
more victims kept in, institutions than formerly; and this is still
the explanation. It is my opinion, however, that the increase is a
real one, and it is one to be expected not only from the strenuous-
ness of modern life and increase of city population, but also, be-
cause more feeble children are nursed to maturity and more in-
valid adolescents are kept alive to propagate weakly constitutions
or to fall victims themselves to alienation : the period of life sus-
ceptible to insanity is longer."
It is true that we prolong the lives of the insane and defective
classes, and that they thus make a greater burden on society. We
should see to it that certain of these classes are not permitted to
propagate their kind.
It is further claimed that infant mortality is but the operation
of natural selection and would not be interfered with if we are
to keep up the vital power of the race. Preventive medicine has
certainly prolonged the lives of infants or, at any rate, of children
in general. But has this weakened the race? It is pointed out
that the mortality later in life has not decreased, and that in some
cases it has even tended to increase. But this fact can be explained
in either of two ways. One is on the hypothesis of the extension
of the lives of weak infants. The other is on the hypothesis of
the comparative neglect of hygiene among adults. It is surpris-
ing that this latter alternative has not been given due considera-
tion.
Every detail of infant life has latterly been made the subject of
special study, and every mother of common intelligence has tried to
learn to apply the results of that study. The times of the baby's
meals, the quantity of its feeding, the modification and sterilization
of cow's milk, the hours of sleep, the ventilation of sleeping rooms,
and other innumerable details are now attended to with scrupulous
care. The change in these respects, even within the memory of
most persons now living, is striking. The children have reaped the
reward. But no corresponding change has taken place in the
habits of the adult population. Many families buy one grade of
milk for the babies and another cheaper grade for the rest of the
family. This they regard as "economy." Parents require their
children to keep regular and suitable hours for sleep, but "owl it"
themselves. They will keep their children out of doors, and
474 FIRST NATIONAI. CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
send theiM into the country, but subject themselves to the dust, smoke
and close air of the workroom and i)laces of business. They will
not allow their children to use alcohol or tobacco, or even tea or
coiTee. much less opium, chloral, or other habit-forminj? drugs, but
they take these themselves as a matter of course. They insist on
playgrounds for children, but their own amusements are sought
in the unhygienic theatre, or maybe in the saloon or immoral re-
sort. The child is protected on all sides, with the result that he
sometimes lives almost an ideal animal life, with its due proportion
of amusement, exercise, rest, and sleep. The parents themselves are
tied down to drudgery, overwork, worry, and long hours. The
ditference. when we reflect upon it, is startling. We make hygiene
paramount for our children ; for ourselves we neglect it totally,
partly from the idea of sacrificing ourselves for the sake of our
children, partly from necessity, real or imagined, and partly from
the thraldom of habit already formed. With such a contrast be-
tw^een the recent improvement of hygiene in childhood and the
lack of improvement in middle life, one need not wonder that the
mortality of one period has improved and that of the other has
not. We do not need to invoke the aid of the theory that weak
lives have been more prolonged than strong lives. The moral is
that hygiene should not stop in childhood. It is natural and proper,
however, that the first attempt to apply hygienic knowledge should
begin with children. It is through children that new ideas usually
make their w^ay into custom. "You can't teach an old dog new
tricks." Grown persons have habits already formed, and when
once a habit is formed, it is difficult to change it.
Habits of living among adults have even grown worse in some
respects. Observing practitioners comment on the increasing
nervous tension in modern life. The rush of the railway train, the
telephone, the elevator, are at once an outgi-owth and an excitant
of this increased tension. They are life's pace-makers, and the
pace is ever quickened. The health officer of New York City at-
tributes to this severe strain the increase. of heart and nervous dis-
eases. It would be interesting to know the relative prevalence of
adult diseases under conditions of reposeful and exciting surround-
ings and occupations, but I know of no investigation on this phase
of the subject.
Recent figures for New York City show a decided reduction in
the expectation of life of the middle aged. In Sweden, on the
other hand, where personal hygiene is more fulh^ practiced than in
any other country, the expectation has increased for persons of all
ages. This is especially interesting in view of the fact that S^veden
EUGENICS AND IMMIGRATION 475
has fought infant mortality longer and more successfully than
any other nation and has reduced that mortality for three or four
generations. If the mere reduction of infant mortality were the
cause of an increase of the adult mortality of the next generation,
we should expect to see some trace of this effect in Sweden. But
we find, instead, a reduction of mortality for all ages even of none-
genarians. Eecent figures from Great Britain show that the ten-
dency of the death rates among the latter ages to, increase seems
to have given, place to a slightly opposite tendency. The expecta-
tion of life at ages 40, 60, and 80 during the decade of 1891-1900
has a little more than held its own as compared with the previous
decade.
Another point needs emphasis. When it is said that the lives
of weak infants are prolonged, it is commonly overlooked that the
same causes also prolong the lives of the strong, and, reversely,
that unhygienic conditions which tend to exterminate the weak
tend also to shorten the lives of the strong. Bad hygiene is merely
a common handicap for all classes. The burden of proof is upon
those who claim that it has a differential effect and increases the
process of weeding out the unfit. This weeding-out process goes
on whether there is a great or a small obstruction to overcome.
Bad air and children's epidemics are the common environment of
all. While this must produce a greater mortality, it remains to
be shown that it would be more selective.
That a high infant mortality does not tend to lengthen life, but
rather to stunt all life, would seem to be indicated by the evidence,
so far as it can be interpreted. Russia, for instance, has a high in-
fant mortality. If the statistics are to be trusted, it is 70 per cent
greater than in the United States; yet Moscow and St. Petersburg
have a general mortality rate which greatly exceeds that of similar
cities in this country.
It may be that the more unfavorable the struggle for existence,
the more rapidly will natural selection result in improved vitality.
But even if this were true, it would not imply that in a more fa-
vorable environment selection would cease. And it may not be true.
It may be that adversity, if too severe, will crush and injure the
survivor as well as eliminate the unfit. We do not look for the best
trees on the bleak mountain top, but in the genial valley. As we
go up, the struggle for existence increases, until even the sturdiest
fail to thrive above the "timber line."
Whether or not degeneration is actually going on is a question
for which the data are insufficient for us to form certain conclusions.
Personally I imagine that some actual race degeneration is going
476 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
ou, though I do not attribute this to hygiene. There are certainly
very strong forces working in the direction of degeneration, but
there a^'e also verj^ strong forces working in the opposite direc-
tion, and presumably, the net influence of hygiene is opposed to
degeneration. In discussing degeneration, one point must be borne
in mind which has often been forgotten by writers on the sub-
ject. Man's fitness to live is relative to the environment in which
he is to live. If muscular strength decreases, it is not a sign of
degeneration, provided muscular strength is no longer needed.
One does not speak of hothouse grapes as degenerates. They
doubtless lack the hardy characteristics of wild grapes, but these
characteristics are not needed in a hothouse.
If it should prove true that in some directions humanitarian
impulses betray us into favoring the survival of the unfit and their
perpetuation in the next generation, such shortsighted kindness
must be checked. But all the dangers of perpetuating vital weak-
nesses can be avoided if proper health ideals are maintained. For
when such health ideals become a national possession, fewer weak
infants will be born into the world. This will come about in three
ways: First, segregation, marriage and "sterilization" laws will
reduce the number of marriages of degenerates. Secondly, parents
will be more careful of transmitting disease or weakness to their
offspring. Immorality, which practically means lack of sex hy-
giene, never strengthened a race; on the contrary, it has been the
most potent cause of race extinction (of the Hawaiians, Indians,
Negroes and others). Thirdly, the influence of higher ideals of
health and vitality will tend both to restore the attraction of a
strong and beautiful physique to its rightful place among the vari-
ous attractions which lead to marriage, and to lessen the allure-
ment of such extraneous attractions as wealth. In short, psychologi-
cally it is true that hygiene of our children and ourselves will lead
us to eugenics, which is the hygiene of the next generation.
THE METHODS OF RACE REGENERATION (in outline)
C. W. Saleebt, F.R.S.E., M.D., Author of "Parenthood and Race Culture,"
1909.
A complete program of Race Regeneration or Eugenics requires
the following, in my judgment, and according to my terminology:
A. Primary or Natural Eugenics
1. Positive Eugenics — the encouragement of worthy parenthood.
2. Negative Eugenics — the discouragement of unw^orthy parent-
hood.
EUGENICS AND IMMIGRATION 477
3. Preventive Eugenics — the protection of parenthood from the
racial poisons.
B. Secondary or Nurtural Eugenics
Involving due nurture of the individual from conception (not
n ""''^^ birth) till the end of the reproductive period. For these
ena^ ,e may provisionally no' certain methods, here arranged, for
discussion, under three tentative heads.
A. Primary Eugenics
1. Positive Eugenics.
(a) Rejected. The institution of compulsory mating and
anything else that involves the destruction of marriage.
(b) Questioned.
1. Marriage certificates or marriage permits.
2. Bonuses for children.
(c) Accepted.
1. "Maternity benefit'' — much extended to protect last
three months of pregnancy.
2. Education for parenthood.
3. Eugenie marriage — including eugenic laws of divorce.
2. Negative Eugenics.
(a) Rejected.
1. The lethal chamber, the permission of infant mortality,
interference with ante-natal life, and all other syn-
onyms for murder.
2. Mutilative surgery.
(b) Questioned. Non-mutilative sterilization.
Accepted. Segregation.
3. Preventive Eugenics.
(a) Rejected. The state regulation of vice.
(b) Questioned. The various legislative proposals for the
control of dangerous trades, plumbism, etc.
(c) Accepted.
1. The notification of venereal disease and provision of
treatment. (At least — notification of ophthalmia, lieo-
natorum, and of congenital syphilis.)
2. The expert instruction of adolescence.
3. The protection of parenthood from alcohol.
B. Secondary Eugenics
From the care of expectant motherhood, infancy, the home child
(as I wish to call it), the school child, and adolescence onward.
478 FIRST XATIOXAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
CALCULATIONS ON THE WOBKING OUT OF A PROPOSED PROGRAM
OF STERILIZATION
H. H. TjAUGhlix, Supeiintendent Eugenics Record Olfiee. fold Spi-ini;
Ilavlxn-, Lf)nfi- Island, NeAv York.
There are two phases of the praetieal application of the Eugenics
progi-am. O^he first is concerned in fit and fertile matings among th*^
upper levels. The second is concerned in cutting off the supply of de-
fectives.J For bringing about this latter end many agencies have been
proposed. Among these agencies, however, only four appear to give
great promise as practical remedies. These four agencies— education,
legal restriction, segregation and sterilization — complement one an-
other in the order named. They are a primary remedial value ; if the
first fails, apply the second ; if it also fails, apply the third ; if segre-
gation ceases and the two factors do not deter from parenthood the
potential parent of inadequates, apply the fourth. vTo purify the
breeding stock of the race at all costs is the slogan of eugenics!] The
compulsory sterilization of certain degenerates is therefore designed as
a eugenical agency complementary to the segregation of the socially
unfit classes and to the control of the immigration of those who carry
defective germ-plasm. It is at once evident that, unless this comple-
mentarA' agency is made nation-wide in its application, and is con-
sistently followed by most of the states, it cannot greatly reduce, with
the ultimate end of practically cutting off, the great mass of defective-
ness now endangering the conservation of our best human stock, and
consequently menacing our national efficiency and happiness.
In order to determine wath as much precision as possible the ex-
tent of the problem and the possibility of its practical solution the
following calculations have been made. They are a fair measure of the
number and extent of sterilizing operations necessary for ar-complish-
ing the desired end. (See chart: Rate of Efficiency of the proposed
Segi-egation and Sterilization Program.)
E:^PLA NATION AND SUBSTANTIATION OF
CALCULATIONS
From the accompanying chart it is seen that the rate of effi-
ciency of the proposed program is dependent primarily upon the
length of time required to send to state institutions, regardless
of length of commitment periods, the potential parents of the
varieties i sought to eliminate. The following factors determine
this period of time :
EUGENICS AND IMMIGRATION
479
lis^ If
-ieii
lllll ft
' lis*!!"
b
a.
ITrl
^:r
:Sill.:
|3
;5^5
480 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
a. TIk Porfioii of the Vojmlat'um W/iich It is Soug/il fa ChI Off.
The extirpation of hereditar.y defectiveness under the proposed
program is dependent npon the groAvth, development, and nse of
our institutions for the socially inadequate. Qln these calculations
it is assumed that the lowest ten per cent of the human stock are
so meagerly endowed by Nature that their perpetuation would con-
stitute a social menacel The manner of arriving at this estimate
is as follows :
In 1910 .91-4 per cent of our total population were inmates of
the institutions for the socially inadequate. Their average period
of custody or commitment was less than five years (see Table VI) ;
then, after allowing for the cases of multiple commitments (see
Table VIII), the total number of living persons who have been
legally committed to institutions must be represented by several
times this per cent. Besides this portion of the total population,
there is another portion who are equipped with equally meager
natural endowments, but who have never been committed to insti-
tutions. In addition to this body of persons, there is another group
of persons who, though themselves normal, constitute a breeding
stock which continually produces defectives ; they are so interwoven
in kinship with the lower levels that they are totally unfitted for
parenthood. The assumed ten per cent, or, to use a current expres-
sion, "the submerged tenth," appears for the purpose of this study
to be a fair estimate of the extent of the body of degeneracy which
the American people can now. in the interest of social betterment,
well seek to cut off. The primary or basal factor, namely, the com-
mitment of all of the members of the socially inadequate strains
to institutions, is, in turn, dependent upon several component factors,
the first of which is the differential birth rate of the submerged
tenth, compared with that of the normal and supernormal nine-
tenths.
/). Differential Birth Rate.
In these calculations the lowest tenth are given a birth rate
greater by five per cent each half decade than that of the general
population. This factor is included in these calculations in defer-
ence to prevailing opinion, that, generally,(^efective and inferior
human stock reproduce more rapidly than our better strains!) The
following table shoAvs the result of a preliminary study of this
field :
EUGENICS AND IMMIGRATION
481
Fkcunditv and Ixfaxt Mobtality Differential
Subnormal Families
BETWEEN Normal and
NORMAL
FAMILIES
SUBNORMAL
Families
Number oi Matings
Total Number of Children
701
3227
4.6
131
109
27
1,054
4,640
4.4
Infant Mortalitj' —
Male
463
237
106
Total
267
806
8.3
17.4
The normal families recorded on this table are those of Ameri-
can professional and bnsiness men ; the subnormal families are each
represented by one or more members in one or more institutions
for the insane, epileptic, feeble-minded, or criminalistic classes. Al-
though the numbers are small, the families were selected in serial
order, without regard to fecundity. "While not conclusive, this
special study points toward a small differential fecundity in favor
of the normal families over defectives, rather than the reverse, as
is generally held. Incidentally, there is a more definite differential
infant mortality, working by natural process to reduce the defective
population. The estimate, then, of the differential fecundity of 5
per cent, each half decade, for the "submerged tenth" seems cer-
tainly to cover the actual rate of increase of this class. It is clear
that such an estimate tends, in these calculations, to delay the con-
summation sought by the program ; the object of estimating so great
a fecundity of defectives is to insure conservatism in the calcula-
tions. However, further investigation, based upon first-hand ma-
terials, is needed to determine the facts of differential fecundity.
c. Future Growth of Institutions for the Socially Inadequate.
These calculations provide that there shall be an increase in the
capacity of stat6 institutions for the anti-social classes, not only
absolutely, but also in relation to the increasing total population.
The rate of increase used in the calculations is equal to that of the
total population plus 5 per cent each half decade. This is approxi-
mately one-third the rate of increase for the decade 1890-1900, and
three-fourths the increase for the decade 1900-1910. This propor-
tion is based upon the fact that in 1890, . 590 per cent ; in 1900, . 807
per cent, and in 1910, .914 per cent of our total population were
in institutions. This is an increase of 37 per cent per 100,000 popu-
lation for the decade 1890-1900 and 13 per cent for the decade 1900-
1910.
(17)
482 KIKST NATIOXAI; CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
That there is clearly a movement toward increasing, both abso-
lutely and relative to the total population, the facilities for earing
for such classes, is seeu by the data just given. The increase for
the last decade is not so great relatively as that of the preceding;
decade ; but the increase is still differential in respect to the grov^th
of population. Accompanying this numerical groM^th there is a
refinement of social ideals, and legal processes governing the com-
mitment of the anti-social to state institutions ; as well as a better
understanding of the cause and nature of their shortcomings.
d. S^x and Age of Persons Committed to State Custody.
Another determining factor in these calculations is the sex and
average age of persons committed to state custody. The correct-
ness of these calculations in measuring the possibility of achieving
the desired end is dependent upon the selection of individuals for
commitment to institutions, from all ages and from both sexes, in
proportion to the total numbers of each age and sex in the general
population. Should the commitment to institutions be deferred until
after the reproductive period, then the segregation and sterilization
program would be useless as an agency for reducing the anti-social
strains. If, however, the commitment is made early in or before
the reproductive period, then the recommended program will func-
tion as intended.
The report of the State Commission of Prisons for New York
for 1912 shows that for the year ending Sept. 30, 1912, the maximum
number of commitments to the state prisons was reached in the
age group of 24 years. For the year ending Sept. 30, 1911, the re-
port of the New York State Commission in Lunacy shows that for
the insane the maximum number of commitments of native-born
persons to the State Hospitals was reached at the age group 35-39
years. This group represented 11.7 per cent of the total native-
born first admissions, while at ages younger than' this, were repre-
sented by 39.6 per cent of the total of such admissions. For the
foreign-born the same maximum was reached in the age group 25-29
years, with 15.2 per cent of the total of such admissions during
earlier years.
In response to a special inquiry sent out by the committee in
the spring of 1913, data were secured from which the following
table has been compiled:
EUGENICS AND IMMIGRATION
483
Type of Institution
Number
of
Institutions
Reporting
Average
Age of
Persons
Committed
in 1912
Average
Age of
Persons
Discharged
in 1912
Average
Length of
Commitment-
of Persons
Discharged
in 1912 .
Hospitals for the Insane
Reformatories and Industrial
Homes
Prisons and Penitentiaries . . .
Institutions for the Blind ....
Institutions for the Deaf
Institutions for Epileptics ....
Institutions for the Peeble-
Minded
Institutions for ' the Feeble-
Minded and Epileptic ....
34.70 years
16.88 years
32.21 years
11.40 years
8.87 years
24.85 years
17.98 years
16.92 years
38.30 years
19.32 years
32.28 years
18.17 years
17.02 years
29.23 years
20.54 years
20.27 years
5.33 years
2.39 years.
2.64 years
9.00 years'
9.20 years :
2.19 years
4.74 years
5. 13 ye.irs
In the report of the State Commission in Lunacy for California,
June 30, 1912, Dr. F. W. Hatch, the General Superintendent of
State Hospitals, reports the ages of persons operated upon, as fol-
lows :
TABLE VII. ■'
Pp;rsons Sterilized under the Califorxi.\ St.\tute
Ages of Those Operated Upon
Male
Female
Total '
1 to 10 years
1
24
33
33
17
22
9
3
1
1
0
15
25
28
28
12
3
1
0
0
1.
39
58,
25 to 29 years
30 to 34 years
61
45,
34
40 to 44 vears
12
45 to 49 vears .
4
50 to 54 vears
1 .
55 to 60 vears .
1
144
6
112
6
250
12-
150
118
268
Civil Condition
Male
Female
Total .
Single
105
21
5
19
150
46
61
6
5
151
82
Divorced or widowed
11
Unknown
24
Totals
118
268
From Table VI it is apparent that at present the socially inade-
quate are being committed to institutions at an age early in their
reproductive periods : early enough, it is clear, to forestall the birth
484 FIRST NATION ATj CONFERENCF: ON RACK HKTTKRMENT
of a large percentage of the ofi"sprin<i' wlio would normally be horn
to these persons, and from Table VII it is equally clear that in prac-
tice the California operations have, as a rule, been had early
enough to be in a large measure eugenically effective, if the persons
operated upon carried defective qualities; but, even here it is evi-
dent that the age limit must be lowered, if the greatest eugenical
good is to accrue from such measures. The civil condition is not
so important, for among the anti-social classes illegitimacy runs
high. If the future tendency should be toward earlier commit-
ments— and it is apparent that such is the ease — then the cutting-
off process would be hastened.
The sex of the persons sterilized is an important eugenical fac-
tor, for it is evident that with the lower strains of humanity, among
whom illegitimacy is high, it will be necessary to sterilize degenerate
women in numbers in fair proportion to the number of males ster-
ilized. This fact has its biological analogy as follows :
In the breeding of the higher and more valuable types of do-
mestic animals, such as horses and cattle, sterilization of surplus
males is one custom universally practiced. The females of these
animals are well cared for and protected from free union with the
males ; here selected matings are the rule. However, in the case of
domestic animals of less value, having mongrel and homeless strains,
such as the dog and the cat, the cutting off of their supply is
largely effected through the destruction or the unsexing of the
females. As a rule the tax on a female dog is two or three
times greater than that on a male dog. Such difference in taxation
is not made because of a difference in individual menace, but rather
.because of a more direct responsibility for reproduction. The fe-
males of such homeless strains are not protected, and consequently
they increase very rapidly. Consorting freely Avith equally worthless
mates, their progeny are often excessive in numbers, and of a worth-
less, mongrel sort. The castration of one-half of the mongrel male
dogs would not effect a substantial reduction in the number of mon-
grel pups born.
The unprotected females of the socially unfit classes bear, in
human society, a place comparable to that of the females of mongrel
strains of domestic animals. As a case in point, the accompanying
pedigree, from "A First Study of Inheritance in Epilepsy" by Dav-
enport and Weeks, illustrates the manner of the increase of defective
children by defective women. This actual family record is an ex-
ample of the type of pedigree w^hich was so common in the family
histories studied by Davenport and Weel<*s that they gave it a
EUGENICS AXD IMMIGRATION
485
name — -"the almshouse type" — a sad commentary on the general
inefficiency of such institutions.
POORHOUSE TYPE OF SOURCE OF DEFECTIVES.
©tQ
RCTURL PIDIGRLE OF FRMILY RLPRLSLNTLD IN THE
SKIUMnNflu) STBTE VILLR&E FOR EP/LEPT/CS.
■"^6-1
s
^ A i A i A i
FIRST STUDY OF INHLRITRNCL
IN EPILZPSY.- iw^v't -""»'./"
The central figure is a feeble-minded woman subject to epileptic fits, de-
scended from a feeble-minded mother and shiftless, worthless father. She has
spent most of her life in the almshouse, and all of her children have been in-
mates. One is by a negro, whom she met in the almshouse. Two of the chil-
dren died in infancy ; one, of whom little is known, died at the age of eighteen.
Of the remainder, two are feeble-minded, and one, from a sire of criminal
tendencies, is an epileptic imbecile.
On Sept. 30. 1912. New York State Prisons held in custody
14,791 persons. Of this number, 1.887 were women and 12,904 were
men. With the criminalistic the method of reaching the women of
such strains becomes very difficult. With the insane, however, the
problem is much more evenly balanced. On Sept. 30, 1911, the
New York State Hospitals for the Insane held in custody a total of
33,311 persons— 16,010 men and 17,301 women.
There is another type of pedigree by Davenport and Weeks which
the same study brought to light — ' ' the hovel type. ' ' In such families
incest is rife. The accompanying pedigree of this type shows a condi-
tion wherein the sterilization of both the male and the female would
have been desirable, for, with an equal lack of sex control in both of
them, it is likely that, if the unions specified in the pedigree had not
486
FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
been made, both male and female would have found consorts elsewhere
and would thus have perpetuated their unworthy stock.
HOVEL TYPE OF SOURCE OF
DEFECTIVES.
£ I i 5
P-i-o
^
3 <i> ^-«f?.4 £ i-
1^
/Actual flea>oret of ftmtly rcpresenUd in thm
^.,J^ [L] i (E)
D-"
^
^
LEGEND
n 7ya/e g re,6k Vf,„rit<t
O /"enate (3 CnminchiTK
0 5er 0/;inff»^
It is thus clear that in the application of the program of eugeni-
cal sterilization, no diiference should be made between the male and
female — hereditary unfitness alone should be the criterion.
e. Average Period of Commitment.
The average period of commitment is assumed, in these esti-
mates, to be five years. From the examination of Table VI, one is
convinced that it is certainly not greater than this term of years.
The long estimate used in these calculations will doubtless cover
the cases wherein sterilized persons would be returned to the state's
custody. From the report of the New York State Commission of
Prisons for 1912, the following table is secured:
From this table it is apparent that the , reformatories have at
some time in the previous career of the inmates of the prisons had
custody of a large percentage of them. This is a eugenical ad-
vantage, for their inborn qualities would, under the policy outlined,
have been determined before their reproductive periods began.
EUGENICS AND IMMIGRATION
487
TABLE Till.
Four Men's Peisoxs. Number of Times Peisoxers Admitted During the Year
Enbing Sept. 30, 1912, Have Been Committed to Prison
A
B
To PrisoDs Now (1912) Detaining
Them
Number of Times Confined in
Other Penal Institutions
First Time
3,075
237
55
23
Prisons
737
887
Third Time .'. '.
Fourth Time and Over
1,002
269
566
Refuges
Total
3,390
Miscellaneous Institutions
212
3,673
For the year ending Sept. 30, 1911, of the total of 7,867 ad-
missions to the hospitals for the insane of New York State, 1,639
were readmissions.
Under the program, the shorter the periods of commitment, the
more rapidly will the whole body of individuals possessing heredi-
tary potentialities for defective parenthood be sent through insti-
tutions; and if the program were carried out as contemplated, their
blood lines would be cut off the more rapidly. There are, however,
many reformatory and other social considerations which must, of
course, determine the length of commitment. Sterilization is simply an
insurance when segregation ceases.
/. Cmitrol of Immigration.
As a final factor, the federal government must cooperate with
the states to the extent of excluding from America immigrants who
are potential parents and who are by nature endowed with traits of
less value than the better ninety per cent of our existing breeding
stock. According to the census of 1910 the native-born population
of New York constituted 70.1 per cent and the foreign-born consti-
tuted 29.9 per cent of the total population of the state. To the state
hospital for the insane the native-born element contributed 51.28 per
cent and the foreign -born 48.02 per cent (.70 per cent unascer-
tained) of the total admissions for the year ending Sept. 30, 1911.
The foreign-born element thus contributed to the New York hos-
pitals for th« insane at the rate of 2.019 times that of the native-
born population. To the state prisons of New York the native-
born element contributed 65.8 per cent and the foreign-born 34.2
per cent of the total admissions in the year ending Sept. 30, 1912.
For the state prisons, therefore, the foreign-born element contributed
admissions at a rate 1.21 times greater than did the native-born
population.
iThe federal government, which has control of immigration, owes
488 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
it not only to New York State on social and economic grounds, but
to the American people on biological giionnds to exclude from the
country this degenerate breeding stoek^
Adequate data, upon which such differential exclusion could b'e
based, can be secured only by investigating the traits of immigrant
families in their native towns and villages, by sending trained field
workers to such places. In view of the fact that the germ-plasm of
a nation is always its greatest asset, and that the expense of such
measures would be paying investments — not only in dollars and
cents, but in the inborn qualities of future generations — the task
should be undertaken. At a cost not at all prohibitive, a large ma-
jority of this degeneracy could be detected. Every nation has its
own eugenical problems, and in the absence of a world-wide eugeni-
cal policy, every nation must protect its own innate capacities.
From the viewpoint of eugenics, differential immigration is not
directly a matter of nationality nor of race, but is rather one of
family traits compatible with good citizenship.
g. General Consideratio)^; ProhaMe Number of Operations Required.
These calculations are based upon the sterilization of one-half
of the socially inadequate persons legally committed to the custody
of the state, relying upon the other half being (a) past the re-
productive age, or (b) congenitally or pathogenically sterile, or (c)
sterilized upon release from some previous commitment, or (d) sus-
ceptible to educational influences deterring them from reproduc-
ing, or (e) not carriers of a defective germ-plasm, or (f) dying
while still in custody of the state. There are therefore excluded
from liability to sterilization the inmates and patients of hospitals
and institutions for such classes as the tubercular, the crippled, the
blind, and the deaf, in cases wherein such persons are not also men-
tally defective or anti-social as well as simply inadequate personally
as useful members of society.
For such classes eugenical education, humanitarian aid, restric-
tive marriage laws and customs, and possibly, in certain cases, vol-
untary rather than enforced sterilization appear to be the proper
eugenical remedies.
During the year ending Sept. 30, 1912, there were discharged
from the state hospitals for the insane of New York 3,796 persons,
while 2,886 died while still in the custody of the state.
Of all the defective classes subject to this program, the feeble-
minded strains would, by the consistent application of such a pro-
gram, die out most rapidly, since their defects are either congenital
or appear relatively early in life. The decimation of the cacaes-
EUGENICS AND IMMIGRATION
489
thetic, the deformed, the epileptic, the criminalistic and the insane
strains would follow probably in order named.
Dr. F. W. Hatch, who supplied the data for Table VII, reports
also the data for the following table :
TABLE IX.
Legalized Stekilizing Opeeations in California
Types of Persons Sterilized
Male
34
45
22
12
20
10
3
4
Female
Total
Dementia Priecox
Manic Depressive
18
61
1
10
12
6
0
10
52
106
23
22
Imbecilitv
32
Confusional and Other Forms
16
3
14
Total Xumber of Persons Sterilized up to June 30, 1912.
150
118
268
From the table it is seen that 20 per cent of the operations
were performed on imbeciles or epileptics, and practically all of the
remainder on insane persons. The ratio of the number of feeble-
minded to the number of insane in institutions is approximately 1
to 10. The California ratio is in keeping with expectation, and
therefore appears to form a fair basis for estimating the future
ration of aments and dements, who would be sterilized under a eugen-
ical sterilization law.
Regardless of the time when such a policy is put into effect,
if the program outlined works out as calculated; namely, cuts off
the lowest one-tenth of the total population, it would require initial
sterilization at the rate of 80 persons per year per 100,000 total popu-
lation, increasing to approximately 150 per year per 100,000 total
population at the end of two generations. If the work should be be-
gun during the present decade, it would, in accordance with con-
servative estimates of future population, require the sterilization of
approximately fifteen million (15,000,000) persons during this inter-
val. At the end of the time we would have cut off the inheritance
of the present "submerged tenth," and would begin the second
period of still more eugenically effective decimal elimination. The
infinite tangle of germ-plasm continually making new combinations
will make such a policy of decimal elimination perpetually of value.
Although the present lowest levels, as we know them, may have dis-
appeared, still it will always be desirable to purge the existing stock
of its loM^est strains. According to Darwin,
"When in any nation the standard of intellect and the number of
intellectual men have increased, we may expect from the law of
490 FIRST NATIONAL COXFKHENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
the deviation from tlu^ avevajie that prodigies of genius will appear
somewhat more frequently than before."
As a logical corollary to this, we should expect the fortune of
recombination of ancestral elements to produce fewer human
"plls."
V^rhe conservative sterilization program, beginning with only a
few operations, applying only to those most patently degenerate,
will allow in time for the segregation, in the complex network of
national heredity, of a larger portion of the good from the bad
traits, making possible the salvage of a great portion of good that
is now associated in the same individual with the most unworthy
qualities'T} It is even urged against eugenics that, if sterilization or
other eugenical elimination had been the rule, so and so would not
have been born. Perhaps so, but would not other personalities —
one or perhaps many — of equal or better natural endowment have
appeared in his or her place 1
The present experimental sterilization laws have been pioneers —
pointing the way — and as such they are to be commended, but as
remedies for social deterioration they have not thus far, in a na-
tional way, functioned. Indeed less than 1,000 sterilizing operations
have been performed under the immediate provisions or even under
the shadow of the twelve statutes. With this in view, the rate of
sterilization required seems high, but, unless the people of the sev-
eral states are willing to attack the problem in its entirety, they can-
not hope to find in sterilization, as complementing segregation, any-
thing more than a slight palliative for the present condition from
which we are seeking relief. A halfway measure will never strike
deeply at the roots of the evil. In animal breeding, when any great
results are wrought, or when new and superior breeds are made
wdthin a few generations, it is the selected one per cent or at most
the tenth part that are selected for reproduction rather than the
upper ninety-odd per cent which this conservative program calls
for. But since segregation and sterilization seek not to make over
the upper levels of the race, nor to establish ncAV and better human
strains (these arc the tasks for constructive eugenics during the
long indefinite future), but(^imply to cut off the most worthless
one-tenth,] the rate of sterilization required seems sufficient.
The recommended program would give ample opportunity for
beginning on a very conservative scale. No mistakes need be made ;
for at first only the very lowest would be selected for sterilization,
and their selection would be based upon the study of their personal
and family histories, and the individual so selected must first be
proved to be the carrier of hereditary traits of a low and menacing
EUGENICS AND IMMIGRATION 491
order. As time passes, and the science of eugenics becomes more
exact, and a corps of experts, competent to judge hereditary quali-
ties, are developed, and public opinion rallies to the support of the
measures, a large percentage could, with equal safety, be cut off
each year. While the cutting off of personalities of as little worth
as our present lowest one-tenth will take two generations, still some
benefits would begin to accrue- almost immediately after the in-
auguration of the policy. It would, of course, be possible to cut off
a large portion of our lowest levels at one fell swoop, but the
dangers, the difficulties — both practical and scientific — and the in-
justice involved would be insuperable. No one advocates such a
plan, but a policy of small beginnings and conservative development
seems wise.
Unless all of the states cooperate in the purging of the blood
of the American people of its bad strains, and their cooperation is
supported by the federal government in respect to immigration, as
indicated in the calculations, we should not expect the program to
work out as calculated. The federal government must, at some
future time, undertake an inquiry in the home countries of pro-
spective immigrants, concerning their hereditary traits. Such a pro-
gram, nation-wide in extent, is possible only when the public becomes
convinced that it is possible to judge of the hereditary potentialities of
a given individual and that in enforcing the experimental laws already
on the statute books, scientific truths were being applied in an un-
erring and humane manner.
There is in this program nothing from a financial point of view
to hinder its immediate inauguration, as outlined, by all of the
states. Indeed, the expense per capita to the people of the state for
the care of the socially inadequate of the present lowest levels
would decline "rapidly. By painstaking analysis of state reports
the table on the following page has been worked out.
This table, which the committee hopes to be able* to extend so
as to include data for all of the states, shows the movement in state
expenditures for institutions for the socially unfit. In order to keep
this growth of expenditure from overwhelming and bankrupting
our state governments, it behooves the several states to provide
more ample opportunity for the managers of their institutions to
work out the industrial and farming systems, whereby the inhabi-
tants of their institutions may not only be happier, healthier, and
better trained than at present, but will also contribute more largely
to their own welfare and maintenance. Our institutions for the
socially dependent are more nearly approaching hospitals and vo-
cational schools in their equipment and management, and less and
492
FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
less have the appearance and real character of jails and dun<>eons.
Any money, moreover, that the state invests in such modern plants
will not be wasted; for, when the anti-social classes, as we now know
them, diminish in number, the lower tenth will always need voca-
tional training such as these changed institutions could so well pro-
vide, and the cost of such training, like all expenditure for fitting
education, would be a national investment rather than a dead ex-
pense or a tribute to degeneracy.
State Expenditures foe the Socially Inadequate: Pee Cent of Total Statk
ExPEXDiTURps Devoted to Institutions for the Socially Inadequate
, Date
Connecticut
Massachusetts
West Virginia
Virginia
1891
Per Cent
21.5
19! 7
25.5
24.4
24.7
25.3
25.5
23.5
38.1
Per Cent
23.9
25.7
26.9
26.9
23.9
23.8
22.7
23.9
21.2
21.0
Per Cent
23.6
27.6
22.6
24.8
26.6
27.2
27.9
27.0
28.4
27.6
Per Cent
27.4
25.3
1893
22.6
24.4
1895
1896
25.2
25.3
1897
1898
1899 . . .
25.0
23.8
22.3
1900
22.7
Total for Decade
Cost to the People Per Capita
24.7
$23.28
23.7
$23 . 84
26.4
$16.06
24.3
$17.76
1901
1902
24.7
2019
23.4
20.6
29.6
23.2
23.4
16.2
18.9
30.3
28.7
27.3
37.2
36.1
37.6
36.4
34.9
38.3
37.1
25.3
24.8
27.4
26.1
21.2
18.4
14.7
13.1
11.6
15.0
21.8
1903
22.4
1904
1905
21.2
19.6
18.4
19.3
19.6
1909
1910
19.1
19 4
Total for Decade
Cost to the People Per Capita
for the Decade
22 . 0
$34.68
35.0
$29.54
17.7
$26.95
20.1
$23.27
^Moreover, the increasing fitness to their purposes should ac-
tually, and does appear to so govern the evolution of our state in-
stitutions for the socially inadequate. It is not, therefore, to be
presumed that a state would develop its institutions and its sterili-
zation policy at a constantly increasing rate, all for the purpose of
bringing the program of decimal elimination and consequently the
usefulness of most of the costly institutions to a sudden end, the
former result as indicated by Tlables I. IT, III and IV of the in-
serted chart. These calculations demonstrate simply the possibility
of achieving such a program of elimination, but the program itself
EUGENICS AND IMMIGRATION 493
is subject to change and betterment. For instance, long before the
end of two generations, the eugenics commissions of the several
states should, and doubtless will, be authorized and directed by law
to extend their investigations and their selections for sterilization
to the population at large. The end sought, namely, the cutting off
of the lines of descent of the present lowest one-tenth of our exist-
ing population, could, by such an extension, be accomplished with-
out the accompanying institutional growth which the indefinite con-
tinuation of the present initial policy calls for ; not only is this true,
but in addition the contemplated end would be brought about more
rapidly. Such an extension of application to the whole population
should, however, in the interests of safety, be postponed for a
term of years, ten possibly, thereby permitting the growth of eugeni-
cal knowledge and sentiment among the people, the education of a
corps of experts in human heredity, and the building up of an in-
A'entory by the state of its cacogenic human stock.
There is one contingency by which the authority of the eugenics
commission would have to be extended to the whole population at
an earlier date. This contingency consists in the possibility that the
Supreme Court of the United States might, in case the constitu-
tionality of one of the existing sterilization laws is tested before that
body, decide that the application of sterilization only to inmates of
the institutions constitutes a breach of the Fourteenth Amendment
to the Federal Constitution, which provides that none of the states
shall "deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protec-
tion of the laws." In the light of the legal opinions presented in
this report, it is not believed that the Supreme Court would hand
down such a decision, and in the interest of sound eugenical prog-
ress it is hoped that it will not be necessary to extend the authority
of the eugenics commission to the whole population immediately,,
howsoever desirable such an extension would be in the future. The
immediate limitation of the law to the inmates of institutions is
solely in the interests of justice and unerring application, and should
not therefore be deemed discriminatory.
