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Their determination to believe this requires some of the most ingenious explaining that scientists with a resolute purpose ever had to employ. We have already seen how they explain away the school systems of the United States. Professor Carl C. Brigham of Princeton University has made what he calls "A Study of American Intelligence." Mr. Brigham devotes two pages of his book on intelligence to the subject of education.

What he is out to prove is that the foreign born who have come in the last twenty years are an inferior stock. Apparently it never occurred to him, however, to compare scores in the intelligence tests with the percentage of foreign born in the different States. Had he done this, he would have got this rather strange result:

The percentage of native-born of white native parentage in

North Carolina is 99 and the median alpha intelligence score for whites is 43.2
New York is 36 and the median alpha intelligence score for whites is 64.5
South Carolina is 97.5 and the median alpha intelligence score for whites is 47.4
Massachusetts is 33.2 and the median alpha intelligence score for whites is 71.6
Georgia is 97.2 and the median alpha intelligence score for whites is 42.2
Pennsylvania is 56.5 and the median alpha intelligence score for whites is 65.1
Tennessee is 96.7 and the median alpha intelligence score for whites is 47.2
Illinois is 47.1 and the median alpha intelligence score for whites is 63.8
Mississippi is 96.3 and the median alpha intelligence score for whites is 41.2
Ohio is 65.2 and the median alpha intelligence score for whites is 67.3
Alabama is 95.8 and the median alpha intelligence score for whites is 46.3
Rhode Island is 30 and the median alpha intelligence score for whites is 62.9
Arkansas is 95.3 and the median alpha intelligence score for whites is 41.6
Michigan is 44 and the median alpha intelligence score for whites is 63.3
Oklahoma is 90.7 and the median alpha intelligence score for whites is 52.5
Connecticut is 36 and the median alpha intelligence score for whites is 73.6

The Northern States in this list are ones in which the bulk of the recent immigration has tended to settle. The Southern States are those with over ninety per cent. native whites of native parentage. These figures do not prove, as a hasty psychologist might think, that immigration has improved intelligence. They simply reduce to an absurdity, in my judgment, the argument that the tests measure native ability alone. If schools, opportunity, and wealth are of no consequence, if the native whites of native parentage are inherently superior, and if the tests really measure superiority, the figures in every bracket of that table ought to be reversed. When the psychologists compare the foreign born with the native they find, as one would expect, that the native average is higher than the foreign average. But they find also one fact that makes their whole case extremely difficult to handle. They find that if you group the foreign born according to the number of years they have been in the United States, then the difference between native and foreign born gradually disappears entirely as the length of residence increases. On what is called the "combined scale," which includes the English speakers and the foreign language groups, the literate and the illiterate, the average score of the native-born whites was 13.77. Compare this figure with the average for the foreign born:

In America 0 to 6 years averaged 11.41
In America 6 to 10 years averaged 11.74
In America 11 to 16 years averaged 12.47
In America 16 to 20 years averaged 13.55
In America over 20 years averaged 13.82
In America the native born averaged 13.77

If any one thinks this ascending curve of the scores of the foreign born in accordance with the time spent in our American environment is a sign of what we call roughly Americanization, he has not reckoned with the Psychological Battalion of Death. Dr. Brigham insists that the scores improved with the time spent in America because each group of immigrants in the last twenty years has been biologically inferior to the preceding group.

The idea that soldiers who had been here over twenty years had been wholly educated in American schools, while soldiers who had recently arrived from Ellis Island had probably never been to any American school, is to Dr. Brigham and his associates an unacceptable explanation of a very striking set of facts. They are determined that education and opportunity shall not count, "for we must -sic- assume," says Dr. Brigham, "that we are measuring native or inborn intelligence." To this we can reply that there is no law compelling professors to assume the very thing which they set out to prove. They are quite free to assume nothing and to conclude, if the facts point that way, that they are measuring very crudely some aspects of the mixture of native ability and acquired habits.