The same is true of the use of narcotics. With the exception of the few diseased who need special care, drunkenness is the product of group mores. The most drunken people in the world are undoubtedly the husky Russian peasants.
When it comes to lying by preference, I fear that none of us would escape, though most of us have painfully learned another way, while our yellow newspaper reporters still remain.
And 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 exactly 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 intelligence. 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. Intelligence consists in that capacity together with the supply of information 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.[1]
And again in this same connection, showing the intimate relation of classes to improvement, he says that what 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 efficiency 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. We have ability enough; we only need to pry loose what we have.
Race prejudice belongs in the same category as social classes. The existence of a race is primarily caused by accidental signs which serve for identification plus the prevailing attitude towards the people bearing the signs. As Professor Ross says:
- ↑ Publications of the American Sociological Society, pp. 7, 8.
