CHAPTER I

PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE

BOOKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR

“WORRY: THE DISEASE OF THE AGE”

“EVOLUTION: THE MASTER KEY”

“HEALTH, STRENGTH, AND HAPPINESS”

Etc., Etc.

PARENTHOOD

AND

RACE CULTURE

An Outline of Eugenics

BY

CALEB WILLIAMS SALEEBY

M.D., Ch.B., F.Z.S., F.R.S. Edin.

FELLOW OF THE OBSTETRICAL SOCIETY OF EDINBURGH, MEMBER OF

COUNCIL OF THE EUGENICS EDUCATION SOCIETY, OF THE

SOCIOLOGICAL SOCIETY, AND OF THE NATIONAL LEAGUE

FOR PHYSICAL EDUCATION AND IMPROVEMENT

MEMBER OF THE ROYAL INSTITUTION

AND OF THE SOCIETY FOR THE

STUDY OF INEBRIETY

ETC., ETC.

[Illustration: Logo]

CASSELL AND COMPANY, LTD.

LONDON, NEW YORK, TORONTO AND MELBOURNE

1909

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Dedicated

TO

FRANCIS GALTON

THE

AUGUST MASTER OF ALL EUGENISTS

PREFACE

This book, a first attempt to survey and define the whole field of

eugenics, appears in the year which finds us celebrating the centenary

of the birth of Charles Darwin and the jubilee of the publication

of _The Origin of Species_. It is a humble tribute to that immortal

name, for it is based upon the idea of _selection for parenthood_

as determining the nature, fate and worth of living races, which is

Darwin's chief contribution to thought, and which finds in eugenics its

supreme application. The book is also a tribute to the august pioneer

who initiated the modern study of eugenics in the light of his cousin's

principle. A few years ago I all but persuaded Mr. Galton himself to

write a general introduction to eugenics, but he felt bound to withdraw

from that undertaking, and has given us instead his Memories, which we

could ill have spared.

The present volume seeks to supply what is undoubtedly a real need

at the present day--a general introduction to eugenics which is at

least considered and responsible. I am indebted to more than one

pair of searching and illustrious eyes, which I may not name, for

reading the proofs of this volume. My best hopes for its utility are

based upon this fact. If there be any other reason for hope it is

that during the last six years I have not only written incessantly on

eugenics, but have spoken upon various aspects of it some hundreds

of times to audiences as various as one can well imagine--a mainly

clerical assembly at Lambeth Palace with the Primate in the Chair,

drawing-rooms of title, working-class audiences from the Clyde to

the Thames. It has been my rule to invite questions whenever it was

possible. Such a discipline is invaluable. It gives new ideas and

points of view, discovers the existing forms of prejudice, sharply

corrects the tendency to partial statement. It is my hope that these

many hours of cross-examination will be profitable to the present

reader.

It has been sought to define the scope of eugenics, and my consistent

aim has been, if possible, to preserve its natural unity without

falling into the error, which I seem to see almost everywhere, of

excluding what is strictly eugenic. Our primary idea, beyond dispute,

is selection for parenthood based upon the facts of heredity. This,

however, is not an end, but a means. Some eugenists seem to forget

the distinction. Our end is a better race. If then, beyond selecting

for parenthood, it be desirable to take care of those selected--as,

for instance, to protect the expectant mother from alcohol, lead or

syphilis--that is strict eugenics on any definition worth a moment's

notice. It then appears, of course, that our demands come into contact

with those prejudices which political parties call their principles.

A given eugenic proposal or argument, for instance, may be stamped

as “Socialist” or as “Individualist,” and people who have labelled

their eyes with these catchwords, which eugenics will ere long make

obsolete, proceed to judge eugenics by them. But the question is not

whether a given proposal is socialistic, individualistic or anything

else, but whether it is eugenic. If it is eugenic, that is final. To

this all parties will come, and by this all parties will be judged.

The question is not whether eugenics is, for instance, socialist, but

whether socialism is eugenic. I claim for eugenics that it is the final

and only judge of all proposals and principles, however labelled, new

or old, orthodox or heterodox. Some years ago I ventured to coin

the word eugenist, which is now the accepted term. With that label I

believe any man or woman may well be content. If this be granted, the

old catchwords and the bias they create forgotten, we may be prepared

to consider what the scope of eugenics really is.

Eugenics is not, for instance, a sub-section of applied mathematics.

