Race Deterioration in the United States Qualitatively and Quantitatively Considered

Abstract

Quantitatively considered, the continuity of a community, a nation, or a race depends upon the balance between birth rate and death rate. This proposition of course eliminates the question of gains by immigration and the losses by emigration. The excess of births over deaths constitutes the only natural increase of population; and, when the excess falls off, the danger signal shifts to red. The birth rate of France has dropped below the death rate 1.5 per thousand of population. In England in 1928 it was less than 5 per thousand above the death rate. In the United States, within a period of less than a quarter of a century, the birth rate has dropped from 25 to less than i9 per thousand of population. The type of civilization toward which we are drifting is not conducive to the only natural means of the increase of population and the preservation of the race. Qualitatively viewed, the continuity of a people depends upon quite another factor-namely, the preponderance of men and women of profound and broad mentality. It is the few who are possessors of wisdom and leadership, and not the hoi polloi, that make a nation both great and strong. In the light of history a people may retain a racial or national name and yet have lost the characteristics that made them famous. Greek peoples still exist in name, but the Greeks of today are not the descendants of the old Homeric stock, the Greeks whose greatness created an unparalleled center of art and literature. The riddle of I-iellenic decline is found in the low birth rate of the Homeric class and the high birth rate of the illiterates. The modern Greeks are the descendants of Helots. The stock that made old Greece a great nation bred itself out of existence and left the fate of a nation to the offspring of illiterates. The Italians of the present time are not the descendants of such Roman families as the Cornelii, the Gracchi, and the Fabricii; they are the offspring of proles and of slaves of various races-very largely the captives of war. The old Roman families disappeared because of a birth rate much below that of the illiterates. The cross-breeding of diverse races produces not the higher but the lower intellectual type. A mongrel people has never get attained real greatness.1 As a nation, the United States presents race problems that do not exist elsewhere. Seventy-five nationalities are represented in its population and