THE EXCHEQUER OF LIFE
“This last lustrum has enabled us to make an astounding discovery,
of which neither Adam Smith nor Cobden nor Malthus dreamed--that
a nation is composed not of property nor of provinces, but of
men.”--Tille (1904), quoted by Forel.
The main thesis which the last chapter was intended to introduce is, in
the words of Ruskin, simply this: “There is no wealth but life.” The
assumption throughout this book is that Ruskin is the real founder of
political economy, he first of moderns having seen this supreme truth.
We speak of a nation's possessions, but possessions imply a possessor
or possessors. Wealth, as Ruskin teaches us, is “the possession of the
valuable by the valiant.” If our national possessions were made over
to a race of monkeys, “they being inherently and eternally incapable
of wealth,” what would they be worth? Furthermore, to possess and to
be possessed by, are totally diverse things. Says Ruskin, “Lately in
a wreck of a Californian ship, one of the passengers fastened a belt
about him with two hundred pounds of gold in it, with which he was
found afterwards at the bottom. Now, as he was sinking--had he the gold
or had the gold him?”
=Vital economics.=--We have already alluded to the unique property
of mankind in virtue of which the radical character of the essential
wealth, which is life, has only too commonly been forgotten. In the
case of any animal or vegetable species we should have no difficulty,
if asked regarding its “success” and “prospects,” in directing our
enquiry to essentials. We should examine the individuals of that
species, young and old, its death-rate and its birth-rate, and these
would supply us with the answer. In the case of man there is the almost
incalculable complication involved in the fact that he is capable of
making external acquirements,--material possessions and spiritual
possessions which, so long as he remains capable of possessing them,
are of real value, and, on account of what they mean for life, are a
true though secondary wealth. Amongst civilised mankind, therefore, the
essential question as to the breed of men and women is obscured by the
secondary question as to their traditional or transmitted possessions
or external acquirements. But if we remember the case of the drowning
man and his gold we shall realise that, fundamentally, the case is the
same for the human as for any other species. No one can openly question
this, but not one publicist or politician in a thousand believes it in
any living sense. The true function of government, said Ruskin, is the
production and recognition of human worth. This has only to be said to
be admitted; it is one of the thoughts that shine, as Joubert says. No
one denies it and no one acts upon it.
In this sense such a phrase as the National Exchequer begins to take on
a new meaning, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer loses every whit of
his importance, except in so far as his proceedings tend towards, or
away from, the production and recognition of human worth. He plays with
money, whereas the Chancellor of the real Exchequer would work for life.
=The facts of childhood to-day.=--But since human life is
discontinuous, since three times in a century the essential wealth of
nations is reduced to dust, and raised again from helpless infancy,
our urgent business is with the children of the nation. What, then, in
general, are the facts of the National Exchequer thus conceived?
We find that, so far as ordinary physical health is concerned,
the majority of human babies--including, for instance, so-called
Anglo-Saxon babies--are physically healthy at birth. On the other hand,
a certain proportion are as definitely and obviously unhealthy at the
very start as the more fortunate majority are healthy. If certain
influences, such as alcohol and _some few_ diseases, have been in
operation, the babies may be already doomed--not national wealth, but
national _illth_. In the absence of these pernicious factors, there is,
on the whole, _physical_ fitness. The ratio is perhaps as ninety to ten
per cent.
Here then, is, on the whole, a ceaseless supply of essential wealth;
physically, at any rate, of good enough quality. As every one knows, or
should know, the greater part of it we immediately proceed to deface
and destroy. Our mouths are full of argument concerning the principles
of what we are pleased to conceive as political economy. The principles
of vital economy we do not enquire into but outrage and defy at every
turn. So horribly and wastefully are we misguided that in point of
fact we actually destroy altogether the greater number, not of all
the children merely, but even of the fit and healthy children; and
it may forcibly be argued that, before any one proceeds to attempt
any choice amongst the children, as to which shall in their turn
become parents and which shall not, it would be well, apart from any
question of discrimination, to revise radically the methods which at
present permit this wholesale destruction. Whilst we kill outright
by hundreds of thousands every year, we damage for life far more,
including a very large proportion of those who, as things at present
are, will in their turn become the parents who alone are the makers
of the real wealth of nations. If this destructive process had the
effect which common notions of heredity would lead us to expect, then
most certainly not merely would Britain, for instance, be doomed, but
the very name would long ago have become “one with Nineveh and Tyre.”