It is at once a science, and a religion, based upon the laws of life,

and recognising in them the foundation of society. We shall some day

have a eugenic sociology, to which the first part of this volume seeks

to contribute: and the sociology and politics which have not yet

discovered that man is mortal will go to their own place.

Only when we begin to think and work continuously at eugenics is its

range revealed. The present volume is a mere introduction to the

principles of the subject: the full elucidation of its practice is a

problem for generations to come. Nor is it easy to set logical limits

to our inquiry. We may say that eugenics deals with conceptions: and

that the care of the expectant mother is outside its scope: but of what

use is it to have a eugenic conception if its product is thereafter

to be ruined by, for instance, the introduction of lead into the

mother's organism? Again, the care of the individual is, in part, a

eugenic concern: for if we desire his offspring we desire that he shall

not contract transmissible disease nor vitiate his tissues with such

a racial poison as alcohol. Plainly, everything that affects every

possible parent is a matter of eugenic concern: and not only those

factors which affect the choice for parenthood.

It follows that the second portion of this volume, which deals with the

practice of eugenics, cannot be more than merely indicative. In the

available space it has been attempted to define certain constituents

of practical eugenics, but in any case the entire ground has not been

surveyed. The concept of the _racial poisons_ may be commended to

special consideration. Whether a poison be so-called “chemical,” as

lead, or made by a living organism, as the poison of syphilis, is of

great practical importance, because of the infection involved in the

second case: but, in principle, both cases belong to the same category.

Sooner or later, eugenists must face the transmissible infections,

and repudiate as hideous and devilish the so-called morality which

discountenances any attempt to save unborn innocence from a nameless

fate. He or she who would rather leave this matter is placing

“religion” or “morality” or “politics” above the welfare of the life

to come, and therein continuing the daily prostitution of those great

names.

Again, the practice of eugenics may be commended and accepted as the

business of the patriot: and two chapters have been devoted to the

question as seen from the national point of view. I am of nothing

more certain than that the choice for Great Britain to-day is between

national eugenics and the fate of all her Imperial predecessors from

Babylon to Spain. The whole book might have been written from this

standpoint, but such a book would have been beneath the true eugenic

plane, which is not national but human. I believe in the patriotism of

William Watson, who desires the continuance of his country because, as

he addresses her,

“O England, should'st thou one day fall,

. . . . . . .

Justice were thenceforth weaker throughout all

The world, and truth less passionately free,

And God the poorer for thine overthrow.”

This is a patriotism as splendid and vital as the patriotism of the

music-halls and of the political and journalistic makers of wars is

foul and fatal: and it is only in terms of such patriotism that the

appeal to love of country is permissible in the advocacy of eugenics,

which is a concern for all mankind.

The prophet of that kind of Imperialism which has destroyed so many

Empires, has lately approved the emigration of our best to the

Colonies, on the ground that “it is good to give the second eleven

a chance.” But as students of history know, it is at the heart that

Empires rot. The case of Ireland is at present an insoluble one

because the emigration of the worthiest has had full sway. So with the

agricultural intellect: the “first eleven” having gone to the towns.

Rome sent her “first eleven” to her Colonies: if you were not good

enough to be a Roman soldier you could at least remain and be a Roman

father: and the children of such fathers perished in the downfall of

the Empire which they could no longer sustain. I can imagine no more

foolish or disastrous advice than this of Mr. Kipling's, in commending

that transportation of the worthiest which, thoroughly enough persisted

in, must inevitably mean our ruin.

The national aspect of eugenics suggests its international aspect, and

its inter-racial aspect. Not having spent six weeks rushing through

the United States, I am unfortunately dubious as to the worth of any

opinions I may possess regarding the most urgent form of this question

to-day. I mistrust not merely the brilliant students who, unhampered

by biological knowledge, pierce to the bottom of this question in

the course of such a tour, but also the humanitarian bias of those

who, like M. Finot, or the distinguished American sociologist, Mr.

Graham Brooks, would almost have us believe that the negro is mentally

and morally the equal of the Caucasian. Least of all does one trust

the vulgar opinions of the man in the street. Wisdom on this matter

waits for the advent of real knowledge. Similarly in the matter of

Caucasian-Mongolian unions. I question whether any living man knows

enough to warrant the expression of any decided opinion on this

subject. Merely I here recognise miscegenation in general as a problem

in eugenics, to which increasing attention must yearly be devoted.

But it would have been ridiculous to attempt to deal with that great

subject here. As for the marriage of cousins, to take the opposite

case, I always reply to the question, “Should cousins marry?” that it

depends upon the cousins. The good qualities of a good stock, the bad

qualities of a bad stock, are naturally accentuated by such unions: I

doubt whether there is much more to be said about them.

