“It is not to be thought of that the Flood

Of British freedom, which, to the open sea

Of the world's praise, from dark antiquity

Hath flowed, . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

That this most famous Stream in bogs and sands

Should perish; and to evil and to good

Be lost for ever”

--those of us who know that the foundations of any empire are living

men and women, and that, _to quote Mr. Kipling_, “when breeds are in

the making everything is worth while,” may wonder what process has been

afoot that in three generations English poetry should pass from the

sonnets of Wordsworth to “Duke's son, cook's son,” etc.; and may even

at times, especially those of us who know what alcohol costs in life,

feel a momentary recession of our faith that Great Britain need not now

be writing the last page of her great history. Meanwhile, we read the

controversy in Parliament and the press concerning alcohol. We see the

cannibal cause of beer and spirits, which makes many widows and orphans

every day,[74] represented, with an effrontery to which no parallel can

ever be imagined, as the cause of widows and children, and we recall

the lines which Wordsworth wrote rather more than a century ago:--

“How piteous, then, that there should be such dearth

Of knowledge; that whole myriads should unite

To work against themselves such fell despite;

Should come in frenzy and in drunken mirth,

Impatient to put out the only light

Of liberty that yet remains on earth!”

CHAPTER XIV

THE RACIAL POISONS: LEAD, NARCOTICS, SYPHILIS

The term racial poisons teaches us to distinguish, amongst substances

known to be poisonous to the individual, those which injure the

germ-plasm: and amongst substances poisonous to the expectant mother

herself, we must distinguish those which may also poison her unborn

child. Alcohol is pre-eminently _the_ racial poison, thus defined, and

I plead for its recognition as primarily a racial poison, this being

immeasurably the most important aspect of the whole alcohol question.

Readers of Professor Forel will not lightly question this assertion.

The total number of racial poisons is, of course, very large. Amongst

them must theoretically be included all abortifacient drugs. There

are also various poisons of disease to be included in this category.

Later pages must be devoted to what is by far the most important of

these. But we may observe in passing that such a disease as rheumatic

fever or acute rheumatism has especial significance for the student of

race-culture since, as he knows, its poisons circulating in the blood

of an expectant mother may not only injure her own heart for life but

may pass through the placenta and deform the valves of the child's

heart, with the subsequent result loosely described as “congenital

heart disease.” The conditions giving rise to rheumatic fever, then,

are conditions from which the expectant mother, even more than the

ordinary individual, is entitled to be protected. But this is of minor

importance. We may here refer, however, to one or two striking cases,

especially since they bear in some degree upon social and individual

duty.

=The racial influence of lead.=--In the first place, it is necessary to

draw attention to a really notable racial poison, viz., lead.

Says Sir Thomas Oliver,[75] “Lead destroys the reproductive powers

of both men and women, but its special influence upon women during

pregnancy is the cause of a great destruction of human life.” It may be

said that in a sense the production of miscarriages and still-births,

and also of infant mortality by lead, does not concern the student

of race-culture. Nevertheless some of these children survive. Says

Sir Thomas Oliver: “I have seen both cretinism and imbecility in

infants in whom, as there could have been no possible influence of

alcohol, and presumably none of syphilis, the occupation of one or

other parent as a lead worker must have determined the imperfectly

developed nervous system of the child.” Later he says (page 202):

“Salpétrière and Bicêtre are large hospitals in Paris set aside for

the reception and treatment of nervous diseases. The experience of the

physicians of these institutions is unrivalled. One of the physicians,

M. Roques, speaking of the degenerates found in these hospitals, says

that slowly induced lead poisoning on the part of both parents or in

one or other of them is not only a cause of repeated abortions, high

percentage of still-births and high death-rate of infants, but is the

cause of convulsions, imbecility, and idiocy in many of the children

who survive the first year of existence. Of nineteen children born

to parents who were lead workers, Rennert found that one child was

still-born and that seventeen were macrocephalic. In his studies upon

hereditary degeneration and idiocy, Bourneville places house-painters

in the unenviable first rank of the occupations followed by parents of

mentally weak children. Out of eighty-seven cases relating to unhealthy

trades, fifty-one were connected with white lead in some form or

another, while syphilis was only responsible for nineteen.”