Attention is directed toward an interesting phenomenon of
Tables I, II, III, and IV of the Rate of Efficiency chart of this
paper. The striking feature in the working out of the suggested
policy consists in the fact that absolutely the numbers within the
socially inadequate classes would increase for a few years, after
which, by the constant application of the same policy, the decline
would come very rapidly. Such phenomena are common with prac-
tically all things that change by the application of persevering
forces — business ventures, institutional growth, the working out of
■494 FIRST NATION-AL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
govoriiinental policy, the trajectories of missiles, military campaigns,
the ravages of a plague, the ontogenesis of an individual, and the
rise and decline of plant and animal species — all experience strenu-
ous struggle in overcoming initial inertia or resistance; finally
the movement is accelerated, and, gathering momentum, the passing
by a given point, a culmination or fruition, or an extinction, as the
case may be, is achieved at a relatively great speed.
h. Conclusion.
The data for these calculations have been carefully compiled,
and the estimate for each of the factors is made on the conserva-
tive side — in each case tending to delay the culmination. The arith-
metic is correct; if one accepts the conditions, he must accept the
conclusion also. If it is held that the bases for the calculations are
too optimistically chosen, then it is necessary only to extend the time
of culmination; the essential thing is that such an end is possible
in consonance with modern humanitarian ideals and reasonable
social endeavor. However, for the reasons herein enumerated it is
believed that the time allotted; namely, two generations, is ample for
cutting otf the inheritance lines of the major portion of the most worth-
less one-tenth of our present population, if the recommended program
be consistently followed. It is clearly within the power of the Ameri-
can people and at not too great a cost in money and effort to forestall
the continuation of the great mass of defectiveness from which we now
suffer. It appears also that this end can be accomplished conserva-
tively, beginning on a small scale and keeping pace with institutional
growth and scientific study: and above all, that it can be accom-
I)lished in a lawful, just and humane manner without detriment to,
but, on the contrary, to the great advancement of, national welfare.
THE RELATION OF PHILANTHROPY AND MEDICINE TO RACE
BETTERMENT
Professor Leox J. Cole, ITniversity of Wisconsin. Madison, Wisconsin.
In accepting the invitation to speak before this. Conference on
the subject of The Kelation of Philanthropy and Medicine to Race
Betterment, I wish to makje it clear that I do so with no special
knowledge of medicine or of sociology. But if by Race Betterment
is meant in this instance the production of an inherently better
race rather than simply the bettering of conditions— if it means
biological improvement rather than social improvement — then I
EUGENICS AND IMMIGRATION 4D'5
may perhaps avoid the charge of presumption, since neither medi-
cal science nor sociology have as yet amassed sufficient data for a
very clear understanding of what their biological effects upon the
race may be. Consequently the subject may be regarded to a con-
siderable extent in the light of biological analogy, and if such facts
as are known fit in with biological theory and deductions in other
lines, we may from this gather some assurance that we may apply
the reasohing of biology, in its narrower sense, to the destiny of
mankind, which is, of course, a cognate field of biology in its
broader meaning. For we must not forget that man is still an
animal, however much he may specialize socially ; and although he
may by his superior knowledge abrogate many of the laws which
bind his more lowly kin, the bird, the fish, the maggot, or ameba,
he cannot hope to escape from the operation of certain of Nature's
methods, and one of the most fundamental and tyrannical of these
is that of reproduction. The heritage of society is passed in an un-
interrupted flow from one generation to the next; but not so the
biological inheritance, for between the individual of one genera-
tion and that of the next tliere is a rearrangement, a shuffling of
the cards face down, leading to an indefiniteness of results which
has long made this problem one of the most difficult of biological
questions.
So it is as a biologist that I propose to discuss the question be-
fore us, and I believe you will agree that until we have enough
facts to enable us to see definitely what medicine and philanthropy
are actually doing for the race, we shall have to predict as best
we can what they will probably do from our knowledge of general
biological laAvs; and our predictions will have value directly in
relation to the correctness and extent of our knowledge of these
laws. This becomes at once apparent when we consider' the dia-
metrically opposed attitudes of certain biologists, sociologists, and
social reformers. One believes that the human race already
possesses the potential factors for a richer and fuller life, that this
more or less latent potentiality is rather universally distributed, at
least within certain group limits,* and all that is needed is a better
environment to bring it out. Such maintain that biological evolu-
tion has largely stopped in the case of civilized man, and that social
evolution, the evolution of the environment, has completely taken
its place. Thus Smith, in his "Social Pathology," asserts that while
"Charles Darwin may learn important lessons from pigeons and
pigs, and a brood of lesser men may talk about human marriage in
* See for example Smith, S. G.', "Social Pathology," New York. 1911,
section on Eugenics, especially pp. 308 and 309.
496 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
the terms of the stock fanu, . . . the men of our generation who
are studying the problems at close range will more and more dis-
cuss them in terms of social psychology.* Another holds that evolu-
tion and selection, or evolution by selection, is in effect as always,
that the potentialities of individuals differ, and that they develop
dift'erentially according to this inherited potentiality and to the
limiting influence of the environment. Furthermore, that such in-
dividuals as are able to survive the environment and to produce
offspring, bequeath to their successors only that which they them-
selves inherently possess. Or still others, while believing that
natural selection is biologically operative, attribute to the en-
vironment an ameliorating effect upon the germ-plasm, which
means the "inheritance of acquired characters." When men differ
to this extent in their interpretation of natural laws, is it surpris-
ing that they fail to agree on specific means for race betterment ?
At first thought it might seem odd that philanthropy and medi-
cine should be classed together in a discussion of this nature. The
former draws upon the resources of the individual, or of the state,
if we use the somewhat broader word charities, while the latter
is ordinarily a source of income and livelihood to the individual
practicing it. In this sense the same might be said of agriculture
or manufacture. But medicine and philanthropy have this in com-
mon— the one tends to relieve the want, the oither the suffering —
and both often to prolong the life of the recipient. t And for this
last reason they are both of the same immediate eugenic importance.
I shall therefore treat of them together in general, discussing spe-
cific instances from one or the other, as the case may be.
Almsgiving and charity are as old as history, and it is generally
conceded that these give advantages to the biologically and socio-
logically unfit Avhich enable them to live longer and to propagate
more than they normally would. But with one or two exceptions,
until recently no thought was given, so far as we know, to the pos-
sible influence upon the race. Nevertheless, to quote Warner,-!'
"Plato, more than two thousand years ago, "warned his countrymen
of the degradation in store for any nation which perpetuated the
nnfit by allowing its citizens to breed from enervated stock; and
* 1. c, p. 304.
t "The most obvious result of charity as a selective force has been to
lengthen the lives of the individuals cared for." Warner, A. G., "American
Charities," New York, 1908, p. 23.
t "American Charities," 1908. p. 20. See also. Pearson, K.."The Scope
and Importance to the State of the Science of National Eugenics," Eugenics
Lab. Lect. Series, I, 1909, pp. 23, 24.
EUGENICS AND IMMIGRATION 497
he sketched for them an imaginary republic in which no considera-
tion of inheritance, of family ties, or of pity was permitted to
stand in the way of the elimination of the weak and the perfection
of the race." With the rise of the study of economics these ques-
tions often came to the fore, and then the whole matter was given
a new turn by the revolutionary ideas of Natural Selection which
permeated so many fields after Darwin's publication of the "Origin
of Species." Biologists and others were not slow to apply the
new ideas to man's racial development, and from this time really
dates the period of active discussion, and often violent disagree-
ment, on the relation of social advance to race improvement or
degradation. As social reformers were concerned with bettering
the environment, a work which could often be seen to produce im-
mediate and marked results in adding to the health and material
comfort of the populace as a whole, the gradual, almost complete
acceptance by biologists of "Weismann's doctrines as to the non-
inheritabilitj' of environmentally produced modifications naturally
led to a widening of the breach between those who placed their
faith in social measures and those who foresaw the direful effects
of what they believed to be the increasingly disproportionate ratio
of defective racial germ-plasm. The social reformer was accused
of being short-sighted, like a mariner driving his ship ahead be-
cause the wind is fair and the weather looks pleasant, but utterly
regardless of hidden shoals. Or he might be likened to the un-
scientific farmer who, because a particular crop is profitable, grows
it year after year in the same ground without rotation until the
land is depleted or "sick" and will no longer produce. Or again,
like the capitalist who razes the forests or despoils the earth of
minerals with all thought to his present gain, and none for future
generations.
On the other hand, those who called attention to the biological
consequences of the withdrawal of selection were called "dismal
scientists" and alarmists; it was maintained that "the mutilation
or destruction of the unfit would make society as a whole increas-
ingly cruel. It would produce a despotism of pseudo-science that
would be more crushing to all the gentler virtues of men than any
political despotism ever known."*
I trust you will bear with me while I make two or three more
quotations illustrating the opposing views set forth above, for I
hope later to point out what I consider some of the fallacies of each.
The first excerpts are taken from the same author mentioned several
times before, and from the same work, "Social Pathology."
* Smith, ''Social Pathology," 1911, p. 294.
4i)S vm^T NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
"Trained in uoiTcct habits of life and taught the practice of
obedience with proper moral inspirations, there is a reasonable ex-
pectation that children will reach the standard of character and
conduct maintained l)y their homes, but this is very far from assum-
ing that moral qualities are directly inherited at birth. There does
not seem to be the slightest proof of such a statement. A study of
children of the same families reveals that 'black shieep' may come
from any home. It was not because of difference in moral strain of
parentage that John became a saint and Judas went out and hanged
himself. It is time to cease digging up excuses for bad conduct
from graveyards, though it still remains true that every living
rascal would be quite willing to lay his sins upon some dead
rascal."*
Xow again, on the other side, Mudget first quotes from the
Bible, "There is a way that seemeth right unto a man, but the ends
thereof are the ways of death," and then applies it to "the social
sentiment that lies at the base of so-called 'social reform' " in the
following words:
"No doubt it seemeth right to alleviate misery, to feed the hun-
gry, to clothe the naked, to pamper the useless, to preserve the
criminal, to propagate the congenitally tuberculous and imbecile.
But is it? When we have cast aside the garment of make-believe,
by which the well-intentioned, the sentimental, the languidly
pathetic, the short-sighted man of medicine, the socialistic place-
seeker and others have woven around the stern facts of life, thereby
masking the implacable laws of Nature, and when we honestly ask
ourselves whether this road, which seems right to us, is in reality
a path that leads to national destruction, then I do not think we
shall proceed at the reckless pace which marks the present."
"For so long as we do not hold fast to that immutable truth
[of heredity], we shall recognize that from the race of civic cripples
there is begotten a race likened unto them. Helpless, useless, dan-
gerous, burdensome, and loathsome that, they are, I say advisedly,
carefully weighing my responsibility, that it is a social crime to do
anything which shall encourage and facilitate their propagation.
Every day that by the aid of medical science the lives of such are
lengthened, and the procreation of their race thus far favored and
increased, there is added a burden to the present and a curse to the
future. It is faeinorous to an extreme degree. It is sapping at the
vigor, the health, the happiness, the social morality, and the civic
* Smith, 1. c, p. 310.
t Mudge, G. P.. "Biology, Theology and Medicine in Relation to the State."
London Hospital Gazette, Vol. 17, No. 8, May, 1911, pp. 189-193.
EUGENICS AND IMMIGRATION 499
cleanliness of the nation. A nation of cripples cannot endure. If
it sinks not beneath the weight of its own helplessness and misery,
it cannot escape destruction at the hands of a more virile people.
Every medical enactment or sentiment which tends to the preserva-
tion of such people, also contributes to the undoing of the nation. ' '
' ' The medical inspection and treatment of school children ; their
free-feeding and free-clothing; their dental inspection and treat-
ment; the recent puerile suggestion of a medical officer of health
to compel certain people in a London borough to open their win-
dows for two hours a day, and to wash their floors once a week,
under a penalty of five pounds, are all delusions. In not one single
tooth, nor in a muscle twitch, nor in the ionic equilibration of one
twig of a single dendron shall we add soundness, or vigor or mental
capacity to our national stock by such means." "Medically in-
spect the earthworms in our gardens if we like, but earthworms
they will be to the end of time."
It has been my purpose in giving these rather lengthy quota-
tions to indicate the extreme positions taken by advocates on the
two sides of the question we have under discussion. And I assure
you that the rhetorical extravagances of the one are certainly no
more extreme than the bizarre ideas of heredity presented by the
other. The author quoted first appears furthermore to have an in-
born antithesis to methods which offer easy correction. Thus he
rejects both eugenics and socialism on the ground that the remedies
they propose ' ' seem too cheap and too easy. ' '*
Between the views elaborated above we find intermediate posi-
tions taken by a large group both of social workers and of biologists.
A few examples may serve to illustrate. Warner, who during his
short life was one of the foremost social workers in America, far-
sighted and discriminating, though primarily interested in practical
charities, clearly recognized the importance of heredity in racial
progress. He nevertheless emphasized the value to the race of al-
truistic sentiments, though he recognized the necessity of preven-
tion of multiplication of the unfit. Thus he says:t "Could we
cheaply rid ourselves of incapables and close our hearts to the ap-
peals of distress, we might never have the compulsion put upon
us of seeking out the wiser plans, which may eventually give us a
more uniformly healthy race. Extermination might be an easy cure
for pauperism, but it would be a costly remedy biologically; and
if we allow our instincts to compel us to forego the use of it, we
may ultimately be driven to preventive measures." He is doubt-
* Smith, "Social Pathology," 1911, pp. 290 and 299.
t Loc. cit., p. 25.
500 FIRST 1^JAT10NAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
fill, however, as to the efficacy of sterilization, and is inclined to
the view which is now gaining wide acceptance that the most effi-
cacious remedy is going to be segregation. He points out that in
many of our almshouses there are sometimes inadequate means of
separating the sexes, and "the breeding of paupers goes on upon
the premises," and even that "formal marriages between almshouse
paupers have very frequently received the sanction of both church
and state.'' He concludes his chapter with the following very sane
statement:* "Certain it is. that while charity may not cease to
shield the children of misfortune, it must, to an ever-increasing ex-
tent, reckon with the laws of heredity, and do what it can to check
the spreading curse of race deterioration. The desire to prevent suf-
fering must extend to the desire to prevent the suffering of unborn
generations."
Among those who have in their treatment of this subject em-
phasized the importance of the natural selection viewpoint may be
mentioned especially Herbert Spencer, Francis Galton, and Karl
Pearson, the director of the Galton Laboratory for National Eu-
genics, though many other names might be mentioned as well. The last
named has turned the energies of his laboratory to studying by
means of highly developed statistical methods the inheritance of
various diatheses, traits and defects, as well as the effects of ame-
liorative measures. In his Cavendish Lecture for 1912, entitled
"Darwinism, Medical Progress, and Eugenics, "t we find his posi-
tion well set forth. After marshaling the data of his laboratory to
prove that "general health is inherited and that the infantile death-
rate is selective, he makes the following statement (p. 16) :
"But, because I state that the infantile death rate is selective,
and assert that it by no means follows that a low infantile death
rate will compensate racially for a falling birth rate, why should
I be described as a Herod, and those who hold the same views as
supporters of the better-dead doctrine? I feel sure that many of
you who have, by your skill, helped into the world the cripple, or the
child of diseased or deformed parents, must have said to yourselves,
when you found it viable, better it had not been born. Many of
you, I take it, hold with me the 'better-not-born' doctrine, but the
recognition of the fact that the infantile death rate is selective can-
not of itself justify the charge that we wish the weakling killed
off."
After then giving a number of examples showing conclusively
the inheritance of achondroplasia, congenital cataract, deaf-mutism.
* Loc. cit.^ p. 31.
t Eugenics Lab. Lect. Series, IX, 1912.
EUGENICS AND IMMIGRATION 501
general degeneracy, and the like, he sums up so well that I cannot
refrain from again quoting. He says:* "... These are individual
illustrations of what is happening, because the intensive selection
of the old days has been suspended. That suspension is partly due
to medical progress ; 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 that the feeble-minded woman goes
to the workhouse as a matter of course for her fourth or fifth ille-
gitimate child, while the insane man, overcome by the strain of mod-
em life, is fed up and restored, for a time, to his family and pa-
ternit5^ 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. In the old days, without these medical bene-
fits and without these social provisions the hand of Nature fell heav-
ily on the unfit. Such were numbered, as they are largely num-
bered now, among the unemployables ; but there were no doctors
to enable them to limp through life ; no charities to take their off-
spring or provide for their own necessities. A petty theft meant the
gallows, unemployment meant starvation, feeble-mindedness meant
persecution and social expulsion ; insanity meant confinement with
no attempt at treatment. To the honor of the medical profession,
to the credit of our social instincts, be it said, we have largely
stopped all this. We have held out a helping hand to the weak,
but at the same time we have to a large extent suspended the auto-
matic action whereby a race progressed mentally and physically.
"Surely here is an antinomy — a fundamental opposition be-
tween medical progress and the science of national eugenics, or race
efficiency. Gentlemen, I venture to think it is an antinomy, and
will remain one until the nation at large recognizes as a funda-
mental doctrine the principle that everyone, being born, has the
right to live, but the right to live does not in itself convey the right
to everyone to reproduce his kind.
"Our social instincts, our common humanity, enforce upon us
the conception that each person born has the right to live, yet this
right essentially connotes a suspension of the full intensity of nat-
ural selection. Darwinism and medical progress are opposed forces,
and we shall gain nothing by screening that fact, or, in opposition
to ample evidence, asserting that Darwinism has no application
to civilized man."
I have made these quotations frankly and at length because
I believe they will show you more faithfully than I could perhaps
have done it in my own words the positions held by various stu-
* hoc. cit., pp. 25-27.
502 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERIMENT
dents of race progress and betterment. I believe that any reason-
able person must agree with Pearson that in spite of the masking
influence of the increasingly complex social heritage which is passed
on from generation to generation in our customs, beliefs, books,
laws — in fact, in all our increasing knowledge of science and arts —
nevertheless, biological inheritance is operating in man now on the
same principles that it did when he swung the stone axe, or scuttled
through the trees with his simian congeners. The detailed studies of
individual lines of inheritance Avhich have in recent years been
made along Mendelian lines* leave no doubt of this. Further-
more, this being true, it must be conceded by all thinking persons
at all conversant with biological principles that selection plays
the same role in directing the course of heredity, that is, the sur-
viving line of germ-plasm, that it always has. Note that I say
selection here rather than natural selection, for the latter term
is associated in many minds with the crude methods of Nature un-
influenced by sentient forces. Will anyone deny that the animal
or plant breeder utilizes the same principles of selection in breed-
ing his cattle or his corn that have in Nature brought about the
evolution of one form from another? The difference is that instead
of being nat^iral selection it is now conscious selection on the part
of the breeder, and he directs the processes of change, in so far
as his art enables him, along the lines which his needs or his fancy
direct.
Now as man's mental capacities began to develop, the course
of selection shifted increasingly on to these, and they became more
and more important as his social relations and capacities grew. I
am not prepared to assert that the minds of the highly civilized
ancient peoples, such as the Greeks, the Egyptians, or even more
remote cultures, might not be capable of assimilating and utilizing
to the full the complexities of our present social and political condi-
tions, our inventions and our scientific knowledge — indeed recent
Japanese history would be an argument in favor of such a view;
but certainly this cannot be said of the more primitive races, and
therefore some mental evolution must be postulated from such a
condition. To my mind the course of evolution presents a picture
somewhat like that of a small stream of water making its way
down an almost level but slightly irregular surface. Tongues are
sent out this way and that as slight depressions lead here and there,
and at times a considerable course may be made more or less con-
sistently ; but then a higher obstruction is reached and a new course
* For a summary treatment of these see DavenpoT-t. C. B.. '"'Heredity in
Kelation to Eugenics," New York, 1911.
EUGENICS AND IMMIGRATION 503
started, determined by the point of the lowest level. No matter
how well one branch has progressed, if another finds a lower spot,
it diverts the stream. Just so races and civilizations have arisen
and prospered and flourished until others superior in brute strength,
in organization, or in equipment in arms, have come in and super-
seded them.
Until social customs became comparatively highly developed,
individual physical prowess w-as as necessary to existence as among-
the lower animals. This was in the stage of individualism. With
specialization, as particular classes in a community took up cer-
tain special tasks, and especially as armies were formed not in-
cluding the total population, physical selection became relaxed for
some of the individuals. These conditions have become more pro-
nounced until modern philanthropy and medical science are bring-
ing them to a point where they can no longer be ignored. Neither
the greater diligence in seeking them out nor the fact that they
remain in institutions for longer periods will account for the dis-
proportionately increasing number of defectives and criminals in
our population. This fact seems demonstrated and one does not
merit the epithet of alarmist for pointing it out. And if true, must
v^'e not give thought to its remedy? Chatterton-Hill,* in a striking
simile, has likened the condition of the social organism under these
circumstances to that of a biological organism in which eatabolism
is exceeding anabolism, resulting in autointoxication, the gradual
poisoning of the civic body. Death is the normal process of elimina-
tion in the social organism, and we might carry the figure a step
further and say that in prolonging the lives of defectives we are
tampering with the functioning of the social kidneys!
Just as artful means of preservation superseded purely physical,
when the human race developed from the savage, and as the
breeder has replaced fortuitous natural selection by conscious selec-
tion, so I believe the time is at hand when mankind will find it
necessary to substitute some form of rational selection for the
hit-or-miss, happy-go-lucky way they have drifted along in the
past. Exactly what this method shall be I do not think we are in
a position at the present time to say. Two chief lines seem open;
restrictive and constructive — sometimes called negative and positive
eugenics. The quotations which have been made in the earlier part
of this discourse show clearly, it seems to me, that the former
measures may be adopted under certain conditions without doing
violence to the finer instincts of the race, without in any way de-
* Chatterton-Hill, G., "Heredity and Selection in Sooioloav." London,
1007, p. 260.
504 FIRST NATIOXAI. CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
stroyin^' or lesstniiiiii- altruism or hiiiiiauitai'iaiiisiii. In oui- nation-
wide agitation for conservation we are just beginning to realize
onr duty to future generations. The ease is a close parallel; for
we are saying that the material benefits of our forests, our minerals,
and our Avater power must be conserved for the benefit of all the
people, and not reaped now to enrich a few individuals and to be
passed on only to their families. Shall we have less foresight in
the heritage of defectives and cripples that we pass on to the next
and future generations? Is not the social reformer who does not
take this into consideration spending all his thought on bettering the
present generation, just as exhausting our national resources might
enrich this generation but pauperize the next?
Now, if it is going to be necessary for us to practice some de-
gree of rational selection, we must be sure that it is rational — ^it
must be based upon positive knowledge. What has modern bio-
logical research to offer in the way of contribution to such knowl-
edge? In the first place, we can readily see that a large part of
the disagreement which has been mentioned is due to difference
in opinion as to the influence which the environment may have on
the individual and on the offspring. It is the old question of Na-
ture and Nurture. While I am free to admit that in its abstruse
aspects this is one of the most difficult questions confronting the
biologist, I believe that much unnecessary confusion and needless
discussion has resulted from the tendency of writers to exaggerate
their views either on the one side or the other, and not to accord
the question fair treatment. When I am asked, as often happens,
which I consider of greater importance, heredity or environment,
I commonly give a Yankee reply by asking in return, Which is of
more importance for sustaining life — food or air?
Although we may concede what is the almost universal biological
opinion of today, that the effects of environment are not in the crude
sense heritable, we must not, nevertheless, lose sight of the fact
that the environment is a most important determining factor in
evolution and in selection. This may perhaps best be illustrated
by an example. Let us suppose two cows, one of which is inherently
a low producer, and is incapable of producing any considerable
quantity of milk beyond that necessary to raise her calf, the other,
on the other hand, has inherited the capacity to produce a large
quantity of milk under certain conditions, namely, proper feeding,
care, and handling. Now let us first consider these animals under,
say, range conditions, where they receive' no special care and where
they have to hustle for their maintenance. So far as milk produc-
tion is concerned, they will measure up about the same — each will
EUGENICS AND IMMIGRATION 505
produce enough to raise her calf and no more — and very likely
the inherently low producer will be at an advantage under these
more severe conditions. But now take the tM^o animals and place
them in a modern dairj^ with scientifically prepared rations and
the best treatment that modern dairy practice can provide. What
is the result? The animal which inherited the capacity to respond
to such treatment does respond at once by a sustained increase in
the flow of milk ; but the other does not. The former was ham-
pered by conditions in the first place, but the latter is now abso-
lutely prevented by her nature from the possibility of a response
to the improved conditions. We see therefore that these conditions
were necessary to make apparent the differences which existed in
the heredity make-up of the two animals. Is not the same true of
the human race? It is only by giving opportunity to all that we
may know which are capable of profiting by that opportunity. The
good environment, then, is necessary for differentiation, and with-
out differentiation how may we hope to make selection?
Two other biological concepts are of importance. These have
grown out of recent Mendelian investigations. The first is the idea
of hypothetical factors, which are definite heritable units, and upon
the presence of one or more of which all the characters of an or-
ganism depend. Since the factors behave for the most part inde-
pendently in inheritance, the problem of handling them in selec-
tion becomes an extremely complex one. Where only two factors
are concerned, any desired combination as to their presence or
absence may be expected in at least one of sixteen individuals
in the second generation. But as the number of factors to be dealt
with increases, the number of individuals necessary to give all the
combinations increases at a most disproportionate rate, as is indi-
cated in the following table, which shows the number of individuals
that according to expectation would be necessary to produce at
least one individual with each of the possible combinations under
the conditions most favorable for bringing them about:
1 factor 4 iiulividnals
2 factors 16
3 '•' fi4
4 " 256
10 " 1,048.576
Certain conditions, such, for example, as certain striking defects
or abnormalities, may depend upon the presence or absence of a
single factor, and it might be comparatively simple to deal with
such cases singly. But the difficulty of dealing with any consider-
able number, especially in the case of man, where conditions are
506 FIRST NATIOXAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
very different from those of animal or plant experimentation, may-
be readily appreciated. It might be possible, by prohibiting by law
certain marriages and encouraging others, to breed a race of man-
kind free from the diathesis toward a particular disease, let us
say; but think of the number of diseases alone with which man
has to contend and consider again the foregoing table. And then tell
me how soon eugenics is going to produce an "ideal race," made
to order, as the newspapers would have us believe is its aim.
Such speculations may do for the visionary who likes to specu-
late what the world may be like a century or twenty centuries
hence: but the practical eugenist is merely trying to determine
how what knowledge we have gained to the present may be turned
to the best advantage for race improvement as distinguished from
individual amelioration. At the present time it would seem that
we are in a position to apply certain phases of restrictive eugenics
with comparative certainty of results, such, for example, as the
cutting off of those definitely defective lines of germinal protoplasm
which are beyond hope of hereditary improvement. x\s to the
methods which shall be employed, it is coming, I think, to be gen-
erally conceded that permanent segregation, at least during the
period of reproductive capacity, is going to prove the most feasible,
if not the most effective of restrictive eugenic measures. But we
must be certain of whom it is necessary to segregate. The recent
advance of knowledge in this line has been considerable, but it is
only a beginning, and I must say that it is due more to the work
of biologists than of physicians. Experimental breeding of plants
and animals has supplied the keys which have unlocked some of
the puzzles of human inheritance, but what we need now are more
facts, the facts which can be gathered from the hospitals and asy-
lums, from vital statistics and from the case records of practitioners.
But these facts must be gathered with a fulness and an accuracy, and
with a view to the purpose they are to serve which has not been
customary in the past. It is a deplorable fact that comparatively
few medical men have very clear ideas of heredity, nor indeed
evince much interest in the subject, and few realize its importance.
It is easy to see that the surgeon or the physician, engrossed in his
daily duties and in the outcome of his individual cases, has little
time to give thought to the result of his operation or his cure on
the next generation or the future of the race. This attitude was
brought forcibly to my mind when reading recently an account and
discussion of ovarian transplantation. The article states* that
* Morris, R. T., "Lectures on Appendicitis and Notes on Other Sub-
jects," Third Edition, New York, 1899, p. ISO.
EUGENICS AND IMMIGRATION 507
"some patients object to the idea of carrying a piece of ovary from
another woman, as a child from such a case would have a treble
parentage, but there are many women whose uterine adnexa have
been removed who grasp at an opportunity for bearing children,
and whose minds are much relieved at the thought of the possi-
bility of such a prospect." I am not necessarily condemning the
operation, but I wish to call attention to the fact that apparently
the only thought given to heredity was that "there may be legal
difficulties involved in inheritance."
Reverting again to the matter of collecting facts, it is a sad
commentary on either the civic mind or our political institutions
that it is usually far easier to arouse public opinion and obtain
from our legislatures what are often ill-considered and premature
laws having eugenic bearing, such as those for sterilization, and
the like, than it is to induce these bodies to appropriate funds for
the adequate investigation of the facts on which such laws should
be founded.
I have not had time in this discourse to touch upon specific dis-
eases, operations, and charitable procedures, and to discuss their
relation to the question in hand as I should like to have done. It
has no doubt occurred to many of you to ask, however, Suppose we
grant the necessity of restricting the reproduction of the obviously
unfit, what about operations in other cases, the treatment of endemic
and epidemic diseases, and the like? Is removing the appendix or
the tonsils or the turbinal bones going to be to the race like tho
drug habit to the individual — once begun, having to be continued
in ever-increasing doses? It may be. It is possible that the popu-
lar idea of the predicted "hairless, toothless race" may not be so
far from the mark, or at least that this type shall increase in num-
bers unless sentiment against it becomes so strong as to become a
selective factor. I wish merely to point out that the filling and
crowning of our teeth is not going to insure better teeth for the
next generation any more than wearing a set of false ones would;
if selection is eliminated, the individuals of the next generation will
have to take their chance of inheriting a better or a worse dental
battery than their parents. My point is simply that if the inheri-
tance of the factors concerned were understood, by selection of the
parents good teeth could undoubtedly be insured to the next genera-
tion. But the question would have to be asked. Would it be worth
while ? The breeder knows how hard it is to fix a number of char-
acters at one time, and the student of genetics understands why;
and while effort was being concentrated on the teeth, other char-
acters would run riot. The difficulties are further magnified bv
508 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
the fact, greatly emphasized in recent studies, that the way in
which a character will be inherited often cannot be determined by
its appearance in the individual. This is a fact which has almost
completely been overlooked or ignored in the discussions of sociol-
ogists. So the conservatively inclined need not be alarmed that
practical eugenics will do much more than to eliminate the more
obviously unfit for some time to come.
If time permitted, I should like to discuss the question of
w^hether, in the case of certain specific diseases, such, for instance,
as tuberculosis, the greater promise for the race lay in selective
heredity, or in environmental adjustments, such as prophylactic
measures, antitoxins, treatment, and the like. My feeling is that
in most of these specific cases the race will find it most expedient
to do as now, except in such diseases as denote general physical
or mental defect or Aveakness. Take the case of cancer, for ex-
ample. Suppose it were found to be definitely inherited, but that
medical science could find an easy and early diagnosis and cer-
tain cure. Would it not be simpler and easier to cure it as it ap-
peared, even though its incidence should be even larger than now,
than to cut off all affected lines of germ-plasm? For certainly the
stock that would be eliminated by such measures would be an in-
estimable loss to the world.
The very specificity of disease, coupled with the difficulty of
selecting for a large number of characters at once, and taken in
connection wdtli man's present cosmopolitanism, by which all dis-
eases are becoming distributed all over the world within their pos-
sible ranges — all these factors make the breeding of a race of man-
kind immune to all, or even to a large number of diseases, a prac-
tical impossibility.
Eugenic selection must, I believe, for a long time be confined
to cases of marked defect and weakness. In addition, more study must
be given to those influences which may weaken the germ-plasm directly,
such as alcohol. And medical science, raither than desisting, must push
on, especially in the field of general prophylaxis, but with more thought
to succeeding generations and the future of the race than it has given
in the past. Philanthropy and charities cannot stop, but they must
take more counsel of other sciences, and, like medicine, give more
thought to the future.
EUGENICS AND IMMIGRATION 509
THE HEALTH CERTIFICATE — A SAFEGUARD AGAINST VICIOUS
SELECTION IN MARRIAGE
The Very Reverend Walter Taylor Sumner, D.D., Dean of the Episcopal
Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul, Chicago, Illinois.
We guard our business with a great deal of care. If a group of
men desire to form a corporation, they must secure permission of
the legislature. If a man or a group of men desire to carry a munic-
ipal burden, they must secure a municipal license. If a man in the
city of Chicago and elsewhere in this country desires to carry on
only some insignificant street trade, such as the selling of shoe-strings
or the pushing of a banana cart, such a man must take a responsible
citizen to the city hall to vouch for his responsibility. Now. on
the other hand, if this same man desires to get married — -and we
must a^ree that this is a very much more serious undertaking —
he goes down to the city hall alone and unknown. He may be a
degenerate, an epileptic, or the cursed diseases of the social evil
may be coursing through his veins. He passes his name through
the wicker window with the name of a similar unknown female and
they are ready to marry and to propagate their kind and to pass
on to succeeding generations, in an increasing geometric ratio,
the physical, mental, and moral deficriencies which they may possess.
We are giving much time and attention to the question of en-
vironment. We should give much attention to culture. But, after
all, is it any wonder, in face of the fact that we safeguard mar-
riage or the selection in marriage by no laws and by no public at-
tention, that we have in our public institutions in these United
States today three million abnormal people, costing this nation two
hundred million dollars a year for their upkeep and care, and that
they are increasing far and beyond in proportion to the increase
of the population of this country, large as that increase is? It
does not matter very, much, with reference to the philosophy of the
movement, whether a health certificate before marriage is possible,
or desirable, or not. Let us not lose sight of the logic of tthe need
of some safeguard against vicious selection in marriage. When
people come to understand existing conditions, there will be no
danger but that we shall have legislation. When people come to
understand the true state of things, there will be no question about
a health certificate being demanded by parents.
Now there are three avenues through which we may approach
this subject of a health certificate :
First, through the avenue of those who perform marriage cere-
monies— clergymen, justices of the peace, members of the bench,
510 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
even our public officials, ns the Mayor of Cleveland said yesterday
that he officiated even in a marriage ceremony. It does not matter,
so far as the philosophical question is concerned, ^\•hethor we have
had one Avedding or fifty weddings, or no weddings, at the Cathedral
in Chicago, since Easter of 1912 when we took the stand that there-
after we would marry no persons unless they presented a certificate,
signed by a reputable physician, that they had not an incurable
or communicable disease. What is of importance is this: That since
that time over fifty ministerial associations representing nearly
every religious body from Maine to California in their membership,
about thirty-five hundred of the clergy, have agreed at least to
urge, if not downright demand, a health certificate before they will
perform a marriage ceremony. National conventions, the Jewish
rabbis, have agreed to the same." Various churches and justices of
the peace throughout the country have also agreed to the same, so
that now the movement is apace among those people who officiate
at holy marriage.
The next avenue is through legislation. Legislation is just so
effective as it is backed up by public opinion. Public opinion today
is not well informed with regard to the conditions and the needs
of safeguarding marriage selection. Therefore, we should not be
discouraged because various states have not preventive measures,
as in this state of Michigan, and the enactments have not been
forthcoming. The measures have been defeated. But, even then,
sixteen states today have legislation pending and five states have
passed legislation since Easter of 1912. There are objections. There
is, of course, the question of whether the law is constitutional or
not. That is for the lawyers to decide. But public opinion, once
informed, wall call for legislation which is constitutional, because
any legislation is constitutional that is based upon justice and good
common sense.
The third avenue is through education. T believe that is the
great hope. The greatest agent in education in this country today,
with refefence to health certificates (and I am not handing a bou-
quet) is the press, largely the metropolitan press of this country.
I have thousands and thousands of clippings, filling five great scrap
books, of th'C articles that have appeared in the public press through-
out the country in these last eighteen or tw^enty months. It is
most marvelous that this great instrument to inform and build up
public opinion has approached the subject so intelligently and so
sympathetically. Fathers and mothers are now giving their atten-
tion to the subject; for they realize, as knowledge takes the place
of ignorance, that if they are to safeguard the integrity of their
EUGENICS AND IMMIGRATION 511
family, they must have some assurance from the man who comes
to ask for the daughter's hand that he has not an incurable or a
communicable disease. Mothers are learning that they are largely
the sufferers from these conditions — conditions in connection with
commercialized vice and the social evil ; conditions more to be
feared than a leprous plague, scattering broadcast insanity, paraly-
sis, sterility, locomotor ataxia, the blinded eyes of little babies, the
twisted limbs of deformed children — physical rot and mental de-
cay— afflicting not only the guilty one, but the innocent wife and
child in the home with a sickening subtlety. And the young women
who are coming to the marriage state are realizing that the lowest
conservative estimate of men in this country between the ages of
eighteen and twenty-five who have or have had a social-evil dis-
ease, is sixty per cent and that eighty per cent of all operations
upon womanhood, peculiar to women, are due to the guilty infection
of a husband and the wife has never known it. And best of all,
boys are learning, as never before, that there is a calling just as
high, just as noble, just as holy as the call to motherhood, and that is
the call to fatherhood ; and that if they are to reach, if they are to
qualify when that great duty and privilege and responsibility shall
come to them, they must lead such lives in their adolesscence and
young manhood that there can be absolutely no question with ref-
erence to that qualification. The boy can be taught and should be
taught, as well as the girl, in the home. The fathers' or mothers,
or both, who neglect this education are taking upon themselves
responsibilities nothing short of criminal. The child does not
know these things. Ask any social worker, any physician. Ig-
norance plays the largest part in the initial delinquency of the
child. We raise the question, Shall we teach personal purity in
the high schools, to segregate classes? I say, we can. In the last
few weeks we have in the city of Chicago overthrown the proposi-
tion which was. adopted last summer to teach sex hygiene. Per-
haps it is just as well for the reason that there is now in the minds
of the citizens of Chicago such an uncertainty with regard to the
success of the movement that it may be better to give the teaching
of sex hygiene or personal purity a short vacation. Then by the
end of that time we may have teachers, better trained, to teach
the subject. In the meantime the parents of the children will be
better informed, and when once knowledge does take the place of
ignoranoe, then there will not be the opposition that today exists.
We can afford to wait.
Whether we approach this subject from the standpoint of com-
mercialized vice, or whether we approach the subject from the
512 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
stand j)oint of race betterinent, we shall never reach a solution to
the conditions which are giving ns the broken body and the de-
generate mind that we find in the child until we are ready to de-
mand that which women have never demanded and men have never
been just enough to concede — the single standard of morality for
men and women alike. And in the instance of this, you can take
the boy and say to him, "Will you not make this resolution:
Some day I expect to marry. I am determined to bring to my wife
as pure a life as I expect of her. Somewhere, some girl is keeping
herself pure and sweet and clean for me. Cannot I do as much
for her?"
I appeal for a greater intelligence with reference to safeguard-
ing the selection in marriage. I appeal for justice to the unborn
child. We may nurture, but the physiologist, the physician, the
criminologist, the penologist, and the teacher of the young find the
great failures today in the fact that the child has not been well
born. A desire for righteousness shall take the place of unright-
eousness only when boys and men have a finer instinct of chivalry
and a more splendid honor for womanhood, and have the convic-
tion that to fight for a woman's honor is indeed the occasion for
a valiant fight. Perhaps you read in the March number of the
Cosmopolitan a poem entitled, "The Price He Paid." It is the cry
that is going up from tens of thousands of boys and men today.
THE PRICE HE PAID
I said I would have my fling:.
And do what a young man may : •
And I didn't believe a thing
That the parson.s have to say.
