mselves who have feeble-mindedness on one side of their family tree,
there will be no feeble-mindedness cropping out in future generations.

[Sidenote: Instances of Eugenic Improvement]

But not all human abnormalities are recessive. Thus Huntington's chorea
is dominant, so that every child of the unfortunate victim of this
malady will contract it when it reaches the right age. Marriages of such
people should, therefore, never be allowed, even with normal
individuals.

But when we propose to restrict marriages or mating of those unfit to
marry, people are apt to say, "That is a dream. It can't be done." But
it can be done and it has been done. Every one has heard of the cretins
in Switzerland. They are a kind of idiot who are short in stature and
afflicted in all cases with goitre in the neck. Of course, many people
have goitre who are not cretins, but there is no cretin who has not
goitre. These cretins are peculiarly a feeble-minded people. They are
common still in many towns of Switzerland; they are loathsome objects,
helpless as children, with silly smiles, unable to take care of
themselves in even the simplest toilet ways, and have to be looked after
like domestic animals, or even more closely.

A gentleman very much interested in Eugenics visited Aosta, in Italy,
just outside of Switzerland, once in 1900 and again in 1910. In 1900 he
found many of these creatures among the beggars in the streets, in the
asylums, in the home, in the orphan asylum--everywhere he ran across
these awful apologies for human beings. But in 1910 he found only one!
What had happened? Simply that a few resolute intelligent reformers had
changed the entire situation. An isolation institution, or rather two
institutions, one for the men and the other for the women, were
established. In these the best care of the inmates was taken as long as
they lived, and they do not live long. But pains were taken to see that
by no possibility could marriage or mating of those people take place.
They forfeited any such rights in return for the care that they received
from the State.

Thus is it possible to apply the laws of heredity as laid down by Mendel
in a thoroughly practical way and to get results _immediately_ in one
short generation. It seems, and it is, a colossal task to change average
human nature one iota. Yet in the light of modern eugenics we could make
a new human race in a hundred years if only people in positions of power
and influenc