“There has been much discussion pro and con of this mode of punishment, or—as some prefer to express it—mode of treatment. But it is now generally conceded that society is entirely justifiable in employing this mode of defense, especially since capital punishment has been abolished, and this is the maximum penalty that is corporally inflicted. The public mind having had before it the operation of this treatment as a sort of object lesson is the more ready to listen to the proposition that is now being discussed to use this same treatment for the defense of society against herself. The question is one that must be approached with the utmost consideration and tenderness as well as fairness and justice applied after the most careful and expert selection and with due regard to the character and physical and mental qualities that are due to be expected from such conditions. It is natural selection they say, artificially applied without the circumlocution and tedious delay of nature’s ordinary methods. Left to herself, nature in the long run provides for the survival of the fittest. We now propose say they to make the same provision in the short run. We are now approaching one of those crises in human affairs in which something has to be done, and if men have not the wit to do it themselves, nature takes hold and performs it in her hard way with small tenderness for anybody’s feelings or notions of propriety. If we are competent, we will find some way out of this difficulty without losing our civilization; if we are not, nature will put us back in the primer of barbarism, to learn it all over again as she has done a dozen times before. We have it in our power, and it is our obvious duty to reduce the population, or to stop its increase, and to do it in the very scientific manner that is at our disposal, by which the best blood is selected for transmission and the poorest is quietly eliminated without shock or pain to the individual or to society. Not only can the best blood in general be made exclusive, but any particular brand of best blood can be picked out to receive special encouragement. We can preserve a class of talent invaluable to civilization that nature could not be depended on to select for preservation in the hard struggle for existence—the gentle, the unselfish, the intellectual worker and the poet. Nor can she be depended on to eliminate the ruffianly, brutal, criminal and selfish members whose room is better than their company. Rather these are the very ones she would be likely to save. “This is all in our hands, say they, and if we have the nerve to carry it out, we can make the earth a perpetual paradise. All we have to do is to disqualify in their infancy the stirps whose posterity we prefer not to see.” The Professor paused here and changed the profile to his ‘jokers’ or middle pair of hands and proceeded to roll up the 20th century and expose the 21st.