* * * * *

In the following general study of a subject to which no human affair

is wholly alien, it has been impossible to deal adequately with the

great question of eugenic education--that is to say, education _as for

parenthood_. If only to emphasise its overwhelming importance, one

must here insist upon the argument. There is, I believe, no greater

need for society to-day than to recognise that education must include,

_must culminate in_, preparation for the supreme duty of parenthood.

This involves instruction regarding those bodily functions which exist

not for the body nor for the present at all, but for the future life

of mankind. The exercise of these functions depends upon an instinct

which I have for some time been in the habit of terming the _racial

instinct_--a name which at once suggests to us that we are to represent

this instinct, to the boy or girl at puberty, not as something the

satisfaction of which is an end in itself--that is the false and

degrading assertion which will be made by the teachers whom youth will

certainly find, if we fail in our duty--but as existing for what is

immeasurably higher than any selfish end. Youth must be taught that

it is for man the self-conscious, “made with such large discourse,

looking before and after,” as Hamlet says, to deal with his instincts

in terms of their purpose, as no creature but man can do. The boy and

girl must learn that the racial instinct exists for the highest of

ends--the continuance and ultimate elevation of the life of mankind.

It is a sacred trust for the life of this world to come. We must teach

our boys what it is to be really “manly”--the fine word used by the

tempter of youth when he means “beast-ly.” To be manly is to be master

of this instinct. And the “higher education” of our girls, as we must

teach ourselves, will be lower, not higher, if it does not serve and

conserve the future mother, both by teaching her how to care for and

guard her body, which is the temple of life to come, and how afterwards

to be a right educator of her children. The leading idea upon which one

would insist is that the key to any of the right and useful methods

of eugenic education is to be found in the conception of the racial

instinct as existing for parenthood, and to be guarded, reverenced,

educated for that supreme end. It is for the reader who may be

responsible for youth of either sex with this key to solve the problem

on the lines best suited to his or her particular case.

By the application of mathematical methods to statistics we can

ascertain their real meaning, if they have any. If, as frequently

happens, they have none, mathematical analysis is worse than useless.

Mr. Galton is the pioneer of this study, which Professor Karl Pearson

has named biometrics. Biometrics is not eugenics, as some have

supposed, but is a branch of scientific enquiry which, like genetics,

obstetrics and many more, contributes to the foundations of eugenics.

In the Appendix reference is made to various publications, mostly

inexpensive, which deal with biometrics. In the text I have availed

myself of biometric, genetic and other results impartially. Differences

of opinion between this school and that of scientific workers are to

be regretted by the eugenist; but it is for him to accept and use

knowledge of eugenic significance no matter by what method it has been

obtained. Directly he fails to do so he ceases to be a eugenist and

becomes the ordinary partisan. No reference is made in the following

pages, for instance, to the _law of ancestral inheritance_, formulated

by the Master to whom the volume is dedicated and of whom all eugenists

are the followers. I believe that law, despite its beauty, to be

without basis in fact and incompatible with demonstrated Mendelian

phenomena: and though the book is dedicated to Mr. Galton, it is more

deeply dedicated to the Future. This, indeed, is the _Credo_ of the

eugenist: _Expecto resurrectionem mortuorum, et vitam venturi saeculi._

* * * * *

Woman is Nature's supreme instrument of the future. The eugenist is

therefore deeply concerned with her education, her psychology, the

conditions which permit her to exercise her great natural function

of choosing the fathers of the future, the age at which she should

marry, and the compatibility between the discharge of her incomparable

function of motherhood and the lesser functions which some women now

assume. Obstetrics, and the modern physiology and psychology of sex,

must thus be harnessed to the service of eugenics, and I hope to employ

them for the elucidation, in a future volume, of the problems of woman

and womanhood, thus regarded.

