CHAPTER X

MARRIAGE AND MATERNALISM

Our present concern is the relation of marriage to race-culture,

and for this purpose we must investigate an epoch ages before the

institution of human marriage, ages before mankind itself. We must

first remind ourselves of what may be called the trend of progress

from the first in respect of that reproduction upon which all species

depend, all living individuals being mortal.

At first, in the effort for survival and increase, life tried

the quantitative method. If we take the present day bacteria as

representatives of the primitive method, we see that not quality nor

individuality but quantity and numbers are the means by which, in

their case, life seeks to establish itself more abundantly. We express

our own birth-rate in its proportion per year to one thousand living:

but twenty thousand bacteria injected into a rabbit have been found

to multiply into twelve thousand million in one day. “One bacterium

has been actually observed to rear a small family of eighty thousand

within a period of twenty-four hours.” “The cholera bacillus can

duplicate every twenty minutes, and might thus in one day become

5,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, with the weight, according to the

calculations of Cohn, of about 7,366 tons. In a few days, at this rate,

there would be a mass of bacteria as big as the moon, huge enough to

fill the whole ocean.”

If now we trace the history of life up to man, we find in him--as

we have seen--the lowest birth-rate of any animal and the longest

ante-natal period in proportion to his body weight, the longest

period of maternal feeding, and by far the lowest infant mortality

and general death-rate. A chief fact of progress has been, in a word,

the supersession of the quantitative by the qualitative criterion of

survival-value. Immeasurably vast vital economy and efficiency have

thus been effected. The tendency of progress, in short--a tendency

coincident with the evolution of ever higher and higher species--is to

pass from the horrible Gargantuan wastefulness of the older methods

towards the evident but yet lamentably unrealised ideal--that every

child born shall reach maturity. This great historical tendency, which

will ultimately involve the restriction of parenthood to the fit, fine

and relatively few, has occurred under the impartial rule of natural

selection simply and solely because it has endowed with survival-value

the successive species in which it has been demonstrated.

=The rise of parenthood.=--Consistently with this fact and with

the argument of the previous chapter is the tendency towards

the lengthening of infancy, a very characteristic condition of

the evolution of the higher forms of life. This lengthening and

accentuation of infancy makes for variety of development, and, as

we have seen, is supremely instanced in man, where it depends upon,

and makes possible, the transmutation of fixed instincts into the

plastic thing we call intelligence. Thus, to quote the words of Dr.

Parsons,[44] “we find that as infancy is prolonged in the progress

of species, the care given to offspring by parents is increased. It

extends over a longer period and it is directed more and more towards

the total welfare of offspring. The need of a potentially many-sided

and enduring kind of parental care is filled through the social group

we call the family.”

Apart from those immensely significant creatures, the social insects,

we find well-marked though primitive signs of motherhood amongst the

fishes, and in a few cases, such as the stickleback, the beginnings of

fatherhood. But it is not until we reach the mammals, and especially

the monkeys and apes, that we find a great development of motherhood,

far more prolonged and far more important than the more frequently

extolled parental care found amongst the birds.

Very interesting, however, in the case of the fishes is the fact

observed by Sutherland that “as soon as the slightest trace of parental

care is discovered the chance of survival is increased and the

birth-rate is lowered.” As a general summary these words of Dr. Parsons

will serve:--“Diminution of offspring is a threefold gain to a species.

(1) It lessens the vital drain upon the parent. (2) It enables the

size and capacity of the limited number of offspring to be increased.

(3) In the case of the higher developments of parental care after

birth, it concentrates the advantage of that care upon a few instead of

scattering it, and thereby weakening its influence, upon many.”

Now how are these facts connected with that relation between the

parents which we call marriage, temporary or permanent, foreshadowed or

perfected?

_It may be submitted that the racial function or survival-value of

marriage in all its forms, low or high, animal or human, consists in

its services to the principle of motherhood, these services depending

upon the help and strength which are afforded to motherhood by

fatherhood._

=Animal marriage.=--Let us now look very briefly at the facts of animal

marriage from this point of view. The phrase, animal marriage, may

possibly offend the reader, but is there any reason to be offended

at the suggestion that the principle of marriage actually has a

warrant older even than mankind? It has lately been pointed out by a

distinguished naturalist, Mr. Ernest Thompson Seton, that animals, like

men, have long been groping, so to say, for an ideal form of marriage.

We now know, as will be shown, that, contrary to popular opinion,

promiscuity does not prevail amongst the lowest races of men. Equally

false is the popular notion that promiscuity prevails amongst most of

the lower animals. Promiscuity, it is true, does occur, but so also

does strict monogamy, “and promiscuous animals, such as rabbits and

voles, while high in the scale of fecundity, are low in the scale of

general development.” Says Mr. Seton: “It is commonly remarked that

while the Mosaic law did not expressly forbid polygamy, it surrounded

marriage with so many restrictions that by living up to the spirit

of them the Hebrew ultimately was forced into pure monogamy. It is

extremely interesting to note that the animals, in their blind groping

for an ideal form of union, have gone through the same stages, and have

arrived at exactly the same conclusion. Monogamy is their best solution

of the marriage question, and is the rule among all the higher and most

successful animals.”

The moose, Mr. Seton tells us, has several wives in one season but only

one at a time. The hawks practise monogamy lasting for one season, “the

male staying with the family, and sharing the care of the young till

they are well-grown.” The wolves consort for life, but the death of

one leaves the other free to mate again. There is a fourth method “in

which they pair for life, and, in case of death, the survivor remains

disconsolate and alone to the end. This seems absurd. It is the way of

the geese.” The point especially to be insisted upon as regards animal

marriage is its evident service to their race-culture, in accordance

with the principle here laid down that _marriage is of value because it

supports motherhood by fatherhood_, and that its different forms are

of value in proportion as they do so more or less effectively. We may

note also, as a corollary to this, that marriage must be more important

in proportion as the young of a species are helpless and in proportion

as their helplessness is long continued. The importance of marriage for

man, therefore, must necessarily be higher than for any of the lower

animals.

=Human marriage.=--We must turn now to human marriage, and the

principle which we must remember is that of survival-value. We are

discussing a natural phenomenon exhibited by living creatures. This is

what so few people realise when they speak of marriage. They cannot

disabuse themselves of the idea that it is a human invention, and

especially an ecclesiastical invention. Thus, on the one hand, it

is supported by persons who base its claims on mystical or dogmatic

grounds; whilst, on the other hand, it is attacked by those who are

opposed to ecclesiasticism or religion of any kind, and attacked in

the name of science--in which, if the fact could only be recognised,

is found every possible warrant and sanction, and indeed imperative

demand, for this most precious of all institutions. Here we must

endeavour to look upon it as an exceedingly ancient fact of life,

vastly more ancient than mankind; and in judging it and explaining

it we must apply Nature's universal criterion, which is that of

its survival-value or service to race-culture. Let us then glance

very briefly at the actual facts of human marriage--conceived as an

institution by which the survival-value of fatherhood is added to that

of motherhood.

The pioneer student of marriage from the standpoint of science was

Herbert Spencer, who with great labour supported the conclusion that

monogamy is the highest, best and latest form of marriage. But in the

absence of the great mass of evidence which is now before us, Spencer

too readily assumed the truth of the popular notion that promiscuity

was the primitive state, and taught that human marriage has developed

from this through polygamy towards the ideal of monogamy. The work

of Professor Westermarck, however--Spencer's chief follower in this

path--has shown, and later writers have abundantly confirmed it, that

this primitive promiscuity never existed. There is no nation or race

or clan of man now extant, however primitive or barbaric, that has

not definite marriage laws; there is no society on earth, however

rude, that does not punish the unfaithful wife. Furthermore, polygamy,

the only historical rival of monogamy, is now known to have played a

quite trivial part in history, not merely compared with monogamy, but

as compared with that which it was supposed to have played. Even in

countries which we call polygamous to-day, polygamy is the relatively

rare exception and monogamy the rule. On this most important question

it is well, however, to quote the words of Professor Westermarck

himself:--

“The great majority of peoples are, as a rule, monogamous, and

the other forms of marriage are usually modified in a monogamous

direction.” “As to the history of the forms of human marriage, two

inferences regarding monogamy and polygyny may be made with absolute

certainty; monogamy, always the predominant form of marriage, has

been more prevalent at the lowest stages of civilisation than at

somewhat higher stages; whilst, at a still higher stage, polygyny has

again, to a great extent, yielded to monogamy.” “We may thus take it

for granted that civilisation, up to a certain point, is favourable

to polygyny; but it is equally certain that in its highest forms

it leads to monogamy.” “But, though civilisation up to a certain

point is favourable to polygyny, _its higher forms invariably and

necessarily lead to monogamy_.”

It is the principle of survival-value that explains the dominance of

monogamy at all stages of human society--with the single exception

of continuously and wholly militant societies, in which polygamy

obtained in consequence of the great numerical excess of women. It is

the fate of the children, in which everything is involved, that has

determined the history of human marriage. Furthermore, we may see here

one more illustration of the truth that quality is ousting quantity in

the course of progress, and that a low birth-rate represents a more

advanced stage than a high birth-rate. The birth-rate under polygamy

is undoubtedly high, but polygamy does not make for the survival and

health of the children, and the infant mortality is gigantic. As I have

said elsewhere, “the form of marriage which does not permit the babies

to survive, _they_ do not permit to survive. There is the beginning and

the end of the whole matter in a nutshell. It is not a question of the

father's taste and fancy, but of what he leaves above ground when the

worms are eating him below.... No system yet conceived can compare for

a moment with monogamy in respect of the one criterion which time and

death recognise, the fate of the children.”

In a word, the wholly adequate and only possible explanation of

the historical fact of the dominance of monogamy is its supreme

survival-value. It has competed with every other kind of sex relation

and has been selected by natural selection because of its supreme

service for race-culture--the most perfect conceivable addition of

fatherhood to motherhood.

=Plato and motherhood.=--Thus eugenics must repudiate not only the

ideas of Mr. Shaw on this subject, but the teaching of Plato, from whom

Mr. Shaw's ideas on this particular subject are apparently derived. It

is in the fifth book of his _Republic_ that the pioneer eugenist lays

down his ideas for race-culture. He realised, indeed, the importance,

after birth, of the nurture of children--“it is of considerable, nay,

of the utmost importance to the State, when this is rightly performed

or otherwise;” and he refers also to their nurture while very young,

“in the period between their generation and their education, which

seems to be the most troublesome of all.” His method involved a

complete community of wives and children amongst the guardians of the

State, and on no account were the parents to know their own children

nor the children their parents. The best were to be chosen for parents,

on the analogy of animal race-culture by man. The children of inferior

parents were to be killed. The others were to be conveyed to the common

nursery of the city, but every precaution was to be taken that _no

mother should know her own child_. This practice was to be the cardinal

point of the Republic and “the cause of the greatest good to the city.”

We see here, then, that the very first proposals for race-culture

involved the destruction of marriage and the family, and a total denial

of the value of the psychical aspects of motherhood and fatherhood

alike. Plato's first critic, however, his own great pupil Aristotle,

devoted the best part of his work, the _Politics_, to showing that the

suggestions of Plato were not only wrong in themselves, but would not

secure his end. Aristotle showed, in the words of Mr. Barker, that “the

destruction of the family, and the substitution in its place of one

vast clan, would lead but to the destruction of warm feelings, and the

substitution of a sentiment which is to them as water is to wine....

So with the system of common marriage, as opposed to monogamy. The one

encourages at best a poor and shadowy sentiment, while it denies to

man the satisfaction of natural instinct and the education of family

life; the other is natural and right, both because it is based on those

instincts, and because it satisfies the moral nature of man, in giving

him objects of permanent yet vivid interest above and beyond himself.”

The truth of this matter is that the rest may reason and welcome--but

we fathers know.

=Marriage a eugenic instrument.=--It has definitely to be stated, then,

that the abolition of marriage and the family is in no degree whatever

a part of the eugenic proposal. We desire to achieve race-culture by

and through marriage, on the lines which indeed many lower races of

men successfully practise at the present day. We must make parenthood

more responsible, not less so. It will afterwards be shown that the

suggested incompatibility between marriage and the family, on the one

hand, and race-culture or eugenics on the other, does not exist. It

will be shown that we have in marriage not only the greatest instrument

of race-culture that has yet been employed--half-consciously--by man,

but also an instrument supremely fitted, and indeed without a rival,

for the conscious, deliberate, and scientific intentions of modern

eugenists. The applicability of marriage for this purpose will be

shown by reference to actual facts. Mr. Galton himself has shown how

effectively an educated public opinion can employ marriage for the

purposes of race-culture, its services to which have indeed led to its

evolution. It has furthermore to be added that only the formation of

public opinion can ever lead to the ideal which we desire. This opinion

already exists in some degree as regards one or two transmissible

diseases, and, though without adequate scientific warrant, as regards

the marriage of first cousins. In these respects it is not without some

measure of effectiveness, and the fact is of the utmost promise.

“Marriage,” said Goethe, “is the origin and the summit of all

civilisation.” Perhaps it would be more accurate to say _the family_

rather than _marriage_. The childless marriage may be and often is a

thing of the utmost beauty and value to the individuals concerned,

but it is certainly not the origin of civilisation, and if it be

its summit it is also its grave. The eugenic support of marriage,

therefore, depends upon a belief in the family, and that form of

marriage will commend itself which provides the best form of family.

From the point of view of certain eugenists, polygamy would be

desirable in many cases, as extending the parental opportunities of

the man of fine physique or intellectual distinction. The problem

remains, however, as to the nurture of the children so obtained, and

historical study returns us a very clear answer as to the relative

merits of the polygamous family and the monogamous family. It is this

last that pre-eminently justifies itself on the score of its services

to childhood and therefore to the race. Its survival is a matter of

absolute certainty, because of its survival-value. Neither Plato nor

Mr. Shaw, nor any kind of collectivist legislation will permanently

abolish it.

=The principle of maternalism.=--The merits of monogamy can be

defined in terms of the principle which I would venture to call

maternalism--the principle of the permanent and radical importance of

motherhood and whatever institutions afford it the greatest aid.

Maternalism would point, I think, to the supreme paradox that the

dominant creature of the earth is born of woman, and born the most

absolutely helpless of all living creatures whatsoever, animal or

vegetable; it would note that this utter dependence upon others, mother

or foster-mother, is not only the most unqualified known, but the

longest maintained; it would observe that of all the human beings now

alive, all that have lived, all that are to be, not one could survive

its birth for twenty-four hours but for motherhood; it would note that

only motherhood has rendered possible the development of instinct into

that intelligence which, itself dependent upon motherhood for the

possibility of its development, has dependent upon it the fact that

the earth is now man's and the fulness thereof; and to the advocates

of all the political -isms that can be named, and the small proportion

of them that can be defined, it would apply its specific criterion:

Do you regard the safeguarding and the ennoblement of motherhood as

the proximate end of all political action, the end through which

the ultimate ends, the production and recognition of human worth,

can alone be attained; do you realise that marriage is invaluable

_because_ it makes for the enthronement of motherhood as nothing else

ever did or can; do you realise that, metaphors about State maternity

notwithstanding, the State has neither womb nor breasts, these most

reverend and divine of all vital organs being the appanage of the

individual mother alone?

