The Fargo forum and daily republican. [volume] (Fargo, N.D.) 1894-1957, 1910-12-03
FOR THE BABY'S SAKE

President David starr Jordan, Of
Leland Stanford university. chairman
of the eugenics commits ion, director
Of the International peace foundation,
has just become consulting editor Of
the new magazine of race progress,
The American Baby. Tn a leading edi-
torial in the forthcoming December
number, DIR. Jordan says:
THE best gift to baby Is healthy
father and mother physically
healthy, mentally healthy and morally
healthy Such gift Is not to be found
every day, but ii Is rather to be chosen
than great riches. 1t is great riches
for, accident or mischance aside, 1t
means efficient life, Joyous life, life that
is worth while,
AS our study of the problems of
human life goes on, we are coming
more and more to recognize the fact
that misery has biological rather than
economic causes, that incapacity for
the stress of life is hereditary, to be
Only partly removed by training, that
every child is a MOSAIC of parental
and ante parental traits. made up
from what its mother and father
ought to have been, not from what
they really are.
1--WE shall some time recognize a
social obligation, to be applied firmly
but mercifully to give to every child
a decent parentage. generous edu-
cation should be the birthright of
every child of the republic. In like
manner, some day, it may be hoped
that every child of the republic shall
be freeborn.
There are millions of feebleminded
children in our country. They are in
nearly every case the children and
grandchildren or otherwise descended
from other feebleminded. The pauper
in our western cities is descended.
through a long line of paupers recev-
ing outdoor relief, from the impecuni-
Gus prisoner of debt sent over by
England to Virginia in the seventeenth
century.
IF the great stream of charity
should stop for week pauperism
would cease" Like the seed is always
the harvest. If those clearly unfit
should be restrained from marriage.
the fit would inherit the earth. Men
fit for citizenship offer few social
problems.
We are not vet ready to carry our
knowledge over into statutes. There
are many kinds of fitness and of un-
fitness and sometimes the two are
strangely mixed in the same person.
We must learn more about each kind
Of these, Moral unfitness may be a
matter of opinion On a background
of physical unfitness some of the most
heroic of lives have been built.
But the grosser forms of undtness
must be cared for in institutions.
These we can recognize and separate.
Ability to care for oneself in the or
binary strain of life should be the
minimum requirement for marriage.
Public relief-except for old age or
misfortune should involve segrega-
ton. This much society has the duty
to ask in the interest of the American
baby.
And for those fit to be the parents
of the American baby. of which we
dream, there can be no higher duty
than parenthood, And every condf-.
ton which forces the fit into celibacy
u
commonwealth Every war takes it's
quote OF the strong. the spirited. the
bold and with them the generations
|of brave and fair who might have
been and. are not.
The American baby. as we figure
him, has a fine, strong ancestry. The
young men of England who were inn,
patient of religious restraint and OF.
physical oppression; the young men
Of Germany touched with the dream
Of democracy; the pick OF northern
Europe, the strong. the fair. the self
reliant, the conscientious English at
bottom. but with dash of the best
blood of the other races-this is the
American baby. and no king nor lord
ever had a better heritage. Take
them as they go in Massachusetts,, in
Ohio. in Michigan. In Washington, in
California, the average American baby
has in his veins more of the blood OF
the PIantagenets than any king now
living has 1t was his fortune to have
come from the daughter lines and the
lines OF the younger sons, not from the
elder son whom British custom has
marked for the aristocrat.
and we hope that his Puritan
stock. mellowed though, it may be by
other strains, has never crossed with
the feebleminded. the pauper. the in
ebriate or the syphilitic. Free from
faint all are good, each in his own. de-
gree.
"A good citizen is one who can take
care Of himself and has something
more for the common welfare. In
such hands the republic is safe And
a sound heredity in the baby means
sound manhood or womanhood. And
the dominance of sound men and wo-t
men in society is our guaranty of JUS
tice. of temperance. of education. OF
sanitation, of peace. We ask the
peace of the strong and self reliant,
never that of the weak and discour-
aged. And with peace. Justice be-
comes possible With justice all else
is assured.
FtFra ha Apoaricav ~, oe tal,.. -