Race-Culture

COOPER said it was all well enough to speak of a perfect human race, but personally he had no confidence in Eugenics. This was entirely independent of the fact that he always had the greatest difficulty in spelling the word.

Did Cooper know what Eugenics means, Harding asked rather tartly.

Cooper admitted that he did not know. He was rather glad of it because he could thus say conscientiously that he did not believe in the thing.

Then why, Harding asked, dismiss a subject without making an honest attempt to master it?

Cooper said that he had made the attempt and failed. As far as he could gather, Eugenics was intimately connected with the business of raising peas. Forty years ago an Austrian clergyman named Mendel had hit upon an interesting discovery. It was fraught with such momentous consequences for humanity that for nearly half a century nobody took any notice of it. You crossed a species of dwarf pea with a species of giant pea and the offspring was seventy-five per cent of one kind and twenty-five per cent of the other kind; Cooper had forgotten which. Then you took some peas of the second generation and self-fertilized them, whatever that might mean, and the third generation would be divided half and half. Cooper really could not recall just what the proportions were, but it was a satisfaction to know that they would continue indefinitely. At any rate it followed from Mendel’s discovery that consumptives and criminals should not be allowed to marry, though Cooper could not quite see why. That is, he was quite in accord with the general principle that consumptives ought not to wish to get married, but, if they insisted, who had the right to prevent them from striving after their share of happiness?

Harding said that Cooper had just pointed out the reason why, though in a characteristically confused and unintelligent fashion. The simple fact is that we are all what our fathers have made us, and society has the right to guard itself against the evil workings of the iron law of heredity.

But that was precisely what puzzled Cooper. Was there such a thing as an iron law of heredity?

Harding advised him to read Weismann.

Cooper said he had read Weismann. He did so immediately after he had read up on Mendel, and with approximately the same results. With Weismann, heredity was everything. If Cooper remembered accurately, Weismann maintained that acquired characteristics could not be inherited. We can pass on to our children only what we have ourselves inherited. A man, for instance, might lose two of his fingers while celebrating the old-fashioned Fourth of July. That does not mean that his son would be born with only three fingers, though he might possibly be born with six. Or a man might be master of a dozen foreign languages; it did not follow that his eldest son could learn to speak French without instruction, or would be proficient in spelling at college. That was simple enough.

The only acquired characteristic that could be inherited, Cooper was inclined to believe, was an income from United States bonds and a house in town, or something like that. Everything else was determined for him from the beginning of time. It was all in the germplasm, for which, as Cooper recalled, Weismann had a decided fondness that was possibly equaled only by his liking for the chromosome. This chromosome was a very valuable and interesting portion of the germ-plasm. It was too small to be descried under the microscope, but everything was packed away in it. If a man was tall or short, if he bit his finger-nails, if he stuttered, if he voted the Republican ticket mechanically, it was because of the chromosome in the hereditary germ-plasm. Nature seemed to have succeeded in getting almost as many things into a chromosome as a woman can get into a steamer trunk.

From all this, Cooper thought, it followed that if a man committed murder, the proper thing to do was to hang his grandfather; provided, that is, his great-grandfather was no longer living. It might seem hard on the old man, but apparently it served him right for harboring the wrong kind of chromosome. From the practical point of view, Cooper agreed that it was much better to hang a useless, decrepit veteran, than a man in the prime of life. He had not calculated the amount of money that society would save, but it was undoubtedly a very considerable sum.

Harding said that what was practical was to prevent the murderer from passing on his tainted heredity to future generations.

‘Chuck the chromosome overboard, you mean?’ said Cooper. And he made the objection that it. would mean throwing away the good with the bad.

To the writer of the present lines this point was well made. Take the case of Cooper himself. At first sight there are many things about him that Nature could have done much better. He is not what one would call handsome, even in a romantic sense. He lacks ease. When Nature fashioned the original chromosome that became Cooper, she ordained that whenever Cooper entersa public conveyance he shall step on a lady’s feet. The same iron law of heredity, I regret to state, has deprived him of perfect table manners, occasionally compelling him to make use of the wrong spoons. Heredity has handicapped Cooper by making him blurt out unpleasant truths before strangers. But, on the other hand, Cooper has sometimes gone without a winter overcoat, because, after telling a stranger just what he thinks of him, Cooper will lend the stranger considerable sums of money. He is always about town on unsolicited errands of mercy. And even at the dinner-table, when Cooper has once mastered the problem of the dessert spoon, and feels fairly at ease, he will speak with the tongue of men and of angels so that women lean forward, bright-eyed, and listen. If Eugenics had taken a hand with Cooper’s great-grandfather and bred out Cooper’s unfortunate habit of addressing elderly single ladies as Mrs. Smith, and left behind the heart of the poet and the child, what a wonderful thing Eugenics would be! But that was not to be had; it was all or nothing with Herr Weismann.