I didn't believe in a God
That gives us blood like fire,
Then flings us into hell because
We answer the call of desire.
And I said : "Religion is rot.
And the laws of the world are nil;
For the bad man is he who is caught
And cannot foot his bill.
And there is no place called hell ;
And heaven is only a truth,
When a man has his way with a maid,
In the fresh keen hour of youth.
"And money can buy us grace.
If it rings on the plate of the church :
And money can neatly erase
Each sign of a sinful smirch."
Discussion.
EUGENICS AND IMMIGRATION 513
For I saw men everywhere,
Hot-footiBg the I'oad of vice;
And women and preachers smiled on them
As long- as they paid the price.
So I had my joy of life :
And I went the pace of the town ;
And then I took me a wife,
And started to settle down.
I had gold enough and to spare
For all of the simple joys
That belong with a house and a home
And a brood of girls and boys.
I married a girl with health ^
And virtue and spotless fame.
I gave in exchange my wealth
And a proud old family name.
And I gave her the love of a heart
Grown sated and sick of sin !
My deal with the devil cleaned up,
And the last bill handed in.
She was going to bring me a child,
And when in labor she cried.
With love and fear I was wild—
But now I wish she had died.
For the son she bore me was blind
And crippled and weak and sore!
And his mother was left a wreck.
Aye, it was so, she settled my score.
I said I mi;st have my fling.
And they knew the path I Avonld go ;
Yet no one told me a thing
Of what I needed to know.
Folks talk too much of a soul
From heavenly joys debarred —
And not enough of the babes unborn,
By the sins of their fathers scarred.
— Ella Wheeler Wilcox.
Health Certificates in Michigan
Mrs. Maud Glassxer, J\lichigan Federation of Women's Clubs. Nashville,
Michigan.
I wish to say just a -word here in addition to some of the things
Dean Sumner has said about health certificates before marriage.
My husband stood in the State Legislature of Michigan fighting
for this protection for womanhood for three straight years, day in
(18)
534 i>MRsr N.vnoMAi; coxkerencr on uack i?F.TTi;rniF,N'T
and clay out. Wc feel that cci'taiiily if a healtli certificate will .
jiot protect us, yon men must invent something else that will. The
moral and educational effect of such a law upon our young people
is one of the great things that led us to advocate this measure. We
hope to say to our young people, "You shall not marry if you do not
live pure lives." But one Senator in the state of Michigan said,
"No." so we could not do it. I have sat in this Convention all
the way through, and T have heard my sister women blamed for
race suicide. T have heard the women blamed for their husband's
doings when the husbands won't do a thing they want them to. I
have heard women blamed for this, that and the other by the men
and by the other women, and I want to stand up and say for
my sister Avomen in the United States that there never was a cleaner,
brighter body of women in the world than there is in North America
today. The opposition to this health certificate law did not come
from the women. Not a woman in the state of Michigan ever wrote
and asked not to have that law. Women are demanding all over
the country for the protection of themselves and for the protection
of their children from these diseases that are devastating the popu-
lation. What chance, I want to ask you, has a girl to marry health-
fully under the conditions that we have heard pictured of Ameri-
can civilization today Avithout a health certificate? What chance
has she? What chance has any girl when she is brought up to con-
sider marriage as a sacrament, as a holy institution, and then al-
loAved to marry some man, corrupt in mind and body, AA^ho has had
his fling.
I Avant just a chance to tell this Convention about Betty. We
have heard so much about AA^omen not being good mothers. Betty
Avas the finest daughter. She Avas one of the strongest, brightest,
freest girls I ever kncAV. Today, at forty years of age. Betty stands
old, AA^rinkled, bent and Aveak and sick. At sixteen years of age. a
man came courting Betty aa^io had soAved a plentiful crop of wild
oats. Sixteen years after she married, this felloAV having run aAvay,
I saAV her again. She stood on the hillside in the country cemetery.
We had taken my mother back there for burial and Avhen I turned
from my mother's graA^e, this figure of an old Avoman stood in the
path before me holding out her hands to me and I said, "Why!"
She said, "Maud." and I said, "0 Betty, AA-hat has life done for you
to make you like this?" She Avas a deathless old hag at thirty-tAvo
years of age. Turning to the hillside beside her, she pointed to a
roAV of sticks, and e\'ery one marked a tiny grave. There AA^ere one.
tAvo, three, four, five, six, seven, eight little sticks stuck in the
ground. She said, "Here are all my children. Eight times I have
EUGENICS AND IMMIGRATION 515
gone down to the gates of death for a little child and I have never
held in my arms a living form." What are you going to do
about it?
MARRIAGE SELECTION
Professor Roswell H. Johnson, University of Pittsburg, Pittsburg, Pa.
The great principle of natural selection still furnishes the chief
motive power of evolution, even though nowadays we believe the
lines are largely determined by the nature of the variations which
appear. Now, in the study of human evolution at least, it becomes
necessary to distinguish three distinct kinds of natural selection,
for our social agencies affect these three kinds differently. These
are lethal selection — that whicli operates by differential mortality ;
sexual selection — that Avhicli operates by differential success in
mating; and fecundal selection — that which operates by differential
fecundity. Today it is sexual selection, differential success in mat-
ing, that I am to discuss under this title of Marriage Selection.
We may- call it marriage selection, inasmuch as the extra-marital
relations are largely sterile, for one reason or another which we
need not here analyze.
Sexual selection in man has one sharp distinction from that in
the inferior species. In the latter, because of the larger role of
instinct and the lesser role of social regulation and judgment, nearly
all the individuals mate. There are very few unmated females and
very few unmated males, except in species having severe male
combat, when matelessness is the result of defeat. Where combat
prevails, the main result of sexual selection is to cause a disparity
of size and strength between the sexes and to accentuate bodily
weapons, such as horns, canine teeth, spurs, and the like.
Since the disparity of size and strength between the sexes in
man is no greater than that in the anthropoid apes, there is no
evidence that male combat played a large role in the da\An-man.
Indeed, the great reduction in the canine teeth indicates, that com-
bat has played a smaller role as time has passed, and fortunately so.
Sexual selection in primitive man, as soon as individual combat
was reduced, operated very slightly if unaided. Its effectiveness
depended largely upon the cooperation of lethal and fecundal selec-
tion. Thus, in warfare, the males of the defeated tribes were fre-
quently killed, and the females taken as additional wives. Or,
even when all eventually mated, some, who possessed a specially
desirable characteristic to a higher degree, were chosen earlier
51(i FIRST NATIONAI. CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
and thereby liad more progeuy, or tliey were chosen by the superior,
whose progeny would in some cases inherit a greater viability.
It is very probable that many of our esthetic attributes, sucli
as musical and artistic ability, which are difficult to account for by
lethal selection, have been produced by sexual selection.
In modern man we have the contrast of an unprecedented num-
ber of unmated individuals. This condition has developed with
the growth of romantic love, which is the exclusive preference for
a very long period for one mate over all others. As Finck has
pointed out, this has been very much accentuated from the time of
Petrarch on.
Now if these unmated individuals differ from the others in any
important respect, sexual selection is very important. Or if we
can alter the percentage of the unmated in different classes, sexual
selection may become very potent.
Figure 1 shows how the innately mediocre individuals are most
numerous and how both the markedly superior and inferior by
nature are each much less common. I mean by superior those who
are more individually happy and socially useful than the average.
The mental characteristics, at least in such a category, are too com-
plex for a unit character treatment, even if such superiority is built
up by unit characters.
We must consider, then, what causes the failure to mate and
what is the quality of each of these classes. Taking the men, we
have :
1. The cultivation of a taste for sexual variety and a consequent
unwillingness to submit to the restraints of marriage.
2. Infection by venereal disease.
3. Pessimism in regard to women from such experiences.
4. Deficiency in normal sexual feeling or perversion.
5. Deficiency of one kind or another, causing difficulty in getting
an acceptable mate.
The persons in these five groups are, as a class, inferior. This
inferiority is in part innate and in part the result of bad environ-
ment. But since innate inferiority is so frequently a large factor,
we can conclude that the group as a whole will average innately
inferior.
There are two other classes largely superior by nature:
6. Those who seek some other end so ardently that they will not
make the necessary sacrifice in money and freedom to marry.
7. Those whose likelihood of early marriage is reduced by a
prolonged education and apprenticeship.
We see that the action of sexual selection in regard to males,
EUGENICS AND IMMIGRATION 517
while favorable in some ways, is in great need of improvement.
Such efforts may be made along three lines:
1. Try to lead all young men to avoid a loose sexual life and
venereal disease. The effects of a general effort will be heeded
more by the superior than by the inferior.
2. Hold up the role of husband and father as particularly hon-
orable, and proclaim its shirking, without adequate cause, as dis-
honorable. For a man to say he has never met a girl whom he
can love, simply means he has not diligently sought one, or else
he has a deficient emotional equipment, for there are many, sur-
prisingly many, estimable, attractive, unmarried women.
3. Cease prolonging the educational period past the early twenties.
The professional schools in our country are steadily delaying the
age of graduation and thereby that of marriage. They formerly
asked for high school training, and many still ask no more. But
other schools have demanded more and more, till now one requires
a bachelor's degree for entrance. The situation is made still more
serious for medical students by the frequent post-graduate hospital
practice without pay. It is time to call a halt. This cannot go on with-
out serious loss to the race. Our young men should not have their
marriage postponed by external circumstances past twenty-five
years. This means we. must allow students to specialize earlier. If
there is need of limiting the number of candidates let us have com-
petitive entrance examinations. We must have our superior men
marrying earlier, even at some cost to their early efficienc3^ The
high efficiency of any profession can be more safely kept up by
demanding a minimum amount of continuation work in after-
noon, or evening or seasonal classes, laboratories or clinics. No
more graduate fellowships should be established till those now ex-
isting carry a stipend adequate for marriage.
Now we come to the consideration of sexual selection in women.
Are the unmated inferior?
We do find some inferior individual groups, such as those un-
attractive in manner and appearance, wholly as the result of poor
health. This may be either inherited or else the result of ignorance,
frequently due to mental inferiority. Others are unattractive be-
cause of the absence of all sex feeling, or of some physical ab-
normality. And still others are unmated because they have fallen
into ways of loose living, some as the direct result of innate de-
fects, such as feeble-mindedness, unusual susceptibility to sugges-
tion or sexual hyperesthesia.
On the other hand, when we have passed these groups of women,
we find large groups that are distinctly superior. Some of these
518 FIRST XATIOXAI. CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
have had their chauee of marriage reduced by ,u:oing to women's
colleg-es, others through engaging in pre-eminently feminine occu-
pations, such as the teaching of children, yielding meager oppor-
tunities to associate with men, or living in those cities that have an
undue proportion of women. Then there are, besides these, superior
women who, because they are brought up in families without
brothers or brothers' friends, are so unnaturally shy that they are
unable to become friendly with men. however much they may care
to. There are still others who repel men by a manner of extreme
self -repression and coldness, sometimes the result of parents' or
teachers' overzealous efforts to inculcate modesty and reserve,
things valuable in due degree, but bad in excess.
In order to present to yon the seriousness of the situation, I
Avill present the results of a study made by my student, Miss Helen
D. ^Murphey. This deals with the graduates of Washington Semi-
nary in Washington, Penn., a secondary school for women founded
in 1837, greatly antedating the first woman's college, which opened
in 1865. You will see in Fig. 2 that the marriage rate has declined.
The drop in the '60 's is due to the Civil War. You will also notice
that the percentage engaged in occupations other than housewifery
has increased progressively. It is not clear which of these occur-
rences is causal.
The ominousness of this declining marriage rate is aggravated
by the low birth-rate which these same women contribute, as shown
in Fig. 3. Now combining these results to get the birth rate of
the graduates as a whole, we have this (Fig. 4) discouraging re-
sult. Notice that only the earliest classes, with one or two excep-
tions, have enough children to reproduce the class. And this is
not a college, and is not in New England, but in the same small
city as Washington and Jefferson College, a much larger institu-
tion for men. If, then, under these favorable conditions, the mar-^
riage rate is so low, and marriage is so late (Fig. 5), we may infer
that the low rate is widespread.
Let us now examine some of the results thus far attained in a
study of Wellesley College data, made by my student. Miss Bertha
Stutzmann (Table 6). We see from this that the recent Wellesley
alumnae have a very low marriage and birth rate. There is only one
mitigating circumstance, that these women have married superior men,
as shown in Miss Smith's ('00) study.
That college women are superior to the average woman is a safe
inference. However, we may use another criterion of superiority.
Eminence may be measured by space in collective biographies^
EUGENICS AND IMMIGRATION 519
Table 7 shows such a correlation with a very late asre at marriage
and a consequently decreased racial contribution.
The objection has been made that engenists are too much dis-
turbed by this late marriage of superior women. To postpone
marriage seriously reduces the likelihood of marriage. The critic
says that late-marrying women will have their children closer to-
gether and so eventually have as many. But the facts as collected
by Miss Smith do not bear this out. Furthermore, the late mar-
riage of superior persons cuts down their contribution to the race
stream, because the years of fertility left to the wife are reduced
(now that the average of human life is prolonged, the climacteric
seems to come on startlingly soon to many of these late married
women"). Again, late marriages are relatively ineffective, because
of the lengthened generations. Suppose a generation to be 25 years
or 335^ years respectively in two different stocks, and that all per-
sons marry and each couple have four surviving children or two
per parent. The effect (Fig. 8) is to cause the 25-year stock to con-
stitute two-thirds of the population at the end of a century.
Is it not imperative that something be done to raise the marriage
rate of all superior women? To this end we must dissuade superior
men from .shirking marriage. If these superior men would keep
their sex records clean, they would not suffer the severe deprecia-
tion which they do sustain in the eyes of superior women. But
let us not take that ambiguous shibboleth, "the single standard of
morals." to mean a general sex strike, that is. ostracizing every
man who has had illicit sex experience. This is too extreme. Early
offenses, where infection did not occur or was positively cured,
though properly considered a severe drawback, should not be per-
petually condemning when followed by reform and real love. Such
an unforgiving and uncompromising position cannot be approved
because it leads a very large number of women into celibate lives,
with a serious dysgenesic result. In addition it increases the tempta-
tions of the men left unmarried. These extremists must remember
that it is hard to get men to marry at even a normal rate, as Pro-
fessor Cattell has shown this morning, and which I need not there-
fore demonstrate. The threat of a sex strike ^Yl[l never enforce
chastity. Slow and hard as it is, we must content ourselves to build
up a sounder moral basis by better attested methods.
Inappreciation of wifehood and motherhood by misguided fem-
inists must cease, and greater honor and appreciation must be meted
out to mothers, in order to more than compensate for the recog-
nition that women earn in rival occupations. Women should
properly be permitted to do any work they wish, not incompatibL)
520 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
with their well-being; but greater honor and esteem is due those
who have not shirked the paramount function and responsibilities
of motherliood.
While waiting: for separate colleges to become co-educational,
as they eventually will, their present dysgfenesic tendency can i)rob-
ably be reduced by the gradual introduction of men teachers into
women's colleges, since women professors tend to foster celibate career-
hunting, which, attractive as it is to many young women at first,
in most cases is eventually unsatisfying. Furthermore, the intro-
duction of courses dealing with the home and the child would give
college women increased interest in and eagerness for that noblest
profession of home-making and motherhood.
Let us not err in our efforts to teach chastity by making sex
appear an evil thing. This is a terrible mistake and all too com-
mon. One of my students, referring to a widely read sex book for
young men, said one would infer from it that all maiTied men suffer
a serious sacrifice in health. I am confident that much of the
celibacy of w^omen may be blamed to ill-balanced mothers and others
who, in w^ord or attitude, build up an impression that sex is indecent
and bestial, and engender a general, damaging suspicion of men.
It is necessary to keep our heads level in the sex ethics campaign.
The venereal diseases will probably, if we can continue our present
progress in treatment and prophylaxis, be brought under control
in the course of a century, while the problem of differential mating-
and the fecundity of the superior stocks will be wath us as long
as the race lasts, w^hich we may expect to be tens of millions of
years. Let us not present too luridly, by drama, novel, or maga-
zine stories, dramatic and highly-colored individual sex histories.
These often impress an abnormal situation on sensitive girls so
strongly that aversion to marriage or sex antagonism is sometimes
aroused. The facts should be presented in a more dispassionate,
scientific, proportioned, and psychologically sound way — not by
cjTiics, but by competent, experienced, sweet-minded persons.
Eligible young people should have their circle of acquaintances
broadened. Co-education (Tables 9 and 10), I believe, is one of
the best means, as associating the best groups. But many other
means should be encouraged. We have in this a further justifica-
tion of cards, dancing and theaters. That these may sometimes
be pursued intemperately need not condemn them universally.
These and other social devices extend the range of acquaintance,
and also give the necessary time for mutual estimates and friend-
ships. Others besides parents should feel some obligation to afford
these social opportunities to young people. Surfeit for some indi-
EUGENICS AND IMMIGRATION 521
viduals and dearth for others call for curtailment here and en-
couragement there.
I now pass to the consideration of the objection so frequently
heard that the selection of mates in man cannot possibly be im-
proved, because it is wholly a personal and capricious thing. But
the objectors on this score ignore the fact that three mental stages
are normally passed thru in this mate-choosing process. They fall
into error by concentrating attention on the last, most obvious,
emotional, " love-is-blind " stage. The first involves the broad de-
termination of our associates. The second is the narrowing of
choice to those whom we specially admire and elect as friends. The
last is the actual "falling in love."
One of the chief factors in this first stage is the structure of
the social unit to which we belong. How frequently matings are
determined by the school, church, or neighborhood! Then there
is another group composed of our parents' chosen friends, with
whose children we are naturally thrown. The mother who sends
her girl to the university rather than into the the dansant set,
determines largely the type of her daughter's finance, not only be-
cause her associates are different in the two cases, but because the
girl's ideals will be differently built up. The young man who goes
with fast girls is indirectly determining the kind of girl he will
marry, if indeed, he is not thereby led to abandon marriage. Dur-
ing this second stage of more intensive associations or friendships,
there is clear-minded discrimination, before the emotions have
become imperious. I believe that the period of mere friendliness
is longer in most cases than the period of conscious loving before
marriage. So we see the choice of a mate is not ordinarily ca-
pricious.
To show you that marriage selection does really operate, I have
collected in Table 11 the cases so far observed showing assortative
mating. This may be defined as the degree to which like mates
with like. This does not have as great a eugenic significance as
preferential mating, but the latter has not yet been so well demon-
strated. Assortative mating has the value, however, of building
up the unusually able brains the world needs. In this Table 1 ex-
presses perfect assortative mating, that is, each degree always
mating with the corresponding degree.* 0 expresses random mating.
You will notice in the royal families that assortative mating is low
because interfered with for state reasons.
My student, Miss Carrie F. Gilmore, has found a preferential
mating for facial appearance and class marks, as shown in Fig.
12. Preferential mating is also indicated in the following data re-
.)2L* first XA'I'IOXAL COXFKKExXCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
gardiny: college women and their non-college sisters, cousins, and
friends as collected by ]\Iiss M. R. Smith (Table 13).
^Marriage selection is under some degree of legal control thru
marriage and divorce laws. Those who maintain that mating is
wholly capricious forget the very considerable extent to which
social control has made itself effective in the past. Indeed, many
of the prohibitions are now relaxed, such as the notorious deceased
wife's sister provision. It is obvious that marriage laws should
make as few restrictions as possible without strong reason. A mini-
mum age and a high degree of consanguinity have been an almost
universal matter for legislation or enforced custom. And let it be
noted, their object has been primarily eugenic. A relationship
closer than that of cousin should constitute a prohibition. Yet
cousin marriages need not be denied except in the event of that
branch of the family common to the cousins in question having
individuals with certain specified defects. The suggestion that
proposed cousin marriages should be passed upon by a state eugenic
board, tho biologically sound, does not seem so from the socio-
logic standpoint. In case of an adverse decision, there would fol-
low either broken hearts or a liaison, for the hope of a favorable de-
cision would have engendered a sitrong attachment. Freedom
from venereal disease, at least for men, must be attested to by
competent physicians by competent tests, the state assuming a
share of the financial burden. It does not seem wise, however, to
demand freedom from, all mental and physical defects, for if the
defect is very serious, a surer method must be employed than the
withholding of a marriage license. If it is less than very serious
and not pernicious, we are not justified in prohibiting marriage,
provided it is the earnest intention of the couple not to reproduce.
In the event of such a marriage proving fertile, sterilisation would
prevent a second offense.
■"*< Miscegenation" of certain races may properly be controlled as
far as possible by the refusal of marriage licenses and by public
opinion^ This will unfortunately result in cases of individual in-
justice, but is nevertheless racially necessary. The proposition to
refer doubtful cases of mixed blood to the state eugenic boards is
objectionable, for the same reasons as above.
While society may deny the right to marry only for grave cause,
it should be glad to divorce pairs whose progeny are not desirable ;
this for the reason that in one case societj^ is acting against the
will of the two parties. In the second case both the two parties
concerned and society profit by the divorce. Divorce is far prefer-
able to separation, since the unoflfending party should net be de-
EUGENICS AND IMMIGRATION 523
niecl the privilege of remarriage, as the race in most cases needs
his or her contribution to the next generation. Divorce, it must
be remembered, is ordinarily just a legal recognition of a separa-
tion that already exists. The time-honored and justifiable grounds
of adultery, sterility, impotence, venereal infection, desertion, non-
support, and habitual cruelty are no more worthy of legal recogni-
tion than the dysgenesic grounds of drunkenness, feeble-mindedness,
epilepsy, insanity, or other specified serious mental, moral or
physical defects.
For sexual selection to work at its best, it is desirable that the
mated persons be as superior as possible to the unmated. Is it not,
then, a social blunder to deny divorce to a married pair if one of
them at least is inferior? We hear much of a divorce evil, but
we have in reality a divorce remedy for the evil of ill-mated pairs.
Dysgenesic marriage we cannot prevent as frequently as would be
desirable, because we have not the cooperating will of the couple.
When, in such undesirable marriages the individuals come to see
their mistake, society should gladly welcome the prompt undoing
of the marriage bond.
In closing let me urge you to do all in your power to correct
this growing tendency to postpone, if not to abandon, martiage
entirely on the part of our superior young people. Hold out mar-
riage as one of the ends of a useful, normal, beautiful life. Help
superior young people to meet, and encourage and further their
early marriage. Give more honor and appreciation to those who
have married well and have had adequate children. And in what-
ever ways you properly can, reduce this appalling percentage of
superior celibates who are thus pulling down the quality of the
human raee.
524 FIKST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BET'J
EUGENICS AND IMMIGRATION
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FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
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EUGENICS AND IMMIGRATION
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528
FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
-Curve showing time between graduation ;ind mar-
riage.
Average age of graduates, nineteen.
Washington Seminary Classes of '41-'00, Status
in 1913.
^
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; i 3 4 A U T ? <) lo u )2 13 H IS )k n ir 11 20 ii ij jj av a- ju Ji u if Jo j; Jx i-i it Jiji-
TABLE G.
WELLESLEY ALUMNAE STATUS IN FALL OF 1912
By Beetha J. Stutzmann
Per Cent Which Have
Married
No. of Children per Student
NON.
NON.
Graduations
All
<!». b. k.
<1». B. K.
(|). B. K.
(p. B. K.
1905
32.8
20.0
33.8
.20
.21
1906
38.2
.50.0
37.8
.00
.22
1907
30.6
•21.0
31.3
.16
.11
1908
29.8
33.3
29.6
.13
.14
1909
16.2
.5.8
15.9
.06
.05
1910
7.3
6 -^
6.3
.00
.01
19ll
6.1
6.2
6.1
.00
.00
1912
1.7
2.0
1.9
.00
.00
Collectively . .
19.1
15.4
19.3
.065
.085
TABLE 7.
AGE AT MARRIAGE OF EMINENT WOMEN
C. S. Castle, Pop. Sci. Mon., June, '13
Century
Av. Age
Range
No. of Cases
12
16.2
8-30
5
13
16.6
12-29
5
14
13.8
6-18
11
15
17.6
13-26
20
16
21.7
12-50
28
17
20.0
13-43
50
18
23.1
13-53
127
19 (Amei
. 27.7) 26.2
15-67
189
EUGENICS AND IMMIGRATION
/ §
o =
o
530
FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTKHMENT
TABLE 9.
THORKDIKK— MARRIAGES AMONG COLLEGE WOMEN AS IN laOl
OUTLOOK, Oct. 5, '01
Ages
Smith, Vnssar
and Wellesley
55
45
35
29.5
23.5
17
45 Per Cent of Collesre "Women Marry by 40.
90 Per Cent of All Women Marry by 40.
96 Per Cent of Arkansas Women Marry by 40.
SO Per Cent of Massachusetts Women Marry by 40.
In Massachusetts 30 per cent have married at the age at which collesre women graduate.
TABLE 10.
SHINN — MARRIAGE RATE OF COLLEGE WOMEN. CENTURY, OCT. '95
Women Over
Separate
Assuming
Graduation
at
22
25
38.1
49.7
53.6
56.9
29.6
40.1
46.6
51.8
„ , ^ ■, ^ „ ■ (Nor. Atlan. ..29.0
Marriage Rate from Co-ed. Colleges >n ^ jyj-j^ West ..33.6
Women in general marry most frequently 20-25 years old.
College women marry most frequently 25-30 years old.
TABLE 11.
ASSORT ATIVE MATING
1. =rr COMPLETE
Trait
Investigator
Probable Error
Stature (English Middle Class)
Stature
Age
Cephalic Index .
Deafness
Normality (Families with Criminals)
Longevity
Intelligence
Temper
Excitability
Sympathy
Reserve
Success in Career
Insanity
Intelligence (Royal)
Pearson-Galton
Pearson
Lutz
Boas
Schuster
Goring
Warren et
Elderton et al.
EUGENICS AND IMMIGRATION
531
CO
CM
o
+
a>
O QC
C/3
0)
CO
CO
o
CO
o
O ^
O
00
o o
532
FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
SMITH, M. R., '00 COLLEGIATE ALUMNAE DATA
Tub. Amer. Stat. Ass'n, VII, 1900, p. 1.
Under 23 years . .
23 to 32 years . .
33 years and over
Equivalent Non-College
30.1
64.9
5.0
Age at Marriage
r26.?. College
J 24.2 Sisters )
■| 24.7 Cousins >
L24.'_' Friends )
College
Equivalent Non-College
No. of Children
1.65
1.875
Per Cent Childless at Time
25.36
17.89
Where Wife is
Occupations of Husbands, Per Cent
College
Equivalent Non-College
College Teachers .'
Other Teachers
65.9
23.3
15.7
9.0
2.0
7.0
0.9
51.4
11.8
11.2
8.6
Scientists .
0.6
Clergymen
Artists
4.8
0.3
Where Wife is
Income of Husbands, Per Cent
College
Equivalent Non-College
Less than $2,000
24.5
46.6
27.1
36.7
$2,000 to $5,000
44.1
Over $5,000
16.9
SOME EFFICIENT CAUSES OF CRIME
Professor R. B. von Klein Smid, Secretary American Association Clinical
Criminology, Associate Superintendent and Director Department of Re-
search, Indiana Reforaiatoiy, Jeffersonville, Indiana.
A student in the field of criminology is forced to wonder at
times whether there is any other field in which it is possible for him
to encounter so great a diversity of opinion or such extreme and
opposing views. It is to be said, however, that conclusions here-
tofore reached have come largely from empirical sources alone,
rather than from scientific investigations, and that the extreme posi-
tions held are those dictated by the angles from which penal and
EUGENICS AND IMMIGRATION 333
correction problems have been approached. In general these con-^
elusions may be grouped as four in number.
The first is that, to a greater or less extent, every man is guilty
of crimes, his detection, conviction and sentence avoided only be-
cause of concomitant circumstances. Were the eye of the law
trained as carefully upon him as upon others who are compelled
to pay the penalty of their misdeeds, he, too, must suffer the dis-
grace and the punishment meted out to other offenders. In other
words, all have committed and do commit crimes, and it is very^
largely a matter of chance as to which ones reap the just harvest
of their anti-social seed sowing. Out of this theory has grown the
belief that by no means are all of our criminals incarcerated in
institutions, nor indeed our worst ones, but that there are many,
as Tarde points out, who even go so far as to make a profession of
the criminal life, operating with a cunning which, with rare excep-
tions, evades detection and so escapes the penalty.
The second belief on the part of certain of those Avho give atten-
tion to the problem of crime is that all criminals are vicious men,
and consequently that it is the dut,y of society to hunt them out
wherever they may be found in order to mete out to them that de-
gree of punishment appointed by legislation for the particular crime
committed. Out of the attitude of this faith have grown the high
wall, the whipping post and the dungeon, together with all means
of discipline and punishment which humiliate and degrade, in the
conviction that the vicious must be cowed and made afraid to vent
their nefarious temper upon a society strong enough and determined
enough to cope with them, and to demand of them an eye for an
eye and a tooth for a tooth.
Another view held- particularly by those of sociological inter-
ests is that transgressors of the law would be very few in number,
if any, except for a peculiar and contaminating social environment.
Those of this belief hold that Society is to blame directly for the
existence of the so-called "criminal class" because she neglects to
conduct her economic and social affairs so as to surround all of her
members with those influences which make for good alone.
Still a fourth conclusion is to the effect that all criminals are
defectives and that no man of normal mental and physical status
commits a crime. On the grounds of this belief there have sprung
up among us, in the last few years, a number of serious and, more
recently, organized attempts to investigate the field of crime for
the purpose of determining the degree of abnormality of those who
have been convicted and incarcerated.
While the truth is not to be found exclusively in the theory held
534: FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE liETTKHMENT
by any one of these partieular groups, it is not at all unlikely that
there is a considerable element of soundness in the arguments of
all; in fact, may it not be the case when investigations will have
continued for a greater length of time and a more exhaustive study
Avill have contributed more generously to the science of criminology,
that it will be discovered that there is a large element of identity
in the theories advanced and that these various conclusions are
not antagonistic to so great a degree as supposed. Until quite re-
cently the science of criminology was regarded as a legal science,
exclusively. Now there are indications that there are many who
believe it to be purely a social science. On the contrary, if there
be a science of criminology (which some deny), there are those
who insist that it has its origin in the sciences of medicine and
psychology. The legal science emphasizes the responsibility of the
present criminal ; the social science, the responsibility of society
from which he came ; the medico-psychological science, the responsi-
bility not more. of the individual criminal than of his 'ancestors.
May it not be, too, that these different positions have come about
only because of varying approaches to the same truth. If we grant
that the individual offender is vicious and should be punished ac-
cording to the law% we still have to account for the fact that this
man is vicious and some other members of society are not. If we
grant that the environment from which he came was conducive to
criminal activity, we still have to account for the fact that many
others from the same environment do not become offenders. Grant
a vicious attitude in his case and carelessness and neglect on the
part of society to create a proper environment for him, and we are
confronted with the fact that it was this particular individual who"
committed the crime who doubtless carries within himself the cause
of his misdeeds. However, just as surely as we discoTer from a
clinical study of the individual that the probable cause of his own
downfall rests in his constitutional inferiority, we shall find it neces-
sary to lay the blame for his condition in large part at the door
of short-sighted society and its institutions. From the standpoint,
then, of the clinical research laboratory, let us see what situation
presents itself.
One has not labored long among those convicted of crime be-
fore he is strongly impressed with the fact that he is dealing with
beings of retrograde type — beings who fall appreciably below the
generally recognized standard of normality, and who, in a very
large percentage of cases, bear about in their bodies the marks of
this degeneracy. In this matter, however, one must needs exercise
the greatest care to avoid the common error of concluding that the
EUGENICS AND IMMIGRATION 535»
presence of one or more characteristics, generally accepted as stig-
mata of degeneracy, is proof positive that the subject is subnormal.
The Darwin ear, the Morel ear, or the ear marked with the entire
absence of the lobulus, the malformed palate, polydactylism or hy-
pertrichosis— any of these ma^ be found in a particular individual
in whom the closest analysis will fail to find any basis for a classi-
fication below the normal ; and yet the number of these stigmata
and their various combinations so frequently found among those
convicted is sufficient to cause their presence to be regarded as a
usual accompaniment of criminal activity. Asymmetry in the face^
microcephaly, macrocephaly. dental deformities, strabismus, mi-
crophthalmia, pigmentary retinitis, albinism, syndactylism, mis-
placed and malformed limbs, flat feet, hypospadias and hermaphro-
dism — these and many other signs of degeneracy are constantly
met with.
We do not seek to establish a causative relation here, but merely
to observe the accompaniment of stigmata with crime. This of
itself is of the utmost importance. On the other hand, so frequent
and so serious are the various physical and physiological abnormali-
ties and defects as to challenge our earnest effort to discover this,
closer relationship. Phimosis, enlarged tonsils, adenoids, bad teeth,
defective vision, poorly developed chest, stooping shoulders, pul-
monary lesions, valvular heart lesions and a serious nervous con-
dition brought on by eye trouble of one sort or another; "a sub-
normal temperature, associated with an accelerated pulse and res-
piration," as noted by Doctor Sleyster; "perversions of the sexual
instinct, uncontrollable desire for liquors, migraine, disorders of
the nervous system, insensibility to pain, defects of speech and
reduced physiological tension," as pointed out by Doctor Bowers;
impotency and sterility — Avhile by no means is this a list to be ac-
cepted in toto as naming positive evidences of degeneracy, all of
these conditions are bound to assert themselves among either the
l)rimary or the secondary causes of crime.
From the philosophical standpoint it may be that we are not
ready to admit of anything more than a mere parallelism between
mind and matter, yet it must be admitted that a seriously defective
body could not express rightly a mind of even supernormal capabil-
ities. "Aye, there's the rub.'" As though not sufficiently afflicted
with physical and physiological defects, the criminal class are lack-
ing pathetically in mental ability, and it is in an investigation along
this line that, in my thinking, we arrive at the real, fundamental,
efficient cause of the greater proportion of crime.
It has been recognized for some time by those who have had to-
536 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
do in any intimate capacity- with the criminal class that, as a whole,
they are of a low mental order, and yet only within the last two
years have a sufficient number of laboratories been operating to
furnish such data, as would support a rather wide-spread belief,
by the results of scientific investigation. In this work, however,
there is much yet to be desired. The tests themselves applied in the
various clinics are to be more thoroughly tested, corrected and
adapted through a longer period of time and with a greater num-
ber of subjects. Too few scientists well trained for the work are
in the field; and there is lacking at present a sufficiently strong
public sentiment to demand a breaking away from tradition in the
handling of law violators, and to insist upon the adoption of
methods prescribed by the scientific diagnosis of the case.
Nevertheless, the returns to date are indicative, and of very
valuable significance. The New York State Reformatory at Bed-
ford Hills reports that thirty-seven per cent of its inmates are de-
fective. Dr. Frank L. Christian, of the Reformatory at Elmira,
reports forty-two per cent defective. Results of our own laboratory
w^ork in the Indiana State Reformatory at Jeffersonville show quite
fifty per cent to be subnormal. Returns from reliable sources at
Avork among juvenile delinquents show a percentage as high or
higher. There is little question that when terminology and defini-
tion, standards and methods of procedure are agreed upon among
the various laboratories, the variation of results will fall well within
a reasonably small margin of difference. All of this suggests that
in the past we have disregarded quite entirely the peculiar condi-
tions of what likely will prove to be at least one-half of the popula-
tion of our penal and correctional institutions. This situation
belies the very purpose for which these institutions are founded and
maintained. Moreover, were this condition of these offenders known
before trial, conviction and sentence, it is quite certain that the
necessity of a different disposition of the cases would have been
recognized.
The range and degree of defectiveness afford an interesting
study. We have those of positive psychosis — the insane, including al-
coholics, drug fiends, epileptics and feeble-minded imbeciles, morons,
and those of but slight subnormality. As a class, of course, all of these
reveal to the institution clinician a long list of symptoms and reactions,
which would have led an alienist at once under any cireurastanees and
surroundings to a correct diagnosis of their condition. While this
group, representing approximately fifty per cent of the population of
our prisons and reformatories, is disposed of comparatively easily, the
remaining inmates, sharing with the subnormal many of the mental
EUGENICS AND IMMIGRATION 537
and psychic stigmata peculiar to the criminal class, form a group
which furnish a problem of the greatest complexity — anomalies of in-
tellect. Emotion and will are everywhere presenting themselves for
analysis. Dr. Harold W. Wright, in a recent number of the Jonrnal of
the American Medical Associatimi, calls attention to the fact that all
offenders are characterized by one or more of the following attributes :
"exaggerated suggestibility; exaggerated egotism; emotional insta-
bility ; a lack of altruistic or unselfish sense ; a lack of the power of
sustained energy — that is, abnormal nervous fatigue ; a tendency to the
easy disintegration of consciousness, which permits the brutal or in-
ferior qualities of the subconscious mind easily to become dominant
when temptation occurs, and to be ungoverned by the critical quality of
the conscious mind : even when the critical function is sufficiently
aroused, the power of direction by the will is in abeyance." The
offender is marked, too. by instability and eccentricity, is given to
self-pity, moroseness, fault-finding- and hatred, and is, therefore,
resentful and retaliative ; he is lacking in the ethical sense and
consequently is presumptuous ; he is deplorably deficient in judg-
ment. All or any of these characteristics may be possessed in such
a degree as to make it practically impossible for the unfortunate
so to deport himself as to satisfy the conditions of good citizenship
and healthy social relationships.
Responsibility for crime in the manifestly subnormal is quite
out of the question. These will alwaj^s be mere children and re-
quire a guardianship. The perpetuity of their kind among us is
quite entirely a matter of eugenics. But who shall say that the
majority of those not classified by present-day tests as defectives
would not be able to find factual defense of their crimes in their
own infirmities? Indeed, there are those who choose to call them
"borderland cases," believing that, as all feeble-minded persons
are potential criminals, so large numbers, at least, of those crim-
inals usually regarded as normal, require only a peculiar series and
setting of stimuli to reveal such serious defects as to prove the ex-
istence of positive subnormality, and often clear-cut psychoses.
If asked the question, "Why did you commit the crime for
w^hich you are paying the penalty?" and pushed for an answer
beyond that born of the memory of the mere pleasure or gratifica-
tion in the reward of the act, many must honestly answer, "I really
don't know. I guess I couldn't help it." Either some instinctive
tendency of low order, undeveloped and uncontrolled, is pushing
on the unfortunate individual to criminal reaction, or some specific
mental function too weak to do its office work or perverted in the
538 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
nature of its activity coinpelled an inal)ility to resist temptation
when it offered. Take a case or two in point :
North (4059) is a habitual criminal, a native of the state of
Kentucky, whose mother committed suicide at the age of thirty-
nine. For some time previously she had been a nervous wreck, and
had been separated from her husband for two years. The son never
saw or heard of his father after the separation, at which time he
was seven years of age. After the death of his mother he fell into
the hands of an aunt and attended public school more or less reg-
ularly. He failed of promotion twice, because of lack of attention
to his work, and finally left school at the seventh grade. His asso-
ciates were bad. He drank moderately, smoked cigarettes, and
early suffered venereal diseases. His first arrest was at the instance
of his aunt, who, no longer able to control him, hoped by this means
to keep him off the streets at night. His second arrest was for
petit larceny. He took money from the cash drawer of a pool room
at night. He next broke into a store with others, securing knives
and revolvers. Again with companions he attempted to burglarize
for the purpose of securing money with which to secure a room at
the hotel for immoral purposes. The crime for which he was sen-
tenced to the Reformatory consisted of the theft of a motorcycle.