The maternalist principle being assumed, and the value of monogamy on

the ground that it supports motherhood by fatherhood, the forthcoming

discussion as to the possibilities of race-culture will assume the

persistence of monogamy and will centre upon the possibility of

selecting or rejecting, for the purposes of race-culture, those who are

available for entrance into the marriage state. The reader who has not

studied social anthropology--and this is true of nearly all the critics

of eugenics, very few of whom have studied anything--will be astounded,

I believe, to discover the practically unlimited extent to which public

opinion, whether or not formulated as law, has always been capable of

controlling marriage, and therefore, race-culture.

=Proposed definition of marriage.=--Recognising the existence

of subhuman marriage, we may be at a loss to define marriage as

distinguished from sex-relations in general. It is that form of

sex-relation which involves or is adapted to _common parental care_ of

the offspring--the support of motherhood by fatherhood.

PART II--THE PRACTICE OF EUGENICS

CHAPTER XI

NEGATIVE EUGENICS

N'abandonnons pas l'avenir de notre race à la fatalité d'Allah;

créons-le nous-mêmes.--Forel.

“It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed,

leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but except in the case

of man himself, hardly anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst

animals to breed.

“With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated, and

those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We

civilised men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process

of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maim and the

sick; we institute poor laws; and our medical men exert their utmost

skill to save the life of everyone to the last moment.... Thus the

weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who

has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this

must be highly injurious to the race of man.”--Darwin, _The Descent

of Man_, 1871. Pt. i., chap. v.

Hitherto we have mainly concerned ourselves with broad aspects of

theory, endeavouring to prove that conscious race-culture is a

necessity for any civilisation which is to endure, and to show how

alone it can be effected. But evidently for a great many of the

practical proposals that might be, and for not a few that have been,

based upon these views, public opinion is not ripe. We may be thankful

to believe that for some it will never be ripe: it would be rotten

first. Marriage, for instance, we hold sacred and essential: we find

intolerable the idea of the human stud-farm; we are very dubious as

to the help of surgery; we are much more than dubious as to the

lethal chamber. It is necessary to be reasonable, and, in seeking

the superman, to remain at least human. Now if we are to achieve any

immediate success we must clearly divide our proposals, as the present

writer did some years ago, with Mr. Galton's approval, into two

classes: _positive eugenics_ and _negative eugenics_. The one would

seek to encourage the parenthood of the worthy, the other to discourage

the parenthood of the unworthy. Positive eugenics is the original

eugenics, but, as the writer endeavoured to show at the time, negative

eugenics is one with it in principle. The two are complementary, and

are both practised by Nature: natural selection is one with natural

rejection. To choose is to refuse.

In regard to positive eugenics I, for one, must ever make the criticism

that I cannot believe in the propriety of attempting to bribe into

parenthood people who have no love of children: we have to consider

the parental environment of the children we desire, as well as their

innate quality. Thus, positive eugenics must largely take the form, at

present, of removing such disabilities as now weigh upon the desirable

members of the community, especially of the more prudent sort.

For instance, it was recently pointed out by a correspondent of the

_Morning Post_ that in Great Britain, despite the alarm caused by the

decreasing marriage-rate, no one has protested against--

“... the tax which the propertied middle classes have to pay on

marriage.... To take a few instances. Two persons each having £160 a

year marry. Previous to marriage they were exempt from income tax;

after marriage they pay £6 per annum. Two persons each having £400 a

year pay £18 before and £30 after marriage. Similarly the additional

income tax payable on marriage by people each having £600 a year is

£9, by those having £1,200 a year £30, and by those having £2,000 a

year £50. It is difficult to see how our legislators arrived at this

result unless they started to average the incomes of married people

and then forgot to divide by two.... If, as I contend, a man and his

wife should be counted as two people, not one, should not children

also be counted in any scheme of graduated taxation, and an income

be divided by the number of persons it has to support in order to

fix the rate at which the tax is to be charged? It is ridiculous to

suppose that a man with a wife and six children is as well off on

£1,000 a year as a bachelor with the same income. It is, I believe,

acknowledged that the moderately well-off professional classes marry

later and have fewer children than the wage-earners, and I think

there can be no doubt that the special burthens they have to bear

is a material influence contributing to this result. Thus, while we

are deploring the decadence of the race, the State is doing what it

can to discourage marriage in a class whose children would in all

probability prove its most valued citizens.”

But it is in negative eugenics that we can accomplish most at this

stage, and in so doing can steadily educate public opinion, the

professional jesters notwithstanding. There is here a field for action

which does not demand a great revolution in the popular point of view;

and, further, does not require us to wait for certainty until the facts

and laws of heredity have been much further elucidated. The services

which a conscious race-culture, thus directed, may even now accomplish,

can scarcely be over-estimated; and even if we cannot reach the public

heart at once we can reach the public head by means of the public

pocket--which will benefit obviously and greatly when these proposals

are carried out. As Thoreau observes, for a thousand who are lopping

off the branches of an evil there is but one striking at its roots. If

we strike at the roots of certain grave and costly evils of the present

day, we shall abundantly demonstrate that this is a matter of the most

vital economy.

=The deaf and dumb.=--We might begin with the case of the _deaf and

dumb_, since the facts here are utterly beyond dispute. The condition

known as deaf-mutism is congenital or due to innate defect in about

one-half of all the cases in Great Britain. Says Dr. Love,[45] “In

every institution examples may be found of deaf-mute children who have

one or two deaf parents or grand-parents, and of two or more deaf-mute

children belonging to one family.” A recent report from Japan is of

a similar order, and the evidence might be multiplied indefinitely.

The obvious conclusion that the inherently deaf should not marry “is

generally conceded by those who work amongst the deaf, but the present

arrangements for the education of the deaf, and their management in

missions and institutes for the deaf during the period of adolescence,

is eminently fitted to encourage union between the congenitally

deaf. If not during the school period, at least during the period of

adolescence, everything should be done to discourage the association

of the deaf and dumb with each other, and the danger of their meeting

with those similarly afflicted should be constantly kept before the

congenitally deaf by those in charge of them.” Dr. Love quotes the

following newspaper report: “At an inquest yesterday, on William

Earnshaw, 59, a St. Pancras saddler, it was stated that the relatives

could not identify the body, as the wife and sister were blind, deaf

and dumb, and that the four children were deaf and dumb. The deceased

was deaf and dumb, and was so when he was married.”

=The feeble-minded.=--The case of the _feeble-minded_ is of course

parallel. The problem would be at once reduced to negligible

proportions if all cases of feeble-mindedness were dealt with as they

should be. These unfortunate people might lead quite happy lives,

the utmost be done for their feeble capacities, the supreme demands

of the law of love be completely but providently complied with.

The feeble-minded girl might be protected from herself and from

others--her fate otherwise is often too deplorable for definition--and

the interests of the future be not compromised. These words were

written whilst awaiting the long overdue Report of the Royal Commission

on this subject--which abundantly confirms them. The proportion of

the mentally defective in Great Britain is now 0.83 per cent., and it

is doubtless rising yearly. Only by the recognition and application

of negative eugenics can this evil be cured. I have elsewhere[46]

discussed the supposed objection which will be raised in the name of

“liberty” by persons who think in words instead of realities. The right

care of the feeble-minded involves the greatest happiness and liberty

and self-development possible for them. The interests of the individual

and the race are one. What liberty has the feeble-minded prostitute,

such as our streets are filled with?

=The insane.=--As regards obvious _insanity_, the same principles of

negative eugenics must be enforced. It is probably fair to say that the

whole trend of modern research has been to accentuate the importance,

if not indeed the indispensableness, of the inherent or inherited

factor in the production of insanity. Yet, on the other hand, the trend

of treatment of the insane has undoubtedly been towards permitting

them more liberty, sometimes of the kind which the principles of

race-culture must condemn. It is well, of course, that we should

be humane in our treatment of the insane. It is well that curative

medicine should do its utmost for them, and it seems well, at first

sight, that the proportion of discharges from asylums on the score of

recovery should be as high as it is. But at this point the possibility

of the gravest criticism evidently arises. I have no intention

whatever of exposing the question of race-culture to legitimate

criticism by laying down dogmatically any doctrines as to the perpetual

incarceration of insane persons, including those who have been, but

are not now, insane. Pope was, of course, right when he hinted at the

nearness of the relation between _certain forms_ of genius and certain

forms of insanity. It may well be that if we could provide a fit

environment we might welcome the children of some of those, highly and

perhaps uniquely gifted in brain, who, under the stress of the ordinary

environment of modern life, have broken down for shorter or longer

periods. On the other hand, there are forms of insanity which, beyond

all dispute, should utterly preclude their victims from parenthood. As

a result of recent controversies it seems on the whole probable, if not

certain, that the apparent persistent increase in the proportion of

the insane in civilised countries generally during many years past, is

a real increase, and not due simply to such factors as more stringent

certification or increase of public confidence in lunatic asylums. If,

then, there be in process a real increase in the proportion of the

insane, who will question that no time should be lost in ascertaining

the extent--undoubtedly most considerable--to which the principles of

negative eugenics can be invoked in order to arrest it?

As regards _epilepsy_ and _epileptic insanity_ there can be no

question. There is, of course, such a thing as acquired epilepsy, and

we may even assume for the sake of the argument that no inherent and

therefore transmissible factor of predisposition is involved in such

cases. Yet, wholly excluding them, there remains the vast majority

of cases in which epilepsy and epileptic insanity are unquestionably

germinal in origin, and therefore transmissible. The principle of

negative eugenics cannot too soon be applied here.

=The criminal.=--When we come to consider the question of _crime_

the cautious and responsible eugenist is bound to be wary--chiefly,

perhaps, because such a vast amount of sheer nonsense has been written

on this subject. The whole question, of course, is the old one, Is it

heredity or environment that produces the criminal? If and when it is

the environment, race-culture has nothing to do with the question,

since the merely acquired criminality is, as we know, not in any

degree transmissible. If the criminal, however, is always or ever a

“born criminal,” then the eugenist is intimately concerned. At the

one extreme are those who tell us that the idea of crime is a purely

conventional one, that the criminal is the product of circumstances or

environment, and that we, in his case, would have done likewise. The

remedy for crime, then, is education. It is pointed out, however, that

education merely modifies the variety of crime. There is less murder

but more swindling, and so forth. Then, on the other hand, there are

those who declare that criminality is innate, and that if we are to

make an end of crime we must attach surgeons to our gaols; or at any

rate must extend the principle of the life-sentence.

Doubtless, the truth lies between these two extremes. In the face

of the work of Lombroso and his school, exaggerated though their

conclusions often be, we cannot dispute the existence of the born

criminal, and the criminal type. There are undoubtedly many such

persons in modern society. There is an abundance of crime which no

education, practised or imaginable, would eliminate. Present-day

psychology and medicine, and, for the matter of that, ordinary

common-sense, can readily distinguish cases at both extremes--the

_mattoid_ or semi-insane criminal at one end, and the decent citizen

who yields to exceptional temptation at the other end. Thus, even

though there remain a vast number of cases where our knowledge is

insufficient, we could accomplish great things already if the born

criminal, the habitual criminal and his like were rationally treated

by society, on the lines of the reformatory, the labour colony,

indeterminate sentences, and such other methods as aim, successfully or

unsuccessfully, at the reform of the individual, whilst incidentally

protecting the race. Here, as in some other cases, the nature of the

environment provided for their children by certain sections of the

community may be taken into account when we decide whether they are

to be prohibited from parenthood. Heredity or no heredity, we cannot

desire to have children born into the alcoholic home; heredity or no

heredity, we cannot desire to have children born into the criminal

environment. In Great Britain we are no longer to manufacture criminals

in hundreds by sending children to prison. It remains to be seen, after

the practical disappearance of the made criminal, what proportion

of crime is really due to the born criminal. He, when found, must

certainly be dealt with on the lines indicated by our principles.[47]

=Other cases.=--So far we have considered exclusively diseases and

disorders of the brain, the question of alcoholism being deferred to

a special chapter. When we come to other forms of defect or disease

we find a long gradation of instances: at the one extreme being cases

where the fact of disastrous inheritance is palpable and inevitable,

whilst at the other extreme are kinds of disease and defect as to which

the share of heredity is still very uncertain. In some instances, then,

the eugenist is bound to lay down the most emphatic propositions,

as, for instance, that parenthood on the part of men suffering from

certain diseases is and should and must be regarded and treated as a

crime of the most heinous order: whilst in other instances all we can

say is that here is a direction in which more knowledge is needed.

Some particular cases may be referred to.

The diseases known as Daltonism or colour-blindness, and hæmophilia

or the “bleeding disease,” are certainly hereditary. The sufferers

are usually male, but the disease is commonly transmitted by their

daughters (who do not themselves suffer) to their male descendants.

As regards colour-blindness, the defect is evidently insufficient

to concern the eugenist, but hæmophilia is a serious disease, the

transmission of which should not be excused. It may seem hard to assert

that the daughter of a hæmophilic father should not become a mother,

she herself being free from all disease. But it has to be remembered

that the possibility of this hardship depends upon the fact that a

hæmophilic man has become a father, as he should not have done.

This point, as to the amount of hardship involved in the observance

of negative race-culture, has always to be kept in mind. If negative

eugenics were generally enforced upon a given generation some

persons would, of course, suffer in greater or less degree from the

disabilities imposed upon them. But their number would depend upon the

neglect of eugenics by previous generations, and _thereafter the number

of those upon whom our principles pressed hardly would be relatively

minute_.

=Eugenics and tuberculosis.=--It would not be correct to say that

the old view of consumption regarded it as hereditary. In this and a

hundred other matters, medical, astronomical, or what we please, if

we go back to the Arabic students, or further, to the Greeks, we are

lucky enough to find sound observation and reasoning. Many quotations

might be made to show that the infectious nature of tuberculosis was

recognised long ago, just as the revolution of the earth round the

sun was recognised a millennium and a half before Copernicus. But

the view of our more immediate fathers was that tuberculosis is a

hereditary degeneration, and the medical profession proclaimed with no

uncertain sound the hopeless and paralysing doctrine that an almost

certain doom hung over the children of the consumptive. Then, in

memorable succession, came Villemin, Pasteur, and lastly Koch, with

his discovery of the bacillus in 1882. The doctrine was then altered

in its statement. There was, of course, no choice in the matter, since

it was easy to show that not one new-born baby in millions harbours

a tubercle bacillus; so all-but-miraculous and, rightly considered,

beautiful are the ante-natal defences. It was taught, then, that we

inherit a predisposition from consumptive parents, that the bacillus

is ubiquitous, and that variations in susceptibility determine the

incidence of the disease in one and not in another. It was lightly

assumed (simply through what may be called the inertia of belief)

that these variations in susceptibility were hereditary; but we are

wholly without evidence that the hereditary factor counts for anything

substantial, even assuming that it appreciably exists at all. These

differences, so far from being inherent, may be _most palpably_

acquired. Under-feeding, alcohol, and influenza, let us say, will

adequately prepare any human soil. Furthermore, we are learning that

the bacillus is nothing like so ubiquitous as used to be supposed.

Tuberculosis is now sometimes described as a dwelling disease. It might

probably be described with still more accuracy as a bed-room disease,

or a bed-room and public-house disease. It has been evident for many

years past that the more we learnt about tuberculosis the less did

we talk about heredity; and in one of the most recent authoritative

pronouncements[48] upon the subject, the lecturer did not even allude

to heredity at all. Many readers will be up in arms at once with

apparently contrary instances; and much labour may be spent in the

mathematical analysis of statistical data--as that of cases where a

father and a child have tuberculosis. But suppose the father kissed the

child? What have you proved regarding heredity? No mathematics can get

more out of the data than is in them.

