rather than of happiness to themselves and those around them. These should be reduced in number, as we have shown at some length earlier in this book.
The other parts of the population should be perpetuated by the best, rather than the worst. In no other way can the necessary leaders be secured, without whom, in commerce, industry, politics, science, the nation is at a great disadvantage. The task of eugenics is by no means what it is sometimes supposed to be: to breed a superior caste. But a very important part of its task is certainly to increase the number of leaders in the race. And it is this part of its task, in particular, which is menaced by the declining birth-rate in the United States.
As every one knows, race suicide is proceeding more rapidly among the native whites than among any other large section of the population; and it is exactly this part of the population which has in the past furnished most of the eminent men of the country.
It has been shown in previous chapters that eminent men do not appear wholly by chance in the population. The production of eminence is largely a family affair; and in America, "the land of opportunity" as well as in older countries, people of eminence are much more interrelated than chance would allow. It has been shown, indeed, that in America it is at least a 500 to 1 bet that an eminent person will be rather closely related to some other eminent person, and will not be a sporadic appearance in the population.1
Taken with other considerations advanced in earlier chapters, this means that a falling off in the reproduction of the old American best strains means a falling off in the number of eminent men which the United