But though this destructive process (which it is best to describe as
resulting in deterioration rather than degeneration) has been long
continued, and though, in consequence of the great economic changes of
last century and the rush into the cities with their over-crowding,
it is perhaps more disastrous now than ever before: _yet_ it remains
true that most of the babies born in the slums are splendid little
specimens of humanity--so far as physique is concerned--bearing no
marks of degeneration to correspond with the deterioration of their
parents. In a word, heredity works--the racial poisons apart, as we
shall see--so that each generation gets a fresh start. _If there be no
process of selection_, each new generation begins where its predecessor
began and is as a whole neither worse nor better, whether physically or
psychically.
=Eugenics and infant mortality.=--In the face of the foregoing, which
merely outlines the appalling indictment that ought to be framed
against civilisation for its treatment of its children, it is evidently
incumbent upon us to answer the objector who should say that the
whole purpose and argument of our present enquiry is premature, and
that surely our first business should be not to propose any novel and
revolutionary doctrine as to the choice of parents and of children, but
rather to stop this child slaughter and child damage--in other words,
that we should devote ourselves rather, not to providing children
with a good heredity, but to providing them with a good environment,
it being only too demonstrable that the environment we at present
provide for the great majority of them is deadly and abominable in the
extreme. This argument is all the stronger because most of the children
are admittedly fit physically at birth. It would seem as if there were
little to complain of in their heredity, whilst there is certainly
almost everything to complain of in their environment.
If this objection is to be met at all, we must be most careful and
serious in our going. Whatever conclusions we come to we must at any
rate be sure that we do not impugn or deny the instant, immediate and
constant law of love which declares that there can be no adequate ideal
short of doing our best for all children, once they are born--nay,
more, from the very moment, months before, at which their individual
history starts. Whoso suggests that, as a present and immediate
policy, it is not right to care for all children, healthy or diseased,
welcome or unwelcome, nurseried in Park Lane or in the slums, may have
plausible and even so-called eugenic arguments on his side, but his
proposal is essentially immoral and therefore essentially false. For
all children actually in being--whether they await or have passed the
particular moment of birth--it is our duty, ideal and real, to do our
utmost. The believer in the principle of race-culture or eugenics--whom
I shall hereafter, as for some years past, call the eugenist--may
believe that it would have been better had some of these children never
been born; he may believe that, in the present unorganised state of
society, in the present dethroned state of motherhood, it were vastly
better had many even of the healthy majority never been born. He may
be convinced that, since so many of them will certainly die, failing
our feeble efforts to save childhood, their birth is a misfortune: but
on no terms and for no objects whatever does, or can, the eugenist
propose that any of these children, even though from the moment of
birth they be riddled with disease, should be allowed to die. Though
some will say that the keeping alive of diseased children, or even of
many children at first healthy, is a disaster, I maintain that no such
question of choice, selection or discrimination can find any warrant
in any form of morality--eugenic or other--from the moment at which
the child in question began its individual existence. Those of us who
advocate the eugenic idea must be perpetually on our guard against the
insidious alliance of any who, agreeing with our premises, declare
that it is a mistake, for instance, to prosecute a campaign against
infant mortality. I myself have had a share--by a continuous propaganda
started in 1902--in making this last a publicly recognised question,
whilst, on the other hand, I have done my best to popularise the idea
of eugenics. Let me repeat here what I have already said elsewhere:
that I strenuously repudiate any suggestion that the eugenic end is
legitimately or effectively to be served by permitting the infant
mortality to continue. The distinguished Egyptologist, Professor
Flinders Petrie, in his recent book _Janus in Modern Life_, describes
as follows the results of the present crusade against infant mortality,
as he conceives them:--“We must agree that it would be of the lower or
lowest type of careless, thriftless, dirty, and incapable families that
the increase [of surviving children] would be obtained. Is it worth
while to dilute our increase of population by ten per cent. more of the
most inferior kind? Will England be stronger for having one-thirtieth
more, and that of the worst stock, added to the population every year?
