absurd. Or else the logical absurdity is involved of inventing one cause to explain an effect to-day and a wholly different cause to explain the same effect to-morrow. This is unjustifiable in any case, and it is particularly so when the single cause that explains both cases is so evident. If weak heredity causes high mortality in the royal families, why, similarly, can not weak heredity cause high infant mortality in the industrial communities? We believe it does account for much of it, and that the inadequate income and low standard of living are largely the consequences of inferior heredity, mental as well as physical. The parents in the Genealogical Record Office files had, many of them, inadequate incomes and low standards of living under frontier conditions, but their children grew up while those of the royal families were dying in spite of every attention that wealth could command and science could furnish.
If the infant mortality problem is to be solved on the basis of knowledge and reason, it must be recognized that sanitation and hygiene can not take the place of eugenics any more than eugenics can dispense with sanitation and hygiene. It must be recognized that the death-rate in childhood is largely selective, and that the most effective way to cut it down is to endow the children with better constitutions. This can not be done solely by any euthenic campaign; it can not be done by swatting the fly, abolishing the midwife, sterilizing the milk, nor by any of the other panaceas sometimes proposed.
But, it may be objected, this discussion ignores the actual facts. Statistics show that infant mortality campaigns have consistently produced reductions in the death-rate. The figures for New York, which could be matched in dozens of other cities, show that the number of deaths