His physical condition at this time is fairly good. He is small
in stature, but fairly well developed and not unattractive in appear-
ance. He is not lacking in general intelligence. The Binet test
classifies him adult, while he grades of high order in information
and other tests. In general, however, there is revealed an unsettled
condition of mind. The nervous status of his mother, probably
before his birth and during his early childhood, her consequent neg-
lect of him and her suicide — all must have served to react upon him
in such a way as to impress him for life with a lack of normal
nervous organization and to stamp his subconscious mind with a
character conducive to instability and consequent immorality. The
correctives of judgment have never been furnished. The easiest
w^ay out is, for him, the best way.
Some w^orthy ideals of boyhood may have prevented criminal
activity earlier in life, but after the first offense relieved the tension,
others, all of the same nature, followed with quick succession. He
is of the type that seeks pleasure in the activities suggested by
the complex of emotion, as completely regardless of the intellect
as if it did not exist. When once his action is begun, the power
of inhibition is paralyzed.
An example of the born criminal is found in Eastman (4052)^
about twenty-one years of age, now serving a sentence of from two
EUGEXICS AND IMMIGRATION 539
to fourteen years for assault and battery with intent to kill. He
is a native of Buffalo, born of Polish parents. His father was a
common laborer up to the time of his death by accident, four years
ago. Eastman had no formal schooling, prior to the age of eight
years, when he was arrested and sent to a private reform school
at Buffalo. Here he remained for six years. After his release,
arrest followed arrest, until he was sent to the Elmira Eeformatory
on the charge of burglary. Paroled in 1912, he with three com-
panions worked his way west to Indiana as a common tramp. On
being ordered out of a box car wherein they were stealing a ride,
the gang opened fire on the train conductor, severely wounding
him. From an early age, Eastman's companions were bad. His jail
and reform school surroundings probably only accentuated his disre-
gard for the rights of others. He used both liquor and tobacco^
contracting the habits when a mere boy. His physical condition is
fair, though he is not free from certain physical stigmata. He
claims to have suffered a fracture of the skull some years ago, from
the effects of which he has not fully recovered. This accident,
however, was not experienced until after his life of crime was well
begun. His mental tests were marked by a general spirit of indif-
ference on his part. He cared not at all to make a creditable record
for himself. Attention and application were out of the question
with him, though he did not lack so seriously in point of general
information. He was not interested by those motives which usually
govern action. He confessed that he had never worked and did
not care for the money which labor earned. Thoroughly selfish,
he has no regard for ideals of honor, and no respect for law and
order. He is not impressed with the heinousness of his crime, nor
does he feel any pity or remorse because others have suffered
through him. He furnishes a splendid example of those in whom
there is an entire absence of the normal development of ' instinctive
tendencies in the ethical sphere.
A type of criminal through passion is South (4065). He is
twenty years of age, son of temperate, law-abiding American par-
ents, both living and living together, without any known criminal
history. He remained in school through the eighth grade, where
he failed in grammar, because, as he says, he liked arithmetic so
much better that he put in his best efforts on that branch. After
leaving school he purchased a car and opened a taxicab business,
which he conducted for three years. After bankruptcy he became
an instructor in a school for automobile drivers. He smokes cigars,
but confessed to no other bad habits. He was both honest and in-
dustrious. His single crime consisted of stealing an automobile
540 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BET'I'ERMENT
from an old gentleman who employed him through two weeks to
overhaul his machine and then refused to pay him a fair wage,
taking advantag:e of the fact that no contract had been made at
the time of engagement. Enraged beyond control at this perfidy,
South ran the car away, to be revenged. His only motive was to
get even. He was arrested, convicted, and sentenced for grand
larceny.
Physically he is none too strong. He has suffered from hernia
from childhood and has had venereal disease. His mentality, in
general, is of high order. He easily grades adult, with no marked
deficiency in the tests applied, and yet, brooding over a wrong so
accentuated his anger at his unfair treatment as to cause him to
lose all control of himself. Here, too, as in the second case, the
power of inhibition under severe strain was not sufficiently opera-
tive to support good judgment by strong will.
Time will not allow a consideration of examples of the merely
accidental criminal or of the weak subject of suggestion. These,
too, show a defect of specific function, which places the subjects
■completely at the mercy of circumstances.
Crime, then, is more than a mere accompaniment of defective
mind. It is the natural outgrowth of faulty mental processes. This
doubtless accounts for the fact that punishment cannot cure the
criminal, nor even deter others from committing crimes. It is fool-
ish to insist that punishment even deters the criminal from repeat-
ing his crimes. There is surely no fact more clearly proved to the
criminologist than this one. Institutions of punishment only serve
to augment the anti-social attitude of the criminal and return him
to society determined to perpetrate even more daring crimes than
he had known before. Statistics from investigators the world over
call our attention to the fact that crime among us is increasing
at a very rapid rate. Treatment, not punishment, is what is needed
— good, intelligent, sympathetic, and scientific treatment under the
best conditions and by the best advised scientists that can be se-
cured for the work. This is not a call for the introduction of sen-
timentality. Warden Francis insists that the greatest menace to
our progress today in institution affairs is "the long-haired man
and the short-haired woman," and he is right.
Instead of indulging in expression of sentimental regard for the
unfortunate offenders. Society should rather give herself to the
most careful investigation of those tolerated and even encouraged
practices which everywhere are shown to be those agencies that
contribute to the perpetuity and the multiplication of the criminal
class.
EUGENICS AND IMMIGRATION 541
Of a total of 416 new arrivals at the Reformatory last year, 246
came from disorganized families, and approximately this same pro-
portion has been maintained throughout the last ten years; that is
to say, that sixty per cent of the criminal class, as represented by
the boys of our institution, have not had the possibility of normal
family training. In a very large number of the disrupted homes,
divorce has been granted. In other eases the father, the mother
or both were dead. Neglect of youth makes directly for crime.
Clearly, it seems to me, society has a duty to perform by the chil-
dren in disorganized homes. No one of us but recognizes the large
place the home should and does take in the normal development of
the child. Where these influences are made impossible because of
one reason or another, it is obligatory upon the state to act in loco
parentis to assure to the child that training without which we
cannot hope for his normal development.
Again society not only harbors, but seeks to profit by, such
agencies as play upon the weaknesses of the Aveak. Fifty-nine per
cent of the inmates received during the past six years Avere users
of intoxicating liquors ; eighty per cent used tobacco in one form
or another; while fifty per cent were addicted to the use of cigar-
ettes. Whatever may be said in the way of excuse for a moderate
use of alcoholic beverages and tobacco among adults, there can be
no justification whatever for the use of those drugs on the part of
adolescents : but in spite of legislation, the one purpose of which
is to make it impossible for the ruination of the boys of our coun-
try to follow from these sources, the process continues among us
to an ever-increasing extent.
Most states of our nation boast rigid eonipulsorv education
laws. In spite of this fact, over ten per cent of the men entering
our institution are absolutely illiterate, while the number who have
reached the high school in educational progress is practically neg-
ligible. Of the 416 new arrivals at the Indiana Reformatory last
year, eleven only claimed to have completed the twelfth grade,
three entered college and one the theological seminary. The largest
number left school at about the fourth grade. Here, again, sc long
as we are content to legislate merely for the purpose of keeping our
state assemblies out of mischief while in session, with little tlought
of enforcing the laws which they make, we need not look for a bet-
tering of those social conditions out of which we annually recruit
our law violators.
Fully one-third of the new registrations of last year ware idle
at the time of committing the crime for which they w^re con-
victed. This is not to place the blame either here or tlisre, and
542 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
yet it -was no more true in the days of our youth than it is now
that the devil himself puts to work any man who stands on the
street corners Avith his hands in his pockets.
I love the Church and should be pained to say one word of ad-
verse criticism against her; yet I wonder if she fully understands
and appreciates her obligation toward those who come within the
shadow of her towers. Only 122 of the 416 sent to us from the
counties of Indiana last year Avere without church affiliation. One
denomination alone, and that not the strongest in the state, sent
us seventy-six. No, they were not good church members, yet the
church can ill afford to lose so many of its communicants in a
single year to a single correctional institution within the borders
of the Commonwealth.
It may be argued that these various social agencies are not to
be blamed for the lack of results in their attempts to train those
Avhom we have clearly shown to be either mental defectives or at
least more or less seriously disturbed in mental function. Never-
theless, we do insist that Avhere the peculiarities of mental reac-
tion are due to a lack of proper nurture rather than to a defect
of nature, such oversight and care should and could have been
exercised as to enable a considerable number to live lives of happi-
ness, harmlessness, and comparative usefulness. While investiga-
tion in this field is still in its infancy, there can be no doubt that
the coming years Avill prove conclusively what seems now to be
indicated — that while the real efficient cause of crime is to be found
in defective mental condition, the contributing agencies, in large
part, are those social institutions which fail to interpret the vision
and with consecrated effort so to purge themselves of carelessness
and neglect as to recognize not only their splendid opportunity, but
their grave and undeniable responsibility.
RACE BETTERMENT AND OUR IMMIGRATION LAWS
Professor Eobert DeC. Ward, Harvard University. Cambridge, Mass.
In developing new fruits, and cereals, and flowers, we send
our Gcvernment experts abroad. Far and wide, over Europe and
Asia, in Africa and even in Australia, they diligently seek out the
best se^ds and plants and cuttings which they eau find. These.
having ^rst been carefully selected, are then quarantined, if neces-
sary, and closely examined to see that they are sound and free of
disease ind imperfection. Then, and not till then, are they planted
in our sdl. and begin their work of improving our stock.
EUGENICS AND IMMIGRATION 543
So also it is with our domestic animals. From abroad, after a
study of pedigrees often reaching back several generations, we
import the best horses and cattle and sheep and swine that can be
bought anywhere in the world. AVe send over expert breeders to
select and bring back these animals. Every possible care is taken
t(i ensure the selection and the importation of none but sound and
fit stock.
During the past decade there have come to this country- from
abroad each year nearly one million human beings whose blood is
to be mixed with ours in the production of the "American" race.
Yet infinitely more care was taken in the selection of the few cattle
which were imported for breeding purposes in this same period
than anyone thought of taking in the case of these millions of men
and women and children. Our public health is being well pro-
tected against diseased cattle, but we have not as yet done nearly
as much as we should to guard against the far greater danger that
lies in bad human blood. No officials, expert in diagnosing mental
and physical defects, were sent abroad to pick out the fittest and
most desirable aliens for introduction into this country, or even
placed on board ship to pick them out in transit.
A policy of national eugenics, for the United States as for
every other nation, means the prevention of the breeding of the
unfit native. But for us it means far more than that. For us it
means, in addition, the prevention of the immigration of the unfit
alien. And of these two problems of American national eugenics
the second is by far the easier to solve. We are only just be-
ginning to devise means of reducing and of controlling the num-
ber of births among the unsound and the unfit w^ho are already in
our midst. But we have an opportunity which is unique in his-
tory for the practice of eugenic principles, immediately, and on
a vastly^reater scale than is possible in the case of any other
nation. [By selecting our immigrants, through proper legislation
we can pick out the best specimens of each race to be our own
fellow-citizens and to be the parents of our future citizensj The
responsibility which rests upon us in this matter is overwheljning.
"We can decide upon what merits— physical, mental, moral— ithese
incoming aliens shall be selected. But what have we done? We
have left the choice of the fathers and mothers of the future ^Ameri-
cans practically altogether to the selfish interests, which care very
little whether we want the immigrants they bring, or whether these
people will be the better for coming. At present, the selection of
our immigrants is almost altogether in the hands of the ste<tnship
companies. Steamship agents and brokers all OA'er Europf. and
544 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
even in -western Asia and northern Africa, are today deciding for
ns the character of the American race of the future. The steam-
ships and railroad companies, and the large employers of cheap
labor, have financial interests at stake. They want unrestricted
and unselected immigration. They are well organized, and have
very great influence in Washington. None of these "interests"
cares in the least for the sanity or for the physical soundness of our
race. If their pocketbooks are well filled, they rest content. Think
of the extraordinarily illogical and indefensible position of the
great "philanthropist" who gives his millions to "charity" and is
at the same time opposing any further regulation of immigration
because he wants to import foreign "cheap labor," regardless of
its etfect upon the race, in order that he may roll up more millions !
This is not altogether a fictitious case. "We constantly speak of the
need of more "hands" to do our labor. We forget that we are im-
porting, not "hands" alone, but bodies also. The vast majority
of incoming alien immigrants are potential fathers and mothers,
and the character of the race that is to be born depends upon the
kind of alien bodies Avhich we are allowing to have landed on our
shores day by day. It is just at this point that there is the con-
tact between immigration as an economic problem and immigration
as a racial and as a eugenic problem, a contact which few of us are
fully aware of.
Our laws at present aim to exclude some twenty-one classes of
mentally, physically, morally, and economically undesirable aliens.
On paper, the list of the excluded classes is long and formidable,
and seems sufficient to accomplish our eugenic purpose. But the
fact is that careful and unprejudiced students of immigration, both
within the Immigration Service and outside of it, agree that we
cannot now keep out the unfit sufficiently to preserve the mental
and physical status quo of our population, to say nothing of pro-
moting eugenic improvement. The former Commissioner of Im-
migration at the Port of New York says: "The present excluded
classes by no means include all who are undesirable" (1912 Ee-
port). The Committee on Immigration of the Eugenics Section
of tie American Genetic Association, in its last Annual Report,
sumned up the situation as follows: "Not only (1) are the immi-
gration laws inadequate to effect the exclusion of the unfit, but (2)
the iispeetion is not as thorough as it ought to be, owing to in-
adeqiate facilities, an insufficient number of inspectors, and the
frequmt arrival of very large numbers of aliens at one time, and
(3) ii some cases the law has actually been violated, both in the
spirit and in the letter."
EUGENICS AND IMMIGRATION 545
Our immigration laws have grown up slowly as the result of
experience extending over many years. They are good as far as
they go. They have served as the basis for the immigration legis-
lation of Great Britain and of Canada. They were not the result
of any "Know Nothing" agitation, of the sudden demands of a
political party, or of the whim of a moment. As recently as 1875,
our laws excluded only criminals and prostitutes. Slowly, deliber-
ately, carefully, this legislation was planned and grew up. Never-
theless, the experience of years has brought certain defects to light.
Competent officials haA^e pointed them out. Disinterested citizens,
and economists, and medical men, and social workers, have studied
our laws, and have shown us where they fail to accom])lish their
purposes. There is need of more excluded classes, and there is
need of better administrative machinery.
Most of the recommendations which have been urged by those
who have made an unprejudiced study of immigration were in-
cluded in the Eeport of the United States Immigration Commission,
which investigated the whole question for over three years, and
w^ere embodied in 'the immigration bill which passed the Sixty-second
Congress; was vetoed by President Taft: was passed by the Senate
over the veto by a vote of 72 to 18 ; and failed by less than a dozen
votes of being passed over the veto by the House. Every medical
man in the United States: every social ivorker : every person in any
way connected tvith the care of mental defectives; every taxpayer;
every citizen who wants to keep the blood of the race pure, should join
in demanding of the Sixty-third Congress the immediate passage of a
similar hill and should see to it that that hill becomes a laic.
C^To our own very heavy burden of the defective and" the degen-
erate we are adding every year, by immigration, thousands of aliens
whose presence here wall result, because of their own defects and
those of their offspring, in lowering the physical and mental stand-
ards of the American racerj We have much still to learn about
heredity. But we know enough to be sure that if the quality of our
race is to be preserved, there must be a far more careful selection
of our immigrants than w^e have ever attempted to nlake. The
need is indeed imperative for applying eugenic principles in much
of our legislation. But the greatest, the most logical, the most
effective step that we can take is to begin with the proper eugenic
selection of the incoming alien millions. Let us see to it that we
are protected, not merely from the burden of supporting alien de-
fectives, but from that "watering of the nation's life-blood" which
results from their reproducing their kind after admission. As
Prof. Karl Pearson puts it: "You cannot change the leopard's spots.
546 FIRST NATIONAL CONFEKENCK ON HACK liKTTIOKMKXT
siiul yoii t-niiiiot cliantit' l)ii(l stock to good. Yoii may dilute it, pos-
sibly spread it over a Avidc area, spoiling f^ood stock, but until it
ceases to mnltiply, it will not cease to be." Every Senator and
every Cong-ressnian of the Ignited States should have brought home
to him the truth of Lord Beaconsfield's words: "The public health
is the foundation on Avhich reposes the happiness of the people
and the power of a country. The care of the public health is the
first duty of a statesman."
The conservation of our national resources — how much we hear
about that. Conservation of American forests is important.- So is
conservation of American coal, anci of American oil, and of Ameri-
can natural gas, and of American water supplies, and of American
fisheries. But the conservation and improvement of the American
Race is vastly more important than all other conservation. The
real wealth of a nation is the quality of its people. Of what value
are endless acres of forests, millions of tons of coal, and billions of
gallons of water, if the Race is not virile, and sane, and sound?
KACE BETTERMENT AND AMERICA'S ORIENTAL PROBLEM
Professor Sidney L. Gulick, D.D., Kyoto, Japan.
The problem of race betterment for Americans is intimately
connected with that of immigration ; for the hundreds of thou-
sands from other lands who annually come here to stay, contribute
their quota to the heredity of the American people. During the
past fifty years a few score thousand Chinese and Japanese have
come to our land. At first welcomed by those who wanted cheap
labor, they are noAV feared, and complete Asiatic exclusion is be-
coming the settled policy of America and of all lands in which the
white man is dominant. A high wall of exclusion is raised against the
Asiatics in Britislj America, the United States, New Zealand, Australia
and British Africa. This threatens serious dangers if persisted in.
California's anti-Asiatic legislation is producing indignation
throughout Japan, not because of deprivation of economic oppor-
tunity, but because of treatment which is regarded as unfriendly,
ignominious and contrary to the treaties of sixty years' standing.
Japan, three hundred years ago, afraid of the white man's ag-
gressions, excluded for 250 years all foreign peoples, refused to her
own people all foreign travel, and sought to live entirely to herself.
The price she paid for national seclusion was loss of international
stimulus to growth : she fell behind. At last it became impossible
to carry out her age-long exclusion policy. To maintain her ex-
EUGENICS AND IMMIGRATION 547
isteuce she was compelled to nudergo radical, liumiliating, and
painful reorganizations of her national life. She adopted the new
policy of learning what the white man has to teach, and of enter-
ing fully into the life of the world. The late war with Russia
shoAvs her success.
In the Boxer uprising, China tried to follow Japan's exclusion
policy of three hundred years ago, but she began too late and failed.
One month after the signing of the treaty of Portsmouth between
Japan and Eussia, China officially abolished her system of classical
education which had lasted for over two thousand years and adopted
Japan's policy of learning from the white man.
Japanese cannon at Port Arthur and Mukden sounded out not
only over the hills and plains of Manchuria, but over all Asia, and
told the colored races the secret of power wherewith to hold their
own against the white man; namely, international life with mastery
and adoption of the white man's knowledge.
Napoleon is reported to have said: "China is a sleeping giant —
let her sleep; for when she wakens, she will shake the world."
China is awaking ; she is friendly now to America because of our
return of the Boxer Indemnity and our helpfulness in recent times.
But do you think China will fail to be indignant if we continue
to treat her citizens in America as we have been treating them dur-
ing the past fifty years? As surely as the night follows sunset, will
the united antipathy and ill treatment of the yellow man by the
white race be followed by resentment and indignation of the yellow
man. Then will begin the "Yellow Peril."
What an unspeakable obstacle to race improvement will arise
if the Occident and Orient are thus set in solid ranks against each,
other? Not only will incalculable commercial loss take place, but
vast military and naval expenses will be thought necessary, as each
prepares to meet the anticipated invasion of the foe. Race suspi-
cion, ill-will, antagonism will demand the application of the wealth
and brains of both sides to military defenses instead of to race
betterment. IMilitarism and warfare breed countless ills; they are
fertile sources of race deterioration.
But we must look at this matter from another side. Races,
plant, animal and human, have arisen through isolation and segre-
gate interbreeding. For thousands of years little groups of men
have battled Avith the universal, common problems of human life,
practical, theoretical, social, moral, and religious;, each has de-
veloped its own mode of solving these problems; each has its OAvn
world-view, its own practical methods of Avringing a liA'ing from
548 FIRST NATIOXAL CONFKHKNCK ON UACK IJKTTKKJf ENT
Nature; its mvii way of intej.',Tatin<;- society, of iiial<in<;- men social
mid responsible.
Each people and race has thus been carrying on. quite uncon-
sciously indeed, yet none tlie less really, vast practical experiments.
These have progressed along lines largely different. Divergent evo-
lution is the source of diverse races and civilization. Yet in spite
of large isolation, periods of limited interchange of ideas and
practices have occurred : these have proved to be periods of im-
mense progress; the stimulus of one civilization on another has
been of incalculable value, adding materially to richness of life
and thus to race betterment. On the other hand, prolonged in-
breeding of small groups of men has tended to degeneration. The
virile races today are all the products of wide race mixture.
Now the outstanding characteristic of the present age is the
collapse of space through man's modern mastery of nature. Races
wholly ignorant even of one another's existence are now coming
into close contact. Two great streams of civilization have arisen —
the Eastern and the Western. With the modern collapse of space,
mankind inevitably enters on a new era of universal contact, re-
sulting in convergent social and biological evolution. The good and
the true which each race has acquired through its isolated life.
may now be communicated to every other race. So, too, may its
diseases and its errors. The barriers separating peoples today are
language and race antipathy — race prejudice. This general inter-
change, however, is intimately related to universal race better-
ment. The policy of the white race, scorning all other races and
excluding them from equal opportunity with themselves in their
own best political, economic, moral and religious life, is a serious
obstacle to race betterment — alike of the white man himself and
also of the colored races.
Eace betterment rests on two distinct factors: nature and nur-
ture— biological heredity and social heredity. The laws of the
two are distinct, yet their interrelation is of the closest. Human
race betterment, be it ever remembered, does not depend exclusively
on biological principles, for social inheritance, given only after
birth, is a factor of superlative force ; this is given not by biological
processes, but by education, by language, by every influence which
molds the mind and heart and conduct. Wholesome nurture, trans-
mitting wholesome social inheritance, can alone provide the right
environment in which human biological heredity can produce its
best results.
This distinction between social and biological heredity and in-
heritance is of the utmost consequence in considering the prob-
EUGENICS AND IMMIGRATION 549
lems of immigration, race assimilation, and race improvement. Civi-
lization, mental habits, moral and religious ideas, with all the
practices to which they lead, are matters of social, not of bio-
logical heredity ; they can be taught to individuals of any race.
The social assimilation of races can proceed independently of in-
termarriage. Sociologically speaking, Japanese and Chinese are
just as assimilable as Italians and Russians. Indeed, Asiatic chil-
dren born and reared in America are more completely cut off from
their social inheritance than are the children of any European
people because of tlie extraordinary difficulty of learning to read
Chinese and Japanese.
The problem of the intermarriage of whites and Asiatics is one
that needs scientific study. We need a commission of expert biolo-
gists, sociologists, and psychologists to make such a collection of the
facts already available that we may know accurately what are
the biological consequences of intermarriage. Even though the
intermarriage of whites with blacks may be bad — I know nothing,
however, as to facts at this point — it does not necessarily follow
that their intermarriage with Japanese or Chinese will be bad.
Black races have been developed under the tropics and have never
undergone social discipline. Chinese and Japanese have lived for
thousands of years in the North Temperate Zone, and have under-
gone severe social discipline. They are on the whole vigorous,
brainy people. The Japanese are characteristically artistic and
dexterous. There is- every reason to hold, a priori, that intermar-
riage would prove advantageous, just as crossing of nearly allied
animal and plant races is often highly advantageous. But we now
need scientific knowledge which can be collected only by experts
adequately equipped. Whether race improvement or degenera-
tion will occur through Asiatic and white intermarriage should not
longer be left to the decision of ignorant dogmatism based on race
prejudices.
The permissibility of race intermarriage — even if biologically
not harmful — is, however, closely dependent on social assimila-
tion. Social assimilation should precede intermarriage, otherwise
the right conditions cannot be secured for transmission of the right
social inheritance. This is a principle of the very highest im-
portance, and pertains alike to Europeans and Asiatics coming to
America.
It is not to be lightly assumed, however, that all races should
have absolute freedom for immigration to America. The United
States is making stupendous experiments and, in justice to our-
selves, and for the sake of the whole human race, we must not
550 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
allow those races and peoples to come here in any considerable
numbers -who will not or cannot enter into our life and cordially
make these experiments with us. The Pacific Coast is quite right
in demanding- that there shall be no swamping Asiatic immi-
gration. It is wrong in its mode of attacking the problem, in its
treatment of the Asiatic and also its attempt to solve the problem
from the standpoint of exclusively local interests.
The new Asia that is arising, with its consciousness of race
history, destiny, pride, and plight, demands of the West equality
of treatment with that accorded one another by nations of the West.
America accordingly needs a new Oriental policy, which, while
it conserves our great democratic experiment and its institutions,
shall treat all races alike and yet shall admit only so many annually
from each land as we can really assimilate.
This is a' principle that applies equally to every people. This
assimilable number depends in large part on the number of those
from that land already here and assimilated. The full explanation
of this principle I have given in my work on '^ America's Japanese
Problem. ' ' An immigration law should be enacted allowing an annual
immigration from any single mother-tongue group of. say. five per
cent of those already here and naturalized, including their American-
born children. Such a law would allow practically unlimited immigra^
tion from Great Britain. Germany and Scandinavia; it would curtail
somewhat immigration from South Europe, and allow only a very
small number of immigrants from Japan and China.
For the real and full assimilation of foreigners, moreover, nat-
uralization upon qualification is essential. Provision should accord-
ingly be made for proper education of aliens in American history,
ideals, political practices, and the English language. Only when
aliens qualify should they be given the ballot. If Chinese and Jap-
anese have adequately qualified, they, too, should be naturalized.
In conclusion, I summarize the central points brought forward.
1. The era of convergent evolution has begun. The policy of
complete exclusion by one race of the civilization and people of
another has been repeatedly tried and has failed because it is in
the end disastrous.
2. The permanent betterment of any one section of the human
race cannot go forward to any large degree independently of that
of the rest. We are members of one another — East and West, North
and South. The diseases of Africa and Asia and the destructive
ideas of Europe and America cannot be permanently isolated. The
good of each should be transmitted to the rest. Race betterment
EUGENICS AND IMMIGRATION 551
must be universal if it is to be permanent. All must consciously
combine in repressing the bad and upbuilding the good.
3. I urge, therefore, the importance of appointing a commission
of experts for the scientific determination of questions of inter-
marriage between members of different races.
4. I also urge the importance of adopting immigration and nat-
uralization laws which, while they conserve the essential inter-
ests of our own country, shall also deal justly and courteously with
■every other race on a basis of equality and in harmony with their
dignity and race consciousness.
Discussion.
Immigrant Classij&cation by Mother-Tongue
Professor Herbert Adolphus Miller.
Dr. Sidney Gulick stated that a large part of the immigration
problem was assimilation, and suggested that if we had a law limit-
ing the number of immigrants to five per cent from any mother-
tongue, that would probably be a practical way to handle it. The
Dillingham Bill, before Congress now, limits the number to ten
per cent of any nationality, taking the country of birth as the
basis of computing that nationality. Doctor Gulick 's suggestion of
mlother-tongue is the only possible solution of the immigrant diffi-
culty. Most people do not realize, for instance, that most of the
immigrants who furnish so much of our problems, come from
Austria, Hungary, and Kussia. It is absurd to compute it as ten
per cent of, say, the people from Austria. The smallest proportion
who migrate here are Germans and the largest number are Poles.
Poles come also from Germany and from Russia. Twenty-eight per
cent of Austrian immigrants are Poles. From Russia fifty-two per
cent are Jews and a large i^er cent of those who come from Germany
are both Poles and Jews. From Russia there are fifty-two per cent
Jews, then Poles, then Lithuanians, then Finns, then finally twent>'-
two per cent Russians. The framers of this bill think of the im-
migration by countries as those who have definite characteristics.
The Slovak of Austria hates the Magyar, and the Pole hates the Ger-
man, and the Bohemian hates the German, and the Slovak hates
the German, so there is less similarity between the people of Austria
and Russia who come here than there is between the people of
Sweden. France, and England. If we are going to get after this
on the proper basis, it should be on the mother-tongue basis.
Last year I went to supper with a Lithuanian undertaker. To
be gracious, I asked him about his business. His face lighted up
quickly, and he said, "It is a strange thing that this is a growing
552 FIRST NATIONAI; CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
city, but the number of funerals has dropped off about one-third. '^
I asked him why it wns. He said that it was because of the new
law, which he did not understand, which required the undertaker
to have a death certificate from a physician or to notify the coroner,
and if the coroner finds that a physician was not called in, he fines
the family twenty-five dollars. It is necessary to fine only one
family in a community. These Lithuanian peasants, as you know,
are illiterate ; they have never been in the habit of calling in a
physician. I have found people who have been in Lithuania who
have had pneumonia and did nothing for it except to take gun-
powder, thinking it would shoot the pain out. That is a prevailing
idea. They never call a doctor, but this law, fining them for not
calling a doctor, suggests to a whole neighborhood that the way to
save the coroner's fine is to get the physician. In order to save
the fine, the people call the doctor. They have cut the death-rate
down nearly a third in that mining town.
This undertaker had a good deal of information that the most
of us don't have. He said that most of these babies are saved by
young doctors. He said the old doctors are good for the big folks,
but the young doctors save the babies. I don't know how that is
explained, but it is an interesting thing. This particular town has
this immigrant problem also in a very interesting way.
Another host was a Polish priest. The Poles of Spring Valley
come from Kussia and Germany and they are members of that
church. In this city, nine-tenths of the population are foreign-bom.
They are all segregated into groups. There is practically no Ameri-
can influence. You cannot reach that problem by a literacy test.
You have to meet it by some readjustment of the forces of civiliza-
tion, so as to get a group small enough to bring under the influence
of those things which are necessary for the maintenance of our
American civilization.
Discussion.
Immigration
Professor Maynard M. Metcalf.
I Avish to correct a little further Dr. Sidney Guliek's point, that
race betterment means the betterment of the human race, not
merely of any American race. The point I wish to make is that
since isolation is ceasing and every man is becoming every other
man's neighbor, there w^ill ultimately be but one human race. Com-
plete amalgamation of all races which persist is inevitable. What-
ever the general feeling as to the intermarriage, illegitimate birth
alone would cause complete amalgamation. It is merely a question
EUGENICS AND IMMIGRATION 553
of mathematics, and not of sociology. The most interesting ques-
tions in this connection are first, What races will survive to share
in building the ultimate human race? and second. What will be
their contribution to that race? In five thousand years — and that
of course to the eugenist is but a day — in five thousand years we
may know, though, of course, it may be longer. The fact that there
will be but one race, of mankind ultimately has important bearing
upon a number of social questions of the present moment, and the
inevitableness of that result should be in the mind of those w^ho
are thinking of any such question as eugenics.
Discussion. '
The Socially Assimilated
Dr. Luther H. Gulick.
The suggestion of my brother [Dr. Sidney L. Gulick] with ref-
erence to immigration was somewhat different from the one offered.
My brother suggests that the immigration from any mother-tongue
group be five per cent of those who have already become citizens.
It is not significant how many unassimilated people have come to
this country of a given nationality or tongue. The significant thing
is how many have become American citizens; that is, have become
socially assimilated. They are the class through whom social diges-
tion may take place, and I may say my brother is in touch with
Senator Dillingham with reference to this matter.
CONSTRUCTIVE SUGGESTIONS FOR RACE BETTERMENT-
SUMMARIZED
Abolish Production and Sale of Alcoholic Liquors
Mr. Arthur Huxter
Wliile not a total abstainer, I am convinced that it wonld be
immeasnrably better for this, or any other, country to have the
production and sale of alcoholic liquors abolished if it were prac-
ticable. The advantages claimed for alcohol are a small offset, in
my judgment, to the evils which proceed from its use and its abuse.
Fake Cures for Consumption
Dr. S. a. Kxopf
The man advertising fake cures for consumption should be
treated as a murderous criminal, for such he is.
Refuse Liquor Advertisements
George B. Peak
A few years ago the leading newspaper in our city announced
the fact that no liquor advertisements would appear in the paper
in the future. That paper was soon followed by the other papers,
and now in Des Moines, a city of over one hundred thousand, it is.
impossible to insert a liquor advertisement in any of the papers.
Anti-Spitting Ordinances
Dr. S. a. Knopf
Anti-spitting ordinances with the request to hold the hand be-
fore one's mouth when coughing, the -avoidance of overcrowding,^
proper ventilation and without overheating, a frequent disinfection
of all street, railroad, and Pullman cars, cabins, steamboats, etc.,
are the only way to minimize the dangers from tuberculosis and
other infectious diseases of the respiratory organs for the traveling
public. These ordinances should be enforced, but receptacles in
public places for those who must spit should also be provided.
Better Babies Contests
Dr. Lydia Allen DeVilbiss
During the past year [by the Better Babies Contests] at least
one hundred thousand babies have been examined for physical and
mental development, as part of this campaign for race betterment.
The parents of these babies have been taught that the unfit child is
CONSTRUCTIVE SUGGESTIONS SUMMARIZED DDD
not a visitation of Providence, but the natural result of ignorance
or sin. They have also learned that in this day of scientific care
of children, practically every baby can be made a better baby if
properly and intelligently brought up.
A Health Survey
Dr. J. H. Kellogg
A health survey should be made of every civilized community,
which should include every man, woman and child.
Birth Registration
Dr. Cressy L. Wilbur
I would suggest that this organization formally take some action
in regard to the importance of birth registration, and perhaps ap-
point a committee to take up the matter as a national and state
question.
Breast-Feeding
Dr. S. a. Knopf
Malnutrition and the underfeeding of the masses, which is so
great a predisposing factor to tuberculosis, should be combated by
beginning with having fewer artificial-fed and more breast-fed babies ;
by instructing ignorant mothers how to feed infants and little
children ; by providing simple but substantial school luncheons
for all school children at cost; by education of the mothers in eco-
nomic housekeeping, cooking, and food values; and by having eat-
ing places for the great army of unmarried laborers after the ex-
ample of the German Volkskilchen, where people can receive good,
wholesome food at reasonable prices; by legislative and philan-
thropic endeavors to make farming more profitable and more at-
tractive, and by a wiser statesmanship, whereby the cost of living
may be reduced for the entire people.
Edward Bunnell Phelps
Simply give the baby what God intended it should have — one
primary article of food for which its little digestive organs alone
are adapted — mother 's milk ; also plenty of air, plenty of Avater, plenty
of sunshine, and keep out of its stomach for the first six months, as
you would a virulent poison, any semblance of solid matter. I
finally believe, after some years' study of the statistical side of this
subject, that if we could accomplish this much, we could cut the
world's infant mortality rate in the middle.
Bureaus of Child Hygiene
Dr. S. a. Knopf
Many mothers do not know how to feed their children, which
results in malnutrition. Education, best accomplished by the per-
556 FIRST NATION Ali CONKIOKENCE ON HACK BKTTKiniKNT
soiial visits of competent nurses, under the direction of a bureau
of child hygiene, should be a part of every modern health board.
, Business Men's AiRdavits
George B. Peak
I noticed the other day in a Des Moines paper that tw^elve of the
leading business men of Des Moines — men who pay the largest taxes
(with the exception of one taxpayer there, who rents his buildings
very largely for saloon purposes) — signed an affidavit and presentwl
it to the courts. They demanded that the saloon be closed on the
ground that (1) it increased their taxes because it increased the
expenses of looking after the policing of the city: (2) because it
increased the expenses of the courts; because it filled the poorhouses
and because of the expense of the inebriate asylum and all of these
things; (3) that the saloon, instead of being a revenue producer,
was an expense maker. Whenever you can get the people to see
the saloon from that point of view — that it is an expense maker in-
stead of a revenue producer — j^ou make a gain.
Camp Hospitals
Dr. S. a. Knopf
In many Indians' homes sanitary conditions are frightful. A
federal commission appointed to investigate tuberculosis among
the Indians reports that "a comprehensive remedy can be afforded
by the establishment of camp hospitals in the nature of temporary
sanatoria for the treatment of tuberculous Indians on the reserva-
tions where the disease is known to be common." The report rec-
ommends a vigorous campaign throughout the Indian country of
systematic instruction in sanitary habits and methods of living
looking toward the making and enforcement of reasonable sanitary
regulations. I have only this suggestion to add, that whenever pos-
sible a doctor of their own race (not a "medicine man"), educated
and licensed as a regular physician, should be put in charge of anti-
tuberculosis work among the Indians, or at least be an assistant to
the government physician. Outdoor sleeping, proper nutrition, and
the prohibition of the sale of alcohol on reservations or anywhere
else to Indians, should, of course, be added.
Clearing House for Mental Defectives
PREsroENT Stephen Smith
The establishment of a "Clearing House for Mental Defectives""
to coordinate all organizations which have supervision of children,*
in a common effort to separate the defectives and place them under
proper care and treatment.
CONSTRUCTIVE SUGGESTIONS SUMMARIZED DO/
Clinical Facilities for the Recognition of Tuberculosis
Dr. S. a. Kxopf
Clinical facilities for the recognition of tuberculosis in every
community arranged by physicians in cooperation with the munic-
ipal authorities; a multiplication of such institutions as dispen-
saries, serving as centers or clearing houses to distribute the cases;
preventoria to which to send suspected cases ; sanatoria for the cur-
able cases, and hospital-sanatoria for the seemingly hopeless ones
for isolation ; and where it is possible sanatorium treatment at home,
— these are most efficacious weapons, up to this date, for solving
this phase of the tuberculosis problem.
Commission on Intermarriage
Prof. Sidney L. Gulick
The problem of the intermarriage of whites and Asiatics is one
that needs scientific study. We need a commission of expert biolo-
gists, sociologists, and psychologists to make such a collection of the
facts already available that we may know accurately what are the
biological consequences of intermarriage. .
Conservation
Frederick L. Hoffman
Much has of necessity been left unsaid which has immediate
reference to the factors conditioning race progress as measured by
changes in the death rate, but the most pressing question is the more
intelligent, and if necessary the radical, conservation and control
of the natural resources of the earth, including the food resources
of the sea.
There is imperative need of improved methods of agricultural
production and the elimination of waste of soil, seed, and labor,
Avhich is inherent in primitive methods of farming, such as are still
exceedingly common throughout the entire United States and
Canada.
There is urgent need of more scientific methods of utilizing waste
products of all kinds, and of qualified research into the sources of
new food supplies.
