CHAPTER I. THE PROBLEM. Human progress demands sincere and purposeful social endeavor in all fields promising social or racial betterment. As society becomes more complex and scientific discovery moves apace, the field of profitable social endeavor widens rapidly; but it is still clear that no one agency alone can effect a regeneration of humanity. In order to move forward, humanity and civilization will always require the best efforts of education, religion, philanthropy, agriculture, commerce, industry, social justice, law and order, medicine, technology, and pure science; no one of these can carry the whole burden of progress, although the decay of any one of them would cause a general deterioration to set in.
Organization in society exists for the purpose of correlating and directing along profitable lines all of these agencies. Eugenics, which Davenport defines as “the improvement of the human race by better breeding,” is one of these agencies of social betterment, which in its practical application would greatly promote human welfare, but which if neglected would cause racial, and consequently social, degeneration.
Eugenics, then, is the warp in the fabric of national efficiency and perpetuity. As an art it is as old as mankind; as a science it is just now taking definite form. Whenever the principles governing an art are definitely determined and made to guide humanity, progress in the particular field so affected is rapid.
Modern family history studies have amply demonstrated that heredity plays an important part in social adequacy; and the studies of this committee are tentatively based upon this fact. Since this is true, it then behooves society, in the interests of social and racial progress, to devise means for promoting fit and fertile matings among the better classes, and to prevent the reproduction of defectives.
Since heredity is the fundamental factor of racial fortune, and is therefore the primary agency in the application of eugenical principles, it is thought proper in these studies to present a brief outline of the basic phenomena of natural inheritance.