CONTENTS

PART I

THE THEORY OF EUGENICS

CHAPTER PAGE

1. Introductory 1

2. The Exchequer of Life 17

3. Natural Selection and the Law of Love 35

4. The Selection of Mind 52

5. The Multiplication of Man 71

6. The Growth of Individuality 86

7. Heredity and Race-Culture 99

8. Education and Race-Culture 120

9. The Supremacy of Motherhood 145

10. Marriage and Maternalism 160

PART II

THE PRACTICE OF EUGENICS

11. Negative Eugenics 171

12. Selection through Marriage 184

13. The Racial Poisons: Alcohol 205

14. The Racial Poisons: Lead, Narcotics, Syphilis 246

15. National Eugenics: Race-Culture and History 254

16. National Eugenics: Mr. Balfour on Decadence 279

17. The Promise of Race-Culture 287

APPENDIX Concerning Books to Read 305

INDEX 321

PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE

PART I.--THE THEORY OF EUGENICS

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTORY

“A little child shall lead them”

This book will be mere foolishness to those who repeat the inhuman and

animal cry that we have to take the world as we find it--the motto of

the impotent, the forgotten, the cowardly and selfish, or the merely

vegetable, in all ages. The capital fact of man, as distinguished

from the lower animals and from plants, is that he does not have to

take the world as he finds it, that he does not merely adapt himself

to his environment, but that he himself is a creator of his world. If

our ancestors had taken and left the world as they found it, we should

be little more than erected monkeys to-day. For none who accept the

hopeless dogma is this book written. They are welcome to take and leave

the world as they find it; they are of no consequence to the world; and

their existence is of interest only in so far as it is another instance

of that amazing wastefulness of Nature in her generations, with which

this book will be so largely concerned.

Beginning, perhaps, some six million years ago, the fact which we call

human life has persisted hitherto, and shows no signs of exhaustion,

much less impending extinction, being indeed more abundant numerically

and more dominant over other forms of life and over the inanimate

world to-day than ever before. It is a continuous phenomenon. The

life of every blood corpuscle or skin cell of every human being now

alive is absolutely continuous with that of the living cells of the

first human beings--if not, indeed, as most biologists appear to

believe, of the first life upon the earth. Yet this continuous life

has been and apparently always must be lived in a tissue of amazing

discontinuity--amazing, at least, to those who can see the wonderful in

the commonplace. For though the world-phenomenon which we call Man has

been so long continuous, and is at this moment perhaps as much modified

by the total past as if it were really a single undying individual,

yet only a few decades ago, a mere second in the history of the earth,

no human being now alive was in existence. “As for man, his days are

as grass: as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth. For the wind

passeth over it, and it is gone; and the place thereof shall know it

no more.” Indeed, not merely are we individually as grass, but in a

few years the hand that writes these words, and the tissues of eye

and brain whereby they are perceived, will actually _be_ grass. Here,

then, is the colossal paradox: absolute and literal continuity of life,

every cell from a preceding cell throughout the ages--_omnis cellula e

cellula_; yet three times in every century the living and only wealth

of nations is reduced to dust, and is raised up again from helpless

infancy. Where else is such catastrophic continuity?

Each individual enters the world in a fashion the dramatic and

sensational character of which can be realised by none who have not

witnessed it; and in a few years the individual dies, scarcely less

dramatically as a rule, and sometimes more so. This continuous and

apparently invincible thing, human life, which began so humbly and to

the sound of no trumpets, in Southern Asia or the neighbourhood of the

Caspian Sea, but which has never looked back since its birth, and

is now the dominant fact of what might well be an astonished earth,

depends in every age and from moment to moment upon here a baby, there

a baby and there yet another; these curious little objects being of all

living things, animal or vegetable, young or old, large or small, the

most utterly helpless and incompetent, incapable even of finding for

themselves the breasts that were made for them. If but one of all the

“hungry generations” that have preceded us had failed to secure the

care and love of its predecessor, the curtain would have come down and

a not unpromising though hitherto sufficiently grotesque drama would

have been ended for ever.

This discontinuity it is which persuades many of us to conceive

human life to be not so much a mighty maze without a plan, as a mere

stringing of beads on an endless cord of which one end arose in Mother

Earth, whilst the other may come at any time--but goes nowhere. The

beads, which we call generations, vary in size and colour, no doubt,

but on no system; each one makes a fresh start; the average difference

between them is merely one of position; and the result is merely to

make the string longer. Or the generations might be conceived as the

links of an indeterminate chain, necessarily held to each other:

but suggesting not at all the idea of a living process such that

its every step is fraught with eternal consequence. In a word, we

incline to think that History merely goes on repeating itself, and we

have to learn that History never repeats itself. Every generation is

epoch-making.

