Better Babies

In an office in the Old Arcade Bldg., Cleveland, reporters listened to the low, kindly voice of a long-beloved citizen--Charles Francis Brush, 79, six feet tall, big of frame, bushy of eyebrows, world-famed physicist, inventor of the arc light. He answered questions concerning the $500,000 foundation he had just endowed.

As a boy on a farm he had tinkered with wires and electrical apparatus. At 27, he had designed the first open coil dynamo, following this with an arc lamp, the "ring clutch," in which the carbon is clutched by a ring attached to an armature which automatically keeps the light steady. This not only solved a long standing difficulty but brought the price to street level. Three years later (1879) the Public Square in Cleveland glowed under the first public arc lights. . . .

He was not a man to talk of his brilliant past; he wanted the reporters to get the right angle on physiology and the cloudy future, wherein lay the purpose of his endowment fund. The half million dollars was put in trust in memory of his scientist-son, Charles Francis Brush Jr., who died last year. Its income is "to finance efforts contributing toward the betterment of the human stock and toward the regulation of the increase of population, to the end that children shall be begotten only under conditions which make possible a heritage of mental and physical health, and a favorable environment."*

Scientist Brush, concerned about the future, knows that science plays no favorites, preserves some of the weak, unfit, feeble-minded as well as the strong. "General reading and common sense," he says, have made him want to educate people to the evils of too great population increase. His trust fund will be used for research in eugenics, popular enlightenment, regulation of overpopulation. The program of the foundation has not yet taken definite form. Birth control clinics may be the first step.

The phrases "birth control" and "human stock" fell harshly on the ears of Bishop Joseph Schrembs of the Roman Catholic diocese of Cleveland. He promptly seized an occasion to set forth the traditional view of his Church. Said he, to a graduating class of nurses at the Charity Hospital training school: "In older times we referred to humans as the human race, but according to this foundation we are being classed with the animals on the farm, the cow, the horse, the mule--perhaps with the alligator and the snake. . . . According to this foundation, I have no right to be born, for I am the youngest of 16 children and God bless my mother for every one of them! . . . Thank heaven that I was born! And if I do say it myself, I have not done so badly in my lifetime."

What the Cleveland bishop said, every Catholic prelate has in some manner paraphrased. Memorable was a 1925 speech of Patrick Cardinal Hayes, Archbishop of New York: ". . . By such sin fell empires, states and nations. Religion shudders at the wild orgy of immorality the situation forebodes. . . . Birth control is heralded because the poor . . . are largely responsible for defectives. Never was there cast . . . a more offensive insult. Defectives, physical or mental, have immortal souls, redeemed by the blood of Christ. The forces of evil . . . would exploit the bodies and ruin the souls of the children of God." (TIME, May 4, 1925.)

-The foundation will be administered by Dr. Thomas Wingate Todd, anatomist of Western Reserve University; Rev. Joel B. Hayden, able young Presbyterian pastor; Mrs. Charles Francis Brush Jr., vice president of the Maternal Health Association; Mrs. Roger Griswold Perkins, author-daughter of Scientist Brush and wife of a Western Reserve professor; Mrs. William H. Weir, grand-neice of the donor and wife of a gynecological specialist; Lawyer Jerome C. Fisher.