Your recent letter interests us very much. We are glad to have you become a member of the Eugenics Research Association. This membership entitles you to receive the “Eugenical News," which is being sent, together with a few back numbers. I am sure that you will find, in this association, many colleagues who have eugenical interests similar to your own, and that the new contacts will be profitable all round.

The eugenics survey which you are undertaking is one of the most valuable methods of practical procedure which a state could possibly undertake. The time will doubtless come when every state will, through a permanent organization maintain not only a state census, but a eugenics survey which will locate all the social inadequates and family stocks in the entire state. I should be very grateful if you would prepare for the Eugenical News, a short article describing the origin, organization and purposes of your survey.

In response to your several inquiries, let me answer them in order. First, about the practicability of a eugenical sterilization law: I have just sent to press a pamphlet of 86 pages, which brings the sterilization matter, legally, statistically, eugenically and practically, up to date. I will send you one of these as soon as it is printed. Meanwhile, I am sending you one of the older pamphlets which brought the survey down to 1920.

The results of the survey show that enough has been learned about eugenical sterilization to enact a law which will be held constitutional in any state of the Union, and which will aid greatly in preventing reproduction of social inadequates whose inadequacy is based primarily on heredity. The statistics which we are sending you in the new pamphlet will show that the new laws are not only being upheld by the courts (recent favorable decisions in Michigan and Virginia), but that there is a wholesome and gradual increase in their use by institutions which are authorized to practice this policy of restriction of defectives. Not too much must be expected from sterilization laws, but a great deal can be expected and a great deal is being done. Sterilization will simply be one of the several remedies which the state ultimately will use in applying eugenics to population control. At the present state of biological and. psychiatric knowledge, a great deal is known about human heredity ‐ enough to make eugenical sterilization a safe policy, provided the standards for sterilization apply only to the most patently degenerate individuals who are definitely demonstrated to be cacogenic. In the future, as more is learned about heredity, the standards can be shifted to include those individuals who now constitute situations described as “border‐line."

It is natural that the whole group of psychiatrists and mental hygiene workers should favor the establishment of mental hygiene clinics. It is also logical from their point of view to promote mental hygiene and rehabilitation. They have the environment side with which to cope. It seems, however, that recently many of the mental hygiene group are rather over‐emphasizing the part of environment in the cause of mental defectiveness. A eugenics survey is broader than a mental hygiene clinic. The fundamental survey should, of course, bring to clinics, courts or institutions the individual inadequate together with his case and family histories. If segregation is applied to the individual, then of course in a modern institution where the inmate is protected against reproduction, sterilization would have no eugenical meaning unless the inmate were about to be discharged while still a potential parent. The state survey, further, as provided in our model law and already in force in the state of Oregon, should bring to the courts not only cases for commitment to institutions, but also cases for sterilization from the population at large, as well as from inmates of institutions who are about to be discharged.

To sum up the matter, I think your survey could well make a study of all custodial institutions, both the state and the local; that it could get in contact with the courts; that it could aid the establishment of clinics, and that it could back the enactment of a model sterilization law. Finally, as its principal service, it could recommend a definite policy for maintaining the permanent survey which would comb the state for defectives, and, after finding them, would act as an executive agent in bringing to the courts the defectives for disposition in institutions or sterilization, according to the demands of the particular cases.

I shall be very glad to hear from you from time to time, and am particularly anxious to print in the Eugenical News, the account for which I have asked you.