It is thus to the conception of parenthood as the vital and organic

link of life that we are forced: and the whole of this book is

really concerned with parenthood. We shall see, in due course, that

no generation, whether of men or animals or plants, determines or

provides, as a whole, the future of the race. Only a percentage, as

a rule a very small percentage indeed, of any species reach maturity,

and fewer still become parents. Amongst ourselves, one-tenth of any

generation gives birth to one-half the next. These it is who, in the

long run, make History: a Kant or a Spencer, dying childless, may

leave what we call immortal works; but unless the parents of each new

generation are rightly chosen or “selected”--to use the technical

word--a new generation may at any time arise to whom the greatest

achievements of the past are nothing. The newcomers will be as swine

to these pearls, the immortality of which is always conditional upon

the capacity of those who come after to appreciate them. There is

here expressed the distinction between two kinds of progress: the

traditional progress which is dependent upon transmitted achievement,

but in its turn is dependent upon racial progress--this last being the

kind of progress of which the history of pre-human life upon the planet

is so largely the record and of which mankind is the finest fruit

hitherto.

* * * * *

It is possible that a concrete case, common enough, and thus the more

significant, may appeal to the reader, and help us to realise afresh

the conditions under which human life actually persists.

Forced inside a motor-omnibus one evening, for lack of room outside,

I found myself opposite a woman, poorly-clothed, with a wedding-ring

upon her finger and a baby in her arms. The child was covered with a

black shawl and its face could not be seen. It was evidently asleep.

It should have been in its cot at that hour. The mother's face roused

feelings which a sonnet of Wordsworth's might have expressed, or a

painting by some artist with a soul, a Rembrandt or a Watts, such as

we may look for in vain amongst the be-lettered to-day. Here was the

spectacle of mother and child, which all the great historic religions,

from Buddhism to Christianity, have rightly worshipped; the spectacle

which more nearly symbolises the sublime than any other upon which the

eye of a man, himself once such a child, can rest; the spectacle which

alone epitomises the life of mankind and the unalterable conditions of

all human life and all human societies, reminding us at once of our

individual mortality, and the immortality of our race--

“While we, the brave, the mighty and the wise,

We Men, who in our morn of youth defied

The Elements, must vanish;--be it so!

Enough, if something from our hands have power

To live, and act, and serve the future hour:”

--the spectacle which alone, if any can, may reconcile us to death;

the spectacle of that which alone can sanctify the love of the sexes;

the spectacle of motherhood in being, the supreme duty and supreme

privilege of womanhood--“a mother is a mother still, the holiest thing

alive.”

This woman, utterly unconscious of the dignity of her attitude and of

the contrast between herself and the imitation of a woman, elegantly

clothed, who sat next her, giving her not a thought nor a glance, nor

yet room for the elbow bent in its divine office, was probably some

thirty-two or three years old, as time is measured by the revolutions

of the earth around the sun. Measured by some more relevant gauge,

she was evidently aged, her face grey and drawn, desperately tired,

yet placid--not with due exultation but with the calm of one who has

no hope. She was too weary to draw the child to her bosom, and her

arms lay upon her knees; but instead she bent her body downwards to

her baby. She looked straight out in front of her, not at me nor at

the passing phantasms beyond, but at nothing. The eyes were open but

they were too tired to see. The face had no beauty of feature nor of

colour nor of intelligence, but it was wholly beautiful, made so by

motherhood; and I think she must have held some faith. The tint of her

skin and of her eyeballs spoke of the impoverishment of her blood, her

need of sleep and rest and ease of mind. She will probably be killed

by consumption within five years and will certainly never hold a

grand-child in her arms. The pathologist may lay this crime at the door

of the tubercle bacillus; but a prophet would lay it at the reader's

door and mine.