The statistics designed to measure the degree of inheritance in this

disease labour under the cardinal fallacy of assuming that where father

and son suffer, the case is one of inheritance, and then proceed to

measure the average extent of this inheritance. These statistics are

so much waste paper and ink--assuming what they claim to prove. They

do not allow for the fact that the child is very frequently exposed

in grave measure to infection by the parent; they ignore wholly,

indeed, the entire question of exposure to infection, both as regards

its extent in time and the virulence of the infection in question.

At the present day, discussions as to the inheritance of consumption

and tuberculosis in general are not fit for practical application:

and a practical disservice is rendered by those who seek to divert

public attention from the removable environmental causes upon which

the disease mainly depends. We know, for instance, that the incidence

of tuberculosis is directly proportional to over-crowding: this being

universally true, we must work to abolish over-crowding and to provide

fresh air for every one by day and by night. When that is done,

alcoholism disposed of, and our milk-supply purified, we may turn to

the question of heredity: but the incidence of the disease will then

present merely trivial instead of the present appalling proportions.

It is not asserted that inherent variations in susceptibility to

this disease are not existent. The case would be unique if it were

so. But it is asserted that the more we learn of the disease the

less importance we attach to this factor, and the more surely do

we see that the three syllables constituting the word “infection”

substantially suffice to dispose of all the confident dogmas with

which we are too familiar. One is almost tempted to quote a forcible

phrase of Mill's, and say that, given this point of view, “once

questioned, they are doomed.” The only method of accurately studying

the question of inherited predisposition would be by comparative study

of the resistance of new-born infants as measured by their “opsonic

index”--which may be (very roughly) described as the measure of the

power of the white cells of the blood to eat up tubercle bacilli.[49]

Nor will even this method be free from fallacy.

The present writer believes that eugenics is going to save the world;

that there is no study of such urgent and practical importance as that

of heredity; that if we get the right people born and the wrong people

not born, forms of government and such questions will be left even

without fools to contest regarding them. Thus he has every bias in

favour of emphasising the hereditary factor in tuberculosis. The fact

will at least not discredit the foregoing views, which are in absolute

accord with those of Dr. Newsholme, our leading authority, in his

recent work upon the subject.

Nothing need here be said about cancer, the best and most recent

evidence tending to show that the disease is not hereditary.

The foregoing may briefly suffice to illustrate the general proposition

that negative eugenics will seek to define the diseases and defects

which are really hereditary, to name those the transmission of which

is already certainly known to occur, and to raise the average of the

race by interfering as far as may be with the parenthood of persons

suffering from these transmissible disorders. Only thus can certain

of the gravest evils of society, as, for instance, feeble-mindedness,

insanity, and crime due to inherited degeneracy, be suppressed: and if

race-culture were absolutely incapable of effecting anything whatever

in the way of increasing the fertility of the worthiest classes and

individuals, its services in the negative direction here briefly

outlined would still be of incalculable value. No other proposal will

save so much life, present and to come: and save so much gold in doing

so--as one would insist if one were writing a eugenic primer for

politicians. To this policy we shall most certainly come: but here,

as in other cases, I trust far more in the influence of an educated

public opinion than in legislation; though there are certain forms of

transmissible disease, interfering in no way with the responsibility of

the individual, the transmission of which should be visited with the

utmost rigour of the law and regarded as utterly criminal no less than

sheer murder.

In the next chapter, recognising marriage as the human mode of

selection, we must consider it in its relation to eugenics, both

positive and negative.

CHAPTER XII

SELECTION THROUGH MARRIAGE

=Historical evidence of control of marriage: Westermarck's

evidence.=--To begin with the most recent refutation of the doctrine

that marriage selection is uncontrollable, one may quote from the

inaugural lecture delivered by Dr. Westermarck in December, 1907, on

his appointment as Professor of Sociology in the University of London.

He said:--

“For instance, when the suggestion has been made that the law should

step in and prevent unfit individuals from contracting marriage,

the objection has at once been raised that any such measure would

be impracticable. Now we find that many savages have tried the

experiment and succeeded. Mr. Im Thurn tells us that among the wild

Indians of Guiana, a man, before he is allowed to choose a wife, must

prove that he can do a man's work and is able to support himself

and his family. In various Bechuana and Kaffir tribes, according

to Livingstone, a youth is prohibited from marrying until he has

killed a rhinoceros. Among the Dyaks of Borneo no one can marry

until he has in his possession a certain number of human skulls.

Among the Arabs of Upper Egypt a man must undergo an ordeal of

whipping by the relatives of his bride, in order to test his courage;

and if he wishes to be considered worth having, he must receive

the chastisement, which is sometimes exceedingly severe, with an

expression of enjoyment.

“I do not say that these particular methods are worthy of slavish

imitation, but the principle underlying them is certainly excellent,

and especially the fact that they are recognised and enforced by

custom shows that it has been quite possible among many people to

prohibit certain unfit individuals from marrying. The question

naturally arises whether, after all, something of the same kind may

not be possible among ourselves.”

=Mr. Galton's evidence.=--But Mr. Galton himself, with his

characteristic thoroughness, and in full recognition of the fact that

this young science must meet ignorant as well as other objections, read

before the Sociological Society[50] a paper entitled “Restrictions

in Marriage,” with special reference to the objection “that human

nature would never brook interference with the freedom of marriage....

How far have marriage restrictions proved effective, when sanctified

by the religion of the time, by custom and by law? I appeal from

armchair criticism to historical facts.” Mr. Galton then proceeds to

quote seven forms of restriction in marriage which have actually been

practised--monogamy, endogamy, exogamy, Australian marriages, taboo,

prohibited degrees and celibacy. He shows how powerful under each of

these heads is the influence of “immaterial motives” upon marriage

selection, how they may all become hallowed by religion, accepted as

custom and enforced by law. “Persons who are born under their various

rules, live under them without any objection. They are unconscious of

their restrictions as we are unaware of the tension of the atmosphere.”

In many cases the establishment of monogamy and the prohibition

of polygamy “has been due not to any natural instinct against the

practice, but to consideration of social well-being.” “It was penal

for a Greek to marry a barbarian, for a Roman patrician to marry a

plebeian, for a Hindoo of one caste to marry one of another caste,

and so forth. Similar restrictions have been enforced in multitudes

of communities, even under the penalty of death.” Cases from ancient

Jewish law are quoted; and, to take a very different case, that of the

marriage rule amongst the Australian bushmen, it is shown that “the

cogency of this rule is due to custom, religion and law, and is so

strong that nearly all Australians would be horrified at the idea of

breaking it.” Passing further on, one need offer no excuse for quoting,

regarding marriage in general, the following words of the founder of

eugenics:--“_The institution of marriage as now sanctified by religion

and safeguarded by law in the more highly civilised nations, may not

be ideally perfect, nor may it be universally accepted in future

times, but it is the best that has hitherto been devised for the

parties primarily concerned, for their children, for home life, and for

society._”

Mr. Galton then proceeds to show how extensive are the restrictions in

marriage already recognised and practised amongst ourselves and quite

contentedly accepted. He proves also that our objection to marriage

within prohibited degrees depends mainly upon what he calls immaterial

considerations, and adds “it is quite conceivable that a non-eugenic

marriage should hereafter excite no less loathing than that of a

brother and sister would do now.” Then, in allusion to the possibility

“of a whole-hearted acceptance of eugenics as a national religion ...

the thorough conviction by a nation that no worthier object exists

for man than the improvement of his own race,” Mr. Galton shows from

the history of conventual life what abundant evidence there is “of

the power of religious authority in directing and withstanding the

tendencies of human nature towards freedom in marriage.” This paper

was discussed by no less than twenty-six authorities, British and

Continental, and in his reply Mr. Galton observes that not one of them

impugns his main conclusion “that history tells how restrictions in

marriage, even of an excessive kind, have been contentedly accepted

very widely, under the guidance of what I called immaterial motives.”

Lastly, we may note Mr. Galton's admirable distinction between the

two stages of love, “that of slight inclination and that of falling

thoroughly into love, for it is the first of these rather than the

second that I hope the popular feeling of the future will successfully

resist. Every match-making mother appreciates the difference. If a

girl is taught to look upon a class of men as tabooed, whether owing

to rank, creed, connections or other causes, she does not regard them

as possible husbands and turns her thoughts elsewhere. The proverbial

‘Mrs. Grundy’ has enormous influence in checking the marriages she

considers indiscreet.”

Surely all the foregoing suffices to show, first, that eugenics or

race-culture is compatible with marriage, and secondly, that it is

compatible with the love of the sexes--two conclusions of the most

cardinal and fundamental importance. This importance it is, and the

obstinate stupidity of critics of a kind, which must excuse me for

having devoted so much space to propositions which the thoughtful

reader would naturally have arrived at for himself.

=The present influence of marriage on race-culture.=--We must turn now

from the past to the present aspect of the question, viz., the actual

relation of marriage to eugenics at the present day. Its nature is

very much disputed. On the one hand, there are those who see in our

present methods what has elsewhere been called reversed selection--that

is to say, an anti-eugenic process, involving the mating of the least

desirable. On the other hand, there are many conservative critics who,

starting from a general opposition to any new thing, such as eugenics,

maintain that we are doing very well as we are, and that, without any

conscious interference, as they call it--as if there were no such

interference--selection by marriage is actually working for the eugenic

end. Dr. Maudsley, for instance, is “not sure but that nature in its

own blind impulsive way does not manage things better than we can by

any light of reason”: an astounding opinion from the veteran pioneer

who has devoted so many decades to successfully modifying natural

processes by the light of his own splendid reason!

This most important question, as to what is actually happening within

the limits of marriage, may legitimately be regarded as substantially

equivalent to the question of the extent and nature of selection,

for good or for evil, as it occurs in society to-day. If we remember

that an overwhelming proportion of children are born in wedlock,

that the death-rate of illegitimate children is gigantic, whilst

the illegitimate birth-rate is generally falling, we shall be fully

entitled to assume that the answer to the one question is the answer

to the other; in a word, if under the present conditions of selection

for marriage we find a eugenic tendency or an anti-eugenic tendency or

a mere neutrality, the answer will be, _on the whole_, the approximate

answer to the larger question as to the present state of selection

for parenthood and therefore of our racial prospects, marriage or no

marriage. The conclusion which we shall maintain is that _both forms

of selection occur in society to-day_--the selection of the desirable

and the selection of the undesirable. We shall go ludicrously wrong

if we agree, with one party, that society in general to-day exhibits

reversed selection; or, with the second party, that everything is

going on admirably on the whole; or, with the third party, which

jumbles the whole mass of facts and tendencies, and declares that

there is no process of selection of any kind occurring in society

to-day--an opinion which, in the face of disease, the enormous

premature death-rate, and the fact that whilst vast numbers of women

are unmarried, the choice of women for marriage does not occur by lot,

beggars comment; is a girl with a birth-mark covering half her face,

or a nose destroyed by transmissible disease, as likely to marry as

a “beauty”? If not, surely we actually select to-day for beauty and

therefore for whatever beauty depends upon--for instance, health. But

really it cannot be necessary to deal seriously with the proposition

that no selection occurs in society to-day.

Let us attempt to state clearly the point at issue. There is granted,

in the first place, that by far the greater part of all parenthood,

in civilised and uncivilised communities alike, occurs within the

limits of marriage; to which may be added that, owing to the excessive

death-rate of illegitimate children, the proportion of effective

parenthood, so to say, that occurs within the limits of marriage is

even larger; and this intervention of marriage, and any selection that

may be involved in it, steadily recur from generation to generation.

Thus even those born outside wedlock will nevertheless be selected

for parenthood, on their own part, mainly by the selective factors in

marriage.

=Selection by marriage has the last word.=--It follows, then, though

the fact is almost constantly ignored by eugenic writers, that

selection by marriage in effect has the last word. Thus supposing

that all other forms of selection, depending upon, for instance,

the various causes of death amongst the immature, were what we call

reversed selection; or supposing that, as is actually the case, society

permitted large numbers of the so-called unfit to survive,--even

so, marriage selection (if it meant that many or most of these were

rejected by it) would control and correct the dangerous tendency. On

all hands, scientific and unscientific, we have writers telling us of

the disastrous multiplication of the unfit. Such multiplication does

occur and is disastrous. Yet hitherto they have failed to recognise

that if--to take an extreme case--all these unfit are rejected

by marriage selection--that is to say, do not themselves become

parents--this alarming multiplication is, after all, not a persistent

factor in racial change, but merely the throwing up or throwing aside

in each generation of a certain number of undesirables _whose breed

gets no further_. Of course there would be much less urgent need for

eugenics if this last were wholly and happily the case. Our object,

indeed, is to make it the case: but so long as selection by marriage

exists,--and its occurrence is palpably indisputable--_it is a

serious flaw in the common argument to assume that the production and

preservation of undesirables necessarily involves their own parenthood

in due course_. It is necessary that strict statistical enquiry be

made on this point. It would show, I believe, that the marriage-rate

_and the birth-rate_ amongst the _grossly_ unfit is much lower than

that of the general community, or, in other words, that the influence

and value of selection by marriage (which, as we have shown, is in

effect selection for parenthood, the only selection that ultimately

matters) has not yet been fully appreciated. I very strongly incline

to the view that if this protective factor were not constantly at

work, the “multiplication of the unfit” would long ago have led to

the destruction of every civilised nation on the earth: they would

have swamped us long ago. Indeed, the proposition may be laid down

that, supreme and indispensable as are the services of marriage to

race-culture, in its protection of motherhood, and the support of

motherhood by fatherhood, probably the services of marriage as in

effect the working of sexual selection are worthy of being rated

almost, if not quite, as high.

=Sexual selection is certainly true of mankind.=--Before adducing

the outlines of the evidence in favour of marriage as an instrument

of selection, it may be well to point out that here we are really

discussing what Darwin called “sexual selection,” modified by the

psychology and peculiar characters of mankind. We must protect

ourselves from the critics who will remind us that sexual selection

is very largely discredited to-day, rather more than a generation

after Darwin's enunciation of it in _The Descent of Man_ (1871). The

controversy regarding sexual selection as the producer of feathers

and markings and song, and so forth, amongst the lower animals, is

fortunately quite irrelevant to our present discussion, which is

concerned with mankind. We can afford to note with equanimity the

observation that, in lower species, no mature female goes unmated,

for instance; the fact remains that in the case of mankind a very

considerable percentage of women remain unmarried. The case is similar

as regards the male sex. In short, one may declare that, whether or not

sexual selection is possible, or occurs, or accomplishes anything, in

the case of the lower animals, it palpably and patently is possible,

and does occur, amongst mankind, and especially amongst civilised

peoples, in the form of selection by or for marriage--which, as we have

seen, is in effect selection for parenthood. Let us first note the

statistical evidence regarding marriage-selection of health and energy.

=Spencer on marital longevity.=--We are all aware that married people

live longer, on the average, than unmarried people, the conclusion

being, “of course,” that marriage is good for the health. But some are

taken and others left in this respect, and if, for any conceivable

reason, health is a factor making for selection by marriage, that may

be a real explanation, in whole or in part, of the longer life of

married people. Considering the risks to life involved in motherhood,

the superior longevity of married as compared with unmarried women

would be incomprehensible except on some such assumption. Yet it is

the fact, so imperfect still is the entry of the idea of selection

into the popular and even the expert mind, that the superior longevity

of married people is still constantly asserted to mean that marriage

makes for long life; every year, when the statistics are printed, this

argument may be seen in the newspapers, and I remember encountering it

in the _Encyclopædia Britannica_, to my utter astonishment.

