Are You Interested in Your Own

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Heredity?

OLONEL WILLIAM BOYCE THOMPSON, of New York, has given $6,000,000 to endow an institution for scientific research in the growth and diseases of plants. Such researches are already under way in many places, but the distinction of the new institution is its insistence upon coöperative work by experts, who have heretofore worked independently in the numerous special lines of investigation. Colonel Thompson believes that if a plant chemist and a plant biologist and a plant entomologist work together on an experiment they will jointly find out things that all three would not find working separately. This seems a reasonable hope, and, if it is fulfilled in practice, the plan will doubtless be adopted in many other fields of research.

Nearly every man and woman of normal good feeling has at some time envied men who, like Colonel Thompson and John D. Rockefeller and other benefactors, have the means to contribute something of general and permanent value to mankind by research foundations like the present one. But it is entirely possible, without spending any money, for every intelligent person in the United States to lend invaluable aid to one of the most important scientific investigations ever undertaken. This investigation is designed to find out the laws that govern human heredity. The only way to discover these laws is to assemble a vast mass of facts, which the scientists can study and thus find the common thread of natural law that runs through them. Scientists in studying plant life can try all kinds of experiments with plants, controlling the conditions of soil and light and air for generations, and thus accumulating the material they need. But studies in human heredity cannot be so controlled, and the data have to be gathered by scientists with the help of other human beings.

At this point helpfully minded people can serve science most usefully. The

facts about your own heredity can now be forwarded to a scientific center, where they are added to a mass of gradually growing information which, in time, will be sufficiently varied and complete to form a secure basis for scientific study of the general laws of human heredity. Any one who will write to the Eugenics Record Office of the Carnegie Foundation, located at Cold Spring Harbor, New York, will receive printed blanks upon which he can prepare organized data upon the physical and mental traits of himself and his blood kin. Thousands of Americans have already filed this information with the Eugenics Record Office, and in another generation, if enough others do likewise, scientists will doubtless have enough data to make discoveries of immense value. Among these discoveries should be the ability to predict the probable characteristics of the children of any union where the characteristics of the families of the couple are known. Certainly much that is now guesswork or superstition will be replaced by solid knowledge. And every person who now files his own data can justly feel that he has contributed something indispensable and unique to the most important of all the sciences, the science of man himself.

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Fewer American Paupers

HERE is a certain sardonic touch in the fact that, at the time when a Presidential candidate is touring the country, picturing the increasing woes of the workingman, a government report should disclose the extent to which pauperism is decreasing in the United States. And it is pauperism of a technical kind— the kind that finds refuge in almshouses. In 1910 there were 84,198 inmates in the poorhouses of the United States, compared with 78,090 in 1924-this out of a population of 115,000,000. Reduced to comparative statistics, this means that 71.5 men and women out of each 100,000 are being supported by their communities. now as compared with 91.5 in 1910. Certainly these are extremely low figures, and low as they are, the even more en

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couraging fact is that they are so rapidly going down. There are many towns in this country which have no poorhouses at all, because there are no candidates for admission, and others in which such buildings are most sparsely populated.

The public has not yet forgotten the curious "reaction" produced in the minds of "charity experts" some time ago, when a well-known millionaire announced his intention of using his great fortune for the erection of a magnificent orphanage. Such an institution, they declared, was unnecessary and unwise, partly because more intelligent methods were coming into use for the rearing of orphans, and partly because most existing orphanages had difficulty in finding unfortunates enough to fill the buildings.

The problem of poverty is by no means solved, for poverty is not the same thing as pauperism; the large cities are certainly full of misery, and the time is still far distant when the care of the destitute will cease to be an obligation of the state. Yet it is just as true that the condition of those who toil is steadily improving and that the share of the workingman in the profits of industry is every day becoming greater. Mr. La Follette's theory of our present economic organization is that it is an association of gigantic monopolies, dealing in the necessaries of existence, and exacting from the consumer constantly increasing prices for the essentials of daily life. As proof of this sweeping charge he points to the steadily increasing prices of all products. That prices have vastly increased in twenty years, especially in the last ten years, is a patent fact. But this phenomenon is not peculiar to the United States. It has taken place in all countries—in most of them to a greater extent than in this-and is due to such apparent facts that it would be insulting human intelligence to recount them. Mr. La Follette ignores the other more apparent fact that wages have increased even more than prices, so that the reward of the workingman is far greater than in pre-war days. Any one who observes the living conditions of the workingman knows how they have improved in com

fort and even in luxury. The recent revelation of the Census Bureau that there are now 71 paupers per 100,000, whereas in 1910 there were 91 per 100,000, is merely another statistical confirmation of a well-known social improvement.