While we read and write, play at politics or ping-pong, this woman

and myriads like her are doing the essential work of the world. _The

worm waits for us as well as for her and them: and in a few years her

children and theirs will be Mankind._ We need a prophet to cry aloud

and spare not; to tell us that if this is the fate of mothers in the

ranks which supply the overwhelming proportion of our children, our

nation may number Shakespeare and Newton amongst the glories of its

past, and the lands of ancient empires amongst its present possessions,

but it can have no future; that if, worshipping what it is pleased to

call success, it has no tears nor even eyes for such failures as these,

it may walk in the ways of its insensible heart and in the sight of

its blind eyes, yet it is walking not in its sleep but in its death,

is already doomed and damned almost past recall; and that, if it is to

be saved, there will avail not “broadening the basis of taxation,” nor

teaching in churches the worship of the Holy Mother and Holy Child,

whilst Motherhood is blasphemed at their very doors, but this and this

only--the establishment, not in statutes but in the consciences of men

and women, of a true religion based upon these perdurable and evident

dogmas--that all human life is holy, all mothers and all children,

that history is made in the nursery, that the individual dies, that

therefore children determine the destinies of all civilisations, that

the race or society which succeeds with its mammoth ships and its

manufactures but fails to produce men and women, is on the brink of

irretrievable doom; that the body of man is an animal, endowed with

the inherited animal instincts necessary for self-preservation and the

perpetuation of the race, but that, if the possession of this body by a

conscious spirit, “looking before and after,” is anything more than a

“sport” of the evolutionary forces, it demands that, the blind animal

instincts notwithstanding, the desecration of motherhood, the perennial

slaughter and injury of children, the casual unconsidered birth of

children for whom there is no room or light or air or food, and of

children whose inheritance condemns them to misery, insanity or crime,

must cease; and that the recurrent drama of human love and struggle

reaches its happy ending not when the protagonists are married, but

when they join hands over a little child that promises to be a worthy

heir of all the ages. This religion must teach that the spectacle of a

prematurely aged and weary and hopeless mother, which he who runs or

rides may see, produced by our rude foreshadowings of civilisation, is

an affront to all honest and thoughtful eyes: that where there are no

mothers, such as mothers should be, the people will assuredly perish,

though everything they touch should turn to gold, though science and

art and philosophy should flourish as never before. I believe that

history, rightly read, teaches these tremendous lessons.

* * * * *

In our own day the bounds of imagination are undoubtedly widening.

Means of communication, the press, the camera, the decadence of

obsolete dogmas, making room for the simple daily truths of morality

which have “the dignity of dateless age” and are too hard for the teeth

of time--these account in large measure for the fact that the happier

half of the world is at last beginning to realise how the other half

lives. There is perhaps more divine discontent with things as they are

than ever heretofore: this being due, as has been suggested, perhaps

as much to the modern aids of imagination as to any inherent increase

of sympathy. Science, too, in the form of sociology and economics,

adds warrant to the demand for some radical reform of the conditions

of life. It teaches that all forms of life are interdependent; that

society is thus an organism in more than merely loose analogy; that

the classes pay abundantly for the state of the masses: whilst

medicine teaches that the tuberculosis, for instance, which slays

so many members of the middle and upper classes, is bred by and in

the overcrowding of the lower classes, this and many other diseases

promising to resist all measures less radical than the abolition of

half our current social practice.

Hence it is that we hear so much of social reform; and the promises of

representatives of many political -isms jostle one another at the gates

of our ears. The Anarchist at one extreme, and the Collectivist at the

other, with the Individualist and the Socialist somewhere between,

offer their panaceas. To me, I confess, they seem little better than

the scholastic metaphysicians of old days, like them mistaking words

for things, incapable of understanding each other, evading precise

definition and using terms which never mean the same thing twice as

missiles and weapons of abuse: and, above all, mistaking means for ends.

But the leading error common to them all, as I seem to see it, is their

conception of society as a stable thing--a piece of machinery which

must be properly “assembled,” as the engineers say; forgetful of the

extraordinary discontinuity which inheres in the swift-approaching

death of all its parts, and their replacement by helpless immaturity.

The first fact of society really is that all its individuals are

mortal. This we all know, but I question whether even Herbert Spencer

fully reckoned with it; and certainly the common run of social

speculators have not begun to realise what it means. Human life is

made up of generations, and the key to all progress lies in the nature

of the relation between one generation and another. Spencer records

the case of an Oxford graduate, desirous to be his secretary, who did

not know that the population of Great Britain is increasing. Here is

a capital present fact of the--merely quantitative--relation between

successive generations. So far as any influence on their theory or

practice is concerned, it is still unknown to nearly all our advisers.

Yet this fact of the ceaseless multiplication of man, which has

distinguished him from the first, and is absolutely peculiar to him of

all living species, animal or vegetable, as Sir E. Ray Lankester has

lately pointed out, is the source of the major facts of history and the

besetting condition of every social problem that can be named at this

hour.

The professional and dedicated teachers of morality seem to be in

little better case. They believe in babies, perhaps, as the prime

and only really valid source of the weal and wealth and strength of

nations, and as the great moralisers and humanisers of the generation

that gives them birth. They are beginning to join in that public outcry

against infant mortality which will yet abolish this abominable stain

upon our time. But they are lamentably uninformed. They do not know,

for instance, that a high infant mortality habitually goes with a high

birth-rate, not only in human society but in all living species; and

they have yet to appreciate the proposition which I have so often

advanced and which, to me at any rate, seems absolutely self-evident,

that until we have learnt how to keep alive all the healthy babies

now born--that is to say, not less than ninety per cent. of all, the

babies in the slums included--it is monstrous to cry for more, _to

be similarly slain_. These bewailings about our mercifully falling

birth-rate, uncoupled with any attention to the slaughter of the

children actually born, are pitiable in their blindness and would be

lamentable if they had any effect--of which there is fortunately no

sign whatever, but indeed the contrary.