This uncritical conclusion was disposed of by the author of the phrase

“the survival of the fittest”--appropriately enough--more than thirty

years ago. If the reader will turn to Herbert Spencer's _Study of

Sociology_ (a masterpiece which may be commended to the publishers

for the purpose of indexing--twenty editions without an index are too

many) he will find in Chapter V. a discussion of this question. It is

an astonishing thing that though Spencer conclusively exposed it a

generation ago, the childish fallacy is still apparently as flourishing

as ever. He shows how the greater healthfulness of married life was

supposed to be proved by Dr. Stark from comparison of the rates of

mortality among the married and among the celibate. Then no less an

authority than M. Bertillon went into the matter and contributed a

paper called “The Influence of Marriage”--thus begging the question in

its very title--to the Brussels Academy of Medicine. He showed that,

from twenty-five to thirty years of age, several Continental countries

being taken into the reckoning, “the mortality per thousand is 4 in

married men, 10.4 in bachelors, and 22 in widows. This beneficial

influence of marriage is manifested at all ages, being always more

strongly marked in men than in women.” The absurdity of the apparent

conclusion regarding widows is surely, as Spencer says, too obvious

for discussion. But, for the rest, Spencer goes on to show that,

in reality, “marriage and longevity are concomitant results of the

same cause”--in other words, “that superior quality of organisation

which conduces to long life also conduces to marriage. It is normally

accompanied by a predominance of the instincts and emotions prompting

marriage; there goes along with it that power[51] which can secure the

means of making marriage practicable; and it increases the probability

of success in courtship.” Spencer shows how “of men whose marriages

depend upon getting the needful income,” those who will succeed

are in general “the best, physically and mentally--the strong, the

intellectually capable, the morally well-balanced.” He shows also

how “women are attracted towards men of power--physical, emotional,

intellectual; and obviously their freedom of choice leads them, in many

cases, to refuse inferior samples of men; especially the malformed, the

diseased, and those who are ill-developed, physically and mentally.

So that, in so far as marriage is determined by female selection,

the average result on men is that while the best easily get wives, a

certain proportion of the worst are left without wives.”

Very likely the stupid conclusion into which so many distinguished

men have been betrayed will survive for many years yet amongst less

distinguished people, but at any rate we may free our minds from it

here, and may recognise in the figures to which I have referred, and

which are of the same order to-day, the statistical proof of what any

observer, however casual, might have inferred from what he sees even

amongst his own friends only--that marriage is, as it probably always

has been, a selective agent of much value in preserving and augmenting

the desirable inherent qualities of the race. It is, of course, the

object of race-culture or eugenics to strengthen the hands of marriage

in this respect to the utmost possible degree.

=Woman as practical eugenist.=--We must especially note one most

important matter, radically affecting race-culture, which is referred

to by Herbert Spencer in the passage cited, and has been greatly

insisted upon by Dr. Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-discoverer with

Darwin of the principle of natural selection. The matter in question

is the possibility of race-culture through the choice of their

husbands by women. Not long ago Dr. Wallace[52] described selection

through marriage as the “more permanently effective agency through

which the improvement of human character may be achieved.” This, in

his opinion, can only be perfectly achieved “when a greatly improved

social system renders all our women economically and socially free to

choose; while a rational and complete education will have taught them

the importance of their choice both to themselves and to humanity....

It will act through the agency of well-known facts and principles of

human nature, leading to a continuous reduction of the lower types in

each successive generation, and it is the only mode yet suggested which

will automatically and naturally effect this.” Thus “for the first

time in the history of mankind his Character--his very Human Nature

itself--will be improved by the slow but certain action of a pure and

beautiful form of selection--a selection which will act, not through

struggle and death, but through brotherhood and love.”

Dr. Wallace is a socialist, and he believes that only through socialism

can we achieve “that perfect freedom of choice in marriage which will

only be possible when all are economically equal, and no question of

social rank or material advantage can have the slightest influence in

determining that choice.” As I have said elsewhere, I would call myself

neither a socialist nor an anti-socialist, but if labels are necessary,

a eugenist and maternalist. As such, I can only say that this argument

for socialism--that it is the necessary condition of eugenics or

race-culture--is, for me, incomparably the best argument for that

creed; and if it were proved that only through socialism could the

utmost be made of women's choice of husbands, then no argument against

socialism could have any appreciable weight at all. The fundamental

and permanent argument against certain of the highly various and

incompatible doctrines which, for our confusion, are commonly lumped

together as socialism, is that they would arrest the process by which

Nature rewards worth and permits it to perpetuate itself. If, then,

it can be shown, as may or may not be the case, that only through

socialism can male worth be most effectively chosen and male unworth be

rejected for fatherhood, the supreme--that is, the eugenic--argument

against socialism becomes the conclusive argument in its favour.

=The field of choice.=--But, however this may be, there can be no

question that the eugenic purpose, as well as the happiness and

elevation of individuals in the present, will be greatly served

by whatever measures increase, to the utmost extent possible, the

opportunities for choice in marriage afforded to women and also to men.

One of the most amazing and satisfactory facts about marriage as at

present practised is, I think, the large proportion--often estimated

at seventy-five per cent.--of unions which, apart from any eugenic

question, turn out happily, in Great Britain, at any rate. What makes

this fact more amazing is the almost incredible limitation of the

field of choice within which both sexes are still confined as a whole.

If the reader will consider the cases most familiar to him or her,

it will surely be admitted that the considerable success of marriage

takes on an astonishing aspect when the present strait conditions of

choice are taken into account. I am convinced that few more radical and

far-reaching, because eugenic, reforms can be conceived than any which,

in accordance with Dr. Wallace's argument, tend to widen the field of

choice, and that not for one sex only but for both. He would be a rash

man who ventured to allot superior value to the selection of man by

woman rather than of woman by man, or _vice versâ_.

Quite apart from any deeper and more difficult reforms, such as Dr.

Wallace alludes to, I am sure that even the mere widening of the

field of choice, as such, is most desirable. To take an instance,

which the reader may very likely think trivial and absurd, I have

witnessed in my brief career as a hockey player two unions most happy

and eugenic in every way, which entirely depended upon the existence

of the amusement called mixed hockey--whereat the contracting parties

met one another! It is not asserted that these two cases suffice for

world-wide generalisation. They are merely cited as instances which

set at least one hockey player thinking, even on the field--the field

of choice. It is a great argument, because it is a eugenic argument,

in favour of community of sports and amusements amongst young people

of both sexes, that it does widen the field of choice in marriage, and

that in doing so it also tends to favour those factors of selection

which the eugenist would desire to see selected: and this especially as

compared with the ball-room. I think that the reader will agree that

the conditions, the “atmosphere,” the costume, and the other features

of what young people call a “dance,” whilst undoubtedly serving the

purpose of marriage and widening somewhat a field of choice which might

otherwise be ludicrously and impracticably restricted, compare most

unfavourably with the conditions of even the mixed hockey field, which,

decried though they often be, are to my mind immeasurably healthier on

every conceivable ground than those of the ball-room, and not least of

all on the eugenic ground of the prominence gained by most desirable

qualities, of which mere strength and energy and neuro-muscular skill

are quite the least, whilst unselfishness, capacity for self-control,

patience, real gallantry--as when a male “full back” refrains from

hitting the ball with all his might against the toes of a girl

“forward”--the sporting spirit and other true and radical virtues, are

the greatest. It is undoubtedly the case that the personal factors,

physical and psychical, which determine the mutual attraction of young

people, have dependent upon them the whole of human destiny. In society

to-day, what one may call the incidence of parenthood, upon which all

the future necessarily depends, _is_ determined by nothing other than

the humanised form of what Darwin called “sexual selection.” Therefore,

it is not trivial but supremely important to discuss the conditions

under which the selection obtains.[53]

It has already been suggested that in order to enhance the eugenic

value of marriage we should endeavour to widen the field of choice, at

present ludicrously restricted by custom, class, religion, economic

position, and so forth. The increased locomotion of to-day will be of

real eugenic service to the race in this respect, I believe.

Then it has been hinted that young people should meet one another

under conditions which make prominent the psychical and put the merely

physical or animal into the background--_e.g._ on the hockey field or

the ice or in the “literary circle,” rather than in the ball-room. This

proposition accords, of course, with what has been said elsewhere as to

that great factor of progress which I define as the enhancement of the

survival-value of the psychical as against that of the physical. (Note

the obvious sequence--survival-value, selection-value, marriage-value,

parenthood-value, progress-value.) This proposition and the last might

both be worked out, I believe, in considerable detail and not without

profit.

Arguing on the same lines, we may agree that even such a small matter,

usually considered wholly domestic, as the length of engagements,

is of eugenic or racial importance. The eugenist, I think, must

welcome long engagements simply because, though they may involve a

reduced marriage-rate and a reduced birth-rate--the latter partly in

consequence of the reduced marriage-rate, and partly because of the

later age at marriage--they tend by the mere operation of time, as

we say, to enhance the importance of the psychical and to reduce the

importance of the physical factors which determine sexual attraction.

To these three points a fourth, of great importance, must be added.

It is that we should favour, as far as possible, those factors of

choice for marriage which are inherent, and therefore transmissible,

as against those which are acquired, accidental, and therefore not

transmissible, _and therefore_ of no racial or eugenic importance.

This, of course, is the point made by Dr. Wallace in the article

quoted above--or at any rate it is involved in the point he makes.

I simply mean that every time a marriage is brought about by, for

instance, money, the eugenic value of marriage is at least nullified

and may become actually anti-eugenic. Again I say, _if_ Socialism, or

the abolition of (_un_-natural) inheritance, be necessary in order

that selection for marriage shall be determined by the possession of

personal qualities of racial value rather than the power of the purse,

which has always been a racial curse, then the sooner socialism is

established the better.

=The eugenic value of contemporary marriage.=--The first purpose of

this chapter has been to show that in marriage, wherever, and in so

far as, it is determined by the mutual attractiveness of young people,

there exists a eugenic factor in society to-day; and since the race

is in effect recruited by the married people, this aspect of marriage

deserves the closest study and attention. I commend this subject, _the

eugenic value of contemporary marriage_, to the small but rapidly

increasing number of students who realise that eugenics or race-culture

will be the supreme science of the future, and who are now devoting

themselves to its foundations. No more important and urgent enquiry can

be undertaken at this stage. Which, for instance, is the more eugenic,

the English system or the French?

The second purpose has been to show that one may believe in and work

for eugenics or race-culture without proposing to overthrow all human

institutions, or to adopt the methods of the stud-farm, or to initiate

a vast campaign of surgery, or sensational and drastic legislation, or

even, yet, the employment of marriage certificates. One or all of these

things may have their place, now or hereafter; or may, on the other

hand, be far worse than futile. But most assuredly it is possible now

for the individual parent of marriageable children, for the clergyman,

the leader of fashion, the doctor, not to start but to strengthen

such by no means impotent eugenic forces as already exist in society,

without outraging sentiment or custom--indeed, without attracting

public attention to their action at all.

Eugenics has already suffered much at the hands of its so-called

friends. It is to be hoped that a real service may be discharged by

this attempt to show that on the highest, most accurate and scientific

eugenic grounds, we may recognise, claim and welcome every father and

mother who desire that the son or daughter whom they care for shall

marry for psychical and not for physical love. Every such parent is a

eugenist, in effect, though his sole motive may be the welfare of his

individual child.

At present we interfere with marriage on every imaginable ground, many

utterly trivial, many worse. We encourage or discourage on economic

grounds; we recognize many taboos, of caste, creed, colour. It is not

for us, certainly, acting as we do, to be offended at the suggestion

that we should use our influence to affect marriage on the highest

conceivable ground--the life of mankind to come. What we really need

is not so much the abolition of Mrs. Grundy as her conversion to the

eugenic idea. It is the business of those who believe that eugenics is

the greatest ideal in the world to make a eugenist of Mrs. Grundy, as

we shall some day: and then it will be realised how potent for good

public opinion may become, once it is rightly educated.

Says Mr. Galton, in his latest contribution to the subject:--

“The power of social opinion is apt to be rather under-rated than

over-rated. Like the atmosphere which we breathe and by which we

live, social opinion operates powerfully without our being conscious

of its existence. Everyone knows that governments, manners, and

beliefs which were thought to be right, decorous, and true at one

period have been judged wrong, indecorous, and false at another; and

that views which we have heard expressed by those in authority over

us in our childhood and early manhood tend to become axiomatic and

unchangeable in mature life.

“Speaking for myself only, I look forward to local eugenic action in

numerous directions, including the accumulation of considerable funds

to start young couples of ‘worthy’ qualities in their married life,

and to assist them and their families at critical times. The gifts

to those who are the reverse of ‘worthy’ are enormous in amount; it

is stated that the charitable donations in the year 1907 amounted to

£4,868,050. I am not prepared to say how much of this was judiciously

spent, or in what ways, but merely quote the figures to justify the

inference that many of the thousands of persons who are willing to

give freely at the prompting of a sentiment based upon compassion,

might be persuaded to give largely also in response to a more virile

sentiment, based on the desire of promoting the natural gifts and the

National Efficiency of future generations.

“In circumscribed communities especially, social approval and

disapproval exert a potent force. Its presence is only too easily

read by every one who is the object of either, in the countenances,

bearing, and manner of those with whom they daily meet and converse.

Is it then, I ask, too much to expect that when a public opinion in

favour of Eugenics has once taken sure hold of such communities and

has been accepted by them as a quasi-religion, the result will be

manifested in sundry and very effective modes of action which are as

yet untried and many of them even unforeseen?”

=“Breach of promise” and race-culture.=--It may be added that perhaps

we shall have to learn to reconsider our ill-judged and stupid

censoriousness, directed against young people who get engaged but then

become tired of one another--as they accurately say, discover that they

are not suited for one another. Not only is it obvious that we are

fools in denouncing this discovery of impermanence in their attraction,

happily made before marriage, whilst we ignore the disasters of

its lamentably _postmature_ discovery, after marriage: but also it

should be obvious that the eugenic end is negatively served whenever

what would have been an unfortunate union is broken off in time. Our

imbecile standard of honour, and the law of breach of promise, which

is outrageously abused, at present condemn the man, for instance, who

finds that he has made a mistake, whilst passively applauding him who,

finding his mistake, thinks it his duty to make it irreparable. Far

better would it be that the man incapable of forming an attachment made

of the non-material ties which last, should not marry at all. The man

who cannot see, or seeing, cannot find it in his heart to love, the

spiritual beauties of womanhood, is just the man who can be safely

omitted in the eugenist's scheme for fatherhood.

The plea of insanity is, in English law, no protection against a

claim for damages for breach of promise to marry, unless it be proved

insanity at date of contract in the defendant. A valid contract once

made, it is no excuse for non-performance that insanity has been

discovered in the family of the other party. This wicked law must be

altered.