Constitutional Amendment
Dr. Hexry Smith Williams
The records of police courts, the records of prisons, the records
of almshouses, the records of as^dums for the insane — all show con-
ditions in the prohibition territory that average at least as bad as
and very commonly worse than those in license territories. I fear
there can be no question about that. It remains, then, to inquire,
What shall we do? Accepting the facts as I found them, I cannot
make myself believe that the present line of legislation is effective^
.rob FIRST NATIOXAI. CONFERENCE ON RACE P.KTTKRM KXT
ov is till' best that we can do. Others feel the same waj' aud some
iu allthol•it^^ Last summer Senator Works, of California, introduced
a joint resolution in Congress providing for the total abolition of
distilled liquor. He wishes to have a constitutional amendment
passed to that effect.
Convalescent Homes and Colonies
Dr. S. a. Knopf
To ha^ e a sufficient number of convalescent homes where pa-
tients discharged from general hospitals, including also the mothers
discharged from the maternity hospitals, can remain long enough
for their physiological vigor and earning capacity to be re-estab-
lished, is the only way to overcome this source of predisposition
to tuberculosis.
But to send the tuberculous patient, particularly a laborer or a
working girl or woman, for a six-months' or even a year's sojourn
at a sanatorium is not enough to make the cure lasting. Hence,
agricultural, horticultural, and general industrial colonies should
be attached to our public sanatoria. It is here where the patient has
the best possible chance, by graded labor, still under medical super-
vision, to make his cure a lasting one.
Agricultural, horticultural and industrial colonies where sana-
torium graduates may have an opportunity to go for a year or more
to earn a fair wage, and at the same time given a chance to make
themselves stronger and more resistant against a new outbreak or
invasion of tuberculosis are as essential as sanatoria or special hos-
pitals.
Contests
Deax Wm. W. Hastings
Physical and Mental Perfection Contests for ascertaining physical
and mental conditions and promoting improvements.
Counter Attractions to Saloons
Dr. Henry Smith Williams
More important as I see it than anything else, let the en-
tire proceeds, both the government revenue and local license fees,
be used for public utility, and not applied to the general tax-rate,
but be used for eleemosynary institutions, playgrounds, gymnasia,
music halls, and other counter-attractions to the saloon. That, of
covirse, is the second fundamental principle of the great Swedish
Gothenburg System.
Country Life
Rev. Newell Dwight Hillis
The evangelist who ultimately wnll solve the problem of the de-
terioration of the factory class physique in the Bowery districts
is the inventor who will give us a better electric motor, a better car
that can be loaded Avith working men and women twenty miles in
CONSTRUCTIVE SUGGESTIONS SUMMARIZED 559
the country and laud them in the city at work in fifteen minutes for
two cents, and then with a little house set in a garden and with
light and air on every side, we shall give the boys a chance and
the girls a chance to build their bodies and to manufacture a splendid
physique as the implement of thinking and of the soul, and then to
have all the other things artistic, intellectual, social, religious, edu-
cational.
Dr. S. a. Knopf
Alcohol, venereal diseases, and tuberculosis are more prevalent
in cities than in the country. I venture to say that all of these dis-
eases, and particularly tuberculosis, will be decreased by a return
to the farm. If our statesmen can help to make farming more at-
tractive and profitable, country life, particularly for young people,
less monotonous and more enjoyable, a great step toward the de-
crease in the morbidity and mortality of the above-mentioned dis-
eases and a consequent betterment of the race will surely be attained.
Sir Horace Plunkett
Speaking as a social worker, may I ask the Conference to bear
in mind the countryside, and to give us any help it can. by way of
counsel and advice, as to how we maj^ re-enforce our plea that coun-
try life is better for the race than city life, and how we may, by
applying the wisdom of the Conference, demonstrate that truth.
The people of my own country are predominantly rural, and ray
experience in studying and dealing practically^ Avith its problems has
brought me into embarrassingly intimate relations with a numerous
body of social workers in the rural sections of the United States.
These workers aim at a complete reconstruction of rural life — an
improvement of its technical and business methods and of its do-
mestic and social conditions. For reasons of national importance
and urgency — reasons economic, social, and political — the settle-
ment of a much greater proportion of the people upon the farm lands
of the country, in healthy, happy, and progressive communities, is
becoming every year increasingly the aim and object of philan-
thropic endeavor.
Dean Walter Taylor Sumner
I wish that before, this Convention there could be the greatest
emphasis put upon the fact that the city is no place for boys and
girls. This is a Race Betterment Conference, and, taking it from
the angle of industry, the boy and the girl have far more show
in a rural district than they have in the city.
Booker T. Washington
We should use our influence, if we would better the condition
of my race, to keep the masses of our people in the country districts
and out of contact with the large, complex problems of city life,
560 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
eithtn- North or South. The negro, on the whole, is better off in our
Southern states than he is anywhere else in this country.
Dr. S. a. Knopf
] must refer to many of the abnormal industrial conditions of
our day and the social injustice arising therefrom — our strikes, the
lack of employment in some districts, the lack of workers in others,
etc. These conditions must be readjusted; our deserted farms must
be repopulated from the congested cities; the lives of the masses
must be made happier, larger, and fuller. When all this is realized,
it will not only help in the solution of the tuberculosis problem,
but will be a mighty factor in bringing about what this Conference
has been called to consider — a genuine race betterment. But let
us not think that this will come about unless we all believe in and
work for a larger love of humanity and for more social justice and
personal service to our less fortunate brothers and sisters. Some-
one has said that service to man is the highest service to God.
"Cures"
Dr. Louis Faugeres Bishop
An element in the prevention of arteriosclerosis is the edu-
cation of all persons in the habit of taking "cures," if this name
may be used for periods of time set apart for the putting of the body
in the best possible order.
We should adopt the motto, "Attend to the health while
healthy," and encourage the European custom of the combination
of a vacation and a visit to a cure resort.
Death Certificates
Prof. Herbert Adolphus Miller
Last year I went to supper with a Lithuanian undertaker. To
be gracious, I asked him about his business. His face lighted up
quickly, and he said, "It is a strange thing that this is a growing
city, but the number of funerals has dropped off about one-third."
I asked him why it was. He said that it was because of the new
law, which he did not understand, which required the undertaker
to have a death certificate from a physician or to notify the coroner.
If the coroner found that a physician was not called in. he fined
the family twenty-five dollars. It was necessaiy to fine only one
family in a community.
Differential License
Dr. Henry Smith WiLLiA:\rs
I would have the saloon where we must have it, pay a much
higher license on distilled beverages. That would discriminate
against whiskey and increase its price. As a mere economic result,
therefore, its consumption would tend to decrease.
CONSTRUCTIVE SUGGESTIONS SUMM.VRIZED 561
School Hygiene
Dr. E. B. Hoag
Large cities should employ a director of school hygiene and
several assistant directors on full time. A few half-time men may'
be required, but in general the work of half-time men in large cities
Avill be better done by full-time school nurses.
Standardize the position of the school health officer in the United
States.
A community, then, in selecting a school medical officer, should
seek a cultured physician whose training in the fundamentals of
medical science has been adequate, and who, in addition, possesses
aptitude and enthusiasm for the Avork and a willingness to supply
any deficiency he may have along special lines.
The school health officer should, in the larger places, be con-
trolled by the board of education.
A cooperative plan whereby the board of education and board
of health jointly control school hygiene may be desirable for spe-
cial local reasons.
School health officers may be provided by combining the posi-
tion of town or small city health officer with that of school health
officer, in which case the expense may be shared by the board of
health and board of education; the appointment may be made by
the former board, with the approval of the latter. This is an excel-
lent arrangement for large towns and small cities.
County health officers, if properly qualified, may be appointed
as school officers as well, and in this joint capacity supervise the
school health of a village or a whole county, according to the popu-
lation and distance involved. This will often solve the problem
of hygiene in rural schools.
The compensation for a school health officer may be based upon
the time required of him and upon the amount of his responsibility.
School health officers should familiarize themselves with the fol-
lowing divisions of school and child hygiene: (a) Transmissible dis-
eases; (b) school sanitation; (c) physical defects; (d) mental de-
fects ; (e) dental hygiene ; (f ) the teaching of hygiene ; (g) juvenile
delinquency; (h) retardation; (i) school hygiene literature; (j)
the elements of school architecture.
Disease Prevention Campaign
Dr. C. N. Johnson-
If our school boards would spend one-half the amount in a cam-
paign for the amelioration and prevention of disease that they now
spend annually for teaching the "repeaters" who are made such by
reason of disease, it would not only be more humanitarian, but it
would be an immense saving financially.
Dr. Lii-lian H. South
Hookworm is one of the easiest disease^ to cure and to prevent.
The wav we can eradicate it is by asking everyone to be examined
562 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE iJETTEKMENT
for hookworm. It does not cost anythiiifi'. The laboratory of the
State Board of Health examines specimens from all over the coun-
try, free of charge. We ask the affected ones to take the treatment
until they are cured. If you have a sanitary toilet in every one of
these homes, you will banish hookworm disease, typlioid fevei-. and
diarrhea, which are so prevalent.
The State Board of Health have devised a separate tank arrange-
ment that does not have to be cleaned out and is odorless and fire-
proof. That is the way we are going to combat this question and
revolutionize the Avhole South, in combating the hookworm.
Disinfection
Dr. S. a. Knopf
Thorough disinfection of rooms and house should follow the
removal of a tuberculous patient, and tuberculosis would no longer
be a house disease.
Educational Courses
Dk. Winfield Scott Hai.l
Education should cover the following lessons : Motherhood and
Fa.therhood ; "Womanhood and Manhood ; Periodicity ; Social Rela-
tionships and Eugenics.
Frederick L. Hoff^max
There is need of greater emphasis being placed in educational
courses upon the principles and practice of domestic economy and
the required reduction of per capita food consumption, with a pro-
portionate increase in nutritive values, conforming to the results of
qualified studies of dietaries such as have been made by Professors
Atwater, Chittenden, and others.
Mrs. Melvil Dewey
The education of all w^omen in the principles of sanitary science
as the key to race progress in the twentieth century; also —
HANDWORK in elementary schools;
DOMESTIC SCIENCE in secondary schools ;
HOME ECONOMICS in normal and professional schools :
EUTHENICS iu colleges and universities.
Edw^ard Bunnell Phelps
Twenty million children are regularly attending the public
schools of this country. At least one-fourth of that number, or five
million children, eventually become mothers. Why not systematize
the teachings of two or three or four fundamentals of motherhood
in the public schools for the girls between, say, eight or nine and
fifteen or sixteen years ; properly put before them moving pictures,
manikins, illustrations, as you please, and teach them the funda-
mentals of motherhood and thereby insure, at least for the next
CONSTRUCTIVE SUGGESTIONS SUMMARIZED 563
generation, proper motherhood for our two and a half million babies
a year?
Dr. Carolyn Geisel
Men, give us money to support the woman's college which
teaches a woman her own business. Then she will stand by you,
equipped to be your helpmate indeed, equipped to care for your
babies, to keep them very carefully, but, more than that, equipped
to keep you out of your grave.
Graham Taylor
One of the recommendations of the Vice Commission was not
only better police, not only stronger spiritual forces, but a safe, sane
training in sex hygiene. It was begun with the parents and it was
continued last year by authority of the Board of Education with
about fifty-one thousand high school children, by about forty care-
fully selected physicians in very carefully supervised and censored
lectures under the masterful and sane and visioned leadership of
Ella Flagg Young.
Educational Period
Prof. Roswbll H. Johnson
Cease prolonging the educational period past the early twenties.
The professional schools in our country are steadily delaying the age
of graduation and thereby that of marriage.
Electric Rays
President Stephen Smith
Use electric rays in school rooms for facilitating the mental and
physical development.
Encourage Early Marriage
Prof. Roswell H. Johnson
Hold out marriage as one of the ends of a useful, normal, beau-
tiful life. Help superior young people to meet, and encourage and
further their early marriage.
Eugenic Investigation
Prof. Maynard M. Metcalf
Aside from a few very limited aspects of the negative practice
of eugenics, the w^hole subject is, as yet, of little social significance.
The prolonged labor of hundreds of special students is needed be-
fore this matter, which already is of the keenest biological interest,
can become of the greatest social moment. We must cultivate a
little of the patience of God. The man of science needs to work
quietly, patiently, doggedh', without too much thought of so-called
practical value to follow from his studies.
7)i'A KIK.ST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTKK.M KNT
There are positive aspects of the matter Avhich deserve the chief
emphasis. Let me again iirpe that among the great needs must be
recognized scientilic study of the principles of inheritance, and for
this liberal financial support should be had ; and the cultivation of
the realization that in marriage it is ignoble to seek the happiness
only of the man and wife and to forget the character of the chil-
dren and through them the welfare of society.
To what extent the state can now intervene to prevent unsocial
marriages is a question Avhich needs careful detailed study, and is
not an appropriate question for discussion in this brief general paper.
But aside from this question of the limits of state action, we must
emphasize the vital need of cultivation of the social point of view
in this most vital of social institutions, the family, and the need
now to gather the data upon which eugenics may in the future be
based.
Eugenics and Euthenics Education
Dr. J. H. IvELLOGG
Eugenics and euthenics should be magnified before the people
until their paramount importance is appreciated and legislatures
become willing to appropriate funds as liberally for these essential
means of race betterment as they are now doing for the improve-
ment of crops and farm animals through similar means.
The laws of eugenics and euthenics should be taught in every
school and preached from every pulpit. Every teacher, every leader
of human thought, every publisher, all professions, all serious-
minded men and women should join in making known to every
human being in every corner of the globe the fact that the human
race is dying, and to discover and apply the remedies necessary
for salvation from this dismal fate.
Dean Walter Taylor Sumner
I believe that education is the great hope for eugenics. The
greatest agent in education in this country today "^dth reference
to health certificates is the press, largely the metropolitan press, of
this country.
Eugenical Agencies
Mr. H. H. Laughlin
Education, legal restriction, segregation, sterilization — these
four eugenical agencies are of primary remedial value. If the first
fail, apply the second; if it also fail, apply the third; if segrega-
tion ceases and the first two factors do not deter from parenthood
the potential parent of inadequates, apply the fourth. Purify the
breeding stock of the race at all costs.
Eugenics Registry Office
Dr. J. H. Kellogg
A Eugenics Registry Office is needed to establish a Race of Hu-
man Thoroughbreds. It takes only four generations to make a
CONSTRUCTIVE SUGGESTIONS SUMMARIZED 565
thoroughbred, when the principles of eugenics have a fair chance
to operate. Intelligent men and women everywhere throughout the
civilized world are becoming aroused to the race significance of
these great biologic laws, and are anxious to become informed in
relation to Eugenics and Euthenics, and to conform their lives to
the principles of physiologic and biologic righteousness.
We have registries for horses, cattle, sheep, pigs, and even cats
and dogs. If a lady wishes to establish the standing of her pet
poodle as a thoroughbred, she can do so by appealing to an official
record, and the puny canine may lift its head above its fellows a
born aristocrat, and prove its claim. But nowhere on earth, so far
as the writer knows, is there to be found a registry for human
thoroughbreds.
The hope is entertained by the promoters of this Conference that
one of its results may be the establishment of such a Registry. In-
deed, it seems that the time has fully come when a Eugenics Reg-
istry Office should be established, in which may be recorded the
names of infants born under eugenic conditions, and perhaps also
the names of persons who in person and pedigree are able to mea-
sure up to eugenic standards.
Prizes should be offered for the finest families and the best
health and endurance records.
Exhibits
Dr. S. a. Kkopf
Besides popular anti-tuberculosis and general hygienic educa-
tion, demonstrations by permanent exhibits, distribution of litera-
ture, lectures in schools, colleges, workshops, mills, factories, mines,
stores, and offices, the examination of every tuberculous adult should
be accompanied by personal instruction in how to prevent infect-
ing others.
Fashions
Dr. Carolyn Geisel
You know that the fashions of today are not of your seeking.
You did not make them, but I call upon you, in the strength of your
united womanhood, that we arise in our power and demand that
decent clothes be put upon the market for us to wear, or that we
will remain in our homes until we can get a gown that will be
seemly.
Fecundity Statistics
Prof. Walter F. Willcox
In the Report of the Director of the Census to the Secretary of
Commerce and Labor for the year 1910 one may read the follow-
ing passage: "It is also proposed ... to work out from the re-
turns on the schedules statistics with regard to fecundity as indi-
cated by the number of children born and the number living for
women of different classes in comparison with their age and the
56G FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
duration of marriage. ... A considerable amount of preliminary
work on this subject was undertaken at the census of 1900, but the
results were never tabulated or published. It is respectfully sug-
gested that the Secretary recommend to Congress that the Director
of the Census be authorized to tabulate the more important informa-
tion on this subject for the 1900 census as well as that for 1910.
. . . This subject is one of profound importance and the census
schedules furnish data by which conclusions of the utmost value
can be readily drawn. A plan has been devised by which the ex-
pense of . . . tabulating the results on this subject for the census
of 1910 will be much less than would have been necessary to com-
plete the work on the lines begun in 1900."*
At the present time no funds are available for completing this
work, and there is danger that for the third time the inquiry will
suffer shipwreck.
Feeble-Minded Colonies
See also ''Cleaiing Bouse for Feeble-Minded."
Hastings H. Hart
If the several states will establish colonies for the feeble-minded,
to accommodate those who are now kept at public expense in insane
hospitals, almshouses, prisons, and reformatories, they will make
room in those institutions for persons who properly belong there,
and will obviate, for the time being, the necessity for their enlarge-
ment. All of these institutions ought to be hospitals in principle.
Feeble-Minded Girls
Hastixgs H. Hart
We should undertake a comprehensive campaign for the care of
all feeble-minded girls of child-bearing age.
Food and Environment
Mrs. Melvil Dewey
The relation of both food and environment to man's efficiency
is a vital question. How far they are responsible for his character,
his health and understanding, what special elements are most po-
tent and which are the most readily controlled, are questions offer-
ing an interesting field for research.
Government
S. S. McClure
"When masses of individuals set out to cooperate together to pro-
duce some given result or to carry on some given enterprise, it has
been found that there is only one successful method of organizing,
and that method is by the election of what corresponds in all cases,
without any exception, to what a board of directors is to a corpora-
tion.
* Report of the Director for 1909-10, pp. 45-46.
CONSTRUCTIVE SUGGESTIONS SUMMARIZED 567
Government Basis for Sale of Alcohol
Daniel A. Poling
I am convinced that the Government ought to assume a proper
attitude on the alcohol question, that the Government ought to say
as a foundation basis — a basis upon which we can work to eugenics
— whether the liquor traffic as an institution, the liquor traffic as
a great problem, industrially, economically, politically, and morally
is right or wrong. Having so declared itself, then it comes to us as
a greater opportunity to take care of the actual situation that con-
fronts us at the present time.
Health Certificate
Dean Walter Taylor Sumner
We may approach the subject of a health certificate through the
avenue of those who perform marriage ceremonies. At the Ca-
thedral in Chicago, since Easter of 1912, we took the stand that
thereafter we would marry no persons unless they presented a cer-
tificate, signed by a reputable physician, that they had not an in-
curable or communicable disease. Since that time over fifty minis-
terial associations representing nearly every religious body from
jMaine to California in their membership, about thirty-five hun-
dred of the clergy, have agreed at least to urge, if not downright to
demand, a health certificate before they will perform a marriage
ceremony.
Housing
Dr. S. a. Knopf
In addition to wise state and city legislation, philanthropy also
must come to the rescue by building houses for the masses such as
will deserve the name of human habitations, giving the occupants
an abundance of light, air, and sunshine. Wherever and whenever
practical, the home of the married American workman should be
a detached, single-family house.
Our colored population and the districts .where many Chinese
and Japanese live must receive special consideration under the sub-
ject of housing.
In view of the existing race prejudice or antipathy, it would be
better for colored people to unite and, by cooperation with philan-
thropists, to build sanitary tenement houses in segregated districts
than to try to crowd into the already overcongested districts in-
habited by the poorer classes of the white population.
Immigrant Insurance against Tuberculosis
Dr. S. a. Knopf
The influx of tuberculous immigrants likely to become a burden
to the community should be prevented by compelling all steam-
ship companies to assure a clean bill of health for every immi-
grant they bring to these shores, and to insure every immigrant
against tuberculosis. The policy should entitle the bearer to return
568 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
transportation and free treatment in a sanatorium in the event of
his contracting tuberculosis within a specified time. The cost of
the insurance could be added to the price of the steamship ticket.
Immigration Legislation and Investigation
Prop. Robert DeC. Ward
We have an opportunity Avhich is unique in history for the prac-
tice of eugenic principles immediately, and on a vastly greater scale
than is possible in the case of any other nation. By selecting our
immigrants, through proper legislation, we can pick out the best
specimens of each race to be our own fellow-citizens and to be
the parents of our future citizens.
Most of the recommendations which have been urged by those
who have made an unprejudiced study of immigration were in-
cluded in the Report of the United States Immigration Commission,
which investigated the whole question for over three years, and
were embodied in the immigration bill which passed the Sixty-
second Congress ; was vetoed by President Taft ; was passed by the
Senate over the veto by a vote of 72 to 18 ; and failed by less than
a dozen votes of being passed over the veto by the House. Every
medical man in the United i States; every social- worker; every per-
son in any way connected with the care of mental defectives ; every
taxpayer; every citizen who wants to keep the blood of the race
pure should join in demanding of the Sixty-third Congress the im-
mediate passage of a similar bill and should see to it that that bill
becomes a law.
Prof. Sidney L. Gulick
I urge the importance of adopting immigration and naturaliza-
tion laws which, while they conserve the essential interests of our
own country, shall also deal justly and courteously with every other
race on a basis of equality and in harmony with their dignity and
race consciousness.
America needs a new Oriental policy which, while it conserves
our great democratic experiment and its institutions, shall treat
all races alike and yet shall admit only so many annually from
each land as we can really assimilate.
An immigration law should be enacted allowing an annual immi-
gration from any single mother-tongue group of, say, five per cent
of those already here and naturalized, including their American-
born children.
H. H. LalttHlin
As a final factor, the federal government must cooperate with
the states to the extent of excluding from America immigrants who
are potential parents and who are by nature endowed with traits
of less value than the better ninety per cent of our existing breed-
ing stock.
Adequate data, upon which differential exclusion of immigrants
could be based, can be secured only by investigating the traits of
CONSTRUCTIVE SUGGESTIONS SUMMARIZED 569
immigrant families in tlieir native toAvns and villages, by sending '
trained field workers to sneh places.
Industrial Welfare
F, 0. Clements
Our President, in going through the factory one day, noticed a
woman heating coffee on a radiator. Later he saw a group of girls
eating cold lunches at their workbenches, and so a kitchen was
installed and they are now served a warm lunch at a nominal fee.
In the early days of the business, the men and women came to
work at the same time, and left at the same time. Now the women
arrive later than the men, and in the evening they are well on their
way home before the men leave the factory.
In the old days employees were compelled to climb the stairs to
the various departments. Today, elevator service is provided, with
separate elevator service for the women.
The uncomfortable stool has been replaced by the high-back
chair and foot-rests. The Company has installed every type of con-
venience, sanitation, and safety within the factory.
A meeting-place was provided for the boys, and classes in man-
ual training established.
A plot of ground was set apart for garden work, and the boys
supplied with seeds and tools and put to work.
It was found necessary to do a great deal of neighborhood work
to clean up the unsightly surroundings, so that skilled labor might
be induced to come to that town.
Lectures illustrated by slides were made up to illustrate the
proper and improper way of beautifying the surroundings.
For many years, much of our type of instruction has had to do
with the general question of health.
In our older type of buildings, air is dravra through a ventilating
duct from the top and distributed throughout the building. The
air is changed every fifteen minutes. Some of our more modem types
of buildings wash and humidify the air, and a very close regula-
tion of temperature is possible.
In our Polishing Department and metal rooms there is an ex-
haust system installed for carrying away the metal dust.
Shrubbery hides the foundations and walls of our buildings, and
adds very much to the beauty of the surroundings.
At ten o'clock in the morning and at three in the afternoon,
the windows in the office departments are thrown open and the men
and women indulge in light exercise.
We have gymnasium and health classes for increasing the effi-
ciency of the office force and the women employees.
The office clerks meet three times a week in the gymnasium after
working hours.
The athletic fields surrounding the factory are used by employees
before and after work and during the noon hour. They consist
of tennis courts, baseball grounds and gun club grounds.
Scattered throusrhout Hills and Dales are a number of Adiron-
;)((» FIRST NATIONAI; rONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT.
dack Camps. These are liilly ('(|nii)pe(l niul can be used by any
employee on application.
Any woman employee is eligible for membership in the Woman's
Century Clnb, its object being to promote the intellectual and social
welfare of its members.
A vacation house located in Hills and Dales is used by the Cen-
tury Club for entertainments, week-end parties, etc. Its object is
to teach women how to manage a home.
The company encourages horseback riding, by boarding the
horses owned by employees in the Company's stables at cost.
The company maintains training-schools in various parts of the
w^orld for its agents.
They also have advertising, accounting, apprenticeship, physical
training, salesmanship, and other classes, meeting at regular inter-
vals.
The office building is supplied with distilled water and individual
cup service.-
Two hundred and twenty shower baths are distributed through-
out the factory. Every employee is given company time to take
two baths a week.
Treatment rooms have been provided.
]Much attention has been paid to food.
Our Officers' Club accommodates about six hundred people at
lunch. We serve a very wholesome, well-cooked dinner, very simple
and plain. Food is kept hot in chafing dishes and served on plates
holding hot water.
Brushes and combs are sterilized daily and washed in benzine.
Roller towels have been done away with, substituting individual
hand towels.
The girls are provided with sleevelets and clean aprons every
Aveek.
Umbrellas and overshoes are loaned on rainy days.
All new employees must undergo a physical examination. We
belicA^e in periodic examinations.
The employees have a strong voluntary Relief Association which
pays sick, accident, and death benefits.
We also have an emergency hospital where accidents are cared
for.
We haA^e a trained nurse who visits our sick employees in their
bomes.
An oculist examines the eyes of our employees and decides
when glasses are needed. Free examination is afforded and the
Company pays half of the price of the glasses.
Our Hall of Industrial Education, recently erected, is capable of
seating about 1,200 people. These lecture halls and school rooms
are thoroughly equipped with projection apparatus. This hall is
aptly named our Power-IIouse. IMuch of our time has been devoted
to educational talks on health.
Welfare work supplies just that which is lacking. It brings the
best there is out of each employee and results in cooperation and
team play.
CONSTRUCTIVE SUGGESTIONS SUMMARIZED 571
Inheritance Records
Prof. Maynard M. Metcalf
One thing, however, of the greatest practical value we can do;
We can promote in every possible way the gathering and safe filing
of human inheritance records, which in the future will serve as the
foundation of such practice of eugenics as shall prove wise and prac-
tical. I can, in imagination, see the day when the compilation of
inheritance data for each citizen will be compulsory, and when the
files of these records will be the most valued of all state documents ;
when no marriage license will be issued except after the most care-
ful scrutiny of the inheritance records of each contracting party
by trained students of inheritance, and Avhen the state will debar
from marriage those whose children will be a burden to it. The
bearing of children is, of course, not an individual right, but a social
privilege, and in time it must come to be so recognized. >
Meanwhile let us actively promote the gathering and preserving
of inheritance records for all persons, thus providing data for in-
telligent practice of eugenics in coming generations. We can at
once insist upon the gathering of such data for all persons in our
state penal institutions, almshouses, hospitals, asylums, etc. I am
told that the city of Rochester is doing this with its public school
children. We can urge the gathering of such data by privately
controlled institutions of similar purpose. We can urge right-
minded individuals everywhere to supply such data as to themselves
and their families. Nothing short of a state system of compulsory
gathering of data for all individuals can serve as an adequate basis
for such negative eugenics as it may in time be wise to enforce by
law.
Dr. C. B. Da\'enport
We believe that it would be an excellent thing were students
who appear in schools able to present to the teacher a record of
inherited capacities or performances of close relatives in order
that the teacher might have, when the pupil appears, something
more than a blank face and a suit of clothes, some idea of the prob-
able potentialities in that child, that his teachings might be directed
in such a way as to develop them and that he should not have to
wait for a year in order to find out what the capacities of the pupil
are.
Inland Sanatoria for the Tuberculous
Dr. S. a. Knopf
For larger children afflicted with pulmonary tuberculosis, we
should have inland sanatoria with schools attached.
Even the smallest children, if found tuberculous, should receive
institutional treatments when the parents are poor, and whenever
possible the mother should be allowed to remain with the child.
We must at once, throughout this vast country, strive to have
no uncared-for tuberculous patient. To this end, institutions for
the treatment and care of the tuberculous who cannot be cared for
572 FIRST NATIONAL CONFEHENCE ON UAC'E BETTERMENT
at liome without endangering others should be multiplied by state
and municipal appropriations and private philanthropy.
Hastings H. Hart
We should convert existing institutions which are no longer
needed for their present purposes into state institutions for defective
delinquents.
International Conference
ROBBINS GiLMAN
I offer you this suggestion, to-wit: That this Conference set in
motion machinery for the calling together of delegates from all the
leading nations of the world for a conference to discuss ways and
means by which such nations, each acting for itself, but for the good
of all. can, through governmental action, or otherwise, better the
race of man from the standpoints of physical health, mental attain-
ments, and moral stamina. This would be more than a Eugenics
Congress, although eugenists would be, it is hoped, delegates; it
w^ould be more than a Health Congress, although doctors would be
in attendance : it would be more than an Ecumenical Conference,
although spiritual leaders would be there ; it Avould be more than a
Peace Conference, although peace advocates would attend. It would
be a gathering of statesmen, scientists, humanitarians, and govern-
ment officials, all optimists, with national and international barriers
knocked down, interested in the welfare of each because the wel-
fare of each is inseparable from the welfare of all. Prison re-
former, social and unemployment insurance advocate, child
labor expert, the missionary, the teacher, the doctor, the social
worker, physiologist, psychologist — they would all be present to dis-
cuss the relationship of syphilis, alcohol, and tuberculosis to racial
betterment and the direct and indirect bearing thereon of medicine,
education in matters of sex, proper care and treatment of infectious
and communicable diseases, mental deficiency, housing and living
conditions, city planning, hours of labor and recreation. And above
all would such a conference discuss the positive side of Race Better-
ment ; eugenics and not dysgenics ; constructive work as opposed to
destructive : perfectibility and not deformity or degeneration or dis-
ease.
Investigation of Insanity
Prop. Walter F. Willcox
We need in this country a thoroughly disinterested, competent,
and qualified study of the subject of the increase of insanity. I
feel sure that if such a study were made, it would show that the
increase that exists, if it does exist, is far less than the increase
shown on the face of the figures. I am disposed to say that some
increase would be found, but nothing like the increase we ordinarily
hear about.
Dr. H. W. Austin
Further scientific investigations are necessary to accurately de-
termine the causes of the various forms of insanity and other mental
CONSTRUCTIVE SUGGESTIONS SUMMARIZED 573
defects, and the cause of their rapid increase in number, and also
the best method to be adopted to prevent their multiplication.
Laws to Prevent Multiplication of Defectives
Dr. J. H. Kellogg
Society must establish laws and sanctions which w^ll check the
operation of heredity in the multiplication of the unfit.
Hastixgs H. Hart
We should provide by law for the establishment of separate de-
partments or colonies in connection with prisons and with adult and
juvenile reformatories.
We should secure legislation whereby, whenever inmates of in-
stitutions for other classes are found to be feeble-minded, they may
be kept permanently in public care.
Dr. H. W. Austin
Provided they could be wisely drawn and wisely executed, spe-
cial laws to prevent the propagation of defectives, such as the
chronic insane, the feeble-minded, epileptics, the degenerate and
habitual criminals, would accomplish much in the way of race bet-
terment. In legislation, as well as in social reform work intended
for race betterment, in which individual liberty is concerned, it is
essential that w^e first have an actual knowledge or some understand-
ing of the evils which we are endeavoring to remedy.
Lectures
Dr. Guilford H. Sumner
Local interest in health work should be stirred up by practical,
convincing literature and lectures.
Marriage Laws
Dr. H. W. Austin
Uniform and proper marriage laws that would prevent the in-
nocent from contracting disease and that would tend to improve
the offspring are desirable ; but syphilis and other venereal diseases
may be, and often are, contracted by men and even women who were
free from the disease prior to marriage. Therefore, to eliminate
syphilis as a cause of mental and physical degeneracy, one must
resort to education as to the terrible results of this disease, to re-
ligious and moral education and preventive medicine and thera-
peutics.
Byron W. Holt
The Pittsburg ]Morals Efficiency Commission took a strong posi-
tion in favor of eugenics marriage legislation. It also reached the
conclusion that (as the New York Evening Post states it) " the one
most potent weapon in the reduction of vice the Commission be-
lieves to be early marriages, to encourage which it emphasizes good
;)/4 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
housing:, cheaper living, and even vocational education, as permitting
the easy conversion of voutli into self-responsihle, M'age-earning man-
hood."'
Marriag-e and Social Welfare
Prof. Maynard M. Metcalf
Let us promote the view that social welfare, not individual com-
fort, is the ultimate criterion in marriage.
Meat and Milk Inspection
Dr. S. a. Knopf
Contaminated food substances, i. e., contaminated by the tubercle
bacillus — tuberculous meat, milk — sources of tuberculous infec-
tion., as, for example, from cattle or hogs, should be dealt with by
federal laws, since state laws, by reason of their diversit}' and often
inadequacy, have proved inefficient. All milk, if not coming from
tuberculin-tested cattle, should be thoroughly and scientifically, and
not merely commercially, sterilized. ,
Rfa'. Caroline Bartlett Crane
In an agricultural region such as surrounds thousands of cities
and villages in the United States, one would naturally expect that
the meat supply, like the milk supply, would be shipped in from
the surrounding country, and that each city might protect itself
against diseased or unAvholesome meat by a proper ordinance and
a proper system of inspection.
We are not necessarily dependent on federal meat inspection.
The remedy is to make meat inspection a detail of Community Hy-
giene. There is no advantage from a sanitary or economic view-
point in shipping cattle a thousand miles or so to a packer to be
slaughtered, then shipping the meat back, with all the attending
loss and deterioration and the increased prices. We want to foster
local packing houses and local stock yards. We want to build up
the stock-raising industry around about our own communities. We
must not expect help by getting our meats from Argentina. We
want to cultivate our own stock-raising industry, a commercial as
well as a sanitary benefit to all our people.
Then we should let the label tell the truth, w^hether upon locally
or federally inspected meat. If there are people willing to eat
meat from tuberculous and cancerous carcasses, let them: but let
them also know what they are eating by the use of a special stamp
or designation which conveys that knowledge. But let us demand
that persons who wish to eat meat, but only if it is from animals
free from disease, may have the means of knowing how to obtain
such meat.
We should do all we can to bring about a reform in our dis-
graceful federal service ; but, also, we should promote local inspec-
tion of a high order. It is for any community to put the standard
just as high as it will. In the matter of milk inspection, each city
CONSTRUCTIVE ST'GGESTIONS STJMMARIZED oTd
may decide for itself how many bacteria per cubic centimeter will
be allowed, and all other details of milk inspection. In the same
manner, a city can decide exactly what standard it will have for
its meat supply. Plere is a department of "Community Hygiene"
which has been long and most un.iustifiably neglected and one which
I earnestly commend to this Conference, and to all members who
feel an interest in the purity of the public food supply, the purity
of governmental administration, and the prosperity of agriculture
in this country.
Medical Examinations
Dr. Victor C. Vaughan
Adopt frequent and thorough medical examinations (especially
hefore entering into a marriage contract), in order to detect wrong
conditions in their incipiency and enable the examinee to cure them
while cure is possible.
It has been proposed that the life insurance companies repre-
sented here seek to prolong the lives of their policy holders by offer-
ing them free Inedical re-rexamination at stated intervals.
Frederick L. Hoffmax
The physical training of the young, and the medical supervision
of schools and factories, including periodical examination for the
purpose of correcting physical defects in the initial stage, or treat-
ing incipient disease, with a reasonable chance of cure, have become
accepted principles of modern government. In course of time these
efforts must profoundly modify not only the health of the young,
but what is equally important, the health of persons employed in
industry. Furthermore, there must come about in consequence of
such efforts, a decided improvement in physique and more general
conformity to a normal physical type, and the gradual elimination
of the. at present, disproportionately large number of persons phys-
ically defective or infirm, and by inference, or obviously, the less
efficient for the economic needs of society.
E. E. RiTTENHOUSE
We should also make an especial effort to teach our people the
wisdom and the urgent need of going to their doctors for periodic
health examinations for the purpose of heading off these and other
affections.
To urge upon our people the wisdom of this course and of using
the knowledge and skill of the physician to prevent sickness and
untimely death rather than to continue the deadly habit of waiting
until the case is hopeless before sending for him, is, to my notion,
a thoroughly practical suggestion.
Here is a neglected but fruitful field. The need of having these
inspections should be firmly fixed in the minds of our school chil-
dren and of our people generally. Every individual and journal
interested in improving the vitality of our race and every health
57() FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
department sliould adopt the policy of constantly urftiiijj;' this inexpen-
sive preventive measure, which can be done almost in a sentence.
It Avonld take but little enconracement for those who are lead-
ing in the campaiern for race betterment to set in motion a sentiment
that wonld soon establish health inspections as a conmion practice
among onr people.
Dr. S. a. Knoi'f
An examination for tuberenlosis prior to admitting an individual
into a workroom or factory where he comes in close contact with
others would seem to be the best safeguard to others.
Our municipal and federal governments should take the lead
in this matter. Have every municipal employee and every employee
in post-offices or other federal departments examined for tubercu-
losis. Federal offices should be models of sanitation and proper ven-
tilation, so that the dangers of contracting a predisposition to
tuberculosis should be reduced to a minimum.
An annual, or better yet semi-annual, examination of every in-
dividual in every community w^ould lead to the early discovery of
tuberculosis in any member of the community ; his being taken care
of at the right time and in the right place would eliminate him as
a danger to the family, and tuberculosis would no longer be a family
disease.
Dr. H. ^Y. Austin
The medical examinations to determine Avhether there are any
mental or physical defectives among the one million arriving immi-
grants at Ellis Island. N. Y.. during a year (occasionally five thou-
sand during one day) is, from the race betterment standpoint, in
so far as it relates to this country, most important
Dr. Eoswell H. Johnson
Freedom from venereal disease before marriage, at least for men^
must be attested to by competent physicians by competent tests,
the state assuming a share of the financial burden.
Rev. Newell Davight Hillls
The city of Dresden, in Germany, spent $350,000 in accumulat-
ing facts. They went into tenement-house regions and studied the
factory-class folk, then put up there the result of their series of
experiments, and I wish you would notice very carefully — since I
am condensing a volume into about a minute and a half — the result
of their experiment. First of all, there is a report on a chart of the
vital experiment. They took one thousand boys on Monday morn-
ing, tested them as to their gripping capacity, their lifting capacity,
tested them as to their lung capacity, tested them as to their heart
action and as to their memory.
Monday night came and at six to eight they were put through
these tests as rapidly as possible. In one test in nine to ten hours
they had lost ten per cent of their gripping power and of their lift-
ing poAver and of their nerve force — an excellent example of the
law of diminishing returns. Monday night, of course, they rested.