The Loeb-Leopold Sentence

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HERE is little doubt that a considerable majority of the newspaperreading public was disappointed with the sentence imposed by Justice Caverly in the case of Loeb and Leopold. The public instinct on this point was correct, because what the public wanted was not so much the vengeful death of two horribly dangerous criminals as the assurance that they would be put beyond power to do further harm.

The WORLD'S WORK for July and August contained two articles on "The Cause of Crime" and "The Cure for Crime." These articles expounded the theories of two distinguished men of great practical experience with criminals-the theories, in brief, that calculated crimes are invariably the product of defective tissue of the basal ganglia, and that such defects are inherited and incurable. Some space was devoted to the behavior of cold-blooded murderers. Though the material for these articles was assembled in February and the first article written. in March, no such perfect illustration of the Hickson-Olson theory was then available as the character and conduct of the murderers of young Robert Franks, who committed their crime in May, too late for reference in the magazine. Every element of that theory is borne out in their case. Most strikingly, the murderers demonstrate that intellectual genius may be housed in the same body with emotional imbecility. Intellectual brilliancy was the outstanding quality of both, and caused their families and friends to overlook emotional defects of the most dangerous kind. For example, their serious assertions that they had no compunction about inflicting needless cruelties upon birds and insects were doubtless passed off by their friends as a joke, be

cause to their friends such absence of good feeling was incredible in themselves and was therefore assumed to be impossible in these boys. But the boys did not mean it as a joke; to them it was a commonplace fact. They scorned "squeamish" people, because they had no emotion of pity in their own make-up, and could not understand it in other people who had. But the reason why they had no pity was not "depravity"; the reason was that their physical mechanism had a defective area in it, where normal people register normal emotions. That defect they either had at birth (which is most likely), or they developed it as the result of some degenerative disease. In either event, it is incurable.

This incurability of most criminals is what sticks in the public mind. "If he did it once, he may do it again," expresses in the vernacular a profound scientific truth. This observation, with the further observations that sentimentality and sometimes corruption bring about the release of hopeless criminals, combine to create the public dissatisfaction with the Loeb-Leopold sentence. If the public felt sure that these boys would never be freed, they would accept the sentence without dissatisfaction.

According to the Hickson-Olson theory, the sentence was proper, provided it is carried out. For under that theory, Loeb and Leopold were not morally responsible, because they were as morally insane as a person can be. But though, that theory relieves the murderers of moral responsibility, it logically demands that they shall never be allowed either to have the opportunity to commit other crimes, or to taint the blood stream of the race by reproducing children to inherit this most awful of human defects. The only way to insure these results is permanently to segregate the murderers. Life imprisonment, actually enforced, is as effective for these purposes as death by hanging. Anything less than life imprisonment would defeat both purposes and would be a crime (against both society and the potential children of the murderers) quite as atrocious as their own.

An Ill Used Word: "Democracy"

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HE carelessness of Americans in the use of words is forcibly illustrated in every Presidential campaign. There is one especially odious ill-treatment of good English that appears with endless iteration in the speeches of political orators, the editorials of newspapers, the articles of reporters-and, less frequently, in every-day speech. It is strange that the organizations devoting their energies to purifying the American language do not launch a campaign against the use of the word "Democracy" as a synonym of the "Democratic party." The word "democracy," properly used, means a form of government, which may or may not exist in this country. It is that form in which the power of government resides, directly or indirectly, in the masses that make up the citizenship. To adopt it as the name of a political organization, even a venerable and a much respected one, perhaps gives a certain rotundity to an oratorical period, but it grates harshly on an ear attuned to the nice use of words.

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policy that more or less threaten its success. One proposed remedy is the alien registration bill so warmly sponsored by Mr. Davis, Secretary of Labor. This is a plan for registering every alien in the United States, and for systematically keeping track of him; this process would necessarily disclose his right to be in the country, and, successfully carried out, would bring to an end present practices. The greatest danger comes from the Mexican border, and here the main difficulty is not the "bootlegging" of stray Chinese and Japanese or other excluded peoples, but the mass migrations of Mexicans themselves-a type of people utterly unassimilable and undesirable on many grounds as even temporary residents.