=The need for further study.=--In his study of this subject the student

will naturally turn to Mr. Havelock Ellis's volume entitled _Sexual

Selection in Man_.[54] This, of course, has its own scientific value

as a statement of facts, notwithstanding its intensely nauseating

character. But anything less relevant to what most of us understand

by psychology it would be difficult to imagine. The book considers

_seriatim_, touch, smell, hearing, and vision as the bases of so-called

love. It thus deals with “sensology,” not psychology. Indeed, to the

best of one's recollection, after very close and careful reading, there

is no allusion to the human mind in it anywhere. If men and women were

simply animals, this book would doubtless cover the ground, and perhaps

the word “psychology” would even be justified in connection with it.

From end to end men and women are consistently treated as animals and

no more. Since, however, the human species is possessed of psychical

characters which distinguish it from the lower animals, it is not

unreasonable to suppose that a volume which really dealt with sexual

selection in man would, to say the least of it, recognise the existence

of those characters--even if only to reject them as irrelevant to the

subject under discussion.

The foregoing remarks do not imply that the purely anatomical and

sensory factors are irrelevant to the selection of parents in any

generation, and for methodological purposes it might be of value to

abstract from the factors of sexual selection in human society such

things as odour and contour. But it would be urgently necessary in

the course of such a study, if it were to be other than extremely

misleading, to observe that this selection of factors was made for

purposes of convenience and that the relation of their importance to

that of other factors was a matter for further and by no means casual

consideration.

We may certainly agree with Mr. Havelock Ellis that sexual selection

occurs in human society, and may welcome his volume as supporting that

assertion. There follows the extremely interesting and indeed urgent

necessity of ascertaining what the factors of this selection really

are, what is their relative potency, and what is their capacity for

modification. We may further enquire whether they tend to be eugenic.

A contribution to this subject is furnished by Mr. Ellis when he shows

that width of “hips” is a female character commonly admired by men.

Since a wide pelvis is one which can accommodate and safely give birth

to a large fœtal head, there is here, as a practically solitary case,

a bearing on the eugenic issue: large heads mean, in general, large

brains, and it would be ill for the white races if men admired hips as

narrow as those of, for instance, the negress, whose pelvis could not

find room for the average head of a purely white baby, and who suffers

terribly in many cases where the father is white, especially if the

child be a boy.

Meanwhile we must wait for studies of this great question from various

points of view: notably for a study of the economics of sexual

selection as it obtains in human society. Yet further, we require

a detailed study of the influence of legislation, custom and public

opinion upon sexual selection--on the lines of Mr. Galton's paper on

“Restrictions in Marriage.” Mr. Havelock Ellis has more than adequately

dealt with the nervous physiology of sexual selection; there remain the

psychology and sociology of it--these latter comprehending, one may

suppose, ninety-nine per cent. of the whole subject. In the preceding

pages allusion has been made to one or two of the more salient aspects

of this matter.

CHAPTER XIII

THE RACIAL POISONS: ALCOHOL[55]

In the first chapter of our second Part, which deals with the practice

of eugenics, there were introduced, defined, and briefly illustrated,

the terms _positive eugenics_ and _negative eugenics_. Of these the

latter, as the more urgent and the more completely and immediately

practicable, claims our special attention; though the present writer,

notwithstanding that he has devoted to it the greater part of his

eugenic work, is bound to protest that the positive increase of ability

and worth is never to be regarded as of secondary importance. The two

methods are, of course, complementary in practice, as they are one

in principle--to select is to reject, to choose is to refuse. The

preceding chapter, on selection (and rejection) through marriage, has

dealt with the conditions under which both aims are to be pursued.

In the following pages we must discuss a specially urgent and

practicable and indisputable portion of negative eugenic practice:

none the less urgent because of the contemporary emergence and future

world-importance of sober nations, such as Japan and Turkey. The term

_racial poisons_, introduced by the present writer in the year 1907,

is self-explanatory. After dealing with the most important of these

poisons, we shall proceed, in the next chapter, to discuss some others.

The racial poisons constitute a special department of eugenics which

has not hitherto been considered by the pioneers of this subject, but

for which I press the claim of the utmost gravity and moment, and which

I conceive to be certainly a part, and a most important part, of our

manifold yet single subject.

* * * * *

The argument of this chapter is that parenthood must be forbidden to

the dipsomaniac, the chronic inebriate or the drunkard, whether male

or female; and this whether Lamarck or Galton and Weismann be right,

or whether, as we may believe with Galton and Weismann themselves,

the controversy between the two parties is wholly irrelevant to the

question in hand. This conclusion, that on no grounds whatever,

theoretical or practical, can we continue to permit parenthood on the

part of the drunkard, is one temperance reform, perhaps the only one,

on which disagreement is absolutely impossible. It is, further, the

most radical that can be named within the sphere of practical politics,

and it is conspicuously practicable. It has hitherto been lamentably

neglected by workers and reformers of all schools. Indeed, at the time

of writing, the London County Council, governing the greatest city in

the world, is pursuing a course of action in this regard, which will be

detailed later, and which, as will appear, is misguided and deplorable

in the last degree.

=Alcohol and heredity.=--According to Dr. Archdall Reid, “alcohol,

year after year, eliminates from the race a great number of people so

constituted that intoxication affords them keen delight, leaving the

perpetuation of the race in great measure to those on whom intoxication

confers little or no delight.... Now since alcohol weeds out enormous

numbers of people of a particular type, it is a stringent agent of

selection--an agent of selection more stringent than any one disease.”

The factor that really makes the drunkard “is certainly inborn, and

therefore as certainly transmissible to offspring. The man who has it

is cursed with the ‘alcohol diathesis,’ with the ‘predisposition to

drunkenness.’ Thus most savages are keenly capable of enjoying drink,

and their offspring inherit the capacity.” Féré has shown that “it

is one of the characteristics of the degenerate that they are prone

to have recourse to the poisons, like alcohol and morphia, which

hasten their decadence and elimination.” Thus, as Dr. W. C. Sullivan

points out, alcohol “might certainly be adjudged a salutary evil if

its incidence were limited to individuals whose extreme inferiority

of organisation renders them wholly undesirable and useless to the

community. _But this is very far from being the case._”[56]

The whole crux of the question lies in this last sentence. Alcohol

certainly destroys many degenerate stocks, and that is good, though it

would be better to do what we shall do some day--hasten and ameliorate

the process by forbidding parenthood to the degenerate. _But does

alcohol also make degenerates; does it even make more degenerates than

it destroys?_ A somewhat similar difficulty arises in the case of

infant mortality. The causes of infant mortality destroy many children

inherently unfit, diseased or weakly. But we are not justified in

keeping up our infant mortality, if we find, as we do, that for every

diseased child whom they destroy they kill many who were healthy at

birth and damage for life many more.

A man is born sober--in most cases, but not always,[57] as we shall

see--and any changes produced in his body by alcohol are “acquired.”

Therefore, rejecting Lamarck, are we to reject the doctrine that the

effects produced by alcohol on parents are transmitted to offspring?

The controversy between Lamarck and Weismann has _absolutely nothing

to do with the question_. Let us consider what would be a case of

Lamarckian transmission in the sense which the modern student of

heredity denies. The birth of a child with a scar on its scalp, to a

father who had acquired a similar scar before the child was conceived,

would be such a case: and this does not happen. Or suppose that instead

of a scar on the scalp the father has an inflammatory change, not so

dissimilar to a scar, produced by alcohol in the membranes covering

his brain. Then it would be a case of Lamarckian transmission if the

membranes of his baby's brain were similarly affected; and this does

not happen. Such is the kind of transmission of which exhaustive

experiment and observation fail to find a conclusive instance anywhere.

But what has such a supposition to do with the theory, as definitely

supported by observation and experiment as the other is not, that if a

man saturates his body with alcohol carried by his blood, he injures

all the tissues which are nourished by that blood, including the racial

elements of his body with the rest: and therefore that his child may be

degenerate?

What says Weismann himself? In _The Germ-Plasm_, p. 386, under the

heading “The influence of temporary abnormal conditions of the parents

on the child,” he writes as follows:--

“Although I do not consider that the cases which come under the

above heading have anything to do with heredity, I should not like to

leave them entirely on one side.

“It has often been supposed that drunkenness of the parents at the

time of conception may have a harmful effect on the nature of the

offspring. The child is said to be born in a weak bodily and mental

condition, and inclined to idiocy, or even to madness, etc., although

the parents may be quite normal both physically and mentally.

“Cases certainly exist in which drunken parents have given rise to

a completely normal child, although this is not a convincing proof

against the above-named view; and in spite of the fact that most, or

perhaps even all, the statements with regard to the injurious effects

on the offspring will not bear a very close criticism,[58] I am

unwilling to entirely deny the _possibility_ that a harmful influence

may be exerted in such cases. These, however, have nothing to do with

heredity, but are concerned with an _affection of the germ by means

of an external influence_.”

Weismann goes on to quote cases showing how germ-cells may be injured

by various agents, and continues:--

“It does not appear to me impossible that an intermixture of alcohol

with the blood of the parents may produce similar effects on the ovum

and sperm cell. According to the relative quantity of alcohol either

an exciting or a depressing influence might be exerted, either of

which would lead to abnormal development....

“_New_ predispositions can certainly never arise owing to such

deviations from the normal course of development, and therefore

a modification of the process of heredity itself is out of the

question. It is, however, conceivable that more or less considerable

abnormalities may affect the course of development, and either

cause the death of the embryo, or else produce more or less marked

deformities. The question as to whether such deformities really

result in consequence of the drunken condition of the parents can

only be decided by observation.”[59]

This is all that Weismann has to say on the subject, since, not

referring to functionally-produced modifications,[60] it does not

concern his theory of heredity at all: yet it is upon this theory that

the most palpable facts of the racial influence of alcohol are denied.

Weismann's own remarks are quite open to criticism, as, for instance,

where he denies that new predispositions can arise in the manner

indicated. This is possibly only a question of words, and Weismann is

perhaps merely denying that alcohol can produce progressive variations.

Also his remarkably brief discussion of the subject seems to concern

itself mainly with the influence of alcohol on the germ-cells _just

before their union_. He has not a word to say regarding the influence

on the germinal tissues of years of soaking in alcohol. It suffices,

however, to make the point which is quite clearly made, that the

Weismannians are going absurdly beyond their book in denying what,

indeed, the book of Nature demonstrates.

Let us turn now to the experimental side of this question. An American

botanist, Dr. T. D. MacDougal, read an address on “Heredity and

Environic Forces” at the Chicago Meeting of the American Association

for the Advancement of Science in 1907. His experiments require

confirmation, but may be provisionally accepted. He has permanently

modified the germ-plasm of plants under the influence of various

chemicals. There is here a vast field for experiment with alcohol.

I quote one paragraph indicating the remarkable results of these

experiments. The reader will see their bearing on our present question,

and will also see that they do not for a moment affect Weismann's

denial of the doctrine that by cutting off rats' tails you can produce

a race of tailless rats, or that by learning a language you can save

your future children the trouble of doing so for themselves:--

“It was found that the injection of various solutions into ovaries

of Raimannia was followed by the production of seeds bearing

qualities not exhibited by the parent, wholly irreversible, and fully

transmissible in successive generations. One of the seeds produced

by a plant of _Œnothera biennis_ which had been treated with zinc

sulphate differed so widely from the parental form that it could be

distinguished from it by a novice. This new form has been tested to

the third generation, and transmits all its characteristics fully.”

=Alcohol a proved racial poison.=--But the reader will rightly desire

some kind of experimental proof that alcohol itself can act as a cause

of racial degeneration. We may first refer to the chapter on alcoholism

and human degeneration in Dr. W. C. Sullivan's _Alcoholism, a Chapter

in Social Pathology_,[61] for a recent _résumé_ of the subject.

Without actually quoting Weismann, Dr. Sullivan begins by showing

that, as we have seen, the doctrinal objection of Dr. Reid and others

to the theory of alcoholic degeneration is quite irrelevant--“the

effects attributed to parental alcoholism are not in the category of

transmitted acquirements at all; they are the results, expressed in

defect and deviation of development, of a deleterious influence exerted

on the germ-cells, either directly through the alcohol circulating in

the blood, or indirectly, through the deterioration of the parental

organism in which these cells are lodged, and from which they draw

their nutriment.” Later Dr. Sullivan points out that the racial effects

of alcoholism in man are similar to those obtained by experimental

intoxication in the lower animals. Combemale, for instance, found

that pups begotten of a healthy bitch by an alcoholised dog were

congenitally feeble and showed a marked degree of asymmetry of the

brain. Recent experiments have shown the same thing as regards other

poisons, and it is especially to be noted that in the experiments

cited the mother was healthy. They prove that _paternal_ alcoholism

alone (all questions of the nourishment of the growing child before

birth, for instance, thus being excluded) can determine degeneration.

Mr. Galton[62] himself long ago quoted the case “of a man who, after

begetting several normal children, became a drunkard and had imbecile

offspring”; and another case has been recorded “of a healthy woman who,

when married to a drunken husband, had five sickly children, dying in

infancy, but in subsequent union with a healthy man, bore normal and

vigorous children.”

Other intoxications show similar results though they are not _yet_ of

grave racial importance. For instance, “a man who had had two healthy

children acquired the cocaine habit, and while suffering from the

symptoms of chronic poisoning engendered two idiots.” Brouardel and

others have observed that the expectant mother who is a morphinomaniac

may give birth to a child who shows all the phenomena of the morphia

habit.

Demme has traced the appalling contrast between the offspring in ten

sober families, and in ten families where one or both parents suffered

from chronic alcoholism. Dr. Sullivan himself, realising the obviously

greater importance of maternal alcoholism, since here we have the

action of poisoned food--the maternal blood--upon the child before

birth, made an enquiry of his own. He found that

“... of 600 children born of 120 drunken mothers 335 (55.8 per cent.)

died in infancy or were still-born, and that several of the survivors

were mentally defective, and as many as 4.1 per cent. were epileptic.

Many of these women had female relatives, sisters or daughters,

of sober habits and married to sober husbands; on comparing the

death-rate amongst the children of the sober mothers with that

amongst the children of the drunken women of the same stock, the

former was found to be 23.9 per cent., the latter 55.2 per cent., or

nearly two and a half times as much. It was further observed that in

the drunken families there was a progressive rise in the death-rate

from the earlier to the later born children.”

Dr. Sullivan cites as a typical alcoholic family one in which “the

first three children were healthy, the fourth was of defective

intelligence, the fifth was an epileptic idiot, the sixth was

dead-born, and finally the productive career ended with an abortion.”

Dr. Claye Shaw told the Interdepartmental Committee on Physical

Deterioration, “we have inebriate mothers, and either abortions or

degenerate children. The teleological[63] relationship between the

two seems to be as certain as any other conditions of cause and

effect.” The general rule is that any narcotic substance affects highly

developed tissues sooner and more markedly than simpler tissues, and

so it is in the case of alcohol and the infant. It is the developing

nervous system that is most markedly affected. This leads, of course,

to an increased child mortality, especially by way of convulsions.

This was the cause of sixty per cent. of all the deaths that occurred

amongst the six hundred children in Dr. Sullivan's series. But it has

especially to be remembered that a large number of children whose

nervous systems are injured for life by parental and more especially by

maternal alcoholism do not die either as infants or children. Instead

of dying of convulsions they live as epileptics. Of the children in Dr.

Sullivan's series “219 lived beyond infancy, and of these 9, or 4.1 per

cent., became epileptic, as compared with 0.1 per cent. of the whole

population.” Other observers have found epilepsy in 12 per cent. and

even 15 per cent. of the children of alcoholic parents. Of course these

data, as such, do not demonstrate Dr. Sullivan's conclusion that “this

action of alcoholism on the health and vitality of the stock is the

most serious of the evils that intemperance brings on the community.”