This racial influence of lead is by no means generally recognised--even

by Royal Commissioners. Its parallelism with the case of alcohol is

striking. We may note, for instance, that paternal lead-poisoning,

like paternal alcoholism, can cause degeneration in the offspring, if

not indeed death before or shortly after birth. To quote Oliver again:

“Taking seven healthy women who were married to lead workers, and in

whom there was a total of thirty-two pregnancies, Lewin tells us that

the results were as follows: eleven miscarriages, one still-birth,

eight children died within the first year after birth, four in the

second year, five in the third, and one subsequent to this, leaving

only two children out of thirty-two pregnancies, as likely to live to

manhood. In cases where women have a series of miscarriages so long as

their husbands worked in lead, a change of industrial occupation on

the part of the husbands restores to the wives normal child-bearing

powers.” According to the statistical enquiry of Rennert, the malign

influence of lead is exerted upon the next generation, ninety-four

times out of one hundred when both parents have been working in lead,

ninety-two times when the mother alone is affected, and sixty-three

times when it is the father alone who has worked in lead. Here, then,

as in the case of alcohol, the racial poison may act either through

the father or through the mother, but especially through the mother.

The importance of the demonstration as regards the father in the

case of both poisons is that it means a poisoning of the paternal

germ-cell. The facts may be commended to those extremists, so much more

Weismannian than Weismann, who regard the germ-cells as existing in a

universe of their own, wholly unrelated to the rest of existence.

Another extremely interesting parallel between these two racial poisons

may be noted. It is found, according to Professor Oliver, that “while

following a healthy occupation these women, after having frequently

miscarried when working in lead factories, would have two or three

living healthy children, but circumstances necessitating the return of

these women to town, and resumption of work in the lead factory, they

in each successive pregnancy again miscarried.” He then quotes the

following most remarkable case: “Mrs. K., aged thirty-four, had four

children before going into the factory and two children after. She then

had six miscarriages in succession, when she came under my care in the

Royal Infirmary, having become the victim of plumbism and having lost

the power in her arms and legs. She made a slow but good recovery and

did not return to the lead works. In her next pregnancy she went to

full term and gave birth to a living child.”

We see here that, as is also true in the case of alcoholism, the

germinal tissue itself may escape or at any rate may recover from the

effects of chronic poisoning of the individual who is its host. The

race is more resistant than the individual. If, however, the poisoning

continues whilst a new individual is being formed--that is to say,

during pregnancy--that new individual succumbs, and indeed is far more

gravely affected than its mother. Such a pregnant woman presents three

distinct living objects for our study. Her own body is one: and this

is already developed. It has some measure of resistance to the poison

but is gravely affected. The embryo is the second; it is developing

and because developing is susceptible. It is usually killed before

birth. The third is the germ-plasm or the race, and this, as we have

seen, may withstand the poison so well that when the poisoning is

discontinued healthy children may be produced from it. Undoubtedly

the case is the same as regards alcohol. The race or germ-plasm is

most resistant, the developing individual is least resistant, and the

adult individual--that is to say, the mother--occupies an intermediate

position in this respect.

This parallelism, which has escaped previous observers, may be pointed

out and its remarkable interest and significance suggested as a

definite advance upon the absurd view that the germ-plasm is incapable

of being poisoned. On the contrary, we know that many poisons will

kill it outright, so that sterility results. But its high degree of

resistance is a fact of great interest. Doubtless Dr. Archdall Reid's

acute explanation of it is correct: namely, that natural selection

would tend to evolve a resistant germ-plasm. Dr. Reid will, I think, be

interested to notice in these remarkable observations on lead-poisoning

a conspicuous illustration of this resistance.