Back of the picturesque phase of this dealing in contraband human material rises an issue of more portentous size. It displays the eagerness of all races to obtain a foothold in the United States, and suggests the complications which American immigration policy is likely to produce with many countries. Nothing is more certain than that the United States is to maintain this policy-to do otherwise would mean the surrender of our birthright as a nation, and voluntarily consent to the utter transformation and consequent mongrelization of our people. Again, nothing is more certain than the hostility which this policy will inevitably arouse in many nations. The Japanese difficulty is only one. Already there is manifest in Europe a tendency to look upon the American continent as something in the nature of a great family estate in which the peoples of Europe have more or less of a vested interest. The attitude of Europe toward war debts contracted. with the United States is merely one phase of this point of view. The right which certain European nations apparently think they possess of shipping their surplus population to these shores, where they are expected to thrive and become sources of prosperity to the mother country, illustrates the same tendency in another form. Italy protested the immigration bill essentially on these grounds, and Roumania officially complained that

its passage would destroy her monetary system, which rested entirely upon the American gold obtained from Roumanian immigrants. In all European countries the pressure of over-population is strong; the same is true of China, Japan, and the East generally; from all corners of the compass eager eyes are directed to our Atlantic and Pacific coasts, only to find the way impassably shut.

It would be absurd to close our eyes to the antagonisms which this causes in most parts of the world. As years go by, and American immigration policy tightens, rather than relaxes-for this is inevitable it will become only another powerful influence in isolating the United States, and any one with the slightest knowledge of history can foresee that it might easily lead to a military combination against this country. Happily there is one big fact in world politics to set on the other side. The problem that confronts the United States confronts, in almost the same form, the British Empire. America and the British Dominions control the larger part of the earth's desirable soil. Both countries have adopted, or will presently adopt, essentially the same policy for their peopling; and both are determined to exclude, not only Asiatics, but also the less desirable and less assimilable of Oriental races. These two empires are so powerful that, together, they can maintain this policy, for any conceivable military or naval organization would be helpless against them. The situation presents another striking illustration of the way in which historic forces, despite all contravening influences, necessarily make the United States and Great Britain partners in the development of the world.

and will be scrapped by the lumbermen. But it is a fact that of the cubic contents of a log 12 per cent. is bark and 12 per cent. sawdust when the mill has completed its sawing. Twenty-six per cent. more is lost in the process of cutting a round log square preparatory to sawing it into planks, or in converting a tapering log into a straight-edged one for the same purpose. The material thus wasted the sawyers term "slabs, edgings, and trims" and it is ruthlessly cast by.

It is the trend of the human mind to follow an immemorial custom rather than the path of reason as much in lumbering as in other pursuits. Man was first accustomed to trim his logs with a hand adze, working from the bark inward to the core, and sawyers to this day follow this traditional precept of their guild. They think first of getting the bark out of the way and of disposing of the taper. They then proceed to the sawing up of the resultant elongated cube into planks, but they resolutely ignore by this process the fact that the best and soundest timber lies nearest the bark and that by their disposition of bark and taper they lose much, if not all, of it. It is converted It is converted into "slabs," "edgings," and "trims" "edgings," and "trims" and is discarded. Not only that, but they decline to consider the obvious geometry of the log and the conclusion to be drawn therefrom. Figure II is the plainest possible demonstration of a process by which the clear timber near the bark may be saved and not that only, but a considerable part of the cubic contents of the log also. Figure I shows the Figure I shows the method used at present. A system was devised by the late John Rodes, a Pacific coast lumberman, for the cutting of logs in a fashion similar to figure II. It is being slowly adopted by mills in that region. Experienced lumbermen judge that the process will effect a saving of at least 13 per cent. of the cubic contents of each log, that by the present system is entirely wasted. It is a percentage too large to continue to cast upon the waters, even in a country whose regal forests seem inexhaustible. The saving costs nothing and probably could mean almost as much

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HE striking parallel in the political careers of Theodore Roosevelt I and Theodore Roosevelt II is one of the minor excitements of the present political campaign. To what extent has heredity figured in American political history? Francis Galton, the great student of inherited genius, might find a few striking illustrations in the story of the American Presidency. The younger and the elder Pitt are the two outstanding instances in the annals of Great Britain; but a more astonishing case is that of the Adams family in the United States. The scoffers who insist that talent, and even genius, is not transmissible, find a serious stumbling block in these tough and able old New Englanders. John Adams, President of the United States, has a son, John Quincy, who also in his time enters the White House. The latter's son, Charles Francis, becomes, as American Minister to Great Britain during the Civil War, one of the greatest of American diplomats. His sons, Henry Adams-he of the famous "Education" -and Brooks Adams, have made great reputations as historians, publicists, and men of letters. The other instance in which the Presidency has shown a tendency to run in the family is that of the