CONSTRUCTIVE SUGGESTIONS SUMMARIZED Oil
"Wlien Tuesday morning came, they had only returned to ninety-
eight. Tuesday night they were dowTi to eighty-eight. When Sat-
urday came they were down to ninety-three in the morning. They
lost two per cent in Monday 's work ; two per cent Tuesday, one per
cent Wednesday, half of one per cent on Thursday, and then they
found it was absolutely necessary — ^to put those boys back in the
beginning — to give tliem one day of rest, which they called the library
day or a hospital day or a picture gallery day for the body as well
as for the soul. Then i\ronday morning they were back again to
normal. They had to skip one day. It turned out to be a physio-
logical law, or a hygienic law, a nerve law, a chemical law so to
speak, or a mineral law if you want to speak of it in that way.
Then came the other tests. There were probably enough tests
on the influence of nicotine on a working boy's body to fill the en-
tire side of this room. First of all, a little jar with a growing weed,
then here there was a little jar with a growing shrub, there a jar
with a large stalk of corn. They breathed a few breaths of nico-
tine into the glass jar that they put down over the weed and the
corn, so that the little plant had to breathe the nicotine. The most
revolting ulcers broke out on the vegetable life. The plants secreted
a vegetable excretion that would answer to the saliva. It was enough
to nauseate a body's stomach simply to look at the result.
Then there were two tests as to the influence of alcohol upon
children's bodies and the physique of the working men, tests in re-
gard to the collections of dust in the lungs of a boy that worked in
a stone quarry and a girl in the department store breathing foul
air all day long — a marvelous city's test. There were photographic
tests exhibited of the influence of various things on the heart. Then
there were great physical tests in regard to the body.
No country has any right to impose burdens and responsibilities
on noble physicians and on clergymen. The state owes it to the
physician who has done so much for us and OAves it to the teacher
and the preacher and the justice of the peace to make it absolutely
obligatory to keep a fair statement open to inspection of everybody
as to the physical history of every boy and girl that lives in a com-
munity, so that whenever they have any disease, the law shall say
it is the duty of that physician, not simply to put a red card, "scar-
let fever," on the door, but to write out a full story, so that when
the boy and the girl come to their wedding time, they know what
lies back of them.
MISCELLANEOUS
Dr. H. W. Austin
Opinions differ as to the principal factor in race improvement, and
one of the following is frequently offered : Education ; physical train-
ing ; religious instruction ; medical instruction : temperance ; chastity;
proper mating ; sanitary environment during childhood : hygienic
diet ; clothing and housing ; social reform, especially in the way of
amusements for all ages: proper marriage laws; laws to prevent the
multiplication of the weak-minded, criminals, and those who have
been insane, by sterilization.
'Olb FIRST NATlONWr. CONFERENCP: ON RACE BETTERMENT
Dean Wm. W. Hastings
It is better to have fillings in your teeth than to lose them en-
tirelj', but better still to choose good parents and use a good tooth
brush freel^v and not need the fillings.
It is better to take the morning cool bath daily, cleanse the skin
and tone up the arteries than to put all the work of elimination on
the lungs and kidneys and contract some chronic disease at fifty.
It is better to take time and take it regularly for proper
elimination than to suffer fatigue and loss of the power of mental
concentration from the reabsorption of poisons into the system.
It is better to stand up straight like a man than to approximate
the all-fours habit of our cousins, the apes, and contract spinal cur-
vature, limit vital capacity, and suffer ultimately from nervous and
lung troubles.
It is better to eat lightly and simply of digestible food than to
consume half the energy produced by this same food in the processes
of preparation for assimilation ; better also to abstain from head-
aches and other symptoms of autointoxication due to wrong feed-
ing. Better to leave the young pig in the mire than to help him out
by being compelled to expend your vital energy in his elimination.
It is better to sleep in a close room long and laboriously than
not to sleep at all, but best to sleep with windows open wide or out
of doors and save an hour of life daily.
It is better to allow yourself some amusement daily for a few
minutes at least, but not preferably for several hours in a stuffy
theatre or public dance hall until late at night. We Americans are
losing our mental poise partly by indulging in the tfinse, exciting
things rather than retaining the simple home amusements of our
English forebears.
It is better to do resistive exercises in your own room or formal
gj-mnasties in the gymnasium than to get no exercise at all
and no neuro-muscular tone, but best of all get out of doors and
work or play where God meant you to be. Men require recreation,
relaxation for strong life and long life.
It is better to marry than to burn, Paul says, but better still to
remain single and burn out your life in the service of humanity
than to marry ^(Without health and without perfect mating. Even
the birds know better than this. If wedded life is the most natural
and most important matter in the world, individual and national,
why not prepare for it by seeking the greatest possible physical
perfection and mentality and real character and by a study of the
nature and function of true love, which is the highest force in all
Nature.
Dr. Guilford H. Sumxer
Curative processes, while very necessary, are not the most essen-
tial to the public in general. We must not only study the clinic,
but the street, the alley, the back yard, insanitary privy, the pollu-
tion of streams and all kindred subjects which are disease-producers.
These very important subjects are the doctor's domain. Numerous
CONSTRUCTIVE SUGGESTIONS SUMMARIZED 579
new topics must be discussed, which deal with the relationship of
medicine to society, and bear on the economic basis of disease.
Dr. S. a. Knopf
Education, wise legislation, rational temperance movements,
better food and better cooking, and popular healthful engagements
for the masses, are, to my mind, the most rational means to combat
the alcoholic evil.
The predisposing factors to tuberculosis, such as child labor,
sweatshop labor, too long working hours for men and women, bad
housing in tenements, apartments, lodgihg houses and hotels in city
and country, including farm houses, boarding schools, orphan asy-
lums, and other institutions housing many people, must be com-
bated by rational laws and their strictest enforcement.
Municipal Hotels
Dr. S. a. Knopf
Cheap lodging houses and hotels should be done away with, sub-
stituting for them sanitarily constructed municipal hotels and lodg-
ing houses.
National Control of Liquor Traffic
Dr. Henry Smith Williams
The great truth is that the real solution of the liquor problem
must come through taking the control of the traffic out of individual
hands, making it so that no individual and no corporation makes
money out of the sale of liquor. That is the great truth which
originated and was promulgated in Sweden.
National Health Department
Dr. Henry Baird Favill
The necessity for some central federal health organization is
agreed upon by all those familiar with the situation.
Dr. Carolyn Geisel
The Government has paid nineteen millions of dollars to call the
boys back to the farm. When has it paid ninety cents to call the
woman back to the home ? And until you call her back to the honie,
the foundation of the Government is gone. Why race betterment
if you have no home? And can you have a home without a female
person around?
Dr. J. H. Kellogg
The establishment of a National Department of Health will pro-
vide a central bureau by which to unify the work and collate its
results and interpret them to the people.
The United States Government has supplied every farmer in the
United States many times over with literature telling how to raise
the best crops, how to produce the fattest pigs and the finest horses
and cattle. How much more important that not only every farmer,
580 KlUST XATI()N.\[. CON'FKRENCK ON liWK BKTTKRMENT
but every family, slioukl l)e instructed in the principles of right
livin<r — hmv to jirodnee strong, sane, healthy, and efficient human
beings.
Rev. Caroline Bartlett Crane
To the wise and discriminating person, it is evident that each
community must not only do its own part, but it must maintain a
partnership in public hygiene with other communities, under super-
vision of the state, which grants to municipal corporations all the
rights and privileges they possess, and which may naturally be
looked to to maintain substantial justice between these corpora-
tions: also, that states, and communities within states, may justly
expect the national Government to exercise strongly, in behalf of
the general welfare, any power it may possess ; as, for example, the
power assumed to itself by what is known as the "Inter-State Com-
merce clause" of the Federal Constitution.
National League of Employers
Melvil Dewey
In talking with Doctor Kellogg, he suggested that an outcome
of the Conference ought to be a national league of employers who
Avould refuse to take into their offices, as I have for many years, a
boy who uses tobacco or liquor or profanity or vulgarity. If we
would begin Avith a league of employers wdio should say as a matter
of economics and of practical business wisdom, "We will not em-
ploy in our offices or in certain places any young man who uses
tobacco, liquor, profanity or vulgarity, it would help immensely."
For the boy who wants to get. on in the w^orld. if he knew a thou-
sand employers in America would absolutely refuse to have him
in their employ, it would help him to take that attitude, and as a
practical example, it would be easier to combat the evil.
The employers of the Employers' League will pledge themselves
not to employ users of alcohol and tobacco if you go as far as that.
We could get a thousand employers in a very short moment who
would refuse to take into their employ any man, boy, or woman
either, addicted to this vice that is making a race of runts.
Naturalization upon Qualification
Prof. Sidney L. Gulick
For the real and full assimilation of foreigners, moreover, nat-
uralization upon qualification is essential. Provision should accord-
ingly be made for proper education of aliens in American history,
ideals, political practices, and the English language. Only when
aliens qualify, should they be given the ballot.
The Negro Race
Booker T. Washington
Those of you who would keep the body of my race strong, vig-
orous, and useful, should use your influence to keep the bar-room
closed — to keep whiskey away from the negro race.
CONSTRUCTIVE SUGGESTIONS SUMMARIZED 581
I want to ask you to use your influence to keep the patent medi-
cine nostrums away from my race.
You can help the negro in two ways, by being: frank with him,
telling him about his faults, and by helping him to improve by prais-
ing just a little more.
It is immediately important for the sake of the colored woman —
and equally important for the sake of the health, happiness and
upbuilding of your race — that that colored woman or colored girl
who plays such an important part in the rearing of a large portion
of the white people should be intelligent, that she should be clean,
that she should be, above all things, virtuous.
Dr. S. a. Knopf
Education by lectures, distribution of literature, and tuberculosis
exhibitions in the districts of colored people will doubtlessly do a
great deal of good.
Open-Air Schools and Outdoor Sleeping
Dr. S. a. Knopf
Open-air schools, and as much open-air instruction as possible in
kindergarten, school, and college, should be the rule. Indoor in-
struction should be the exception. There should be no home les-
sons for the younger children. Love for life in the open should be
inculcated in the young and old throughout the country. There
should be a sufficient number of public parks and playgrounds in
our great cities to counteract congestion and to reduce it to a mini-
mum. The roofs of all city houses should be utilized to give more
open-air life to the inhabitants by making them into roof gardens,
recreation centers or playgrounds.
Outdoor sleeping should be encouraged, whenever feasible, as a
preventive of tuberculosis.
Personal Hygiene
Dr. W. a. Evans
The individual can contribute tow^ard race betterment by keep-
ing his body in better condition, by maturing and by caring for a
"better machine than is the present average machine.
Police Court Records
Dr. Henry Smith Williams
Let the records of our police court be given to the saloon-keeper,
and let him be restricted from selling alcohol to a person who has
"been arrested for intoxication, for a period of one year, let us say,
or two years, and take away his license if he violates that. Take
away his license at once if he ever sells to a minor.
Procreation of Tuberculous
Dr. S. a. Knopf
Procreation of the tuberculous should be prohibited by law and
the prevention of it taught to every tuberculous adult. Violators of
this law should be punished.
582 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
Prohibition
George B. Peak
I believe that the only successful fight against alcoholism is to
stop the open places that educate the young man to drink.
Public Baths
Judge Ben B. Lindsey
A gang of bedraggled, dripping little boys that a policeman had
dragged out of the only "swimming pool" in town, down by the
railroad track, was brought into court because some prudish ones
could not bear to see little boys in that unfortunate state. I found
on investigation that it cost us several thousand dollars a summer
to have two fountains in front of the Court House, in which sported
little boys of brass and iron clad in a nice smart suit of paint. I
said to myself, if this town can pay several thousand dollars a sum-
mer for artificial fountains with boys of brass and iron, it can pay
something for boys of flesh and blood.
The judgment of the court, in that case, was not that they be sent
to jail. I said, "Kids, you better go swimming in the fountain
since there is no swimming pool." But in time — when the com-
munity woke up to the fact that it was not the child that ought to be
before the bar of justice, but the community — we had seven public
baths in the park and one great, splendid public bath in the town, and
we didn't need to jail any more boys for that sort of thing.
Public Discussion
Dr. H. W. Austin
Public discussion of the subject in which men and women of
national reputation take part, which may appear in the public press,
would do much to educate the public and advance the cause of race
betterment.
Publishers' League
Melvil Dewey
I wish someone would take up here and give some sidelight on
what the publisher said who stated he was very ready to join in a
league of publishers that would refuse to break into their columns
the advertising of alcohol, tobacco, and patent medicines, get-rich-
quick schemes, or any other thing distinctly inimical to race bet-
terment. There are hundreds of publications in this country. This
Conference should unify them to form a league of that kind. What-
ever you may say on drink and liquor, we will all agree that it is a
bad thing for the race to have it advertised and thrown before them
in all sorts of ways.
Race Betterment League
Dr. Luther H. Gulick
In view of the fact that there is at present no source from which
authoritative, simple information can be secured with reference to
the subject of better mating and better rearing, I ask that the Execu-
CONSTRUCTIVE SUGGESTIONS SUMMARIZED 583
tive Committee be requested to consider the matter of forming a
Eace Betterment League.
How Women May Suppress the Brothel
Dr. J. H. Kellogg
If the women of this town would say to themselves. "We will
not have a brothel in this town," there would be none. How would
you get rid of them ? Why, if you could not induce your husbands,
by continual clamor, to take proper action in this matter, you would
be justified in going out en masse and tearing that house down.
Registration of Venereal Disease
Dr. J. N. HuRTY
The law should require the prompt reporting of cases of the
hereditary plague. They are, except in certain instances, acquired in
sin and self-disgrace.
Safety Appliances
Judge Ben B. Lindset
Sixteen thousand children were made orphans in a few years in
three or four states in this nation from explosions in coal mines, a large
part of which could have been avoided, according to government
reports, if they had used the right kind of safety appliances. You
can't get rid of delinquency unless you put the child in the bosom
of the home and a father and mother there to look after him.
Sanitary Kitchens
Hastings H. Hart
I was perfectly astonished to find in the city of Jackson last year
the finest kitchen I ever expect to see this side of Heaven, a sanitary
kitchen in the school for the deaf. The school superintendent
searched the world over for ideas, then built an institution that may
serve as a model for at least the whole Southern country. Somebody
gave him five thousand dollars and he has established a sanitary
kitchen which is beyond our conception.
Seaside Sanatoria
Dr. S. a. Knopf
For children afflicted with glandular, joint, and bone tuberculo-
sis we should have seaside sanatoria. Some of our discarded battle-
ships or cruisers may be utilized for this purpose instead of being
sold as junk or made to serve as targets.
Segregation of Tuberculous aild Alcoholic
Dr. S. a. Knopf
In prisons, segregation of the tuberculous from the non-tubercu-
lous and healthful indoor occupation under sanitary conditions should
be provided. Have the cells well aired and properly heated in winter,
584 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
and remove as far as possible all dei)ressing- psychical influence. Tu-
berculous prisoners should be treated like any other tuberculous
patient, and the more agricultural or horticultural work that all
prisoners can do under proper supervision, the few^er will develop
tuberculosis.
Dr. Henry Smith Williams
We must treat the dipsomaniac rationally — segregating him for
a sufficient period.
State Insurance
Dr. J. H. Kellogg
Through state life insurance, the whole population might be
brought under government medical supervision. By periodical ex-
aminations the early beginnings of chronic diseases might be detected
and thus arrested by timely instruction in regard to necessary
changes in habits or occupations, and every such case would be-
come an object-lesson by means of which relatives and friends should
be influenced to adopt preventives in time to avoid the same mala-
dies.
Frederick L. Hoffman
It is well known that annuitants are more likely to attain to old
age than persons badly provided for with the necessaries of life, and
it therefore follows that substantial improvements in the economic
condition of the population must necessarily tend towards the same
result. The economic importance of this question is quite consider-
able, in view of the increasing extent to which the pecuniary needs
of the aged are provided for now by the state, corporate, or private
pensions, best indicated in the case of England and Wales.
Dr. Lydia Allen DeVilbiss
The mother who risks her life to produce a child surely does as
great a service for the state as the man who kills another mother's
son in defense of it, and she ought to be so recognized, and pen-
sioned, if in need.
Dr. S. a. Knopf
There should be state insurance against tuberculosis, so that the
man without means may be assured that even if he is found to be
tuberculous, he or his family will not be in want. Until, as in Ger-
many, state insurance companies have their own sanatoria, our pri-
vate insurance companies should be permitted to establish and main-
tain sanatoria and special hospitals for their tuberculous employees
and policy holders.
Social Program
Dr. Luther H. Gulick
What provision do you make in Battle Creek whereby groups
of girls, Camp Fire Girls or others, or groups of boys or groups of
boys and girls together, with guardian or chaperone, can go off for
a tramp of five miles and find a good place to make a fire and a place
CONSTRUCTIVE SUGGESTIONS SUMMARIZED 585
to bake some potatoes and have a good time together and come back
home again normal, good ?
Are there any places where boys can do things who are motor
minded, who love tools and who want to make engines and automo-
biles and bicycles and steamboats and all those things? Do you
have a sane public school athletic league "1 If you have not, you have
not one of the most important social inventions.
What chance do you people in Battle Creek give to the children
under ten to come in contact with real Nature at first hand with
somebody that loves and understands it? "What chance is there
for them to get it down in their souls so they will have it as a pur-
chased possession all the rest of their lives?
If there is no such opportunity, get up a committee and get
such a place and administer it and see that Boy Scouts, Camp Fire
Girls, or anyone else — ^that these young people in their proper
places and at proper times get the chance to establish this neuro-
muscular habit of wholesomeness. When young people want to
have birthday parties, can you get the use of a room in a school
building for that purpose? If not, why not? There is no reason
w^hy the schools should not be used by the citizens for their social
purposes.
Is there anybody here who realizes that all of this conquering
of air has grown out of our knowledge about kites and that boys
love kites and that a kite-fl^'ing contest in Battle Creek or the model
aeroplane club would occupy the time of some hundreds of boys
probably? Are there any men and women in Battle Creek who
realize that to think up things of this kind, and put the machinery
back of them to make them happen, is the kind of thing that will
really deliver the goods?
State Investigation of Degenerate Communities
Dr. C. B. Davenport
Our studies have also led us to the consideration of degenerate
communities, and we have found them in almost every county
where careful studies of the population living in out of the way
places have been made. That it behooves this state to know some-
thing about its population, is our conclusion, because from such de-
generate communities, so far removed from social influences that
their existence even is not known to most of the people in the
county, certainly in the state — from such localities where the de-
generates are bred, go forth a stream of people who constitute cer-
tainly a large proportion of the paupers, beggars, the thieves, burglars,
and prostitutes who flock into our cities.
Statistics on Comparative Fecundity
Prof. Walter F. Wilcox
In my judgment, no statistical result could come from this Con-
ference more valuable than a concerted efl'ort to increase the avail-
able information regarding the comparative fecundity of the. va-
586 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
rioiis strains in our i)0[)ulation, for this inforlnatiou lying unused
in the government iik's is of more value and importance than the
entire sum of information on differential fecundity now possessed
by the American people.
"Straight-on" Program
Dr. Luther H. Gulick
The "Straight-on" program is for persons eighteen and over.
A "straight-on" is a person who keeps his body, mind, and heart
fit for their most splendid work by living straight-on.
The program is divided into three parts: Physical, Mental, and
Spiritual.
A Straight-on should sleep not less than sixty hours a week. If
you must sit up late, or are out late, pay up. Try to average at
least seven hours of outdoor exercise each week. Keep clean inside
and outside. Read, own and reread each year not less than three
strong books having thought new to you. Carry on some course of
study by mail or otherwise, a course of lectures or anything that
means going on.
Be alone and think out your own ideals toward progress at
least for four fifteen-minute periods a w^eek. Get acquainted with
some great poetical message each year.
Substitutes for Alcohol
Dr. Henry Smith Wh.liams
The best that I can hope, from my study of history and my
knowledge of human psychology, is that we may substitute the
milder drink for the stronger one, ultimately a still milder for that,
and ultimately an altogether non-alcoholic one. That, it seems to
me, is the principle we must attempt to apply.
Tax Liquor
Dr. Henry Smith Williams
I Avould s^y, tax liquor — a modification of Senator Work's idea
to put a very high tax on distilled beverages, double the present
tax at least.
Mrs. Charles Kimball and Elizabeth Hewes Tilton
The arrests for drunkenness having increased in Massachusetts
160 per cent in eleven years, we had a Commission to look into
the matter. Doctor Southard invited this Commission to the
Psychopathic Hospital and showed them one patient after an-
other clear out of their minds from alcohol. Doctor Southard said,
"Gentlemen, individual liberty is a doctrine very much in vogue.
From it I will not dissent. But I wish to say that a state that
licenses shops that sell insanity should pay out its millions liberally
to support the victims of its hobby."
CONSTRUCTI\^ SUGGESTIONS SUMMARIZED 587
Tobacco Legislation
Melvil Dewey
We should control the sale of tobacco as the French do, and
make it no longer an object for the small dealer to induce the boy
to become a smoker.
Town Planning
Frederick L. Hoffman
There is the utmost urgency in the earliest possible adoption of
rational town planning and cheap interurban transportation
schemes, such as have become typified on the Continent and within
very recent years in the United Kingdom.
Rev. Newell Dwight Hillis
The conclusion is that the factory region of the great city must
be rebuilt. Down come hundreds of tenements, therefore. The
new plan is a factory out in the center of an open field, then the
houses where the people live on the side where the trade winds blow
the smoke of the factory away from them. They have little houses
within walking distance and playgrounds within two blocks of
every child, plenty of breathing room and sunshine.
Vice Commissions
Dean Walter Taylor Sumner
The Vice Commission of Chicago was the first vice commission
ever established by a municipality and supported from the city
treasury. Nearly thirty others have been appointed since that time
and the remarkable thing about the vice commission has been this,
that they have been unanimous in their decision. Now here you
have groups of people, men and women all over the country, first of
all a moral view-point, second, with full information. And what do
we find as their decision? Briefly it is this. Any municipal officer
of any municipality which recognizes the social evil is thereby com-
mitting an immoral act. Segregation does not segregate, never has
and it never can. Furthermore, segregation does not solve even the
remotest phase of the problem. Rather it aggravates and intensifies
every phase of it. Regulation does not regulate. Rather it gives
a false security to young men and boys and the only method to pur-
sue is constant and persistent repression as the immediate methods,
absolute annihilation as the ideal.
Vocations
Melvil Dewey
An appeal to the women of America with faith, hope, and cour-
age, to put their education, their power of detail work, and any
initiative they may possess at the service of the state, at the same
time warning them that much harm has been done by indiscreet,
pushing women with only a glimmer of knowledge who too often
approach civic councils with some whim or fad. so that all women's
demands are classed together.
588 FIKST NATIONAL CON FKHENCK ON RACE BETTERMENT
Pkok. Kouert Jahes Spkague
AVhen we get free work in the open air for both men and women
we will get such wholesome, strong bodies that many of these great
problems we have been discussing' will simply disappear because
they won't exist. It seems to me that both men and women of our
race have got to get to work in the open air and the extent to
which we can do that will help to solve every one of these great
jiroblems we have before us.
In the United States the most of our criminals come from the
roving bachelor class of the twenties. In this country we have an
enormous number of young bachelors who come out from all parts of
the country who have had no opportunity to learn a trade, with all
the impulses of manhood. They struggle through those twenties
and come to the cities before they get settled in life. Gentlemen, an
efficient system for vocational education in this country will do many
of those things that the German system of education is doing. It
wall land our boys and girls both, we will say boys, with' an earning
power at twenty-two or twenty-three so that they can marry at twenty-
three or twenty-four or twenty-five, and support a family, and will
do much for the reduction of our criminal classes, a large majority of
which come from that very zone of life. It will accomplish much
for doing away with the prostitution in this country, because every
time a wage-earning boy marries a girl and establishes a home under
the right conditions, he removes the material for all of that kind of
thing.
Education the Watch-Tower against Disease
E. E. RiTTENHOUSE
Is there any sound reason why our communities should not have
a watch-tow^er of education to inform people of their danger and
to teach them how to detect their approach to degenerative diseases,
which are on the increase?
Woman Suffrage
Arthur Hunter
I am absolutely sure that the small advantage claimed for alco-
hol is upset many, many times by the evils wdiich come from the
use and abuse of it, and I am sure w^hen the women get to vote, we
are going to get freedom from it that we have never had in the
past, and this one thing, more than any other, has made me an ad-
vocate of suffrage and a strong one.
Dr. J. H. Kellogg
The worst thing in all the world, the most dreadful thing, is
the slavery of women to men. By and by the ballot will give
women freedom. When women get the franchise, I believe the
white-slave traffic, and all other kinds of slavery of women to men,
will be abolished, and the w^orld will be freed from this greatest
evil.
CONSTRUCTIVE SUGGESTIONS SUMMARIZED 589
Dr. Carolyn Geisel
[To Women]
There will be thrust into your hands before very long (you can-
not escape it) that little piece of paper called the ballot. It is as
surely coming" as tomorrow is coming, wanted or not. It doesn't
matter — it is coming. "Will you use it for the liberty of your sisters ?
Or will you say, "Leave politics to men"? If you must go into
politics to liberate helpless little girls who are enslaved now, then
do it. Do it as quickly as ever you can.
Dr. Guilford H. Sumner
If the manhood of this country will not respond to the call of
this great reformation, then let the women take the reins of govern-
ment into their own hands and rid the world of the destructive
agencies that are destroying the motherhood, womanhood, and
morals of the home. I mean by this that, should men not see the
necessit}^ of taking this advanced step, then it is time for women
to take matters into their own hands and protect that which men
refuse to do.
Women Jurors
Graham Taylor
We must humanize our courts, and we will have to have women
jurors. We will have to do what Judge Pickney, of the Juvenile
Court, has done : see to it that a woman assistant judge hears the
cases of delinquent girls in chambers with no one present except
the children's parents and the witnesses. We will have to enlist
all the agencies that lie back of the family life.
Waverly House
Dr. S. a. Knopf
We have established a house and we do not call it a Magdalene
Home, but simply "Waverly House." There any poor girl tired
of that life, who wishes to leave it, is received with open arms,
given instruction, taught some kind of trade, and, if pos.sible, is
returned to her family or given an opportunity to earn an honest
living. I believe we can do a great deal for them. We have thirty-
three per cent of cures, and that is a good per cent. Thirty-three
per cent of those unfortunate women have been returned to their
homes, have been returned as useful and noble women and mem-
bers of society. We have also looked after their physical welfare
and have tried to make them healthy, as future mothers; for they
are entitled to the same privileges that we are. Our little move-
ment, which we call the '"Waverly House," has also added a bit
to the betterment of the race. I ask that you, going out, going home,
will try to start such a movement and give your sisters another
chance to be mothers also and thus help in the betterment of the
race.
RESOLUTIONS
Resolutions Offered at the First National Conference on Race Bet-
terment and Referred to the Executive Committee
Prof. Walter F. Willcox, Cornell University, Ithaca, N. Y.
Resolved, That the "National Conference on Race Betterment ap-
point a committee with power —
1. To memorialize the Congress of the United States in the name
of this Conference, urging it to provide the funds needed for com-
piling the returns now on the schedules of the census of 1910 and
thereby measuring the fecundity of the races and national elements
within the Ignited States ;
2. To attempt to secure the presentation of similar petitions
from other organizations or from individuals interested in this sub-
ject.
Whether such a resolution would be welcome or not, I sincerely
hope that individuals will write to individual Congressmen, urging
such action as is here proposed.
Melvil Dewey, Lake Placid, N, Y.
Resolved, That the marked success of this first Race Betterment
Conference, and its great promise of future practical usefulness,
clearly show the need of continuing its work in annual or biennial
meetings.
[How many think they ought to be annual or biennial meet-
ings?] [A big show of hands.]
Resolved, That the present Executive Committee be asked to
serve as a permanent Executive Board with power to add to their
number, to call meetings, appoint committees and in all matters act
for and represent this Congress.
[Certainly the five men who have organized this meeting have
our confidence in carrying on future work and in representing us.
Those of you who favor this resolution, please show your hands.]
[Many hands raised.]
Resolved, That we ask the Executive Board to appoint a Race
Betterment Council of One Hundred, representing various sections
and agencies interested in Race Betterment, and also to provide
for affiliating with this Congress such institutions and organizations
as will cooperate in its work,
[So many have said, especially the women, that they wanted to
be identified with this that the Women's Club, the State Federa-
RESOLUTIONS
591
tion of Women's Clubs, are ready to take hold and to carry on this
work. How many are in favor of this resolution?] [Many hands
raised.]
Resolved, That all resolutions submitted to the Congress shall
be referred to the Executive Board, which shall make needed revi-
sion in such as it deems wise to submit to vote of the Congress or
Council ; and no resolution or recommendation shall be promul-
gated as the action of Congress, Council or Executive Board unless
approved by a four-fifths vote.
[If four-fifths are agreed on the recommendation of a Committee,
it may go out as fairly representing, but if sixty vote for it and
fifty against it, it is not fair to commit the rest to that. This is pro-
tection against some earnest souls who mean all right, but are al-
ways trying to get in a resolution. After an eloquent speech you
can carry almost any audience before they have had time to give the
matter careful consideration. Plow many approve of this principle ?]
[Many hands shown.]
[And finally, you know at the great Panama Exposition, one
year from now, the leading congresses of the world interested
in all kinds of work and welfare, will hold meetings, and that
the questions that have been before us here are not American
questions, but they are race questions. It would be most unfor-
tunate if this Congress that has made this wonderful start should
not be represented at San Francisco ; if it is not, the interests are
surely to be represented in some other way, and many feel that this
resolution would fairly express your sentiment. How many think
this is desirable?] [A few hands raised.]
Resolved, That we recommend the Executive Board to arrange
for a meeting of the National Conference on Race Betterment in
connection with the international meetings during the San Fran-
cisco "World's Fair of 1915.
Cressy L. Wilbur, M.D., Chief Statistician, United States Census Bureau,
Washington, D. C.
Whereas, Accurate statistics of births, still births, deaths, and
the causes of illness, disability and deaths, are indispensable for in-
telligent progress in race improvement; therefore,
Resolved, That the National Conference on Race Betterment
earnestly recommend the passage of adequate laws for this pur-
pose and the thorough enforcement, by the regular and systematic
application of the penalties therein contained, of existing laws, so
that the United States may possess, at the earliest possible moment,
useful vital statistics covering its entire population.
592 FIRST XATIONAI; CONKERKNCE ON RACK BETTERMENT
Mr. H. fi. Laughlin, Superintendont Eugenics Kecord Office, Cold Spring
Harbor, Long Tsland. N. Y.
''I should like to see this Convention yo on record, if it chooses,
as favoi'ing: the sterilization of proved degenerate stoek when segre-
gation ceases."
Mr. George B. Peak, President Central Life Assurance Society of the
United States, Des Moines, Iowa.
Resolved, That since it is an established and indisputable fact
that the use of alcohol as a beverage is injurious to the mental,
moral, and physical condition of man, and that its injury is con-
tinued to the children of those v^^ho are polluted by its use, we there-
fore—
Resolve, That the saloon business is the great foe to race better-
ment ; it is a burden upon civilization and there are no good results
from it ; it lives by the destruction of the most valuable asset of the
world — man. We, therefore —
Resolve, That all lovers of the race should unite in the final
closing of the saloon and the overthrow of the liquor power, that
conditions may be more favorable for race improvement.
Dr. Luther H. Gulick, New York, N. Y,
[Note. — Doctor Gulick was delegated to s\im up the expressions of the Conference in
"six or seven miniites."]
To sum up a Conference on Eace Betterment in six or seven
minutes in the terms in which the ideas have been expressed is im-
possible. What I have attempted to do is to put together the con-
structive part of this Conference as expressed in the program, in pri-
vate conversation, or merely in the atmosphere. This will be fol-
lowed by a resolution which I shall move be referred to the Exec-
utive Committee.
We believe that the core of Eace Betterment consists in promot-
ing more and better homes.
1. Domesticity.
To this end we believe that the love of home and domestic
things needs to be given opportimity that is rarely found today.
The first and most important nascent period for the domestic in-
stinct comes in girls before they are twelve. To give opportunity and
incentive and tradition in playing house and playing ^ith and lo%*ing
dolls, we regard as basal to the building up of those desires that lead
people to prefer home and children to other careers. No subsequent
training in domestic science or art can take the place of the love of
home and of children.
RESOLUTIONS 593
2. Inheritance Social Tradition.
"We believe that the transmission of psychic character is sacred
in the same sense as is the transmission of physical life and that
both should be kept inviolable. We think, therefore, that children
should never be predominantly entrusted to the care of nurses.
Much of home work may be done by others, but when the relation
of mothers to their children is taken by nurses or other women, the
essence of the home itself has disappeared.
This relation of parents to children must provide for them en-
thusiastic leadership in wholesome adventure. As children grow
older, parents will need to cooperate in groups and make use of
the specialist and genius. The mere providing of space, time, and
implements is no more adequate for the induction of a higher child
life than it is for adult life. Tradition, leadership and genius is as
necessary in the one case as in the other.
3. Inhentance Germ-Plasm.
The splendor of love is to be achieved most readily by those in
whom the sex feeling is long circuited into noble action before it
acquires any habit of direct expression. Hence our informational
work must be accomplished before children reach the teens.
We must make the factors of personal and race betterment matters
of every day, as are breakfasts, sunsets, and the opening of flowers.
All of the children's questions should be answered truthfully, irre-
spective of age. Children will remember only what they are physi-
ologically ripe for. We must make the dangers to the personal
and race stream as common knowledge as are the dangers of fire
and accident. The sources of this guidance should be those who
are in daily relations of affection to the children. These subjects
should not be separated from the rest of life. The time for in-
formation about mating is before the rapture of love has come
with its transfiguration of form and revelation of color.
In the foregoing I have avoided the use of the terms sex hygiene
and sex instruction because many of us object to these terms; for
they imply a divorce between these matters and the spiritual and
esthetic world. We wish our children to have all the information
belonging under these terms, but wish to have it given with the
larger significance of its relation to the whole of life.
Inasmuch as there is at present no source from which authori-
tative, simple information can be secured with reference to the
subjects of better mating and better rearing, therefore —
Be It Resolved, That the Executive Committee be requested to
consider the advisabilitv of forming a Race Betterment League.
REPORT OF THE SECRETARY
The idea of calling a National Conference on Race Betterment
was initiated by the Reverend Newell Dwight Hillis, Pastor of Plym-
outh Church, Brooklyn, N. Y. He presented it to Dr. J. H. Kellogg,
Superintendent of the Battle Creek Sanitarium, who in turn pre-
sented it to Prof. Irving Fisher, of Yale University, and to Dr.
C. B. Davenport, Director of the Carnegie Station for Experimental
Evolution, and to others interested in hygiene and eugenics. As a
result of the enthusiastic approval with which the idea was met
by everyone, a central committee was formed and a secretary ap-
pointed. The Battle Creek Sanitarium, Battle Creek, Michigan, ex-
tended to the Conference the gratuitous use of its facilities and
entertainment. Accordingly, the Sanitarium was chosen as the meet-
ing-place for the Conference, and the date was set for Thursday,
Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday, Jan. 8th to 12th. IDl-t.
Sessions and Speakers
The first session of the Conference was called to order in the
Sanitarium Chapel at 10.30 A. M., Thursday, January 8th, by Dr.
J. H. Kellogg, the official representative of the Battle Creek Sani-
tarium, as host of the Conference. There were with him on the
platform Hon. John W. Bailey, Mayor of Battle Creek : Dr. Stephen
Smith, of New York, President of the Conference : Dr. J. N. Hurty,
of Indianapolis ; Hon. Jacob A. Riis, of New York ; Dr. S. Adolphus
Knopf, of New York; and the Rev. Charles C. Creegan, of Fargo,
N. Dak. The attendance of the meeting so far exceeded the ex-
pectations of the organizers that some two hundred people were
unable to enter the auditorium.
Prayer was offered by Reverend Dr. Creegan. Doctor Kellogg
then extended a cordial welcome to the Conference, in a short ad-
dress, and introduced the Mayor, who extended a welcome to Battle
Creek of the First National Conference on Race Betterment.
The aged President (ninety-two years old), personally typify-
ing the aim for which the Conference was called — a long, efficient,
and happy life for every citizen — was then formally introduced to
the delegates, amidst enthusiastic applause.
President Smith then called upon Reverend Dr. Creegan to pre-
side as Acting Chairman, and to conduct the proceedings of the
Conference in behalf of the President.
The Conference then proceeded as nearly in the order of the
REPORT OF SECRETARY 595
printed program as oue or two late necessary changes in engage-
ments of speakers, and a number of additions to the list, wonld
permit.
The Thursday evening session and all sessions thereafter, ex-
cept those for Monday, were held in the spacious gymnasium of the
Sanitarium, with audiences at each session of from fifteen hun-
dred to two thousand people. The Monday morning session was
held in the Sanitarium chapel, and the afternoon and evening ses-
sions of that day were held in the Post Theatre. There the entire
stage area was filled with seats and the auditorium itself was packed
to overflowing.
The officially registered delegates from different parts of the
country numbered 406.
Each session was opened by prayer. Those who led these de-
votions were Rev. C. C. Creegan, Rev. J. W. Beardsley, of the Theo-
logical Seminary of Holland, Mich., Reverend Dr. Bishop, of Grand
Rapids, and Dr. E. G. Lancaster, of Olivet College, Mich.
The Battle Creek Ministers' Association voted to make the Sun-
day during the Conference as "Race Betterment Day" in the churches,
and selected their topics accordingly. The pulpit of the Inde-
pendent Congregational Church was supplied on Sunday morning
by one of the speakers on the Conference program, Dr. Guilford
H. Sumner, and the pulpit of the First Congregational Church was
supplied Sunday evening by another Conference speaker, Mr. F. 0.
Clements.
The names of the following speakers did not appear on the
original program, as the final engagements with them were closed
after the program went to press:
Prof. Sidney L. Gulick, Kyoto, Japan.
Mr. F. 0. Clements, Dayton, Ohio.
Dr. James T. Searcy, Superintendent Alabama Hospitals for In-
sane.
Dr. Anna Louise Strong, National Child Welfare Committee,
New York, N. Y.
Mr. S. S. McClure, President S. S. McClure Co., New York, N. Y.
Dr. Lydia Allen DeVilbiss, of the Woman's Home Companion,
New York City, spoke in place of Mrs. Anna Steese Richardson.
Besides the addresses scheduled for them, the following made
additional addresses :
President Stephen Smith.
Dr. Carolyn Geisel.
Dean Walter Taylor Sumner.
596 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERiVIENT
Mr. F. 0. Clements.
-Dr. William W. Hastings.
Mayor John W. Bailey.
On account of a strike among the miners in the northern part
of the state of Michigan, Gov. Woodbridge N. Ferris was unable to
attend and address the Conference, and no paper by him, therefore,
appears in the printed records. The Governor sent his cordial
greetings to the Conference, and expressed keen regret at his in-
ability to attend.
Doctor Warthin's paper does not appear in the Proceedings, al-
though it was considered one of the most absorbing addresses de-
livered at the Conference. Mrs. Ella Flagg Young, Dr. Thomas
Darlington, and Dr. C. A. L. Reed sent late regrets for their inability
to attend and give the papers scheduled for them.