This movement is doing away with one of the few remains of natural
weeding out of the unfit that our civilisation has left to us. And it
will certainly cause more misery than happiness in the course of a
century.”
Here, plainly, is a serious argument. We are bound to sympathise with
its underlying assumption, viz., that not all babies are such as we
can desire to carry on the race. Still more must we sympathise with
any author whatever who has imagination and foresight enough to write
anywhere, on any subject, wrongly or rightly, such a sentence as “and
it will certainly cause more misery than happiness in the course of
a century.” We need more such authors. But without going into the
whole argument here--as, for instance, regarding the singular use of
the word “natural”--I do most entirely deny the right of the eugenic
idea to any voice or place as to the fate of children _once they have
come into being_. Another writer, arguing on the same lines, says _à
propos_ of the abolition of infant mortality: “This last change which,
as the Huddersfield experiment shows, is easy of accomplishment, is
likely to be completely effected in the next few years, and we shall
then have abolished the one factor which in any important degree at
present tends to redress the balance between the rates of reproduction
of the superior and the inferior classes.” These are the words of
Dr. W. McDougall, the distinguished psychologist. Dr. McDougall has
subsequently shown that he repudiates the apparent deduction from them,
and entirely approves of the present campaign of mercy to childhood.
Nevertheless, these arguments, plainly derived from the principle
of natural selection, do express a most important truth--viz., that
indiscriminate survival must lead to racial decadence, whether in man,
microbe or moss. I submit that the difficulty can be solved only by the
eugenic principle.
The fittest must become parents, and the unfit[2] must not; then kill
the unfit, says Nature. And this indeed, in all living species other
than man, is what Nature does. But “thou shalt not kill,” says the
moral law--not even the unfit. As the foregoing will have shown, some
thinkers to-day propose to avail themselves in this dilemma of the “New
Decalogue”:--
“Thou shalt not kill but need'st not strive
Officiously to keep alive.”
This is no solution of the problem. There is only one solution, and
that is the eugenic solution. Nature can preserve a race only by
destroying the unfit. We who are intelligent must preserve and elevate
the race by preventing the unfit from ever coming into existence at
all. We must replace Nature's selective death-rate by a selective
birth-rate. This is merciful and supremely moral; it means vast economy
in life and money and time and suffering; it is natural at bottom, but
it is Nature raised to her highest power in that almost supra-natural
fact--the moral intelligence of man.
=The dilemma defined.=--The moral law, and our natural human sympathy,
insist that we should seek to preserve all the children that come into
the world, to amplify the health of the healthy, and to neutralise,
as far as possible, the unfitness of the unfit. A mother brings her
malformed baby to the surgeon, and he does his best to patch up the
gaps left by the imperfect processes of development. Otherwise the
baby will die. Who dares look that mother in the face and say “Ah,
but it is better for the race that your child should die!” Such a
doctrine, I submit, blasphemes our humanity; it is intolerable to
any decent person who will pause to think what it means: and yet,
in so saying, we seem to defy Nature with her imperative law of the
survival of the fittest only. Pre-eugenic writers on evolution state
the case in all its hardness. Dr. Archdall Reid says that “If we
wish to improve the individual, we must attend to his acquirements by
providing proper shelter, food, and training.” Well, we do wish to
improve the individual, and to preserve the individual! We do not wish
the super-man on the terms of Nietzsche--the super-man obtained at
the cost of love would turn out to be inferior to any brute-beast, an
intellectual fiend. But, Dr. Reid goes on to say, “such means will not
effect an improvement of the race.... On the contrary, they will cause
deterioration[3] by an increased survival of the unfit.” The provision
of “proper shelter, food and training” will cause racial decadence!
Is it not evident, then, that such provisions must rather be styled
improper, and that we must refrain from doing anything for the defects
and needs of the individual, lest a worse thing befall the race? This
is an outrageous proposition, yet it is offered us as a necessary
inference from the principle of natural selection or the survival of
the fittest--which no one now dares to dispute.
