Eugenics Record Office. BULLETIN No. 10A - DNA Patent Database ...

THE SCOPE OF THE COMMITTEE’S WORK. 55
remedied only by cutting off the human strains that produce it. Heredity
and environment work hand in hand; rarely do they pull oppositely.
As a rule, a good ancestral germ-plasm will furnish a good environment
for the offspring and a bad ancestral germ-plasm will add to the degenerate
hereditary gifts of its offspring a poor environment. Eugenics
and euthenics each have their tasks to perform. Neither can perform
the whole work required in advancing the social condition of mankind.
(7) Polygamy. In animal breeding polygamy or the “pure sire
method” has been one of the most potent agencies in rapid advancement
and, could the essential biological principles of polygamy be
applied to mankind, we should expect these same biological values to
accrue. An eugenical program that advocates polygamy must be
doomed to failure because it strikes at one of our most priceless heritages
so laboriously wrought through centuries of moral struggle. It
would be buying a biological benefit at vastly too great a moral cost.
A eugenics program to be effective must and can be based upon an
enhanced sense of monogamy, and of the sacredness of love and marital
fidelity. If any serious students of the modern eugenical studies advocate
polygamy, it is unknown to the members of this investigating
committee, although many uninformed critics of the eugenics program
unhesitatingly complain that eugenics proposes “to apply the methods
of the stud farm to mankind.”
(8) Euthanasia. The ancient Spartans were a race of fighters.
The business of the Spartan mothers was to grow soldiers for the
State, and Spartan social life and customs appear to have been well
directed toward this end. However much we deprecate Spartan ideals
and her means of advancing them, we must admire her courage in so
rigorously applying so practical a system of selection. According to
history and tradition, Spartan officials exposed to the elements children
who promised unfitness as adults for effective hand to hand combat.
Sparta produced soldiers and she consumed them, and left but little
besides tales of personal valor to enhance the world’s culture. With
euthanasia, as in the case of polygamy, an effective eugenical agency
would be purchased at altogether too dear a moral price. Any individual
once born should, in the opinion of the committee, be given every
opportunity and aid for developing into a decent adulthood of maximum
usefulness and happiness. Preventing the procreation of defectives
rather than destroying them before birth, or in infancy, or
in the later periods of life, must be the aim of modern eugenics.