Besides the regular formal sessions, five additional sessions were
held for open discussion. These were presided over by Mr. Frederick
L. Hoffman, by Dr. Melvil Dewey, and by Dr. J. H. Kellogg for
different sessions. These meetings were largely attended, and the
discussions were lively. A report of them appears in the printed
transactions, in addition to a full report of the formal addresses.
On Sunday evening of the Conference, three sessions were held
simultaneously — one in the Sanitarium gymnasium with an audience
of about seventeen hundred ''women only;" another in the Sani-
tarium chapel, with an audience of nearly one thousand "men
only;" and a third in the Independent Congregational Church of
^Battle Creek, presided over by Rev. Thornton Anthony Mills.
Usefulness of the Conference
The Conference served as a forum for the presentation of all
sides of Race Betterment questions. One of its notable features,
which proved its need, and the possibilities of its ^^sefulness, was
the large number of practical suggestions which were brought out,
and upon which definite action is possible. The suggestions are
abstracted and listed in these transactions.
All business matters of the Conference, and all plans for future
action, were left in the hands of the Executive Committee. A date
was set for its meeting soon after the close of the Conference to
discuss the sub.ject of its fields of usefulness, and to make plans for
promoting its aims.
A number of expressions of gratitude were voted to different
members of the Conference during the various sessions.
REPORT OP SECRETARY 597
Mental and Physical Perfection Contests
Mental and Physical Perfection Contests were held in connection
with the Conference, and attracted wide attention, not only in
Battle Creek, but throughout the state and the nation. Several thou-
sand school children and about six hundred babies were tested as to
their mental and physical efficiency, from which tests vahiable data
were obtained for Race Betterment purposes. The score card by
which the school children were recorded was furnished by Dr. Frank E.
Bruner, of the Chicago Board of Education and by Dean William W.
Hastings of the Normal School of Physical Education. Battle Creek.
The tests were made under the direct supervision of Dean Hastings.
The score card by which the babies were recorded Avas furnished
by the Better Babies Bureau of the Woman's Home Companion, of
.New York City. The women 's clubs of Battle Creek assisted in this
contest, as also the Sanitarium Hospital Training School and the
Nurses' Alumni Association and doctors from the city and from
the Sanitarium. Special assistance was rendered by Drs. B. N. Colver
and W. F. Martin who devoted much of their time to the Avork. Drs.
Roth, Allen, Kimball, Holes, Powers, Eaton, Putman, Hoyt, Mosher,
Stoner, Hubly, Dryden and Vandervoort-Stegman also rendered in-
valuable assistance in the critical examination of the many hundreds
of children of all ages who entered into the contest.
At the last session of the Conference, prizes Avere aAvarded to the
children scoring highest in each year's group from six months to
nineteen years. The prizes were in the form of gold medals
stamped Adth the official insignia of the First National Confer-
ence on Race Betterment. In connection with the bahy contest,
educational literature Avas distributed on the subjects of "Sug-
gestions to Mothers about the Care of Babies and Young Children,'*
and "Feeding of School Children." The dentists of Battle Creek
made special examinations of the teeth of the school children, and
rendered a report, Avhich appears in the Proceedings. Educational
literature on this subject Avas distributed.
These contests resulted in numerous hygienic reforms in the
city of Battle Creek. Through the cooperation of the Superin-
tendent of Schools, an open-air classroom Avas established; as was
also dental inspection, better ventilation, and the elimination of
basement classrooms.
One interesting outcome of the baby contest was the adoption,
because of the good record it made, of a baby that had been de-
serted by its father.
C98 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
Exhibits
A large exhibit was shown in the Sanitarium Annex. Nine-
teen organizations working for Race Betterment participated.
These exhibits attracted wide interest, and were visited by one
thousand parents of Battle Creek, in addition to every school child
in the city, the Conference delegates, and Sanitarium patients.
Twelve experienced guides piloted the people through the various
exhibits, where fifteen explainers Avere stationed.
Moving Pictures
Moving pictures were shown at every session of the Conference,
and additional pictures were shown at special hours in connection with
the exhibits.
Entertainment
The delegates to the Conference were housed in the huge Sani-
tarium Annex, which was given over entirely to their use. The
large, cheerful lobby, with its inviting wood fire, offered an at-
tractive informal gathering-place.
On Friday afternoon the members of the Conference were en-
tertained by the Battle Creek Chamber of Commerce. Special cars
took the Conference members through the city of Battle Creek,
through one or two of its larger manufactories, where refreshments
were served, and to the Athelstan Club, which furnished a musical
entertainment. On Saturday afternoon a male quartette entertained
the delegates in the Sanitarium gymnasium.
The Social Secretaries of the Sanitarium were put at the service
of the delegates, and their offices were devoted to making the Con-
ference a social success. On Saturday a reception was held for the
purpose of formally introducing those delegates who had not already
met one another.
The Sanitarium gymnasium facilities were thrown open to the
Conference delegates, where they participated in the athletic exer-
cises, the marches and drills.
The Sanitarium lent to the delegates' dining room, in the
Annex, a number of its dietitians, to promote the dietary comforts
of the guests. The Sanitarium orchestra was also furnished to the
Annex throughout the sessions.
On Saturday evening a "Doctors' Banquet" was held, with Dr.
Victor C. Vaughan, of Ann Arbor, Mich., President-Elect of the
American Medical x\ssociation. and Dr. Lillian H. South, one of the
REPORT OF SECRETARY 599
Vice-Presidents of the same Association, the only woman who ever
enjoyed this distinction, as guests of honor. The banqueters were
entertained by witty and enthusiastic speeches.
After the Conference sessions were terminated, a banquet was
tendered to the thirty-four prize winners in the Mental and Physical
Perfection Contests and their parents. On following days banquets
were tendered the teachers of the city schools, and to everj^ employee
who participated in the Conference, and to every local associate of it,
to the number of 1,000.
The President's Departure
An affecting incident during the twelfth session (]Monday morn-
ing) of the Conference was the farewell of the venerable President,
Dr. Stephen Smith, when he was obliged to leave for New York before
the session was over. As he finished his farew^ell remarks and
passed down the aisle, the audience arose, and a voice started, "God
be with You till We Meet Again." Immediately the song was
taken up by every voice in the room.
The Press
The press showed a remarkable interest in the Conference. Ad-
vance notices of the meetings Avere sent out by the Associated Press,
the United Press, the Western Newspaper Union, and other
agencies. In all, the publicity before and during the Conference
totaled probably a million lines. During the Conference the follow-
ing news associations and new^spapers were represented : the Asso-
ciated Press, the United Press, the Scripps-McRae League, the Asso-
ciated Newspapers, The Detroit Free Press, the Chicago Tribune, the
Detroit News-Tribune, the Cincinnati Enquirer and Chicago Becord-
Herald, New York World, New York Herald, Philadelphia Becord,
and the Pathe Weekly moving picture firm, whose films are showm
to 20,000,000 people. Cable despatches by news agencies to London
and Paris papers carried the news of the Conference abroad. Post-
Conference publicity includes articles in medical, scientific, eco-
nomic, and other journals throughout the country. The Journal of
the Atnerican Medical Association sent a special writer, and de-
voted a generous space to reporting the Conference. The Michigan
State Board of Health devoted a monthly bulletin to a summary of
the papers of the Conference.
Emily F. Robbins, Secretary.
EXHIBITS
Exhibits were shown by the National Child Welfare Exhibition
Committee, the American Association for Study -and Prevention of
Infant Mortality, the Michigan State Board of Health, the Michi-
gan State Tuberculosis Society, the Committee of One Hundred
on National Health, the Battle Creek Health Department, and
several other Battle Creek organizations. These exhibits included
moving pictures and living demonstrations, and covered the subjects
of—
HEALTH PLAY
National Department of Health Home Playroom
Infant Mortality Backyard Gymnasium
Care of Babies Boy Scouts
Children's Diseases Camp Fire Girls
Milk Records Public Recreation
Food Buying SCHOOLS
Food Inspection Social Centers
Dental Clinic The School Building
Open-Air Sleeping Medical Inspection
Open-Air Schools
Educational Training
The exhibition was made under the supervision of Dr. Anna
Louise Strong, representative of the National Child Welfare Exhibi-
tion Committee, New York, N. Y.
THBOUGH A CHILD'S EYES
Anna Louise Strong, Ph.D., National Child Welfare Exhibition Committee,
New York, N. Y.
When I left the Annex to come down this afternoon, crowding
through the halls and in through the various rooms and in front
of the charts, and near the exhibit of foods were, I presume, at least
two hundred children. That is probably a conservative estimate.
It is not counting the adults and it is not counting the nearly three
thousand children who have gone through that exhibit during the
past five days. But the interesting part of it was, that those chil-
dren, many of them, were taking notes. Some of them had long
pieces of paper and note-books pretty well filled with information
about the welfare of the child — about the kind of food they ought
to eat, about the kind of toys the children ought to have and the
way the baby ought to be looked after. Those children were taking
notes to use in compo.sitions in the school. I went up to one child
600
EXHIBITS 601
and said, ' ' It looks to me as if there were going to be a great deal of
competition here." She smiled and said, "I am afraid there will
be so many there w411 hardly be any prizes, but," she added, "I
am not trying to get a prize. I am just writing my composition."
And I thought that was probably the attitude of perhaps many of
the mothers who came to the better babies contest, that they were
not trying for the prize, but it Avas to find out how their bab}^ stood.
If they got the prize they were very much pleased, but they wanted
first of all to find out what they could do for their babj^, just as the
children are up there now trying to find out these various facts for
their composition.
This child welfare exhibit is part of a rather large movement that
has spread over the country in the last three years, beginning with
a large exposition in New York three years ago this month, then
one in Chicago, then spreading to Kansas City, St. Louis. Louisville,
Montreal, Providence, Rochester, and other places, with a total
attendance of more than a million and a half people in the past few
years. I have just heard that as a result of the Exhibit which I
managed in Rochester last spring, they have secured a recreation
commission. The Mayor of the city was so impressed with the play-
ground part of the exhibit that he sent to New York to get a
playground expert to survey the situation and make recommenda-
■ tions. Another result was the introduction into the public schools
of courses for mothers. They hope to be able to manage courses
for mothers in questions of personal hygiene and the care
of babies. Another result of that same Rochester exhibit is the
formation of a society that is going to put up inexpensive work-
men's homes.
I think the thing that will be of most interest today will be to
tell you what I have learned from the child welfare exhibits of the
sort of things that children notice, the kind of things that affect
children. I have been tremendously impressed, in collecting com-
positions relating to child welfare in some of these past exhibits,
to find out how very detailed the knowledge of children is, how
much more they see about their own home than the parents realize,
how much more they see of the turmoil in the home than the parents
know, and of the various conditions in the home which the parents
themselves are perhaps insensitive to. I am going to read one ex-
tract from a composition. These compositions w^hich I have today
were not written after taking notes, but without any warning, in
school, a week after seeing the exhibit. They were asked to write
about the exhibit off-hand. If any adult goes into a room, he
notices in that room the immediate things that are to serve an ira-
602 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
mediate purpose. Yon have gotten into the habit of dropping out
of your notice a great many things that yon are not especially in-
terested in, and for that reason I think you will be very interested
in seeing the number of things the child notices in one of these ex-
hibits. This Avas a girl of ten describing a tidy and an untidy
room :
"Then in a corner opposite that it showed how dirty people keep
their houses. The room was dirty, old clothes on the bed that was
half made. The kitchen was dirty and dusty and a can of tomatoes
emptied out into the dishpan with greasy rags dripping above them
and dripping into them ; and the table cloth was all dirty and mussed
up, and there was some sauerkraut and cabbage mixed together
and cooked an hour or two too long. The coffee was the strongest
I have ever seen in my life and I don't believe I shall ever see any
more as strong as that as long as I live, and there was not any milk
for it, and the pickles were mouldy enough to kill any child, and the
sausage was terrible."
Do you think you would remember that much about the exhibit
a week after it was over? But these are the things the children
notice and these things have a very distinct bearing upon the in-
fluence in the home.
One other story: A small boy in Providence was seen by a man
going up to this same exhibit, of good and bad homes, and looking
into the bad bedroom. After a while two more small boys came
and remarked, "Huh, to our house ain't any of them like that,"
and they went on. The boy went away, came back after a little
while with a rather slatternly looking woman, and a little while
the discussion went on in low tones, then his voice rose and he said,
"Mother, those boys said their house wasn't like that. Why is
ours 1 ' '
Another thing I want to mention, first, the extent to which chil-
dren notice things, then the extent to which they are ready to go
ahead and act on what they have noticed. In that connection I want
to read another very short and rather pathetic composition of a
boy after the Rochester exhibit :
"The good food and bad are almost what I take, but I don't
drink coffee any more and will not take it. My brother used to
have coffee every meal, but since my mother was there, he drinks
no coffee but all milk and bread. Bread is about the only good
food there is, and I have had lately a good appetite for it. ' '
There is one more story. That is to illustrate this same point,
the extent to which children act upon the things they notice; the
extent to which children who have noticed what harm the pacifier
EXHIBITS 603
does the babj', will go to take it away when we adults who know
more about it would not do so. This boy was a Chicago boy and
he wrote to his teacher after coming back from his summer vaca-
tion and after he had seen the child welfare exhibit, and the com-
position was sent on up to Mrs. Ella Flagg Young. He said, ' ' I went
out to the country to spend the summer with my aunt, who had a baby
that was crying all the time. She said she thought the baby was very
cross. The next day it cried, and I said I thought perhaps it was be-
cause she gave the baby too much solid food, because it said in the
Child Welfare Exhibit that babies should not have solid food. My
aunt said, 'All right.' So she took it off solid food and gave it only
milk for a while and the baby wasn 't crying nearly so much. Then I
said to my aunt I thought the baby needed more fresh air because it
was very hot to keep the baby indoors and under the heavy covers and
mosquito netting, and it ought to go out doors. She told me to take
the baby out in the yard and I did and looked after it. And when
I came back home in the fall, the baby was not crying at all."
MOVING PICTURES
The Following Series of Moving Pictures and Lantern Slides were Shown
During the Conference:
Industrial Welfare Work
The Fly Pest
Boil Your Water
The Battle Creek Chautauqua
The Man Who Learned
Paragon Chestnuts
The Walking Party
Bread the Staff of Life
The Normal School of Physical Education
Battle Creek Plomecoming Week
Eochester Playground Film
The Visiting Nurse
The Price of Human Lives
Care of Blind Babies
Dissolving Stereopticon Views
Lakewood Farm
The X-Ray — Its Revelations
Brain and Nerves
Eugenics and Venereal Diseases .
PHYSICAL AND MENTAL PERFECTION CONTESTS
I. SCHOOL CHILDREN
AVm. W. Hastings, Ph.D., Dean Noi-mal School of Phy.sieal Education,
Battle Creek, Michigan.
The object of this contest is to call attention to the practical side
of Race Betterment. Little can be done for the improvement of
adults; the hope of the race lies with the children. Any scheme is
worth while, then, which will interest the children in themselves, and
interest the parents of the children in their development.
No plan is likely to emphasize so fully in the mind of the child
the value of health, vigor and efficiency as the giving of medals to those
possessing physical and mental perfection. Such a contest holds up to
the child 's mind as most desirable many qualities which had previously
seemed to him common and ordinary. His mind is led, by practical
■observation, to disting-uish some of the most essential factors in the
building of his own life. Teachers and parents are led to observe
physical defects and mental deficiencies, and to remove the cause.
One of the most important results which must accrue from such
general examinations — one which has always been observable in everj'
campaign of the kind — is the surprising prevalence of race de-
generacy, as indicated by poor teeth, defective eyesight, spinal curva-
ture and other postural defects.
AYhen it is the children of our own community who are found on
the decline, we begin to think it is time to act, and cannot content
ourselves with hearing sober warnings in scientific conventions and
with reading them in the leading magazines.
The task of selecting from tlie public schools the children whose
development entitles them to gold medals is completed. With the
best possible organization of forces, it took thirty observers seven days
to complete the physical tests of the children of Battle Creek. The
separate testing rooms provided for boys and girls of each school
presented the appearance of an almost continuous stream of young
humanity passing the various pieces of apparatus at the rate of be-
tween one or two per minute.
The students of the Normal School of Physical Education are to
be congratulated on having such a fine opportunity of testing and
estimating the development of the type of children whom they are
planning to serve in the near future. The city is to be congratulated
upon ha\ing such an effective school as this in its midst. We trust
PHYSICAL AND :MENTAL PERFECTION CONTESTS 605
that these physical tests will be repeated, if possible, twice a year in a
more leisurely fashion and that the children Avill be given copies of
their measurements in a form which will indicate to them how well
they are developed and in what they fail to conform to the normal.
If such measurements could be taken twice a year, in the fall and
in the spring, the interesting and instructive observation of the
parallel of the growth of plant and human life would be apparent.
"We know from Malling-Hansen's researches in Copenhagen, and those
of Mr. George Pinneo and myself in Springfield, i\Iass., that children,
like plants, stretch up in height in the spring and fill out in weight
thru the increase of storage matter in the tissues during the fall and
winter. We know that they grow in waves and have periods of ac-
celeration, but we should like to know how our own children grow,
why they do not grow more consistently ; we should like to have some-
one point out their defects and help us to remove them. Wlien half the
children in the United States are hindered in their growth by various
defects, when ninety-seven per cent of them have defective teeth, it is
surely time to look into the underlying causes and attempt to remedy
them.
TABLE I. METHOD OF SELECTION, SHOWING PROGRESSIVE ELIMINATION
Boys
I. Total Number of Children Examined 1724
II. Total of Normal Children 281
III. Total qualifying as Best Representative of Age in Grade
Schools and of grades in High School and Departmental
School 93 97 190
IV. Tot.al of Group III passing Teachers Grade Standard,
Classes A and B (over 85 per cent) 9.^. 81 174
Y. Total of Group IV passing as Normal in Mental Test 45 44 89
A'l. Total of Group V passing Dental Test 7 9 16
VII. Total of Group VI passing Eye, Ear, Nose and Throat Test 6 8 14
V^III. Real Medal Winners — Best of Age 6 5 11
METHOD OF SELECTION
I. The whole number of children examined in Battle Creek schools
was 3.537 : 1,724 boys and 1,813 girls.
II. All children found to be within the limits of normal variability
and above were selected.
1. Children who were under the twenty-five-per-cent grade of
those of the same age and sex in height were dropped. The standards
nsed were Hastings' Age Tables. (See Hastings' Manual for Physical
Measurements.)
2. Out of the group so selected, the children were chosen who did
not deviate in any of their measurements below the twenty-five-per-
cent grade of those of the same height, age and sex. The standards
nsed were Hastings' Age-Height Tables. By this method 281 boys and
Girls
Total
1813
3537
265
546
606 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
265 girls were classed as iiornial children, 546 children in all out of
3,537.
TIL The best-developed child of each age in the grade schools and
the best child of each age of each grade in the departmental school,
and the best of each age of each grade in the High School, were se-
lected from the foregoing group of normal children. The method
employed did not take into account absolute symmetry, but rather size,
strength and vitality.
The table of per cents by which these children were graded follows.
As will be noted, a certain percentage for each measurement is allotted
for conformity to the standard for the sex, age and height. One ad-
ditional point is scored for added development to the amount of the
probable deviation above the normal, that is to say, normal Lung Ca-
pacity for age twelve, height 140 centimetres (55 inches), for boys is
1.9 litres (116 cubic inches). The boy who has this development re-
ceives twelve per cent credit for the same.
A boy who is at the seventy-five-per-cent grade in development,
2.1 litres (128 cubic inches), receives one point more, or thirteen per
cent ; one who deviates above the mean value or normal by double the
amount of the deviation of the seventy-five-per-cent line from the
mean, twice .2 litres or .4 litres (28 cubic inches), is said to have
2 d or t^vice the probable deviation and receives two per cent, making
his total fourteen per cent ; 3 d or more gives him fifteen per cent,
the utmost credit which can be given for Lung Capacity in reckoning
the nine qualities measured on the basis of a total of one hundred
per cent credit.
The folloM'ing table illustrates the method of physical estimation :
RELATIVE PER CENTS FOR GRADING THE DEVELOPMENT OF NORMAL
CHILDREN ACCORDING TO THEIR MEASUREMENTS
Maximum Minimum
Vital Function f Chest. Expansion 15 12
Max. Min. -^ Lung Capacity 15 12
45 36 Respiratory Pleight Coefficient ., 15 12
Vital Size Breadth of Chest 15 12
Max. Min. <^ Depth of Chest 8 6
31 24 I Height Sitting 8 6
W'eight and Strength f Weight 14 12
Max. Min. <. Strength R. Forearm 5 3
24 18 [ Strength L. Forearm 5 3
Total 100 78
In getting the percentage standing of a given child, reference is
made to the Age-Height table and section to which his height entitles
him to be compared. The amount of his deviation from the type
presented in this height section is calculated for each quality in which
he has been measured, and divided by the probable deviation + to se-
PHYSICAL AND MENTAL PERFECTION CONTESTS 607
cure the ratio to the probable deviation and thus determine how many
units and tenths of units up to the allotted number of the table are
to be added to the minimum per cent allowed. Only two per cent to
three per cent above the minimum is allowed.
OBSERVATIONS
1. In the interests of symmetry, bone-lengths and girths could not
be treated like the foregoing measurements. No variation of more
than d, the probable deviation, could logically be allowed for them,
2 . From the point of view of growth, health and vigor, no maxi-
mum limit of deviation above the normal should be assigned, for the
greater the chest expansion, breadth of chest, etc., the more vigorous
the individual. In recognition of the claims of symmetry, however, not
more than three per cent excess was given for any quality, even the
most favorable. Excess of weight above 2d, twice the probable
deviation, was estimated to be excess in fat as a rule and not of value
to physical efficiency.
Dept of chest, height sitting and strength were not accorded so
large a place as other measurements in reckoning the physical standing
of the child. Growth of breadth of chest is one of the signs of ma-
turity ; excessive depth, a barrel-shaped chest, at least, is the typical
phthisical chest, the characteristic chest of immaturity. The w^hole
effect of this mode of selection was to count vital strength and health
more than sjanmetry and graceful lines in the selection.
3. As the result of the use of this mode of selection, out of 281
normal boys and 265 girls, ninety-three boys and ninety-seven girls
were selected as the best representatives of their age in those schools.
Numl>er of children qualifying as the best of each age from each of nine grade schools,
from each grade (7th and 8th) of the departmental school and each class (9th, 10th, 11th,
and 12th grades) of the High School.
Aae Boys Girls
5 2 1
6 7 6
7 5 7
8 7 6
9 7 9
10 X 8 8
11 9 10
12 8 8
13 10 10
14 9 11
15 7 7
16 5 5
17 4 4
18 3 3
19 2 2
93 97 Total, 190
IV. Group III were then submitted to the test of the teacher's
average grades and all eliminated who were below eighty-five per cent.
608
FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
No one was accepted who was not of the B, a or A class standing.
Ninety-three boys and eighty-one gii-ls. a total of 174 students,
survived this test.
V. Of this 174 students, forty-five boys and forty-four girls quali-
fied by the conditions of the Mental Test. It was not intended that
any but the most exceptional student should make one hundred per
cent. The time allotted for the tests prevented this and made com-
parative statement of ability possible.
TABLE OF NORMAL STANDARDS FOR MENTAL TESTS BY GRADES
Grade I
....75%
50.38
Deviation 6.62 . . .
....50%
43.75%
25%
37.12
Grade II
. . . .75%
57.25
Deviation 7.50 . . .
50%
49.75%
25%
42.25
Grade III
75%
57.45
Deviation 6.17 . . .
50%
51.28%
25%
45.11
Grade lY
75%
52 57
Deviation 3.64 . . .
. . . .50%
48.93%
25%
45.29
Grade V
75%
55.56
Deviation 5.06 . . .
50%
50.50%
25%
45.44
Grade VI
75%
56.96
Deviation 4.29 . .
50%
52.67%
Type
Grade VII
Deviation 3.90 .
,75% 61.15
.50% 57.25% Type
25% 53.35
Grade VIII 75% 68.49
Deviation 5.12 50% 63.37%
25% 58.25
Grade IX 75% 72.25
Deviation 5.25 50% 67.00%
25% 61.75
Grade X 75% 57.00
Deviation 4.00 50% 53.00%
25% 49.00
Grade XI 75% 71.00
Deviation 2.00 50% 69.00%
25% 67.00
Grade XII 75% 68.75
Deviation 6.25 50% 62.50%
25% 56.25
Any student whose deviation from the typical ability of the grade
made him fall below the twenty-five-per-eent line, was cast out of the
competition.
VI. Out of those who passed the mental test the Battle Creek
Dental Association found only seven boys and nine girls who qualified
as having practically perfect teeth. They discovered enough children
of each age to be deemed worthy of the gold medals for their teeth but
lack of other qualities caused them to fail to appear in the competi-
tion.
The following is a statement of the condition of the teeth in 561
of the most normal children in Battle Creek :
Number Children Examined
Bovs 229
Girls 332
.561 With Dirty Teeth
Bovs 142
Girls 170
PHYSICAL AND MENTAL PERFECTION CONTESTS 609
Practically Perfect 88 With Filthy Teeth . . .
Bovs 43 Boys . .
Girls 45 Girls . . .
With Decayed Teeth 316 With Irregular Teeth
■ Bovs 137 Boys . . .
Girls 179 Girls ...
With Clean Teeth 14.5
Bovs 36
Girls 109
VII. Of those who passed the dental test, six (6) boys and eight
(8) girls passed the eye, ear, nose and throat test — fourteen in all.
VIII. And of these there were six boys and five girls who by the
strict interpretation of the rules of the contest won heir medals.
The following are the names of those who won ly the method of
selection as originally planned. Had there been time, however, the
original plan contemplated submitting this group to an all-round
strength, endurance and physical efficiency test, and to thorough medi-
cal examination.
Girls Age Boys Age
Margaret Beck 6 Lum Kee 5
Vera Crowell 8 William Gage 6
Chris Klemos 9
Opal Miller 12
Niles Vedder 14
Rachel Neale 17 y^m. Hawley 17
Alice Bekins 18 Trevor Adams 18
To satisfy the public expectation aroused by newspaper announce-
ments, it was found necessary to select the best child of each age and
sex from those who had passed all the tests and could be classed as
normal in development, whether he approximated physical and mental
perfection very closely or not. This was done hurriedly by a special
committee of physicians cooperating with the statistical department.
The following were adjudged medal winners by this committee at this
time. Those children who won by the original plan of estimation are
starred (*).
MEDAL WINNERS
Boys
Name
— aabb* Lum Lee
xaaaa* Billy Gage
xcaxx Edw. Lawrence
xbacc Donald Potter
xaacx* Chris Klemos
cbxxa Cecil Charles
xxxxx Daniel Ilolton
bbxxx LaVerne Coates
caaxx Donald Lauer
xcxca* Niles Vedder
xbaxc Wm. Hastings
aaaab* Wm. Hawley
bxbbx Trever .Adams
baaba* Frederick Woodard . .
— aaaa Bernadine Stine ....
xaaba* Margaret Beck
xbaxx Frances Shonp
bcxcx* Vera Crowell
xxxxc Myrtle Nutter
xacca Carol Spencer
(21)
Age
School
Grade Phvs
Mental
School
Denial
5
4
Beginners
a
a
))
6
11 ,
First
X
a
a
a
7
6
Beginners
c
a
X
8
6
X
b
9
2
2
X
a
10
2
5
c
b
X
11
5
4
X
X
X
jj
12
6
b
b
X
X
13
5-2
a
14
6
X
^■
15
High
11
X
b
a
17
12
a
a
a
b
18
10
h
b
b
19
Girls
12
b
b
5
5
Beginners
a
a
a
6
5
X
a
a
b
7
8
X
b
a
s
(ilO
\\i*.\' N'Al'lONAI- ClONKEKKNCli; ON KACIO BETTERMENT
liacco
xcxbx*
naaxn
cbnxx
cbaxx
caxxx
.laaab*
a II en a*
Coiitps
Name
Gladys Berger
Opal Miller
Rxith Holder
Theda Jones .
Lucile Parish
Tacy Coon . .
Rachel Neale
Alice Bekins .
Aoe
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
Dept.
High
No. 1
Dept.
High
Grnde
5
7-1
101
0-2
8-2
12
10-2
Mental School Denial Senaorv
ix boys and five girls won (he prizes by llip method of judging under which the
t was originally planned.
Places Won by Contestants
-First.
-Second.
-Third.
-Not am
the first three of the
Total Scoring by Contests
h4 al4 al6 a4 a9
b:^ a7 bl ■ b6 b3
c,.5 c4 c3 cb c4
xl2 x3 x8 xl2 xl2
28
28
28
After the presentation of the medals, time was found for a more
systematic estimation of the comparative development of the children
deemed to be normal. With the assistance of Dr. Benton N. Colver,
of the Sanitarium, and a committee of the Battle Creek Dental Asso-
ciation, the Statistical Department prepared the following statement
as to those who won first, second and third places for each age and sex
in each test.
These tables follow: "a" denotes first place, "b" second place,
"c" third place, "x" means some lower rank. Children's names are
^■iven in the order of their rank or place (a, b, c, or first, second,
third).
PHYSICAL TEST
Boys
Per Gent A
Dewitt Brice 94
Clifford Lazarus 92
Cowell Closet 92
*Billy Gage
•Tames Corwin 90
Norman McDonald 87
Gerald Sharpsteen 86
*Edward La'viTence
Leslie Acker 96
Elgin Johnson 96
Lawrence Walker 95.5
Charles Casper 94
Donald Potter
Norman Haiighey 92.5
Frederick Kent 92
Edwin Vary 89
Chris Klemos
Milford Boyce 96
Maxwell Knight 94
*Cecil Charles 90.5
Edwin Ricketson 93
Lavern Potter 92.5
Lawrence Rogers 92
*Daniel Holton
Dean Wells 93
*LaVerne Coates 92
Lisle Bucklin 91
Lyle Sharpisteen 90.5
Woodbridge Johnson 87.5
*Donald Lauer 84.5
Gerald Dough 84.5
John Barker 98
Alan Hastings 97.5
Merill Read 96
-Niles Vedder
Girls
Dorothy Mead . .
Helen Mitchell
Doris McCrumb
'Margaret Beck . .
Per Cent
91
Affp.
6
.94.5
.Tuanita Ziegler
Janey Crillev 91
Lillian Madison 85.5
*Frances Shoup
Minnie Richmond 95.5 8
Vera Crowell 91
Kathryn June Armstrong . .89.5
Frances Poole 97.5 9
Martha Gwendolin Case .... 95
Pauline Wagner 93
*Myrtle Nutter
Lucile Campbell 94.5 10
Rhea Sullivan 92
Marian T. Bruce 90.5
Thelma Boyd 90.5
*Carol Spencer
Marian Ginter 98 plus 11
Shirley E. Hale 98
*Gladys Berger 94
Lenna Mae Canright ..... .93
Emilv J. Marsh 97.5plus 12
Lucy Clark 97.5
Marguerite Dodder 96
Thelma I. Perry 95.5
Opal Miller
*Ruth Holder 98.5plus 13
Mary Seage 95
Gertrude Zanger 94
DEVELOPMENT OF BATTLE GREEK BOYS
From SIX TO NINETEEN YEARS OF AGE
Compiled by Wm. W. Hastings, Ph. D., Dean of Normal School of Physical Education, Battle Creek, Mich.
20.96
J 24.96
22.96
48.98
43.31
37.64
68.06
61.75
55.44
68.50
63.00
57.50
127.48
124.07
120.66
152.58
146.77
140.96
172.87
168.75
164.63
G3.78
61.55
59 . 32
65.71
60,15
58.18
70.01
67.95
67.89
87.08
82.35
77 . 62
90.00
86.40
82.80
15.02
14.68
14.34
15.55
15.21
14.87
19.29
18.77
18.25
19.56
19.05
18.54
23.92
22.75
24.44
23.37
22.30
21.28
22.67
21.76
20.85
23.51
22.77
22.03
24.24
23.30
22.36
25.19
24.10
23.01
26.80
25.59
24.38
28.72
27.08
25 . 44
29.44
28.35
27.26
29.95
28.48
27.01
30.50
29.00
27.. 'iO
22
85
23
91
24
48
25
87
14.76
13.75
12.74
16.76
15.55
14.34
17.87
16.65
15.43
17.93
17.07
16.21
17.69
17.02
16.35
20.23
19.32
18.41
63.97
62.01
60.05
67.64
65.42
63.20
70.26
67.80
65.34
72 . 24
!69.20
'66.16
79.27
74.65
70.03
82.42
78.50
74.58
18.81
83.25
80.10
76.95
19.21
83.86
80.10
76.34
This table is m the Metric S.vstem; Centimetres, kilogrammes, litres.
To traiispo.se centimetres to inches, multiply by .393; kilogrammes to pounds, multiply bv 2 2:
M stands for the mean value, which is the 50% line and is taken for the tvpe of the a^e '
65.45
63.30
61.15
68.55
66.52
64.49
77.01
74.30
71.59
80.38
77.14
73.90
83.39
80.30
77.21
92.56
88.10
83.64
1.10
.96
.82
1.30
1.15
1.00
1.47
1.31
1.15
1.79
1.57
2.02
1.80
1.58
2.40
2.11
3.13
3.57
3.12
2.67
19.53
17.10
14.67
24.79
21.35
17.91
29.70
26.20
22.70
48.79
42.25
35.71
S^
15.25
12.72
10.19
17.54
15.24
12.94
19.71
17.05
14.39
23.04
20.08
17.12
49.68
45.
40.74
68.00
43.00
18.00
ches, multiply by 61
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PHYSICAL AND MENTAL PERFECTION CONTESTS
611
Boi,.« Per Cent Age
1 James Reducr 97.5 15
2. Harold Hoyt 94
3. Robert Dowsett 89.5
*Wm. Hastings
1. Robert Lord 93 16
2. Bovd Redner 88
3. Paul Clark »7.5
1 *William Hawley 84.5 17
2." Franz Toeller 84
3. Harold King 79.5
1. *Smith J. DeFrancc 91 18
2. *Trevor Adams 85
3. Willard Baiigh 74.5
1. Burton Clark 89 19
2. *Frederick Woodard 83.5
3. Cyril Canright 92 20
Girls
Per Cent
93
91
Helen Armstrong . . .
Elaine Collins
Irma Keagle
"Theda Jones 90.5
Elsa Kapp 94
Martba Rose 91
Lucile Parrish 85.5
Norma Peters . . .
Laurell Clevenger
Tacy Coon
,88.5
,88
.83
Rachel Neale 92
Irma Moore 86
Venice Barker 84
Alice Bekins 87
Hilda DeBarr 84
Florence Collier 79.5
Age
14
MENTAL TEST
Boys
Lum Kee .
Glen Case
Age
5
Wm. Gage . . .
Boyce Roberts
DeWitt Price .
Laverne Spooner 64.66
Gerald Sharpsteen 54.83
Edward Lawrence P
Chauncev Kyser 57.83
Donald Potter P
John Clarke Riggs 50.65
Chris G. Klemos 81.75
Arthur Vanguilder 46.5
John Bush 41.3
52.5
50.78
Daniel Holton
Cecil Charles .
Glen Wood 65.33
Edwin Ricketson 54.72
Chas. Winzer 49.9
Lyle Bucklin 55.3
Laverne Coats 54.25
Louis Burgess 53.83
Donald Lauer 63.3
Gerald Dough 51.5
Arthur Carleen 50.25
John Baker 64.05
Alan Hastings 62.65
Niles A^edder 53.6
Wm. Hastings 59.63
James Walker 54.12
Girls
Bernadino Stine
Marguerite Beck
Gertrude Fisher .
(Helen Mitchell .
(Dorothy Meade
Age
5
Oneita Ziegler 54.8
Frances Shoup P
Janey Crilly P
Myrtle Craze 61.06
Frances Holmes 60.83
Vera Crowell 53.16
Martha Case 59.5
Mildred Morso 55.9
Lucile BUeltzingslowen 35.3.i
Carol Spencer . .
Hazel Spaulding
Sarah Norris . . .
.58.46
.53.05
.49.89
Gladys Berch 52.87
Margaret Clayman 52.45
Mazie Butler 51.05
Lucv Clark 58.75
Thelma Perry 53.95
Opal Miller 52.55
Ruth Holder 64.13
Iva Wright 48.58
Irma Keagle 76.96
Theda Jones 59.43
Helen Armstrong 59.16
Martha Rose 66.26
Lucile Parrish 61
Lois Messenger 60.45
Tacy Coone 71.5
Vavah Tobey 57.2
1. Wm. Hawley 67.
Rachel Neale
70.72 17
Willard Baugh 72.6
S. G. DeFrance 67.31
Cyril Canright
1. Alice Bekins
3." *
1.
3".
1.
2.
.69 18
19
20
612
KIRST NATIONAT; CONFERENCE ON RACE BKTTERMENT
SCHOOL RECORD
Boi/s Per Cent Age
1. Lum Kee 85 5
2. Glen Case 70
3. *
1. Will. Gage 98 6
2. Bovce Roberts 95
3. (D"ewitt Price 85
(Leland Richard Keagle 85
1. Edward Lawrence 98 7
2. George Judd 93
3. Laverne Spooner 85
1. Donald Potter 97 8
2. (Elgin Johnson 95
(John Clark Riggs 95
3. Leslie Acker 92
1. Chris G. Klemos 92 9
2. Edwin Vary 90
3. (Frederick Clyde Kent 85
(John Storm 85
1. Paul Lawrence 96 10
' 2. Leroy Hart 95
3. Maxwell Knight 85
1. Chas. Winger 95 H
2. (Edwin RicV:etson 94
(Donald Williamson 94
3. Donald Sherman 86
1. Gordon Schhihatis 9» 12
2. Robert AVilkins 95
3. Dean Wells 93
1. (Donald Lauer 90 13
(Woodridge Johnson 90
2. Lvle Sharpsteen 88
Harry King 88
John Landig 88
Arthur Carleen 88
Floyd Gross .88
1. Alan Hastings 92 14
2. Robert McConnell 89
S. Merrill Read 88
1. Wm. Hastings 96 15
2. James Walker 85
3. Arthur Redner 84
1. Herbert Davy 98 16
2. (Boyd Redner 91
(Paul Clarke 91
3. Robert Lord 83
1. Wm. Hawley 96 17
2. (Harold King 90
(Edward Ferguson 90
3. Franz Toeller 87
1. Harold H. Bauer 89 18
2. (Trevor Adams 88
(Willard Baugh 88
3. L. B. Williams 72
1. Frederick Woodard 100 19
2. Burton Clarke 85
3. *
1. Claude French 88 20
2. Cyril Canright 80
Girls Per Cent
llornadine Stino 80
Margaret Beck 98
Gertrude Fisher O.'i
(Helen Mitchel 90
(Dorothy Meade 90
(Frances Shoup 93
(Janey Crilley 93
Juanita Ziegler 92
Harriet Rothenberg 87
(Irene Norwood 95
(Myrtle Craze 95
Winifred Kirshman 93
Katherine Armstrong 92
Mary Bryant 97
Lueile Bueltzingslowen 96
Pauline Wagner 95
(Emma Ostrander 95
(Thelma Boyd 95
(Hazel Spaulding 95
Marian Bruce 92
Carol Spencer 90
Marguerite Clayam 97
(Georgia Bibbings 87
(Thelma McCabe 87
( Alvida Farrah 86
(Gladys Berger 86
(Marian Sauter 95
(Laura Price 95
Emilv Marsh 94
LaMoine French 90
(Ruth Holder 90
(Eva Wright 90
Mildred Stine 89
Mary Seage 85
Theda Jones 96
Julia Rumohr 95
Ada Whitmore 94
Lueile Parrish 98
Elsa Kanp 94
Martha Rose 92
Dorothy Williamson 91
Ruth Hickman 90
Naomi Peters 88
Rachel Neale 98
Irma Moore 92
( Vavah Tobey 90
(Venice Barker 90
Florence Collier 97
Hilda DeBarr 95
Alice Bekins 91
DEVELOPMENT OF BATTLE CREEK GIRLS
From SIX TO EIGHTEEN YEARS OF AGE
Compiled by Wm. W. Hastings, Ph. D., Dean of the Normal School of Physical Education, Battle Creek, Mich.