Humanitarian sentiment, also, is terribly misguided. “Why always the

benefit of the future, has the present no claim upon us?” I have been

asked. Assuredly all sentient life, and therefore pre-eminently all

human life, in which sentiency is so incommensurably intensified by

self-consciousness, the power of “looking before and after,” has a

claim upon us: but the question could have been asked by no one whose

imagination had been worthily employed. Our posterity will in due

course be as actual and present as we, their deeds and sufferings and

hopes as actual and present as ours. They outnumber us as the ocean

outweighs a raindrop; to avert evil from one of them is as much as to

relieve evil in one of us,--how much more to prevent the misery of five

in the next generation, fifty in the next and unnumbered hosts beyond?

To serve the future of the race is not to benefit a fiction: the men

and women of a hundred and a thousand years hence will be as real

as we. And to serve the future is to put out our talent at compound

interest a thousand-fold compounded. The weak imagination would rather

build a sanatorium for consumptives and see it filled with grateful

patients. This is a palpable, sensible good, for which the meanest

visual faculty suffices: but the strong imagination would rather open

the closed windows of nurseries or work at the mechanical problems

of ventilation, aye, or even at the structure of the bacteriological

microscope--finding the spectacle, in the mind's eye, of healthy men

and women fifty years hence as grateful and as real a reward as the

sight of a sanatorium in the present. The pace of progress will be

incalculably hastened when men, whether workers or bequeathers or

administrators, enlarge their imaginations so as to perceive that the

future will be, and therefore indeed is, as real as the present.[1] I

appeal to the reason of the kind-hearted reader. Would you rather make

one man or child happy now, or two or a thousand a century hence?

It is, in a word, the idea of continuous causation or evolution that

explains the remarkable contrast between our outlook on the future and

our fathers'. In older--that is to say, younger--days, men's interest

in posterity was most naïvely and quaintly selfish. If they raised a

monument or did any piece of work which obviously would endure beyond

the span of their own lives, their chief motive seems to have been

that we should think well of them, nor forget how well they thought

of themselves. They were not concerned with us, but with our opinion

of them. They were anxious about the verdict of posterity; and the

verdict is that they little realised their responsibility for us,

or betrayed it if they did. There is also the frank attitude of Sir

Boyle Roche's famous bull, “What has posterity done for us?” This is

a quite familiar and conspicuous sentiment--as familiar as any other

form of selfishness: but it is as if a father should say, “What have

my children done for me?” and is open to the same condemnation. We

are assuredly responsible for posterity as any parent for any child.

Before the nineteenth century this fact could be realised by very few.

To-day, when the truth of organic evolution is a commonplace, and when

the plasticity of the forces of evolution is slowly becoming realised,

we must face our tremendous responsibility and privilege in a spirit

worthy of those to whom such mighty truths have been revealed.

Parenthood and birth--in these the whole is summed. At the mercy of

these are all past discovery, all past achievement in art or science,

in action or in thought. The human species, secure though it be, is

only a race after all; only a sequence of runners who _quasi cursores,

vitaï lampada tradunt_--like runners, hand on the lamp of life, as

Lucretius said. This it is which, to the thoughtful observer, makes

each birth such an overwhelming event. It is a great event for the

mother and the father, but how much greater if its consequences be

only half realised. Education in its full sense, “the provision of an

environment,” as I would define it, is a mighty and necessary force,

for nothing but potentiality is given at birth: but no education, no

influence of traditional progress, can avail, unless the potentialities

which these must unfold are worthy. The baby comes tumbling headlong

into the world. The fate of all the to-morrows depends upon it.