Herbert Spencer, to whom we owe the phrase “the survival of the
fittest,” expresses this critical difficulty as follows: “The law
that each creature shall take the benefits and the evils of its own
nature has been the law under which life has evolved thus far. Any
arrangements which, in a considerable degree, prevent superiority from
profiting by the rewards of superiority, or shield inferiority from the
evils it entails--any arrangements which tend to make it as well to be
inferior as to be superior, are arrangements diametrically opposed to
the progress of organisation, and the reaching of a higher life.” This
is permanently and necessarily true, and in our care for childhood we
have to reckon with it. Yet even Spencer himself did not pursue this
supremely important enquiry to what I shall in a moment submit to be
its logical and almost incredibly hopeful conclusion.
Huxley, writing his well-known Romanes Lecture, “Evolution and Ethics,”
at a time when, unfortunately, he had somewhat parted company with
Spencer, and was too ready to accept any argument that made against
Spencer's political views, cuts the Gordian knot in an astonishingly
unsatisfactory fashion. He declares that “the ethical progress of
society depends, not on imitating the cosmic process [that is, the
selection of the fittest], still less in running away from it, but in
combating it.” This is shallow thinking and very poor philosophy. One
wonders how Huxley can have forgotten the great dictum of Bacon that
Nature can be commanded only by obeying her. He declares that moral
evolution is the direct contradiction and antithesis of the process of
organic evolution hitherto. He says, “Social progress means a checking
of the cosmic process at every step and the substitution for it of
another, which may be called the ethical process;” and he declares
it to be a fallacy to suppose “that because on the whole animals and
plants have advanced in perfection of organisation, by means of the
struggle for existence and the consequent survival of the fittest;
therefore men in society, men as ethical beings, must look to the same
process to help them towards perfection.”
With all this Huxley offers us no real solution whatever, no hint
that he has realised in any degree what must be the consequences of
indiscriminate survival. It is astonishing how personal bias, so alien
to the whole character of the man as a rule, blinded him to a solution
which, as it seems to me, stared him in the face. Assuredly we can
transmute and elevate and raise to its highest power what he calls
the cosmic process, and can reconcile cosmic with ethical evolution,
_by extending to the unfit all our sympathy but forbidding them
parenthood_. I deny that the provision of a proper environment for the
individual entails racial deterioration. Cosmic and moral evolution
are compatible if, whilst caring for each individual, whether maim,
halt, blind, or insane, and whilst admitting the categorical imperative
of the law of love which demands our care for him, we continue to
obey the indication of Nature, which forbids such an individual to
perpetuate his infirmity. Nature has no choice; if she is to avert the
coming of the unfit race she must summarily extinguish its potential
ancestor, but we can prohibit the reproduction of his infirmity whilst
doing all we can for the success of his individual life. This is the
ideal course indicated and approved by biology and morality alike.
=The eugenic reconciliation.=--I submit, then, that there is no
inconsistency in fighting simultaneously for the preservation and
care of all babies and all children without discrimination of any
kind--and, on the other hand, in declaring that, if the degeneration
of the race is to be averted, still more if racial, which is the only
sure, progress, is to be attained, we must have the worthy and only the
worthy to be the parents of the future. I submit further that only the
eugenist can maintain his position in this matter at the present day.
On his one hand is the improvident humanitarian with his feeling
heart, he who, seeing misery and disease and death, whether in
babyhood, childhood, or at any other time of life, seeks to improve
the environment and so relieve these evils. Close beside this wholly
indiscriminate humanitarianism is that which declares that with
childhood is the future and therefore devotes its energies especially
to the young, is grateful for every baby born, whatever its state, and
when adult years are reached, assumes that all will be well for the
future, though the principle of natural selection is thus made of none
effect.
On the other side of the eugenists stand those whom we may for short
call the Nietzscheans. They see one-half of the truth of natural
selection; they see that through struggle and internecine war, species
have hitherto maintained themselves or ascended. They declare that all
improvement of the environment, or at any rate all humanitarian effort,
tends to abrogate the struggle for existence, and even, as is only
too often true, to select unworth and let worth go to the wall. This
school then declares that infant mortality is a blessing and charity
an unmitigated curse. In short, that we must go back as quickly as
possible to the order of the beast.
