Under existing conditions the most practical and hopeful method of race improvement is through the elimination of the least desirable elements in the nation by depriving them of the power to contribute to future generations. It is well known to stock breeders that the color of a herd of cattle can be modified by continuous destruction of worthless shades and of course this is true of other characters. Black sheep, for instance, have been practically obliterated by cutting out generation after generation all animals that show this color phase, until in carefully maintained flocks a black individual only appears as a rare sport. In mankind it would not be a matter of great difficulty to secure a general consensus of public opinion as to the least desirable, let us say, ten per cent of the community. When this unemployed and unemployable human residuum has been eliminated together with the great mass of crime, poverty, alcoholism and feeblemindedness associated therewith it would be easy to consider the advisability of further restricting the perpetuation of the then remaining least valuable types. By this method mankind might ultimately become sufficiently intelligent to choose deliberately the most vital and intellectual strains to carry on the race. In addition to selection by climatic environment man is now, and has been for ages, undergoing selection through disease. He has been decimated throughout the centuries by pestilences such as the black death and bubonic plague. In our fathers’ days yellow fever and smallpox cursed humanity. These plagues are now under control, but similar diseases now regarded as mere nuisances to childhood, such as measles, mumps and scarlatina, are terrible scourges to native populations without previous experience with them. Add to these smallpox and other white men’s diseases and one has the great empire builders of yesterday. It was not the swords in the hands of Columbus and his followers that decimated the American Indians, it was the germs that his men and their successors brought over, implanting the white man’s maladies in the red man’s world. Long before the arrival of the Puritans in New England, smallpox had flickered up and down the coast until the natives were but a broken remnant of their former numbers. At the present time the Nordic race is undergoing selection through alcoholism, a peculiarly Nordic vice, and through consumption. Both these dread scourges unfortunately attack those members of the race that are otherwise most desirable, differing in this respect from filth diseases like typhus, typhoid or smallpox. One has only to look among the more desirable classes for the victims of rum and tubercule to realize that death or mental and physical impairment through these two causes have cost the race many of its most brilliant and attractive members. V RACE, LANGUAGE AND NATIONALITY