Dr. Sullivan's enquiries show a very high rate of still-births and

abortions amongst the children of drunken mothers--quite sufficient

to prove that “the detrimental effect of maternal alcoholism must be

in a large measure due to a direct influence on the germ-cells and

on the developing embryo, and cannot be explained as merely a result

of the neglect and malnutrition from which the children of a drunken

mother are naturally apt to suffer.” The point is of some theoretical

importance. Practically it matters little; _in either case the drunken

woman must not become a mother_.

The same conclusion is reached even though we accord unlimited weight

to the unquestionably valid argument that the drunkard is himself

or herself usually degenerate from the first, and that the children

are therefore degenerate, and would indeed be degenerate even if the

parents had taken no alcohol. Let us, then, erroneously enough, but for

the sake of the argument, assume that solely and always alcoholism is

a symptom of degeneracy. It is, then, an indication of unfitness for

parenthood no less, and the practical issue is the same: one radical

cure for alcoholism, at any rate, is the prohibition of parenthood on

the part of the alcoholic.[64]

=The most recent evidence.=--The most thorough and comprehensive

enquiry into this matter yet made is also the most recent. We owe it to

Dr. W. A. Potts, of the University of Birmingham, who did valuable work

as Medical Investigator to the Royal Commission on the Care and Control

of the Feeble-minded. His paper, entitled “The Relation of Alcohol to

Feeble-mindedness,” is printed in the _British Journal of Inebriety_

for January, 1909, together with communications from many authorities.

It is quite impossible to summarise here the enormous mass of evidence

which Dr. Potts has accumulated from the literature of the subject, and

to which he has added his own work. I believe that nothing could be

more moderate and assured than the following conclusions, to which he

commits himself after a study of the subject the quality and range of

which can only be appreciated at first hand:--

“... the evidence is not clear that alcoholism, by itself, in

the father will produce amentia; but it is quite plain that in

combination with other bad factors it is a most unfavourable element,

while maternal drinking, and drinking continued through more than one

generation, are potent influences in mental degeneracy.”

It is impossible, within the scope of the present volume, to analyse

in detail the Report of the Royal Commission on the Care and Control

of the Feeble-minded. In this present outline of eugenics it is our

business, however, to show main principles, and as the principle

expressed in the phrase “racial poisons” is to my mind absolutely

cardinal for eugenics, it is necessary here to comment, as I have

already done in the _Journal_ above quoted, upon the following most

unfortunate deliverance of the Commissioners: “That both on the grounds

of fact and of theory, there is the highest degree of probability that

feeble-mindedness is usually spontaneous in origin--that is, not due to

influences acting on the parent....”

The word spontaneous has, of course, no meaning for science, or rather

is a denial of the fundamental axiom of science that causation is

universal. What the Commissioners mean when they say spontaneous is

“sportaneous,” like the occasional production of a nectarine by a peach

tree. Apart from this highly suspicious phraseology, there is the still

more unfortunate fact that the Commissioners have lent their authority

to the view that feeble-mindedness is not due to influences acting on

the parent. The modern student of syphilis will be astonished at this

pronouncement, and also the student of lead-poisoning, as we shall see

in the following chapter.

Every reader of Dr. Potts's admirable paper will realise that this

conclusion of the Commissioners--“not due to influences acting on the

parent”--is directly opposed to an extraordinary mass of evidence

and to the opinion of, I suppose, every authority on the subject,

British, Continental or American. The Commissioners' reference to

“theory,” coupled with portions of the evidence given before them by

witnesses who suppose that the alleged influence of alcohol as a cause

of feeble-mindedness controverts the doctrine of the non-transmission

of “acquired characters,” makes it necessary to point out for the

hundredth time that, for lack of analysis and criticism of terms,

the most prominent followers of Galton and Weismann persistently

misunderstand their masters' teaching. The modern doctrine of the

individual as the trustee of the germ-cells and of the non-transmission

of acquired characters is Mr. Galton's. Mr. Galton himself does not

question and never has questioned the possibility that alcohol may

cause feeble-mindedness. There is no reason why he should. If we take

the somewhat unusual course of consulting the words of the masters

before we swear by them, we find--as has been shown--that Weismann, who

subsequently stated and has so greatly supported Mr. Galton's view,

has expressly repudiated the Commissioners' idea of his “theory.” The

Galton-Weismann doctrine is a doctrine of heredity proper,--the organic

relation of living generations. It does not assert that there are two

unconnected universes--the one made of germ-plasm and the other of the

rest of nature. The “grounds of theory,” or rather, our elementary

physiological knowledge of the nutrition of the germ-plasm by the blood

of its host, are in reality precisely the grounds which would lead us

to expect those consequences of parental alcoholism which in fact we

find.

=Alcoholism as a symptom of degeneracy.=--We have seen that alcohol

may be a cause of degeneracy: we now have to recognize the converse

relation. For an authoritative and radical discussion of the problem,

the reader may be referred to the second Norman Kerr Memorial

Lecture, delivered by Dr. Welsh Branthwaite, H.M. Inspector under the

Inebriates' Act, in 1907.[65] He speaks as “the only man in close touch

with all inebriates under legal detention in England.” He reaches most

important conclusions which are generally accepted, as the discussion

shows. He says, “the more I see of habitual drunkards, the more I am

convinced that the real condition we have to study, the trouble we

have to fight, and the source of all the mischief, is ... defect[66]

in mental mechanism, generally congenital, sometimes more or less

acquired.... In the absence of alcohol, the same persons, instead of

meriting the term inebriate would have proved unreliable in many ways;

they would have been called ne'er-do-weels, profligates, persons of

lax morality, excitably or abnormally passionate individuals, persons

of melancholic tendency or eccentric.... It seems to me exceedingly

doubtful whether habitual inebriety ... is ever really acquired in the

strictest sense of the word--_i.e._ in the absence of some measure

of pre-existing defect.” Having studied 2,277 inebriates, committed

under the Inebriates Acts, up to December 31st, 1906, Dr. Branthwaite

_finds 62.6 per cent. of these mentally defective_. The remainder he

regards as of average mental capacity, using, however, an exceedingly

low standard of what that capacity is. He concludes that in a large

majority of police-court cases, “mental disease was the condition for

which they were repeatedly imprisoned--mental disease merely masked by

alcoholic indulgence.... The majority of our insane inebriates have

become alcoholic because of their tendency to insanity.... Certain

peculiarities in cranial conformation, general physique, and conduct,

have long been recognised as evidences of congenital defect. Nearly

all the 1,375 cases included in the two defective sections of our

table have given evidence of possessing some of these characteristic

peculiarities, and _it is morally certain that the large majority of

them started life handicapped by imperfect brain development_.”[67]

The lecture is accompanied with many photographs clearly showing the

physical marks of congenital defect, and Dr. Branthwaite remarks that

“even the untrained eye should meet with no difficulty in recognising

‘something wrong’ with all of them.”

Of the proportion of mentally defective inebriates (62.6 per cent.

of the whole) mentioned by Dr. Branthwaite, _all_ are “practically

hopeless from a reformation standpoint.” This is a sufficient

comment, if any were needed, upon repeated imprisonment for habitual

drunkenness--which, as Dr. Branthwaite says, “is indefensible and

inhumane.” He adds in closing that, in his judgment, habitual

drunkenness, so far as women are concerned, has materially increased,

during the last twenty-five years, “which I have spent entirely amongst

drunkards and drunkenness.” The unfortunate people whom he studies

“_are not in the least affected by orthodox temperance efforts; they

continue to propagate drunkenness, and thereby nullify the good results

of temperance energy. Their children, born of defective parents, and

educated by their surroundings, grow up without a chance of decent

life, and constitute the reserve from which the strength of our present

army of habituals is maintained. Truly we have neglected in the past,

and are still neglecting, the main source of drunkard supply--the

drunkard himself; cripple that, and we should soon see some good result

from our work._”

A foremost authority, Dr. F. W. Mott, F.R.S., has independently

reached the same conclusion as Dr. Branthwaite--that the chronic

inebriate comes as a rule of an inherently tainted stock. (Dr. Mott,

however, reminds us that “if alcohol is a weed killer, preventing the

perpetuation of poor types, it is probably even more effective as a

weed producer.”) Professor David Ferrier, F.R.S., the great pioneer

of brain localisation, in reference to these people, speaks of “the

risk of propagation of a race of drunkards and imbeciles.” Dr. J. C.

Dunlop, H.M. Inspector under the Inebriates Act, Scotland, states that

his experience leads him to precisely the same conclusion as that of

Dr. Branthwaite. Dr. A. R. Urquhart, an asylum authority, affirms

that chronic inebriety “is largely an affair of heredity ... is a

symptom of mental defect, disorder, or disease.” Dr. Fleck, another

authority, says: “It is my strong conviction that a large percentage

of our mentally defective children, including idiots, imbeciles and

epileptics, are the descendants of drunkards.” Mr. McAdam Eccles, the

distinguished surgeon, agrees; so does Dr. Langdon Down, Physician to

the National Association for the Welfare of the Feeble-minded; so does

Mr. Thomas Holmes, the Secretary of the Howard Association, who remarks

that “our habitual criminals, equally with our mental inebriates, are

not responsible beings, but victims of mental disease.” Finally Miss

Kirby, Secretary of the National Association for the Feeble-minded,

insists upon the obvious conclusion that these people must be detained

permanently. She says, “When one case of a dissolute feeble-minded

woman in America is quoted as the mother of nine feeble-minded

children, we see the cause why inebriate homes, and also reformatories,

penitentiaries, and workhouses are full to overflowing, and society

taxed beyond bearing to keep them there. _Such institutions outnumber

homes for the feeble-minded._”[68] Speaking of the 62.6 per cent. noted

by Dr. Branthwaite, she says, “Would it not have been the more logical

course to have dealt with them in earlier years?” Now what would that

have accomplished? _It would have saved the future._

=The inebriate as parent.=--Is it a mere supposition that these women

become mothers? Amongst those committed as criminal inebriates (under

the London County Council) in 1905-6, three hundred and sixty-five of

those admitted to reformatories had two thousand two hundred children.

These are the official figures. As to the quality of these children

there is unfortunately no possibility of question.

We may quote from Dr. Sullivan a notable enquiry:--

“Even more striking results with regard to the several forms of

degeneracy were obtained by Legrain, who investigated the question

from a somewhat different point of view. Selecting from the material

at his disposal all those cases in which ancestral intemperance had

appeared to exercise a causal influence, and working out their family

history, he collected 215 observations of heredo-alcoholism referring

to one generation, 98 referring to two generations, and 7 referring

to three generations. Of the children of the first generation, 508

in number, 196 were mentally degenerate, the affection of the brain

being shown more particularly by moral and emotional abnormality,

while intellectual defects were less pronounced; 106 were insane, 52

were epileptic, 16 suffered from hystero-epilepsy, and 3 from chorea;

and 39 had convulsions in infancy. Amongst the children of the second

generation, who numbered 294, the intellectual defects were more

marked, idiocy, imbecility, or debility, being noted in the offspring

of 54 out of the 98 families investigated. In 23 out of the 33

families in which the children of the second generation had reached

adult age, one or more of them were insane. Epilepsy was found in

40 families, infantile convulsions in 42, and meningitis in 14.

The third generation in 7 families was represented by 17 children,

all of whom were weak-minded, imbecile, or idiotic; 2 suffered,

moreover, from moral insanity, 2 from hysteria, and 2 from epilepsy;

3 were scrofulous, and 4 had convulsions in childhood. In the three

generations taken together there were, in addition to the children

referred to above, 174 infants who were dead-born or died shortly

after birth.”

Therefore, the chronic inebriate must not become a parent. Let it be

said that these people are wicked or have no self-control, drink for

fun or love of degradation, then become drunkards, and prejudicially

affect their children. The conclusion is the same. Have any theory of

heredity you please--Lamarckianism, Darwin's pangenesis, Weismannism,

Mendelism; it matters not a straw. Look at the thing from the

uncharitable religious point of view, or from the charitable scientific

view which realizes, in the case of these women, that to know all is to

pardon all--the conclusion is still the same.

=The present scandal of London's inebriates.=--This, then, being so,

abundance of official evidence having been gathered in addition to all

the unofficial evidence, let us consider the shameful facts which are

in process as I write, and are still so, on revision of these pages a

year later. They are outlined in the reply of Mr. Herbert Gladstone,

the Home Secretary, to a question in the House of Commons. The reply

is printed in full in _The Times_, Feb. 19th, 1908. There was a paltry

squabble between the Government and the London County Council as to the

exact number of shillings that each was to contribute per week for the

maintenance of inebriates. The London County Council was plainly in

the wrong, its ignorance being sufficiently indicated by the letter to

_The Times_, which I will quote. The result of the squabble is that, as

Mr. G. R. Sims said, “We shall have something like five hundred women,

all habitual drunkards, passing in and out of the prisons, a peril to

publicans, a pest to the police, an evil example to the women with whom

they mix, and free to bring children into the world, their little lives

poisoned at the source.” We have therefore reverted to the shameful,

brutal, and disastrous system sufficiently indicated by the history of

Jane Cakebread, at whom, when one was a schoolboy as ignorant as those

who now govern us, one used to laugh because she had been convicted

so many hundreds of times.[69] As the present writer said in raising

the matter at a meeting of the Eugenics Education Society, the future

children of these women are not only doomed by the very nature of

their germ-plasm, but they will actually be many times intoxicated not

merely in their cradles but before their birth. There is no wealth but

life, and this future wealth of England is to be fed on poisoned food

and many times made drunken before it sees the light. The meeting of

the Society passed a unanimous resolution--“That this society enters

a protest against the present administration of the Inebriates Act,

whereby through the closing of inebriate homes some hundreds of chronic

inebriate women will be set adrift in London, with an inevitably

deteriorating result to the race.”[70]

For this particular scandal the London County Council was the more to

blame. Let not the reader suppose that a Liberal Government, however,

was likely to remedy the immoderate ignorance of a “Moderate” County

Council on this matter. Mr. Gladstone's reply in Parliament was an

exceptionally long one, but it did not contain a syllable to suggest

that any question of the future is involved, or that a woman may become

a mother. Further, the Licensing Bill introduced just when we were

drawing public attention to this scandal contained nowhere any hint of

the principle that you must attack drunkenness by attacking “the main

source of drunkard supply--the drunkard himself.” These, the reader

will remember, are the words of His Majesty's Inspector. There is no

question of party-feeling, then, the reader will understand, in what

has here been said. Whether labelled Liberal, Conservative, Progressive

or Moderate, ignorance is still ignorance, and when in action is still

what Goethe called it, the most dangerous thing in the world.

Pure ignorance, of course, is one of the things against which the

advocate of race-culture must fight. The lack of imagination, however,

is another. At present we have few homes for the feeble-minded, and

many for what the feeble-minded become: few for prevention, which

is possible and cheap, many for cure, which is impossible and dear.

The average county councillor or politician, of course, is rather

more short-sighted than the average man, simply because you cannot

be far-sighted and a partisan. What his defect of vision requires is

impossible, but it would be effective. It is that the consequences of

unworthy parenthood should be immediate, instead of taking months or

years to develop. Any one, even a politician, can see cause and effect

when they are close enough together. It is the little interval that

the political eye cannot pierce. Nevertheless, we shall one day learn

to think of the next generation, and then there will be an end of the

politician who thinks only of the next election.