Some such line of thought must have run through Cooper’s head.

‘All right,’ he said, addressing himself to Harding. ‘Suppose you have your Mendelian peas all straightened out so that you know in advance which are coming out from where. Which peas would you permit to be brought forth, and which would you suppress?' And he went on to show that if Harding had been alive toward the end of the eighteenth century and had been allowed to have his own way, he might have prevented a tuberculous child named John Keats from being born. But who would have written the lines on a Grecian Urn? Or Robert Louis Stevenson: Harding might have choked off the disease-laden chromosome that became R. L. S.; but would he have dared to do so if he had known what the future had in store?

Harding thought that the Grecian Urn and Treasure Island were not too high a price to pay for a world with no consumptive children in it.

One of the peculiarities of the Cooper germ-plasm is that when Cooper is turning a thing over in his mind he pulls out his pocket-knife and cuts up the surrounding furniture. He had ornamented the desk blotter with a handsome monogram of the letters T. R., with the figures 1916 underneath, when the present writer intervened to prevent further damage.

Cooper said perhaps the price was not too high, if only you knew what you were getting for your money. But possibly Mendel and Weismann were mistaken and the iron law of heredity was n’t as rigid as all that. Cooper reads the scientific columns in the periodicals and his impression was that there is a new theory of heredity every month, or, if it was a weekly publication, twice a month. It was quite impossible to keep up with them. He had noticed that this was true of most scientific hypotheses. It was embarrassing, for instance, in the course of conversation with some of his university friends, to refer to the theory of Conservation of Energy and have Smith slowly knock the ashes from his pipe and smile at one corner of the mouth and ask Cooper whether he had seen the last number of the Würzburger Zeitung für Biokinetik. Cooper recalled that on Smith’s table several days ago he did notice a copy of that popular periodical. ‘I mean the July 15 number,’ says Smith. ‘What you saw was the number for July first.’ On July first, it appears, conservation of energy was still the proper thing, but since the fifteenth of the month it no longer had any standing among the best people. Very likely conservation of energy would be all the rage again by the end of August.

And that was the case with the heredity theories that underlie Eugenics. Cooper said that if a dear friend of his with a tendency toward heart-disease fell in love and wished to marry, the proper thing apparently was to go out and buy a late sporting edition. If the Mendelian law was still in force there was nothing for it but a tragic farewell to his friend’s dream of happiness. But if the cable dispatches were for environment, and against Weismann, they could send out cards.

Harding said that environment had not a scientific leg to stand on.

But Cooper had read somewhere of an investigation that had been carried on among school-children in Edinburgh and Glasgow, where they found that the children of drunkards were quite as fit in body and mind as the children of total abstainers; so much for heredity. On the other hand, see what one investigator did recently in New York City. He took a number of immigrant children and measured their facial index, and determined their prognathic angle, and tested them for dolichocephaly and brachycephaly, and subjected them to many other tests not prohibited by the S. P. C. C. And this is what he discovered: As a result of the peculiar climate and other environmental factors that obtain south of Houston Street, young Giuseppe Bruno, whose father was a long-head, was visibly tending toward the short-skull type; whereas young Moses Greenberg, whose father was of the shorthead type, was plainly growing a long skull. Here, then, argued Cooper, was environment shaping a new race in a single generation. Cooper said that he would not lay emphasis on the further highly interesting fact that, under the same stress of environment, Giuseppe Bruno grew up and became Joseph Brown while Moses Greenberg changed into Maxwell Graham. Could Eugenics show any such startling transformation?

Here Harding lost his temper and said a man need n’t be an ass because he was speaking about serious things.

But Cooper insisted that that was not the point. Admitting that he was an ass, was it heredity or immediate environment that made him one? If he did not seem qualified to master the secrets of Eugenics, it was because his instincts and training ran all the other way. He liked to believe that we are born into the world with no irremediable doom upon us. It seemed a much more manly thing to wipe out slums, and suppress child labor, and pension widowed mothers, than to blame it all upon one’s grandfather. With so much important work at hand, what was the use of crossing dwarf peas with giant peas and guessing which pea lay under which thimble?