We want men and women on this continent who shall be well and intelligent and free and wise enough to see that not numbers but quality in population will solve the questions that perplex the souls of men. We want parents who are wise and self-controlled enough to refuse to curse the world and their own helpless children with vitiated lives, and who, if they cannot give whole, clean, fine children to the world, will refuse to give it any. Nothing but a low, perverted and weak moral and ethical sense makes possible the need of an argument on this subject. It is self-evident the moment one stops to ask himself a few simple and primitive questions: "Am I willing to buy my own comfort and pleasure at the expense of those who are helpless? Am I willing to be a moral and physical pauper preying upon the rights of my children? Am I willing to be a thief and misappropriate their physical, mental and moral heritage? Am I willing to be a murderer and taint with slow poison their lives before they get them? Am I willing to do this by giving to them a weak and dependant and silly mother and a father who is less than the best he can be – who arrogates to himself the prerogative of dictator who has no account to render?"
All these questions apply to the health of the nation and to what it shall be in the future. When we speak of the health of a nation, we are so given to thinking of the physical condition, only, of its citizens that the more comprehensive thought of their mental, moral, ethical and business health is likely to escape our minds. Indeed, I fancy that few persons realize that even in the matter of business ethics and general moral outlook (including the nation's political policy, of course) heredity cuts a very wide swath. But it is true that national business morals are as distinctive from generation to generation as are the physical characteristics, well-being or mental qualities of the different peoples. Some one will say, "True, but all this is due to difference of environment," – forgetting that the special features of our environment itself (outside of climate and soil) are due primarily to the hereditary habits and bias of a people. Natural selection, per se, ceased to have full force the moment man reached the stage when he was able to control artificial means of protection or power.. The "fittest" ceased to be so upon the basis of inborn quality. Artificial means – from the use of a sharp stone to overcome a stronger (or "fitter") antagonist, on up to the skilful application of money where it will do the most good – took the place of primary "natural selection," and the "fittest" to survive in the mental, moral, physical, financial or political arena became he who could command the artificial means of guiding and controlling the natural forces of primary "selection." The "tough" lives in the "slums" primarily because his parents did. He inherited his social and ethical outlook as well as his physical form, and the mould in which his thoughts have run was fashioned by nature and secondarily fixed by an environment or surrounding which also came to him as a part of his inheritance.
Heredity and environment act and react upon each other with the regularity and inevitability of succession of night and day. Neither tells the whole story; together they make up the sum of life; and yet it is true that the first half – the part or foundation upon which all else is based and upon which all else must depend – has been taken into account so little in the conduct and scheme of human affairs that total ignorance of its very principle has been looked upon as a charming attribute of the young mothers upon whose weak or undeveloped shoulders rest the responsibility, the welfare, the shame or the glory, the very sanity and capacity, of the generations that are to come!