=Ignorance on its defence.=--The state of what has no excuse for being

uninformed opinion was only too well illustrated in a letter from the

Chairman of the Public Control Committee of the London County Council

which appeared in _The Times_ for Feb. 27th, 1908. In defending

the London County Council the writer used the following words:

“Reformation, not mere detention, was its object when it instituted

its reformatory under the Inebriates Acts.... The case of the Public

Control Committee is that the removal and detention of the hopeless

habituals is a matter for the police.” The explanation aggravates

the offence. In the face of reiterated expert opinion, which has no

dissentient, as to the practical impossibility of reformation--you

cannot _re_form what has never been formed, viz., a normally developed

brain--here we find a man in this responsible position, a man who has

the power to put his ignorance into action, telling us that the London

County Council aims at the impossible in this respect; whilst, in utter

defiance of the future and of the useless brutality of the police-court

method, he tells us that these “hopeless habituals” are a matter for

the police. Then, by way of making the thing complete, he speaks of

“mere detention.” What he calls “mere detention” is everything, for it

saves the future by preventing parenthood on the part of members of the

community who, more certainly than any others that can be named, are

unworthy of it. The adjective “mere” is only too adequate a measure

of the state of opinion which, by such retrograde courses as that

under discussion, promises to destroy the British people ere long--and

therefore, of course, the Empire of which that people is the living and

necessary foundation.

It may be noted in passing that the word “reformatory,” employed in

the Inebriates Act of 1898, is a highly unfortunate one. It suggests

a practically impossible hope, and it ignores what, I submit, must

and will ere long be regarded as the essential purpose, function and

value of the detention of inebriates--the prohibition of parenthood

on their part. In the case of women beyond the child-bearing age,

the whole case is radically altered. If it amuses the legislature to

cherish fantastic hopes, let it speak about the reformation of these

women. If it prefers the futile and disgusting cruelty of the Jane

Cakebread method for such women, when the plan for reformation is found

to fail, that is no affair of ours in the present volume. Such women

have been in effect sterilised by natural processes, and the advocate

of race-culture can afford to ignore them, for they do not concern

him. Let me note, however, that, of 294 female inebriates admitted to

reformatories in the year 1906, 170 were under forty years of age,

92, of whom a considerable proportion would be possible mothers, were

between forty and fifty, and only 32 of the total were over fifty years

of age.[71] It may be said that the lives of these unhappy women tend

to be terminated early. The only pity is that our present blindness

and ignorance in dealing with them are not neutralised, so far as

the future is concerned, by death at much earlier ages. If such a

reflection strikes the reader as cruel, how much more cruel are those

who are responsible for the present case of the women inebriates of

London?

The _Pall Mall Gazette_, on March 4th, 1908, gave the utmost prominence

to an article of mine on this subject, entitled “An Urgent Public

Scandal, The Case of London's Inebriates.” In this article I quoted

_The Times_ letter referred to above, and levelled the most vigorous

indictment I could against the authors of the outrage under discussion.

None of them ventured to reply. In the _Referee_ for March 8th, 1908,

however, a member of the Public Control Committee of the London County

Council made an attempt to defend its action. The curious reader may

refer to that letter as one more instance of that absolute blindness

to the nature of the problem and to any question of the future which

had already been indicated in _The Times_ letter from the Chairman of

the Committee. Taking these two letters together, we may say that never

has a public outrage committed by men in authority been more lamely or

ignorantly defended.

=Ignorance in action--the present facts.=--Since the beginning of

January, 1908, the brutal course decreed by the London County Council

has been pursued. The wretched and deeply-to-be-pitied women have been

and are being discharged at the rate of some twenty to twenty-five

per month as their terms expire. The wiser sort of magistrates and

the police-court missionaries are at their wits' ends, and no wonder.

This country offers these women at the moment no refuge whatever;

nothing but the degrading and destructive round--police-court, prison,

public-house, pavement; _da capo_. Writing to _The Times_ in relation

to the correspondence there published (April 18th, 1908) between the

London County Council and the Eugenics Education Society, Sir Alfred

Reynolds, Chairman of the State Inebriate Reformatory Visiting Board

and a Visiting Justice of Holloway Prison, said (April 21st, 1908):--

“The correspondence published in _The Times_ of April 18, between the

London County Council and the President of the Eugenics Education

Society convinces me more than ever that the dispute between the

London County Council and the Treasury is a scandal and folly of the

worst description. For the sake of 6d. per case per day, the London

County Council (the same body which receives half a million sterling

from the sale of intoxicating liquor) has made it impossible for

the metropolitan magistrates to carry out the Act of 1898, and the

result is that 500 of the worst female inebriates are alternately on

the streets or in prison again, and the former scenes of horror and

drunken violence reappear. Holloway Prison will soon fill up again,

and all the good which has been done during the last few years will

be lost.... I will not trouble you further, except by emphasising

what I have said by adding that since January last year 1,500 women

have been notified to Scotland Yard as always in and out of prison

from the County of London, are qualified for inebriate homes, and

at the present moment there are over 50 of this number in Holloway

Prison serving absolutely useless short terms of imprisonment.”

=The London County Council performs a service for philosophy.=--As

we have seen, there exists or seems to exist a radical antagonism in

certain groups of cases between the interests of the individual and

the interests of the race. You may preserve the quality of the race,

as the Spartans did, by exposing defective infants; you may be kind to

feeble-minded children, as we are, but you will injure the race in the

long run. Darwin saw this more than a generation ago, but instead of

suggesting the prohibition of parenthood to the unfit, he said that we

must bear the ill effects of their multiplication rather than sacrifice

the law of love. Huxley similarly said that moral evolution consisted

in opposing natural evolution. Now it has for some time been evident

that this antagonism need not be radical if, whilst devoting hospitals

and charity and medical science to the care of the unfit, we deny them

the privilege of parenthood. On the other hand, the London County

Council by its present action has performed a service to biological

philosophy by showing that _it is possible to combine the maximum of

brutality to the individual and to the present with the maximum of

injury to the race and to the future_. In his report for 1906 Dr.

Branthwaite cites the history of a girl who, at the age of fifteen

years and nine months, was convicted in 1881 for being drunk and

disorderly. During the next quarter of a century she was sentenced 115

times, and in January, 1906, was sent to a reformatory. She has twice

attempted to commit suicide. Her case is, of course, now hopeless, and

Dr. Branthwaite predicts that her life will end by suicide. Let any one

read Dr. Branthwaite's Report or Dr. Robert Jones's account of Jane

Cakebread, or let him acquaint himself with instances as they are to

be daily seen, and he will agree that the maximum of brutality is no

excessive phrase to describe the policy of shame at present pursued in

London: if, indeed, seeing that we now have knowledge, it should not be

described as something still worse.

As for the injury to the future, we already know what the present

policy effects. We may grant, then, to the London County Council

that it has performed a service for philosophy in showing that it is

possible to combine both kinds of evil in one harmonious policy. Nor

let the reader suppose that any partisan feeling infects this protest.

The Government is also to blame. Even had the L.C.C. declined to

contribute anything at all to the cost of the proper policy, no really

educated and honourable Government had any choice but to undertake

all the cost itself--even at the cost of office! Better were--in Mr.

Balfour's words, the wisest he ever uttered--“the barren exchange of

one set of tyrants, or jobbers, for another,” than the horrible birth

of thousands of feeble-minded babies.

=The argument from economy.=--It would be easy to show that the present

policy is not economical even as regards the cost of these women

themselves, and even if it be assumed that gold is wealth. But consider

the remoter cost. During the period when the present writer was making

public protests very nearly every day on this matter without any

immediate effect, and only one month after the London County Council

had attempted to defend itself on the ground of economy when challenged

by the Eugenics Education Society, there was formally opened, with

a flourish of trumpets, the eighty-seventh school for feeble-minded

children established by the London County Council. It accommodates

sixty such children (besides sixty physically defective). This school

cost £6,000 to build alone. The sixty feeble-minded children whom it

accommodates are not a very large proportion of the 7,000 admittedly

feeble-minded school children in London--a number which is probably

not more than a third or a fourth of the real number. It has been

exhaustively proved that feeble-minded children are mainly, at any

given time, the progeny of feeble-minded persons such as constitute

the majority of chronic inebriates. Ignorance is again in action.

On the one hand, the London County Council, quarrelling over pence,

effectively suspends the working of the Inebriates Acts, and thus

ensures that the supply of feeble-minded children shall be kept up. On

the other hand, it takes these children, cares for them until they are

capable of becoming parents, and then turns them upon the world. The

Chairman at the opening ceremony of the school referred to said that

“at the special schools work was being done which would advance the

intelligence of the pupils, and thus benefit the entire race.” It would

be difficult to concentrate more ignorance in fewer words or in ten

times as many.

=A Home Office Committee appointed.=--The almost continuous protest of

two months did, however, bear fruit, the Home Secretary appointing a

Committee to consider the question of the amendment of the Inebriates

Acts. But the legal brutalities described are still being perpetrated,

and the future is being compromised. The London County Council may be

advised to make arrangements for building a few score more schools for

defective children in anticipation of the growing need which it is

assuring.

Never again, when it is past, must we permit the present abominable

policy. It is for public opinion to effect this, and public opinion has

only to be directed to the case in order to realise its nature. If the

reader pleases he may discount altogether the eugenic argument, though

I believe that in the long run that is more important than any other.

But if he confines his attention solely to the cruelties perpetrated

upon these helpless women, infinitely more sinned against than sinning,

and especially if he considers the testimony of Sir Alfred Reynolds

above quoted, he will surely lend his aid to put an end to a state of

affairs which is a disgrace to our civilisation. We talk of progress,

and we are indeed incalculably indebted to our ancestors, but let any

one consider the case of the poor child, now a wrecked woman, quoted

above, and let him consider what it may be to be an heir of all the

ages in the greatest city of the world to-day.

It will be sufficiently evident that if any warrant were needed for

the formation of the Eugenics Education Society or for the publication

of the present volume, it would be found only too abundantly in the

outrage upon decency and morality and science and the future which is

at present in perpetration. Further, if any warrant were required for

the incessant reiteration of the principle that there is no wealth

but life, it would be found in the fact that this outrage is being

committed in the name of economy. Yet even if the sane and sober London

ratepayer were saved a few shillings now, as he will not be, his

children will have to pay pounds in the future for the support of these

women's children. Economy, forsooth, when the rates of London benefited

to the extent of £559,000 out of the sale of intoxicating liquors in

1905, and spent £8,000 in the maintenance of committed inebriates! Need

one apologise for declaring again, that we require a new political

economy which teaches that gold is for the purchase of life, and not

life for the purchase of gold. For the public outrage under discussion,

whereby an untold measure of life, present and to come, “breathing and

to be,” is to be destroyed and defiled for a squabble over shillings,

one can adequately quote only the words of Romeo to the apothecary:

“There is thy gold; worse poison to men's souls, doing more murders in

this loathsome world, than those poor compounds that thou may'st not

sell.”

=The last touches of art.=--If this protest hurts any one's

feelings, that cannot be helped. When the production of thousands

of feeble-minded children is involved, the self-esteem of what Mr.

George Meredith calls the “accepted imbecile” does not matter. The

question is, How soon do we propose to rectify our present course in

this respect?--a course which is a shame and a disgrace to our age and

nation, and which shall in any case be placed on record in printed

words, as well as in young children stamped with degeneracy--in order

to point for future ages the question “_An nescis, mi fili, quantilla

prudentia regitur orbis?_” “With how little wisdom”--and, whilst

perpetrating this shame, ignoring the _one_ indisputable means by which

legislation can and must check drunkenness, nearly all other measures

having failed since Babylon was an Empire, they were quarrelling

about a temperance measure, so-called, which regarded the question of

transference of money from one pocket to another as vital, and ignored

the one vital question, which is the question of life: a measure

showing scarcely a sign, either in its text or in the words of its

supporters or in the words of its opponents, that the question of the

future race had ever entered into the head of a public man; a measure

which left the protection of children from the public-house to the

discretion of local magistrates; a measure which certainly, whatever

else it might effect, could not have been more carefully drawn if its

object were to promote that secret drinking amongst women[72] which

means the poisoning of the racial life even before it sees the light.

This, then, “_mi fili_,” was what was called practical statesmanship

in the year 1908 of the Christian Era: and in order that no last touch

might be wanted from the hand of ignorance and the blasphemous idolatry

which worships gold to the neglect of the only true god, which is

life, they announced just at this time the issue of a Royal Commission

to enquire and report upon the manufacture and variations in the

composition of whiskey. It has been a public joke for years past that

no one can answer the question, “What is whiskey?” Well, then, I will

answer the question, and we may save the labour of such commissions

hereafter. Whiskey is a _racial poison_, and there is nothing else to

know about it worth knowing _for the future_. Those who will never

become, or can no longer become, fathers or mothers, may do as they

please about whiskey, so far as the ideal of eugenics or race-culture

is concerned. They may say, if they like, that their personal habits

are their affair and concern no one else. Under the influence of

whiskey they may, perhaps, even believe this. But for those who are

to be the fathers and mothers of the future, such a plea is idle. The

question is not solely their affair; it is the affair of the unborn,

and we who champion the unborn are bound to say so.

The time will come when it is recognised that there are two classes

of active mind in society: those who worship and uphold the past, and

will always sacrifice the living to the dead, nay more, the unborn to

the dead. The ultimate fate of these is the fate of her who looked

backwards to the shame and destruction from which she had escaped.

She was turned into a pillar of salt. And there are those who worship

and work for the future, who will, without hesitation, sacrifice the

interests of the dead (who are no longer interested) to those of the

living and the coming race--nay, more, who will even sacrifice the

interests of a few worthless living to those of many yet unborn, _that

they may be worthy_. Let the dead bury their dead; let the worshippers

of the dead and the dying ask themselves whether the life that is and

the life that is to be do not demand their homage and service. Not

until some such principles as these are recognised shall we rightly

deal with the drink problem, amongst many others, and bring to it the

mental and moral enlightenment which makes for life on the higher

plane, just as surely and just as indispensably as the light of the sun

creates all life whatsoever.

=Mr. Balfour on legislation.=--Surely the moral of this argument is

clear. The most important, the most radical, the most practicable of

all temperance measures is that which attacks the main source of supply

of the drunkard. When a Licensing Bill is brought before the House of

Commons, Mr. Balfour repeats the ancient piece of nonsense that you

cannot make people moral by Act of Parliament--an assertion that any

child can see to be a muddle. We may let that pass for the moment,

but Mr. Balfour is a thinker, a student of biology, and heredity in

especial, and he has lately been lecturing on “Decadence.” Might it

not have been expected that such a man would take an opportunity to

say what the humblest serious student of the subject would have said,

and thereby to bring far more damaging criticism against the opposing

party's bill than any he hinted at? He might have said, “Your bill,

even if passed, will accomplish little, or relatively little, at great

cost, because you have no grasp of the principles of the subject. You

have no idea of what drunkenness really is. If your bill were worth a

straw it would seek as a primary principle to safeguard the race by

arresting the supply of potential drunkards. Your endless financial

clauses deal merely with the re-distribution of money, but your bill

has no clause that deals with the only business of governments, the

creation and the economy of the only real wealth, which is human life.”

That is what the ex-Premier did not say. He had plenty of passion,

plenty of party-feeling to give fire to his words, but so far as

knowledge is concerned or any conception of what alone is the wealth

of nations, there was nothing to choose between Mr. Balfour and Mr.