Between these two, surely, the eugenist stands, declaring that each has
a great truth, but that his teaching, and his alone, involves their
co-ordination and reconciliation. He agrees with the humanitarian that
no child should cry or starve or work or die--or at any rate this
particular eugenist does--and he agrees with the Nietzschean that
to abrogate, and still more, to reverse, the principle of natural
selection, is to set our faces for the goal of racial death. But
further, the eugenist declares that the indiscriminate humanitarian,
blind to the truth which the Nietzschean sees, would heap up, if
permitted, disaster upon disaster; whilst he repudiates as horrible and
ghastly the Nietzschean doctrine that morality must go by the board if
the race is to be raised:--that we must be damned to be saved.
Our age is now awakening, at last, to the cry of the children. The
tendency of legislation and opinion in every civilised country is
one and the same. For this humanitarianism let only him who thinks
of any child as a brat refuse to give thanks. But it is the business
of all who, whilst loving children and still in love with love, are
yet acquainted with the principles of organic evolution--in short,
the business of all humane men of science, men of science who have
not ceased to be human--whilst aiding, abetting and directing this
humanitarian effort by every means in their power, to teach and preach,
in season and out of season, that unless meanwhile we make terms with
the principle of selection, the choice of worth for parents, and the
rejection of the unworthy, _not as individuals but as parents_, we
shall assuredly breed for posterity, whose lives and happiness and
moral welfare are in our hands, evils that can adequately neither be
named nor numbered. Already, together with much blessed good, this
indiscriminate humanitarianism has done much evil. Many of our most
instant and, for this generation, insoluble problems are the lamentable
fruit of this inherently good thing. The eugenist declares that this
fruit is not necessary, that if it were necessary he could see no way
out of our morass and would echo the half-wish of Huxley for some
kindly comet that should put a term to human history altogether; and,
in short, that only by the eugenic means can the humanitarian end be
attained.
During the last year or two of the campaign against infant mortality
many things have become clear, and none clearer than the fundamental
compatibility between this campaign and the principles of eugenics. As
these two efforts wall be predominant in the real politics of all the
years to come, a few more words must here be devoted to the relation
between them.
Granted that the highest of all objects is the making of worthy human
beings, it is quite evident that we must attend equally to the two
factors which determine all human life--heredity and environment.
Eugenics stands for the principle of heredity--the principle that the
right children shall be born. The campaign against infant mortality
stands for a good environment[4]--so that children, when born, may
survive and thrive. Obviously eugenics would be of no use if the
children could not survive, and no human infant can survive unless
it be born into a moral environment: no motherhood, no man. The two
campaigns, then, are strictly complementary. We must endeavour to rid
ourselves of the popular notion that the whole result of the campaign
against infant mortality can be measured by the number of babies
whose death is prevented. The infant mortality is merely an index of
a widespread social disease--an index and an extreme symptom. But
for every baby killed many are damaged; and to remove the causes of
infant mortality is to remove the causes which at present effect the
deterioration of millions of human beings. The eugenic campaign, then,
without the other would be almost futile.
=The time for eugenics.=--On our principles the eugenic question can
be decently raised only _before conception_. The unyoked germ-cells
of any individual, though alive, are not entitled to claim protection
from the principle that life is sacred. It is permitted to allow them
to die; but from the moment of conception a new individual has been
formed--a new living human individual, even though it only consists of
a single cell, product of the union of the parental germ-cells: and
we shall not be safe unless we regard this being as sacred and its
destruction--except in order to save the life of the mother--as murder,
even at this as at any later stage. If the eugenist should raise his
voice, and say that this individual should not be born, he must be
regarded exactly as if he were to recommend infanticide or the lethal
chamber for unfit individuals. In such a case he would have entirely
mistaken the whole principle of (negative) eugenics, which is _not_
to elevate the race by the destruction of the unfit, at any stage,
ante-natal or post-natal, but to do so by prohibiting the conception
of the unfit. Directly the new human individual is formed the eugenic
question is too late in that case. It is now the eugenist's duty,
because it is every one's duty, to regard the new individual, whether
born or yet unborn, as an end in himself or herself. But when the
question arises whether that individual is to become a parent, then the
eugenic question can and must be raised.
Circumstances might arise in which “case-law” might be applicable. It
might be thought better to destroy the syphilitic child rather than
allow it to come into the world. But we cannot make these distinctions.