Hitherto its happening has depended upon factors animal and casual

enough, utterly improvident, concerned but rarely with this tremendous

consequence. Fate may be mistress, but she works only too often by

Chance, as Goethe remarked. Fate and Chance hitherto have never

failed to keep up the supply which the death of the individual makes

imperative: and forces have been at work determining for progress,

to some extent, but most imperfectly, the parentage of these headlong

babies. Yet the human intelligence cannot remain satisfied with their

working--and much less so when it realises how they can be controlled,

how effectively, and to what high ends. The physician may and must

concern himself, on these occasions, with the immediate needs of the

mother and the child, and when these are satisfied he may feel that

his duty has been done; but, as he journeys homewards, he must surely

reflect--that this astonishing thing, then, has happened again, as

indeed it has happened many times this very day; that whilst this baby

is to become an individual man or woman, an end in himself or herself,

in its young loins and in those of its like are the hosts of all the

unborn who are yet to be. If, then, these babies differ widely from

each other, as they do; if these differences are, on the whole, capable

of prediction in terms of heredity; if the future state of mankind is

involved in these differences, which will in their turn be transmitted

to the children of such as themselves become parents; and if this

business of parenthood will be confined to only a _small_ proportion

of these babies, _of whom one-half will never reach puberty_; if

these things be so, as they are, cannot these babies be chosen in

anticipation, there being thus effected an enormous vital economy,

Nature being commanded to the highest ends by the only method, which

is to obey her, as Bacon said; and the human intelligence thus making

its supreme achievement--the ethical direction and vast acceleration of

racial progress? What man can do for animals and plants, can he not do

for himself? Give imagination its fleetest and strongest wing, it can

never conceive a task so worth the doing.

This, and this alone, is what requires to be brought home to the

general reader and the reformer alike. Says Mr. H. G. Wells: “It seemed

to me then that to prevent the multiplication of people below a certain

standard, and to encourage the multiplication of exceptionally superior

people, was the only real and permanent way of mending the ills of the

world. I think that still.” And then, in a few sketchy pages, Mr. Wells

discredits, as with one glance of great eyes, the very proposal which

he thinks to be the only real and permanent way of mending the ills

of the world. Not one man in thousands has got so far as to hold this

opinion; and it is the more lamentable that Mr. Wells, having reached

it, should hold it in the loose, formal, and inoperative fashion in

which the man in the street or the woman in the pew holds the dogmas of

orthodox theology. We need to educate public opinion--that “chaos of

prejudices”--up to Mr. Wells' standard, and then we need to accomplish

the much harder task of converting a mere intellectual speculation into

a living belief.

But so surely as this belief, the crowning and practical conclusion

to which all the teachings of modern biology converge, comes to life

in men's minds, so surely the difficulties will be met, not only on

paper but also in practice. “Where there's a will there's a way.”

Meanwhile men are content to work at the impermanent, if not indeed

at measures which directly war against the selection of the best for

parenthood: they do not realise the stern necessity of obeying Nature

in this respect--for it is Her selection of parents that alone has

raised us from the beast and the worm--and since necessity alone,

whether inner or outer, whether of character or circumstance, is the

mother of invention, they fail to find the methods by which our ideal

can be carried out. There is nothing, either in the character of

the individual man and woman, or in the structure of society, that

makes the ideal of race-culture impossible to-day: nor must action

wait for further knowledge of heredity. Little though we surely know

so far, we have abundance of assured knowledge for immediate action

in many directions--knowledge which is agreed upon by Lamarckians

and neo-Lamarckians, Darwinians and Weismannians, Mendelians and

biometricians alike. All of these agree, for instance, as to the

fact that the insane tendency is transmissible and is transmitted by

heredity. We need only public opinion to say, “Then most surely those

who have such a tendency must forgo parenthood.”

For it is public opinion that governs the world. If it were, as it will

be one day--which may these pages hasten--an elementary and radical

truth, as familiar and as cogent to all, man in the House or man in

the public-house, as the fact of the earth's gravitation--that racial

maintenance, much more racial progress, depends absolutely upon the

selection of parents; if the establishment of this selective process in

the best and widest manner were the admitted goal of all legislation

and all social and political speculation--who can question that the

thing would be practicable and indeed easy? Without the formation of

public opinion this is as hopelessly Utopian and inaccessible an ideal

as words ever framed; public opinion once formed, nothing could be more

palpably feasible. Hence Mr. Galton's wisdom in demanding that, before

we dictate courses of procedure, and even before we can expect profit

from scientific investigation, whether by the biometric method of which

he is the founder, or by any other, _public opinion must be formed_;

that the idea of eugenics or good-breeding must be instilled into the

conscience of civilisation like a new religion--a religion of the most

lofty and austere, because the most unselfish, morality, a religion

which sets before it a sublime ideal, terrestrial indeed in its chosen

theatre, but celestial in its theme, human in its means, but literally

superhuman in its goal. If the intrinsic ennoblement of mankind does

not answer to this eulogy, where is the ideal that does?