1
7
9
10
11
12
14
15
17
18
i
123
158
192
194
188
231
194
180
160
112
55
25
18
1
75
M
25
75
M
2.1
75
M
25
M
25
75
M
25
75
M
25
75
M
25
75
M
25
75
M
25
75
M
25
75
M
25
75
M
25
75
M
25
1
1
if
1!
a
14.45
14.07
13.69
■a
19.09
18.49
17.89
lit
ffl °^
iij
.1
1-
1
iJ
ill
III
.96
.83
.70
:98
.54
P
21.52
19.86
18.15
116.25
112.70
109.15
63.60
61.85
60 10
18.19
17.75
21.11
20 32
19.53
19.40
19.89
20.39
21.17
22.36
22 94
12.92
12.77
12.62
15.30
14.79
13.78
i7^
14.25
60.52
58.51
56.50
65.10
62.90
60.70
4.39
4.55
7.49
5.50
7.53
5.11
2.69
22.95
21.75
20 . 53
121.06
117.10
113.14
65.37
63.50
61.63
14.56
14.19
13.82
18.13
17.65
17.17
19.55
18.88
18.21
21.60
20.90
20.20
22.28
21.46
20.64
13.39
12.98
12.57
15.84
15.21
14.58
61.56
59.90
58.24
70.18
66.45
62.62
10.70
9.16
7.62
10.58
9.00
7.43
11.38
9.81
8.24
24.68
23.12
21. 5G
125.06
122.18
118.70
67.19
65.41
63.63
14.64
14.30
13.96
18.22
17.78
17.34
20.08
19.32
18.56
13.58
13.06
12.54
13.91
13.29
16.11
15.45
14.79
63.27
61.11
58.95
67.95
65.95
63.95
69.94
67.93
65.92
4.84
1.26
1.12
.98
13.83
11.70
9.57
25:90
23.68
132.18
128.62
125.06
69.87
67.92
65.97
14.65
14.33
14.01
18.47
18.03
17.59
18.49
18.06
17.63
20.74
20.02
19.30
23.21
22.35
21.49
16.48
15.88
15.28
14,58
64.89
62.87
60.85
5.06
1.43
1.28
I.IS
15.83
13.79
11.75
14.44
12.34
10.24
30.86
28.13
25.40
135.38
132.15
128.92
71.55
69.48
67.41
14.80
14.41
14.08
21.01
20.22
19.43
23.57
22.73
21.89
13.74
13.13
17.39
16.52
15.65
15 13
66.45
64.00
61.55
71.60
69.42
67.24
5.42
1.50
1.35
1.20
16.58
14.45
12.32
16.09
13.67
11.25
35.31
31.98
28.05
142.80
137.70
132.. 'li
75.62
72.90
14.92
14.53
14.14
18.55
18.08
17.61
21.94
21.07
20.20
24.71
23.66
22.61
14.97
14.04
17.78
16.89
16.00
15.46
69.35
66.41
63.47
75.86
73.08
70.30
6.67
1.73
1.65
1.37
21.35
18.07
14.79
18.85
16.14
13.43
40.47
36.72
30.97
149.67
144.33
138.99
78.55
75.80
73.05
15.13
14.68
14.23
18.82
18.31
17.80
22.68
21.55
20.42
25.56
24.34
16.01
15.00
13.99
17:50
16.58
16.25
72.77
69.19
65.61
78.54
75.09
71.64
5.90
1.96
1.73
1.50
25.46
22.02
18.58
22.72
20.00
17.28
46.85
41.75
36.65
156.80
151.30
145.80
82.26
79.14
76.02
15.46
15.00
14.54
18.99
18.52
18.05
23.81
22.67
21.53
26.67
25.67
24.67
24.17
16.50
15.54
14.58
19.24
18.37
17.50
■16.95
76.42
73.43
70.44
83.00
79.13
75.26
5.70
2.14
1.89
1.64
26.14
22.74
19.34
25.81
22.40
18.99
48.75
44.10
39.45
158.35
154.40
150.45
83.45
81.20
78.95
15.47
15.00
14.53
19.03
18.59
18.11
24.12
23.09
22.06
27.42
26.30
24.69
16.94
16.04
15.14
20.22
19.10
17.98
17.57
78.00
74.70
71.40
85.03
81.12
77.21
6.42
2.38
2.09
1.83
27.67
24.94
22.21
25.69
22.77
19.85
51.99
47.50
43 . 01
54.0V,
49.83
45.60
57.16
52.25
47.34
161.87
156.70
151.53
85.34
82.95
80.56
15.55
.15.07
14.59
19.34
18.81
18.28
25 . 03
24.03
23 . 03
27.81
26.88
25.95
25.95
25.62
26.18
26.03
17.14
16.35
15.56
20.06
19.11
18.16
16.86
18.30
79.92
76.44
72.96
85.84
82.55
79.26
6.11
2.45
2.20
1.95
30.00
27.44
24.88
29.41
26.30
23.19
162.65
159.07
155.49
86.34
84.30
82.26
15.57
15.13
19.43
18.95
18.47
24.93
24.07
23.21
28.11
27.17
26.23
17.39
16.38
15.37
20.13
19.12
18.11
20.13
19.15
18.17
86.63
78.14
75.65
83:50
80.74
5.36
2.45
; 2.14
1.83
30.77
27.38
23.99
28.45
25.10
21.75
162.03
159.16
156.29
85.86
83.70
81.54
15.49
15.08
14.67
19.13
18.55
17.97
25.25
24.52
23.79
28.60
27.85
27.10
17.39
16.45
15.51
16:25
15.23
82.20
79.56
76.92
87.98
85.25
82 . 52
5.69
1 2.62
2.38
2.14
33.20
30.87
28 . 54
60.37
50.50
40.63
30.18
27.72
25.26
56.25
51.50
46.75
164.12
160.25
156.38
84:70
83.39
15.47
15.25
15.03
19.40
18.85
18.30
25.53
24.55
23.57
28.15
27.52
26.89
20.20
19.07
17.94
17.66
78.96
77.08
75.20
85.68
82.75
79.82
5.67
2.49
2.22
1.95
59.25
50.50
41.75
1
Tin
s table is
in the Metric Svstem
raii.spose
centimetres to inches.
M
tMiiilK fnv
the me.m valiip, which
Centimetres, kilogrammes, litres,
uiltiply by .393: kilogrammes to pounds, multiply l
IS the 507i, line and is taken for the type of the age.
(>1-2
IKS'l' NATIONAL f'ONKERENCE ON KA("I': P.KTTKRMKNT
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PHYSICAL AND MENTAL PERFECTION CONTESTS
613
DENTAL EXAMINATION
Clii¥ord McGriflRn
Lum Kee
Glen Case
Wm. Gage
Ernest Van Strain
Clifford Lazonis
Earl McMahan
Harry Ellis
Robert Baker
Emerson Brigham
Frederick Hunt
Donald Potter
Paul Lawrence
Gilbert Adams
Chris Klemos
Ernest Fall
Douglas Dunsmore
Donald W. Winans
Lawrence Rogers
Newton Gould
Glen Winger
Robert Wilkins
Howard Pomeroy
Markham Fitzgerald
Gregory Robinson
.John Jacob
Nelson Wickham
Albert Gould
Robt. Russel Mcintosh
Niles Tedder
Ralph Tabor
Lawrence Young
Earl Burgett
Chas. Jones
Edw. Ferguson
Alliston Barker
Harold King
Wm. Hawley
Herman A¥oodard
L. B. Williams
Trevor Adams
Willard Baugh
Burton Clark
Frederick Woodard
Claude French
Age
Girls
5
1.
2.
3.
Bernadine Stine
6
1.
2.
3.
Tilda Parsons
Margaret Beck
Helen Mitchell
7
3!
Ruth Adaline Garrard
Dorothy Fenn
Harriet Rothenberg
8
1.
3!
Winifred Kirshman
Clara Carter
Yera Crowell
9
L
3.
Enid McAllister
Frances Gorsline
Alta Hanson
10
1.
3.
Prudence Parson
Bessie Brandt
Carol Spencer
11
1.
3'
Ruby Hart
Marian "Zanger
Gladys Berger
12
1.
3.
Ruth Leach
Opal Miller
Hazel Johnson
13
1.
Carlotta Squier
Mary Seage
Georgia Faith
14
1.
3.
Rita Love
Gladys Coon
Beatrice Guildford
15
1.
3;
Beatrice Lapham
Zelma Tyner
Elsa Kapp
16
1.
2.
Iva Fisher
Agnes Heffley
Nellie Clapper
17
1.
2.
3.
Rachel Neale
Rachel Leo
Irma Moore
18
1.
3.
Alice Bekins
Hilda DeBnrr
Leona Ford
19
1.
3'.
:
20
1.
*
EYE, EAR, NOSE AND THROAT EXAMINATION
1.
Boys
Glen Case
. . . 95
C
c
Age
5
1.
2.
3.
Girls
Bernadine Stine
95
C
Age
5
s.
1.
3:
Wm. Gage
Leland Keagel
Clifford Lazarus
. .. 90
. . . 88
. . . 84
R
R
R
0
1.
2.
3.
Margaret Beck
Gertrude Fisher
Dorothy Meade
88
... 87
86
R
R
R
6
1.
■2.
3.
Lang Davis
Gerald Sharpsteen ....
Norman McDonald . . .
. . .100
. .. 90
. . . 88
R
R
R
7
1.
3.'
Juanita Zeigler
Gertrude Roberts
Harriet Rothenberg . .
100
... 88
87
R
R
R
7
1.
Leslie Acker
John Clark Riggs ....
Donald Potter .
. . . 90
. . . 89
89
R
R
■p
8
1.
2.
0
M\Ttle Craze
Winifred Kirschman . . .
Minnie Richmond . . . .
Martha Case
Mildred Morse
Mvrtle Nutter
. . .100
... 93
... 84
. . . .100
... 98
.. . 90
R
R
R
Ca
Ca
Ca
8
2'.
3.
Norman Haughev ....
Frederick Clyde Kent .
Edwin Yary
. . .100
. . . 90
.. S3
R
R
R
9
1.
3.
9
614 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
I.
Boys
Cecil Charles
.... 90 Ca
89 Ca
Age
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
■^o
3!
1.
3'.
1.
3!
1.
3.
1.
3'.
1.
3.
1.
3.
1.
S.
1.
3.
1.
2.
1,
OirlH
Carol Spencor
Fmma Ostrander . . . .
90 Ca
89 Ca
Age
10
3.
Milford Boyce
Kenneth Brownell . . .
Lnvern A. Potter . . .
Donald Sherman
Laverne "Wright
Bean Wells
85 Ca
98 Ca
98 Ca
97 Ca
. . . . 95 H
90 H
1.
Ida Kecne
95 H
u
'J.
3.
1.
Gladys Bugcr
Thelma Perry
. . . . 88 H
95 H
12
3
Robert Wilkins
85 H
Marian Fauter
Ruth Holder
. . . . 85 H
. 95 H
1.
Lyie Sharpsteen ....
John Laudig
Arthur Carteen
Xiles A'edder . .
95 H
93 H
. . . . 85 H
100 c
13
3.'
Shirley E. Hale
Thelma McCabe
94 H
. . . . 85 H
1
Helen Armstrong ....
Ruby Oxley
Julia Rumohr
Martha Rose
Mildred Stevens
Cecil Hager
Dorothy Williams . . .
Norma Peters
91 C
90 C
. . . . 89 C
98 C
. . . . 90 C
. ... 88 C
98 C
90 C
14
Alan Hastings
98 C
3.
1.
Lee Coller
James Walker
Arthur Redner .
95 C
95 C
90 C
15
3.
1.
Wm. Hastings
Herbert Davy
Boyd Redner
Paul Clark
85 C
100 C
90 C
. . . . 85 C
16
3.
90 C
1
Irma Moore
Rachel Neale
Vavah Tobey
Alice Bekins
95 C
. . . . 90 C
. . . . 88 C
95 C
IT
3'
Wm. Hawley
95 C
90 C
1.
Harold Bauer
S. J. DeFranee
L. B. Williams
Frederick Woodard . .
Burton Clark
Claude French
90 C
88 C
80 C
98 C
. ... 95 C
. . . . 70
18
2
Florence Collier ... .
85 C
3.
1.
3'.
1.
Hilda DeBarr
* (No Contestants)
. . . . 75 C
19
30
"^- * 3. * (No Contestants)
By reference to the foregoing table on "Medal Winners," the places
won by each medal winner are to be observed. As will be noted, some
of the medal winners won no place in anything, were mediocre in
everything, but won because they qualified in everything. Others, not
medal winners, very nearly perfect by the physical tests and mental
tests, lost the medal by irregular teeth or enlarged tonsils. Others
lost by the omission of some physical or mental test.
Another year would witness a very much more satisfactory contest.
Nearly all of the five thousand Battle Creek children would enter and
be careful to miss nothing. A month's time for examination and three
months for statistical work would give more accurate and satisfactory
results.
It goes without saying that many children of excellent mentality
have been eliminated by the physical test, some of those making the
highest grades. There are not many of these children Avho are very
precocious who have inferior bodies. Generally speaking, muscle and
mind are good yoke-fellows and are found associated. Exceptions al-
ways look more prominent and seem more frequent because of the
contradiction which one finds in their occurrence.
It is to be observed that some children well-groMTi and well-de-
veloped were not symmetrical. Some were below normal height or below
normal in chest depth, strength, sitting height, chest expansion or some
PHYSICiVL AND MENTAL PERFECTION CONTESTS 615
other particular. They were very much superior in certain qualities
but not all-round in development, and were therefore excluded from
the contest. It must be remembered also that in selecting from the
grades in the Departmental and High Schools, the youngest boys and
girls have the advantage from the fact that there are few of the same
age to compete with them, but in the final tests of health and physical
perfection by dentists and physicians, they compete with the most
perfect children from all grades and justice is finally done in the
matter of selection.
Important lessons have accrued to teachers, parents and children
thru these tests ; lessons of the reality of race degeneracy, of the possi-
bilities of race betterment, lessons of toothbrushes and clean mouths,
regular baths, plain, simple foods, plenty of sleep and outdoor exer-
cise ; lessons that children will never forget.
We want to acknowledge our indebtedness in this contest to a few
of the people who assisted us. We want especially to acknowledge our
indebtedness to Superintendent Coburn and the Board of Education
for the opportunity of taking these tests, and for everj^ form of co-
operation which they could lend us ; also to the principals and teachers
of the schools who have assisted us in every way possible. We want
to acknowledge our indebtedness to the eye, ear, nose and throat
specialists of the city, four of whom gave their time freely to the ex-
amination of the children — Dr. W. M. Carling, Dr. Chas. W. Ryan,
Dr. AVilfred Haughey and Dr. B. N. Colver, and to the members of the
Battle Creek Dental Association : Dr. B, R. Parrish, Dr. C. F. Larned,
Dr. S. i\I. Fowler, Dr. B. F. Johanson, Dr. J. H. Rockwell, Dr. D. C.
Nichols, Doctor Trestain, for without the hearty cooperation of all
these people, the contests would have been absolutely impossible.
We also acknowledge our indebtedness to the Normal School
students Avho have stayed with it loyally from the start to the finish,
who began this work the second week in December and have spent
about one month on it.
The mental tests recently taken in Battle Creek occupied the time
of over thirty instructors and students in the Normal School of
Physical Education for five days. Three or four rooms were taken
at a time in the grade schools so that the whole school was completed
during a morning or an afternoon.
Heavy as has been the labor of taking the physical and mental
tests, and important as it was to employ the verj^ best available assis-
tance for the purpose, the task of scrutinizing carefully and compiling
results from these tests has been infinitely more laborious than all that
has gone before. In this work, the head clerks. Mr. A. L. Ralicoek
CA6 FIRS'l' N.VI'KtNAI, CONKKHENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
;iml Mr. (Mias. P.i'adsluiw, Seniors in llic Xoi'iual Sdiool of IMiysical
Hdiicatioii. lia\H' i-cccivcd iinaluahic assistaiuu' i'l-oiii tlu' students of
tlu> seliool.
Report of Physical Development of Children in the Public Schools of
Battle Creek
The following conclusions were secured by the use of data secured
thru the Physical and ]\lental Perfection Contests.
The method of measurement was tliat employed for the children in
Nebraska schools. Shoes, coats and sweaters were removed during the
measurements. Five of the measurements are not affected at all by re-
tention of clothing; six are affected on an average of from one to two
millimetres or not more than the average error of observation ; girth
is affected on an average of three or four millimetres : weight in-
creased on an average of eight per cent. (See Bowditch's conclusions
as to Boston children in "Growth of Children," "Papers on Anthro-
pometry.")
The measurements were taken under the direction of Wm. AV.
Hastings, Ph.D.. Dean of the Normal School of Physical Education,
Battle Creek, by a corps of the faculty and students from this institu-
tion; eight observers and eight recorders for each room, an observer
and a recorder for each piece of apparatus being used.
TIIE TOTALS OF CHILDREN MEASURED AT DIFFERENT AGES ARE AS FOLLOWS :
i.(/e
Boys
Girls
Age
Boys Girls
6
122
123
15
107 112
7
133
134
16
79 55
8
182
192
17
37 25
9
167
194
18
20 18
10
207
188
19
13 3
11
201
231
20
4 4
12
173
194
13
138
180
Boy
s 1,724 Girls 1,813
14
141
160
Total Xu
mber of Children, 3,537
The development of Battle Creek children compares very favor-
ably with that of children from Boston, St. Louis. Toronto and
Nebraska. They are in the main superior in all qualities except chest
expansion. A comparison of Battle Creek standards with those of
Nebraska in the following table indicates a marked superiority over
Nebraska children in everything but chest expansion. (Ages six and
seven girls, and age six boys, are an exception to this statement.)
No importance should be attached to differences observable in ages 16
to 20 for the reason that the data is not sufficient to warrant the ac-
curacy of the Battle Creek types for these ages.
The table on the following page presents the type (50^ grade) of
each measurement for each age and sex from six to eighteen years for
girls, and six to nineteen years for boys, together with corresponding-
types from Nebraska calculated in the same Avay for the respective ages.
I br hli nurol
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' 'i
PHYSICAL AND MENTAL PERFECTION CONTESTS
617
If called upon to account for the deficiency of Battle Creek chil-
dren in chest expansion, we would first call attention to the fact that
Battle Creek children are invariably larger in breadth of chest and
depth of chest and prevailingly larger in height sitting. Battle Creek
children are also larger in lung capacity in spite of the fact that they
are deficient in chest expansion. This indicates a great lack of flexi-
bility of the thorax.
This difference may be attributed to lack of muscular exercise and
to climatic conditions. It is already known thru investigations by life
insurance companies and thru Hastings' data on phenomenal develop-
ment in flexibility of thorax by boys (see pp. 4 and 5 of ]\Ianual for
Physical Measurements, Hastings) that the climate of Nebraska tends
to develop a more rapid heart rate and deeper and more rapid respira-
tions. The dry, electric condition of the Nebraska atmosphere is to
be contrasted with the humidity of the Ijower Peninsula, lying be-
tween the lakes.
The recent introduction of systematic physical education into
Battle Creek schools will doubtless tend to correct this lack of flexi-
bility.
BATTLE CREEK SCHOOL CHILDREN — DEFICIENT IN HEIGHT
OR RESPIRATORY MEASUREMENTS
Age
e
7
^
9
10
Sex
B
G
B
G
B
G
B
G
B
G
Deviation
*No. Def.
-D -2D
-I) -2D
-D -2D
-D -2D
-D .2D
-I) 2D
-D -2D
-D -21 >
-D -2D
-D -2D
18
Height
0
6
13
6
15
12
10
20
10
18
fL. C.
4 5
4 2
11 2
10 2
11
18 3
7 10
14 5
13 7
7
Ch. Exp.
15
4 2
15
15
27 11
30 4
42 56
53 34
23 30
18 15
Bd. Ch.
6
2
2
1
6
1
2
2
2
Dp. Ch.
1
2
2 2
Def. for Age
20
11
20
24
46
45
130
128
64
45
Normal
65
51
97
39
129
154
139
148
152
139
Age
Sex
Deviation
*No. Def.
Height
fL. C.
Ch. Exp.
Bd. Ch.
Dp. Ch.
Def. for Age
Normal
1
B
-D -2D
6
11
36 37
1 1
1
75
136
G
-D -2D
11
11 4
37 47
1
93
135
11 23
52 33
2 1
1
140
113
G
-D -2D
3
97
118
4 9
36 32
2 1
6
G
-D -2D
10
8 4
1 2
1
G
■D -2D
1
20 10
1
22 10
48
62
G
D -2D
14 2
5
61;
FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTEKMENT
Age
Hi
17
18
19
Total
Sex
B
G
B
G
B
(t
B
G
B G
Devintion
-D -2D
-I) -2D
-D -21)
II -21)
.1. -21>
-1) 21)
-I) -2It
-D -211
-D -21 » -D -2D
*No. Pef.
Height
1
7
3
2
tL. C.
.S 4
3
2 1
1
1
1 1
2
Ch. Exp.
8 3
3
2
1
3
1
Bd. Ch.
1
1
1
2
1
Dp. Oh.
3 1
1
1
Def. for Age
19
14
10
10
2
6
7
1401
Normal
37
32
18
13
8
11
6
2240
*Xumlier Deficient, Classified according to individual measurements. No. Def., above.
fAbbreviations for Lung Capacity (L. C), Chest Expansion (Ch. Exp.), Breadth of
Chest (Bd. Ch.), Depth of Chest (Dp. Ch.), Total Deficients for age in one or more partic-
ulars (Def. for Age). "Normal, " do not fall below 25% in any particular.
The foregoing table presents some of the notable deficiencies in
measurements which show development in respiratory functions. -D
indicates below the twenty-five per cent for the age, height and sex.
-2D indicates a deviation two or more times that of the twenty-five
per cent below the mean value. "Deficient for the age" indicates the
number who are deficient (below the 25% grade) in any respiratory
measurement. Especially significant are the large number deficient in
chest expansion.
It is interesting to note the degree of conformity of Battle Creek
children to "Bowditch's law" of comparative acceleration of growth
in boys and girls. As in Nebraska, the girls begin to excel boys in
height and weight at an earlier date than in Boston.
Lge Height
Q S 124.07 Boys
° 1 122.18 Girls
„ f 128.00 B
^ 1 128.62 G
in S 131.80 B
^" 1 132.1.5 G
n f 136.06 B
^^ \ 137.70 'G
.„ f 142.10 V.
^■^ I 144.33 G
f 146,77 R
■^^ ( 151.30 G
, . f 153.14 B
^* I 155.40 G
,^ f 158.70 B
^° I 156.70 G
Age Weight
„ J 28.40 B
^" I 28.13 G
f 30.77 B
^^ 1 31.98 G
34.20 B
35.72 G
3,S.25 B
41.75 G
.83 B
.50 G
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PHYSICAL AND MENTAL PERFECTION CONTESTS 619
in weight ; at eleven materially lower in height and weight ; at four-
teen boys are slightly heavier than girls ; at fifteen taller than girls.
In other words, the pubertal acceleration of growth occurs about three
years earlier in girls than in boys.
Further study of Battle Creek children will doubtless reveal even
more valuable information. It is planned by Dr. J. H. Kellogg to
give prizes this coming year for the greatest improvement attained dur-
ing the past year. This is Race Betterment in a practical form and
worthy of imitation in other cities.
AWARD OF PRIZES
Hox. John W. BahjEY, LL.B., Mayor of Battle Creek, IVIichig-an.
I have the extreme honor, for the second time today, to come before
you for the purpose of presenting, or rather being the mere instrument
of the presentation, to these young ladies and gentlemen, the medals
which have been awarded to them by this Conference because of the
fact that they are more perfect physically and have stood a higher
test mentally than any of their fellow-students and fellow-boys and
girls. It is indeed a great pleasure to me to do this and I congratulate
these young boys and girls upon the fact not only that they are well
bom, but upon the further fact that they have had the energy to
do their work well and according to directions in school. It is an
inspiration to them which will follow them, I am certain, during all of
their lives. They have been able out of the many hundreds who have
been tested to stand both the best physical and the best mental tests,
and if I speak not incorrectly, that is also an indication of the fact
that their moral test is quite as high.
Before giving the medals to these young boys and girls, I wish for
just one moment to diverge from the task which has been allotted to me,
because I think it is entirely fitting at this time, on behalf of the
citizens of Battle Creek who for the last week have been treated to this
great Conference and to the best thought and the best opinion and
knowledge of these great men and women who have been giving these
special studies their particular attention, to express gratitude. It has
been a treat to our people and we shall receive more and more benefit
from it in the future. We are also under many obligations to our great
Sanitarium, of which we are all proud, and to its great leader. Doctor
Kellogg, to whom more than any other and perhaps all others is due
the fact that the eyes of the world have been upon Battle Creek during
the past Aveek Avatehiug the proceedings of this Conference, hearino-
620 FIRST N.VTU)N.VL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
what thesi' men ami women have given you personally. We have, I
hope, been beneHting thereby. As one of the citizens of Battle Creek,
and I am sure that I speak for all of you, I hope that Doctor Kellogg 's
desire that this may be the beginning of a series of Conferences in
which all matters which tend to Race Betterment shall be considered
will be fulfilled, and that these Conferences may be held yearly or
oftener and that Battle Creek maj^ continue always to be the place
where they shall be held. It has been a great treat to our citizens and
we are deeply indebted to all of these ladies and gentlemen who have
come here, leaving their homes and their occupations in order to give
of their experience and their life's work that we may be better. I am
sure that all of us who have had the opportunity and have spent the
time to listen to these valuable papers are benefited and will be in the
future.
I understand that through the generosity of this Conference and of
Doctor Kellogg these young ladies and gentlemen [prize winners]
are to be given some medals, something which they may keep through
their lives as an indication that, in this, possibly their first, contest,
they have come out with colors flying. I sincerely hope that in all
your future contests you will do as well, that you will always, as I am
sure you will, give a splendid account of yourself and, in doing that,
give a splendid account of your fathers, mothers and grandfathers and
those who have gone before you. Their names will be printed and
announced so you will know who they are.
II. BETTER BABIES CONTEST
Dr. Walter F. Martin, Battle Creek Sanitarium, Battle Creek, Miehigan.
It is with pleasure that we bring before you the report of the com-
mittee of judges. The duties of this committee have been both pleas-
ant and trying. If you can imagine five hundred babies, every one
the ''best baby in the land;" some cooing, some laughing, some wig-
gling, others crying and resenting every attempt of the physician to
make the necessary examination, then you can have some idea of our
task.
Some of these babies were very diplomatic and would look up at
the .judges with a twinkle in their eyes and a smile on their face,
attempting, as it were, to influence or impress the .judges favorably.
Others appeared to express their feelings of having their personal
liberties interfered with, and were not inclined to use any winsome
5-5
§ 3
s- o
PHYSICAL AND IMENTAI, PERFECTION CONTESTS 621
ways to attract favors — no doubt they felt their physical scoring was
able to stand on their own merits.
The members of this committee have worked faithfull5^ Every
baby has been examined from head to foot. A score card indicating
the different measurements and examinations to be made has been
followed in each case. By referring to your score card you will note
that a certain per cent is deducted for each deviation from the normal,
and that the child's final score is the result of the sum of these taken
from one hundred per cent. All babies scoring ninety-five per cent
or above at the first ^examination were called back for a re-examina-
tion and a more careful search was made. By this means the most
perfect babies were found, the final selection being made from the
score card by choosing the baby with the highest per cent of develop-
ment. You will note that the most perfect baby and not the most,
beautiful baby is selected. The possession or lack of beauty does not
score either for or against the child. Your baby may be more
beautiful and have a better disposition than the prize winner, but it
may be behind in its teething, delayed in closure of fontanels or have
some other deviation from normal development which would score it
down.
The committee cannot feel sure that the babies presented here to-
night are the very best in the city, but we have the self-consciousness
of having done our work as faithfully as Ave could and that those which
have been selected were chosen on their merits alone without any feel-
ing of partiality toward any. We fear that some may feel disappointed
that their babies did not get the prize, and Avish to offer for your con-
solation this thought, that "he who wins the first round does not al-
ways come out ahead on the home run." Did you ever notice that the
semi-invalid usually lives to an old age, and that often the strong and
rugged is stricken off early in life? The reason for that is this: The
semi-invalid recognizes his Aveakness and is continually on the lookout
to spare himself, to avoid exposure, and dangerous environments, and
thus saA'cs himself serious illnesses, whereas the strong man. proud of
his strength, spends it in a reckless way. All is at peace Avith him and
he does not feel the need of conserving his forces for a physical conflict
in which he may soon be invoh^ed.
In my opinion those Avho feel that they have lost in this contest
can be the Avinners in the final contest of life. By studying the score
card which Avill be sent you you can learn Avherein your child is de-
ficient, and thus by applying suitable measures for relief increase the
child's dcA'elopment and Avelfare. This Avill be a decided benefit
to the child; Avhereas those Avho Avnn in this contest will be quite apt
622 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
to rest on their laurels, and such a policy always leads downward. We
hope this will not be so in either case. We hope that this contest
has stirred in the hearts of every participating parent a desire to
strive to make his child better by learning the simple rules and sug-
gestions for the child 's betterment which will be mailed you v^^ith your
baby's score card, and seeing to it that they are applied to your child's
welfare. Strive to improve your child's physical condition so that it
may be the Avinner next year.
It has been a pleasing experience to the members of this committee
to note this desire manifest in the mothers in this city. Many of them
said, "I did not bring my baby because I expected him to win a prize,
but to learn if there is anything wrong and what I can do to aid his
development." This is the true spirit of Motherhood and if every
mother can see this phase, then there need be no disappointment.
Another pleasing experience of this committee has been to notice
the high class of babies presented in this contest. W"e cannot imagine
where a better lot of babies could be found. Battle Creek will cer-
tainh^ be bettered in the next generation by the painstaking work of
the mothers here today in their efforts to raise these fine babies.
In behalf of the following members of this committee, who gave
liberally of their time and worked faithfully at this task, Doctor Allen,
Doctor Kimball, Doctor Holes, Doctor Powers, Doctor Eaton, Doctor
Putman, Doctor Hoyt, Doctor Moshier, Doctor Stoner, Doctor Hubly,
Doctor Dryden, Doctor Vandervoort-Stegman, Doctor Roth and Doctor
Colver, I take great pleasure in presenting to you the six first prize
winners :
Virginia June Nay Phillip 0 'Toole
Alvin Kingsley Charlotte Sherwin
Florence Judd George Wentworth
In addition to these six prize winners there are certain ones who
received special mention. The Woman's Home Compmiion issues
certificates for names in this Special Mention class.
Six vinnths old are, — TifO years old are —
Lora Mae Smith. Benlah Edgell.
Georgft Andrew Robertson. Katherine Schram.
Wendell Frederickson. Robert Staid.
One year old are — Three years old are —
Freda Freeman. Margaret .Tacobsen.
Robert Mortensen. John Bailey Breece.
Donald Hayes. Patience Sutton.
Virginia Belle Todd. Frederick William Wildenbevg.
Deward Clark. William Edward Marsh.
Four years old are —
Marion McConnell.
Phillip OToole
PHYSICAL AND MENTAL PERFECTION CONTESTS
623
PRIZE WINNERS
Six Months to Three Years Old
Girl
6 mo. Virginia June Nay,
108 Ann Ave.,
Battle Creek, Mich.
Mr. and Mrs. S. R. Nay.
Bov
35 mo. Alvin Kingsley,
261 Champion St.,
Battle Creek, Mich.
Mr. and Mrs. Albert Kingsley.
Three Years to Five Years Old
Girl Boy
43 mo. Florence .Tudd, 44 mo. Phillip O'Toole,
179 Oak Lawn Ave., 84 Wefit St.,
Battle Creek, Mich. Battle Creek, Mich.
Mr. and Mrs. Geo. Edward Judd. Mr. and Mrs. Robert O'Toole.
Girl
48 mo. Charlotte Sherwin,
Battle Creek, Mich.
Mr. and Mrs. Frank Sherwin.
Four Years Old
Bou
45 mo. George Wentworth,
Oaklawn Ave.,
Battle Creek, Mich.
Mr. and Mrs. M. W
CERTIFICATE WINNERS
Si.x Months Old
Girl
11 mo. Lora Mae Smith.
N. Washington Ave.,
Battle Creek, Mich.
Mr. and Mrs. Jessa Smith.
George Andrew Robertson,
247 E. Van Buren St.,
Battle Creek, Mich.
Mr. and Mrs. William Robertson.
Boy
.Tohn Bailev Breeee,
251 Grove St.,
Battle Creek, Mich.
Mr. and Mrs. Wm. Breeee.
Boy
Wendell Frederickson,
Battle Creek, Mich.
Mr. and Mrs. Tom Frederick.son.
Girl
Katherine Schram,
188 Manchester St.,
Battle Creek, Mich.
Mr. and Mrs. Ed. Schram.
Three Years Old
Girl
Patience Sutton,
33 Broad St.,
Battle Creek, Mich.
Mr. and Mrs. V. D. Sutton.
Girl
Marion McConnell,
20 Rowland St..
Battle Creek, Mich.
Mr. and Mrs. John McConnell.
Four Years Old
Boy
Robert Mortenson,
Manchester St.,
Battle Creek, Mich.
Boy
William Edward Marsh,
71 N. Wood St.,
Battle Creek, Mich.
Mr. and Mrs. William E. Marsh.
One Year Old
Girl
12 mo. Freda Freeman,
100 Bennett St..
Battle Creek, Mich.
Mr. and Mrs. Fred Freeman.
Boy
Frederick William Wildenherg,
Battle Creek, Mich.
Boy
Donald Hayes,
84 Rumely Ave.,
Battle Creek, Mich.
Mr. and Mrs. Willis Hayes.
Girl
19 mo. Virginia Belle Todd,
26 Greenwood Ave.,
Battle Creek, Mich.
Mr. and Mrs. Henrv Todd.
Eighteen Months Old
Boy
Deward Clark,
124 Bennett St.,
Battle Creek, Mich.
Mr. and Mrs. D. L. Clark.
624 FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RACE BETTERMENT
Two Years Old
Girl Hoy
30 mo. Beulnh Edgell, ;!2 mo. Robert Stiiid,
167 Nelson St., 90 Nichols St.,
Battle Creek. Mich. Buttle Creek, Mich.
Mr. nnd Mr.s. Donnld Edgell. Mr. and Mrs. Alfred F. Staid.
Three Years Old
Girl
38 mo. Margarete Jaeobsen,
210 Hubbard St.,
Battle Creek, Mich.
Mr. and Mrs. Fred. Jaeobsen.
AWARD OF PRIZES
Hon. John W. Bailey.
It is indeed a pleasure for me to have the honor and opportunity of
handing to these infants the prizes which indicate that they, in the
opinion of the judges, are the best baby boys and baby girls of the
six hundred who went to the Sanitarium Annex to be examined.
There is nothing which has occurred during this Conference
which has attracted more attention and in which more interest
has been taken, "especially by fathers and mothers, brothers and
sisters, than in this baby contest. Every mother and father
here and in the city have felt in their own hearts that they
really had the best little girl and the best little b in the whole city.
All of those Avho went up to the Sanitarium t , oe examined felt that
they were going there with really the best boy or the best girl, even
if it didn't stand the best physical examination. I have myself ex-
pressed some interest in that contest. I really felt sorry for five or
six hundred mothers and fathers who were bringing their little boys to
the Sanitarium to be examined, because I did not think any of them
had a ghost of a show. I thought there was one boy going up there
that was especially ahead of all the others, and there wouldn 't be any
use of going through the performance of an examination. I cannot yet
understand how the judges arrived at the conclusion they did, unless
they took into account disposition. My little boy has the best dispo-
sition of any boy in town — he takes after his mother. As Doctor
Martin has well said, it is not these six beautiful boys and
girls who are so much benefited, as perhaps these oth»r five or six
hundred, who have been measured and in a measure found wanting.
Their parents will certainly take advantage of the information which
their score cards will contain. They will spend some time in the
future in attempting to correct those defective matters which are in-
dicated on those cards. I feel certain that the great good which mil
come to the fathers and mothers and the citizens of Battle Creek from
this Conference will be the fact that manv of them learned that their
PPIYSICAL AND MENTAL PERFECTION CONTESTS 625
little boys and their little girls need some special attention along some
special line in order that in the future they may grow up to be prize-
winning boys and girls. There is nothing which any community can
well be so proud of as its boys and its girls. There is nothing which
any community should spend willingly so much time in looking after as
the physical, moral and mental welfare of its boys and girls, for
we cannot very well determine who our grandfathers should have been.
We cannot very well, most of us, change our present conditions, either
physically or mentally, although we may somewhat, in a measure,
morally. But this much is true, that each father and mother in Battle
Creek can do very much to improve the condition of their children,
so that when a child grows to be a 3"oung man or a young woman, it
will have, as near as may be, a perfect body, a well-trained mind, and
morals of the highest. I think these mothers can very well be proud
indeed, that out of six hundred of the best babies in Battle Creek,
which means six hundred of the best babies on earth, their babies'
should have come out Avith the highest score, indicating that, physi-
cally, they are the best. It is indeed a proud moment for these mothers,
for they appreciate it very much more than do the little boys and
girls, that they can come here to this splendid audience and receive
this signal token o^ success. It means not only that the little boy and
girl is a good, stro^*^'^ healthy boy and girl, but it means something to
themselves, something 'to their fathers and mothers, their grandfathers
and their grandmothers, in order that they may be able to bring here
today these perfect specimens of mankind, boyhood and girlhood.
The Woman's Home Companion has very fittingly donated prizes
for these little ones from six months to three years of age, and this
Conference on Eace Betterment has also furnished prizes for the
same ages, and in addition for three years to five years of
age. I take great pleasure now, as those little tokens of success, of
what can be done, are handed to these little boys and girls. I hope,
and sincerely believe, that it will not be your last prize, but that you
will continue in the future to be leaders among boys and girls, and
later, to be leaders among men and women.
^DO
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