The question is simply one of expediency, and the only expedient thing
is that there shall be no paltering with the principle that when a
new human life is conceived our duty is to preserve it, whether it
were conceived only twenty-four hours ago or whether it be a decrepit
and helpless centenarian. The instant we let this principle go we are
proposing to revert to Nature's method of keeping up the level of a
race by murder. It is improper, then, for any one on eugenic grounds to
protest against proposals for the arrest of infant mortality. He should
have spoken sooner; at this stage he must hold his peace.
=The two campaigns complementary.=--Yet further: not only is it evident
that the campaign against infant mortality (which is, in a word, the
campaign for the provision of a proper environment for the young) is
obviously necessary for the fulfilment of the eugenic ideal--since
what would be the good of choosing the right parents if their children
are then to be slain?--but it can be shown conversely that the object
of those who are working against infant mortality can never be fully
attained except by means of eugenics. Eugenics apart, we can and
shall reduce the infant mortality to a mere fraction of what it is
at present, by preventing the destruction of that great majority of
babies who are born healthy. Even, however, when we have provided an
ideal environment for every baby that comes into the world, we shall
not have abolished infant mortality, since there will always remain a
proportion, say ten per cent., whom not even an ideal environment can
save. They should never have been conceived. At the Infantile Mortality
Conference held in London in 1908, this was clearly recognised by more
than one speaker. The maternalist must have the eugenist to help him if
his ideal is to be attained.
Not only is the ideal of the two campaigns one and the same; not only
is each necessary for the other, but their methods are the same.
It is true that at first this was not evident, since when we began
to fight against infant mortality many temporary expedients of no
eugenic relevance were adopted, such as the _crèche_ and the infant
milk depot. But in the interval between the Conferences of 1906 and
1908 many things became clear: so that, whereas the papers at the
first Conference were only accidentally connected, the programme
of the second proceeded upon a principle--the principle of the
supremacy of motherhood. We see now that the one fundamental method
by which infantile mortality may be checked is by the elevation of
motherhood. In the words of our President, Mr. John Burns, “you
must glorify, dignify, and purify motherhood by every means in your
power.” Thus the first two papers read at the first morning's meeting
of the Conference--a brief paper by the present writer on “The Human
Mother,” and an admirable paper by Miss Alice Ravenhill on “Education
for Motherhood”--might equally well have been read at a Eugenics
Conference. The opponent of infant mortality and the eugenist appeal
to the same principle and avow the same creed: that parenthood is
sacred, that it must not be casually undertaken, that it demands the
most assiduous preparation of body and intellect and emotions. When, at
last, these principles are believed and acted upon, infant mortality
will be a thing of the past and national eugenics a thing of the
present.
It is essential in this first general study of the subject to state
the true nature of the relation between these two campaigns, to
which every succeeding year of the present century will find more
and more attention devoted. Between them they succeed in beginning
at the beginning, and it would be a disaster, indeed, if they were
incompatible. On the contrary, they are complementary and mutually
indispensable. As the years go on they will engage between them the
sympathy and the assistance of all serious people. In the year 1907
infant mortality was first named in a speech by a Prime Minister, and
in that same year it was first mentioned in the Christmas-Day sermon
at St. Paul's Cathedral; in that year also Parliament passed the Early
Notification of Births Act, the first substantial legislative provision
which sets our feet on the road towards the goal of a true national
estimate of the value of parenthood. We are about to discover that
the true politics is domestics, since there is no wealth but life and
life begins at home. We are going to have the right kind of life born,
and we are going to take care of it when it is born. We shall raise a
generation which looks upon the ordinary money-changing politician as
an impudent public nuisance, and the brutal, blood-stained Imperialist,
shouting about the Empire which his very existence almost suffices to
condemn, whilst he battens on the cannibal sale of alcoholic poison
to babies and the mothers of future babies, as the very type of those
traitors--they of its own household--who have helped to destroy every
Empire in history. We propose to rebuild the living foundations of
empire. To this end we shall preach a New Imperialism, warning England
to beware lest her veins become choked with yellow dirt, and demanding
that over all her legislative chambers there be carved the more than
golden words, “There is no Wealth but Life.”