Race Suicide. - We deplore the loss to humanity of the secret process by which the ancients manufactured a practically indestructible cement. Artists bemoan the fact that the Old Masters carried to their graves the knowledge of the materials with which they painted and their methods of mixing- them, which produced colors as brilliant today as when spread upon the canvas. Great losses truly, but of trifling importance compared with that which civilization is now confronting. To carry trade and art secrets into the grave is serious enough; but to bury super-intelligence and talents of a 'high order which have taken many generations of upright living and thinking to produce, because of the present day tendency of so many of the more intelligent and superior types of women to remain unmarried, is a racial tragedy. Add to this the parallel fact that millions of the world's noblest young manhood were cut down in the World War, and we have an outlook most disquieting to the thoughtful student of eugenics.
Many years ago a sober-minded physician said to me, "I am about to marry what you would call a butterfly; but the fact is, when I come home I want a wife to amuse me and take my mind off of my professional cares." Years have passed. The physician's wife is still the butterfly, and quite willing to be entertaining in society; but not in the quiet of her home to her husband. He is more lonely than in his bachelor days. Above all, he regrets that their only child-a son-has carried the butterfly traits of the mother into broader and more vicious fields.
The biological fact of the crosswise law of transmission by which, while men inherit chiefly from their mothers, women derive their traits largely from their fathers, is startling in this connection. Inherited features, qualities and tendencies are necessarily colored by the influence of sex. But the student of history and of present conditions will readily see the operation of this law. With this in mind we no longer marvel that Marcus Aurelius could beget the degenerate Commodus. Faustina, his mother, is the explanation. The genius of Rosa Bonheur was inherited from and fostered by her father. The moral strength and spiritual power of the Wesleys and of many other men who have left the world in their debt are directly traceable to the exalted maternal source from which they sprang.
In vain will men mourn the weaknesses of their sons so long as they provide mothers for them whose sole recommendation is their supposed power to amuse. Women should also remember the established fact that men of power and integrity generally endow their daughters with the same attributes. It is as essential that the normal and intelligent of both sexes be encouraged to reproduce their kind, as that the abnormal and degenerate be restrained from reproduction. The exact reverse of this is true today.
Our present unnatural economic system; exorbitant cost of the necessities of life; and the sense of uncertainty and insecurity these conditions engender are restraining many earnest, observant ones from attempting to establish homes in which to rear a family. To the self controlled and pure of mind, this means starvation of the conjugal and parental instincts, while for the weak and immoral it is an excuse fot profligacy and the repudiation of marital and parental ties with their responsibilities. The road to Babylon is thronged with derelicts at this moment. On the other hand, the road to the Golgotha of heart-crushing loneliness is traversed in heaviness by many pilgrims whose steps would have been joyously elastic on the sunny highway of the normal and completed family life, had not their realization of responsibility for those whom they might call into life inhibited the expression of the affections.
Genius. - Investigations have proved conclusively that the great majority of the world's geniuses have been born of mature parents. The present tendency to limit the family to one or two children must of necessity diminish the production of our Franklins, Miltons and other types of genius.