Asquith. Passion you must have if you are to do anything, but not

party-passion: whereas if you have passion for life and for children,

not only will it be effective, but, notwithstanding all that the

psychologists tell us as to the vitiation of judgment by emotion, it

will actually teach you the supreme and eternal truths.

In this book hitherto little has been said as to formal eugenic

legislation. I believe with Etienne that it is opinion which governs

the world: legislation in front of public opinion brings all law into

contempt. But in his first speech opposing the Licensing Bill of

1908, Mr. Balfour, the author of the Licensing Bill of 1904, decried

legislation. “Intemperance,” he said, “is a vice”: and legislation

can do practically nothing in dealing with a vice. Plainly Mr.

Balfour is ignorant of the nature of intemperance, which largely

depends upon transmitted and inherent brain defect. He therefore

lost his opportunity of pointing out in what fashion you _can_

actually, notwithstanding the parrots, make people sober by Act of

Parliament--viz., by forbidding parenthood to those whose children

would almost certainly become drunkards. We who are not politicians,

much less ex-Premiers, must make our own proposals then. Last year's

criticism of the London County Council began, I believe, to educate

public opinion to the necessary point. In the name of race-culture and

the New Patriotism, in the name of morality and charity and science,

we must demand, obtain and carry into effect the most stringent and

comprehensive legislation, such as effectively to forbid parenthood

on the part of the chronic inebriate. Ere long, the person who would

have become a chronic inebriate will be cared for and protected during

childhood and thereafter,--with the same result. This solution of the

problem is denounced, says Dr. Archdall Reid,

“... as horrible, as Malthusian, as immoral, as impracticable....

The alternative is more horrible and more immoral still. If by any

means we save the inebriates of this generation, but permit them

to have offspring, future generations must deal with an increased

number of inebriates.... The experience of many centuries has

rendered it sufficiently plain, that while there is drink, there

will be drunkards till the race be purged of them. We have therefore

no real choice between Temperance Reform by the abolition of drink,

and Temperance Reform by the elimination of the drunkard....

Which is the worse; that miserable drunkards shall bear wretched

children to a fate of starvation and neglect and early death, or of

subsequent drunkenness and crime, or that, by our deliberate act,

the procreation of children shall be forbidden them? We are on the

horns of a dilemma from which there is no escape.... But our time has

seen the labours of Darwin. We know now the great secret. Science

has given us knowledge and with it power. We have learnt that if we

labour for the individual alone, we shall surely fail; but that if

we make our sacrifice greater, if we labour for the race as well, we

must succeed. Let us then by all means seek to save the individual

drunkard; with all our power let us endeavour to make and keep him

sober; but let us strive also to eradicate the type; for, as I have

said, if we do it not quickly and with mercy, Nature will do it

slowly and with infinite cruelty.”

=Women and children first.=--The noble cry on a sinking ship is

“women and children first.” This perhaps is a plea for the service of

helplessness as such, though it might be equally warranted as a demand

for the sacrifice of the present to the future. And assuredly the cry

for a sinking society must also be “women and children first.” It is

well if the cry be raised when the ship of state is not yet sinking,

but only water-logged or alcohol-logged. Temperance legislation and the

agitation for temperance reform are themselves in need of reform. Their

appalling record of failure--for it is such a record--should help even

the fanatic, one thinks, to accept the introduction of the eugenic idea

as a new principle of life for the temperance cause. In the present

state of custom and opinion, the teetotaler cannot force his own wise

habits upon the vast majority who do not agree with him. If he has an

infinite amount of energy and resources, let him spend as much of both

as he pleases upon the sort of propaganda with which we are familiar:

he will, by the hypothesis, still have an infinite amount of both

available for the cause to which the principle of race-culture would

direct him. If, however, his energy and resources are finite,--if,

indeed, they are by no means excessive in proportion to the urgent

task which the ideal of race-culture asks of him, then let him not

fritter away a moment or a penny or a breath until he has achieved the

process of salvage or salvation which is expressed in the phrase “women

and children first.” More accurately, perhaps, our cry must be “parents

and possible parents first,” and this for present practical purposes is

equivalent to “women and children first.”

It would have been well if the temperance propaganda from the first,

say two generations ago in Great Britain, had adopted this motto.

But its adoption is far more urgent to-day in consequence of the

fact, unfortunately no longer to be questioned, that drinking amongst

women, the mothers of the future, is, and has been for some time,

steadily increasing. Children yet unborn must be protected from the

injury which may be inflicted upon them by those who will be their

mothers. Yet though there is more need for action in this regard than

ever before, and though Mr. G. R. Sims in his books _The Cry of the

Children_ and _The Black Stain_ has lately drawn wide attention to

the subject, we have seen that the principle of women and children

first, a principle derived from the ideal of race-culture, and directly

serving that ideal, was almost wholly ignored in the Licensing Bill of

1908. The motto “Money, not motherhood,” is a bad one for the framers

of a temperance measure. If ever we have a temperance measure worthy

the name the motto of its framers will be “Motherhood, not money.”

Such a measure will most certainly have to introduce the principle

of indeterminate sentences--or rather, indeterminate _care_--in

the treatment of the chronic inebriate. There is no possibility

of two opinions as to the urgent and indispensable necessity of

such treatment, nor yet as to its scrupulous humanity both for the

unfortunate victim himself or herself and for the unborn.

The word “reformatory” had better be abolished from official language,

since it leads accredited people to write to _The Times_ such

foolishness as “reformation, not mere detention.”

Further, the expense of dealing with the chronic inebriate in this, the

only humane and economical way, had better fall entirely and directly

upon the state. It must not be possible again for a local authority,

even the London County Council, however ignorant or criminally

careless, to commit a public indecency like that already recorded--but

the full record of which none of us will live to see.

=An unpunished magistrate.=--Yet again, in this measure there must

be some means of compelling such magistrates as cannot be educated.

At present, even when accommodation is provided, the unfortunate

creature of the Jane Cakebread type, when she is only just beginning

to enter into competition with that horrible record, and when she is

therefore most dangerous as regards the possibility of motherhood,

can be detained only by the magistrate's order. Now it is very much

less trouble for all concerned to say “five shillings or a week” than

to make the necessary enquiries in such cases. Further, in putting

this measure of one's dreams upon the statute book, we shall have to

remember that the idea of protective care and the eugenic idea are, to

say the least, not native in the mind of every magistrate. In Dr. Welsh

Branthwaite's report for 1906, there is quoted a case where a woman had

been habitually drunken for at least thirteen years previous to her

committal to a reformatory. Her known sentences included 27 fines, and

138 terms of imprisonment. She was feeble-minded. On the termination

of her reformatory sentence the discharge certificate described her as

“quite unfit to control her own actions,” and “certain to succumb to

the first temptation to drink.” The woman was found drunk a few hours

after discharge. Said the magistrate, “this case clearly proves that

it is almost useless trying to reform such women as this.... I think,

after all, the old way is best and therefore I sentence her to one

month with hard labour.” I refrain from suggesting a suitable sentence

for the magistrate: doubtless he got off scot-free.

Surely we might agree, as regards this racial poison, that at least

parenthood and the future must be kept out of its clutches. It may be,

it assuredly is, a deplorable thing that the woman of fifty, to take

an instance, should become alcoholic, but at the worst this is only

the fate of an individual--in the main at any rate. Such principles

as these will some day be the cardinal principles of legislation, and

not only in regard to alcohol. The time will and must come when public

opinion will urge, whether in the name of a New Imperialism or of

common morality or of self-protection, that in our attempts to deal

with alcohol we shall begin by removing its fingers from the throat of

the race: “Women and children first.”

=The Report of the Inebriates Committee.=--In January, 1909, the

Committee which was at last appointed to consider this matter made its

Report.[73] I have not the literary capacity to comment adequately upon

the political wisdom which brings in a Licensing Bill, devotes vast

labour and much time to it and has it rejected by the House of Lords,

while such a Committee as this is at work. The spirit of the politician

who spoke of “those damned professors” still reigns over us, and will

certainly ruin us unless speedily deposed. However, here is the Report,

and its recommendations are earnestly to be commended to the study of

all students. New legislation, as it shows, is urgently required, and

it is pre-eminently the duty of every eugenist to hasten its coming.

This is not a party question, but merely a national one, and will

therefore be dealt with by politicians only under external pressure,

such as produced the Committee itself. The finger of public opinion

must apply that pressure forthwith.

The recommendations of the Committee are so admirable and thorough and

eugenic in effect as to temper one's disappointment that the Report

contains no definite, overt recognition of the eugenic idea. I had

hoped that the evidence prepared and submitted to the Committee for

the Eugenics Education Society would suffice to ensure the recognition

of the eugenic idea in the Report, for the first time, we may suppose,

in official history. For the present we may merely note that the

suggestions made in preceding pages are confirmed by the Committee's

Report, and that the next legislation bearing on the question of

temperance will undoubtedly have to attack the subject in this radical

manner--by what will be in effect the sterilisation of the habitual

drinker of either sex and any social status. The Committee do not

recognise that that is what their Report involves, much less that that

gives it its real value; but so it is, as the year 1950 will be late

enough to show.

Much time and trouble were spent in preparing for the Eugenics

Education Society answers to many of the questions submitted to it by

the Committee, and the Society may fairly claim, I think, that its

original services to this matter were well-continued. The present

writer also prepared for the Society a Memorandum (Minutes of Evidence,

p. 189), which perhaps fairly sums up, in the briefest possible space,

the indisputable relations between alcohol and parenthood, and which

may therefore be reprinted here. The reader will notice an omission

in that nothing is said as to the effects of alcohol in injuring

the germ-cells of healthy stock of either sex. The omission was made

in order that nothing possibly disputable might be included. It has

already been argued that on grounds both of fact and of theory there

is every reason to recognise in alcohol, as in syphilis and in lead,

a racial poison, originating racial degeneration which, in accordance

with generally recognised principles, shows itself in the latest,

highest and therefore most delicate portions of the organism.

The Memorandum is as follows:--

“It may be pointed out that the children of the drunkard are on the

average less capable of citizenship on account of

“(a) The inheritance of nervous defect inherent in the parent.

“(b) Intra-uterine alcoholic poisoning in cases where the mother is

an inebriate.

“(c) Neglect, ill-feeding, accidents, blows, etc., which are

responsible on the one hand for much infant mortality, and

combined with the possible causes before mentioned, for the

ultimate production of adults defective both in body and mind.

“It would appear, then, that the drunkard, if not effectively

restrained, conduces to the production of a defective race, involving a

grave financial burden upon the sober portion of the community, to say

nothing of higher considerations. It therefore seems to the Eugenics

Education Society of extreme importance that some substantial effort

should be made for the reform of existing drunkards, or the permanent

control of the irreformable.

“Scientific warrant for the foregoing propositions is now to be

found in no small abundance. Reference may be made, for instance, to

the chapter on ‘Alcoholism and Human Degeneration,’ in Dr. W. C.

Sullivan's recent work _Alcoholism_ (Nisbet, 1906). Dr. Sullivan quotes

the results of more than a dozen observers in this and other countries,

and special attention may be drawn to his own well-known study of the

history of 600 children born of 120 drunken mothers. The works of

Professor Forel of Zurich are widely known in this connection, notably

_Die Sexuel Frage_, and _The Hygiene of Nerves and Mind_ (Translation,

Murray, 1907). Parental alcoholism as a true cause of epilepsy in the

offspring is now generally recognised. For numerous and detailed proofs

from many sources reference may be made to page 210 of the last work

named.

“It is not necessary, however, to go over the ground which has

doubtless been covered by the Royal Commission on the Care and Control

of the Feeble-minded.

“The existing laws comply to only a very small and almost negligible

extent with the eugenic requirement. They only deal with (a) the very

minute proportion of inebriates who can be induced to voluntarily sign

away their liberty, and (b) those who are also criminal or all but

hopeless and who have done harm already, either as individuals or in

becoming parents. The third group of inebriates (c) not included in

(a) or (b) constitutes the overwhelming majority of the whole. They

are absolutely untouched by the present law, and further powers are

urgently required to deal with them.

“Such legislation would be by no means without precedent, and may avail

itself of the experience of several of our own colonies and various

foreign countries. Such methods as compulsory control on petition,

guardianship and so forth are in employment, for instance, in the

Australian Commonwealth and New Zealand, California, Connecticut,

Massachusetts, various cantons in Switzerland, Nova Scotia, etc.

“To sum up, the Society advocates the retention of the present law so

far as classes (a) and (b) are concerned, but would most strongly urge

the addition of powers to deal with that great majority of inebriates

whom the present law does not touch.”

=The friends of alcohol.=--Those who defend the alcoholic poisoning

of the race may be easily classified. Some few honestly stand for

liberty. Like Archbishop Magee, they would rather see England free

than England sober, not asking in what sense England drunken could be

called free. Some are merely irritated by the temperance fanatic. Many

fear that their personal comfort may be interfered with. But probably

the overwhelming majority are concerned with their pockets. They live

by this cannibal trade; by selling death and the slaughter of babies,

feeble-mindedness and insanity, consumption and worse diseases, crime

and pauperism, degradation of body and mind in a thousand forms, to the

present generation and therefore to the future, the unconsulted party

to the bargain. Their motto is “Your money and your life.” So powerful

are they that most of them are frank. They form associations for their

defence, and hold mass meetings at which they condemn any temperance

measure that is before the country, “whilst ready to welcome any real

temperance reform.” They demand adequate compensation: though, if they

disgorged every farthing they possess, and devoted themselves body and

soul for the rest of their lives to the human cause, they could never

compensate us who are alive, let alone the dead or the unborn, for the

human ruin on which they build their success. They build their palaces

before our eyes; one of the largest and newest, not far from Piccadilly

Circus, I often pass; but where most see only fine stone, the student

of infant mortality, the lover of children, he who works and looks

for the life of this world to come, sees the bodies of the children of

men and is tempted to recall the curse of Joshua, “He shall lay the

foundation thereof in his firstborn, and in his youngest son shall he

set up the gates of it.”

=Alcoholic Imperialism.=--At least let the alcoholic party refrain from

calling themselves Imperialists. Amongst them, for instance, is the

“Imperial bard,” the “poet of empire,” he who has appealed to the “god

of our fathers,” and who warns us lest it shall be said that “all our

pomp of yesterday is one with Nineveh and Tyre”: and appeals to deity--

“Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,

Lest we forget, lest we forget!”

This prophet of what some may think a blasphemous Imperialism gives

his name to the association which frankly in this matter of alcohol

stands for gold as against life. We are to beware lest “drunk with

sight of power” we boast as do the “lesser breeds” to whom the “awful

Hand” of God has not granted dominion: nor are we to put our trust in

reeking tube and iron shard. We may freely call ourselves Imperialists,

however, even though we should be numbered amongst those whom Ruskin,

himself the son of a wine merchant, called the “vendors of death.” One

wonders whether the “Lord God” exists that he can withhold his “awful

Hand” at such a spectacle as this. If some amongst us are to win gold

by the sale of this racial poison, and if it must be so, let them at

least be consistent, and label themselves _the very littlest of little

Englanders_, which they are. An alcoholic Imperialism is of the kind

which no Empire can long survive.

Those of us whom such things as these make sick, and who yet, with

true poets like Wordsworth, are proud of “the tongue that Shakespeare

spake,” and who with him declare:--