Our business here, however, is with the practical issue. This

fortunately is plain, nor are there the same difficulties of vested

interests which arise in the case of alcohol. Lead-poisoning must be

ended in the interests of race-culture and the essential wealth of

the nation, or, if it is to be continued, it must at least have its

clutches kept clear of parenthood.

=The possible racial influence of narcotics.=--Alcohol is of course a

narcotic poison, or, more precisely still, a narcotic-irritant poison,

but here we may briefly refer to the possible racial influence of

certain other poisons. There is, for instance, the case, noted on p.

212, of the disastrous racial consequences of the cocaine habit. The

matter demands only a paragraph, since for the present, at least, it

is of small general importance, and since we must beware of going

beyond the facts; but when once the idea of race-culture has reached

the popular and professional mind--the latter at present frequently

feeding the pregnant woman with alcohol, as we all know--the whole

question of narcomania will have to be looked at from this aspect, and

the measure of danger in particular cases will then be ascertained. It

is probably safe to assume, however, that, on the whole, alcohol will

be found to stand somewhat apart from other narcotics, and for the

reason that it is not a pure narcotic but also an irritant. Thus, to

take the case of opium, it will probably be very difficult and, one may

hope, impossible to show that, shall we say, opium smoking or eating

has an injurious racial influence where it is practised. Here we have a

narcotic which is not an irritant. The individual may recover perfectly

from its abuse, as he may often fail to recover from the abuse of

alcohol, since this poison leaves permanent changes in the brain, and

elsewhere, dependent upon the fact that it is not merely a narcotic but

also a local irritant. The action of a pure narcotic on the germ-plasm

as compared with the action of a narcotic which is also an irritant may

afford a parallel. The abuse of opium by the expectant mother (see p.

212) is not of the same order: it means simply dosing a _very_ small

baby with opium.

=Tobacco and the race.=--The poisonous compounds absorbed from tobacco

smoke are of interest in this connection. The question as to the

proportion of nicotine included amongst them is immaterial here.

It suffices to know, as we do, that certain substances, doubtless

including some proportion of nicotine, rapidly absorbed into the blood

by the smoker, are poisons to the individual body. The familiar fact of

the acquirement of immunity affects in no degree the statement as to

the toxic character of these substances.

No one but the fanatic would venture to say that any racial

degeneration can be traced to tobacco-smoking. It would be hard to

prove the existence of any injury thus inflicted upon the children of

the father who is a smoker, though the question of the acquirement of

immunity is not without relevance here. The immunising substances or

anti-toxins which are doubtless produced in the smoker's blood may

protect the germ-plasm which he bears as well as his own body.

But in the case of the expectant mother there is more warrant for

offering an opinion even in the absence hitherto of definite evidence.

Apart from any opinion as to the propriety of smoking by women in

general, there is a definite issue in the case of the expectant mother.

A very young child is now being exposed to the poisons of tobacco

smoke, and if we are right in passing laws to prevent this poisoning in

the case of the urchin of eight years (who is really, of course, eight

years and nine months old), what shall we say regarding the unborn

child who is only eight months old? I have observed that the expectant

mother may have her liking for tobacco replaced by violent dislike

during pregnancy.

=The poison of syphilis.=--Brief mention must here be made of syphilis

as a racial poison. Sooner or later the eugenic campaign must and will

face this question, about which a murderous silence is now maintained.

No other disease can rival syphilis in its hideous influence upon

parenthood and the future. But it is no crime for a man to marry,

infect his innocent bride and their children: no crime against the

laws of our little lawgivers, but a heinous outrage against Nature's

decrees. When, at last, our laws are based on Nature's laws, criminal

marriages of this kind may be put an end to.

The lay reader should acquaint himself with the play of Brieux, _Les

Avariés_. The student may be referred to Forel's _Sexual Question_,

Dr. C. F. Marshall's _Syphilology and Venereal Diseases_, and his

article, “Alcohol and Syphilis” in the _British Journal of Inebriety_,

January, 1908.

* * * * *

This chapter and the last do not profess to do more than indicate the

field of eugenics which the term racial poisons suggests. Our business

in the present volume is, if possible, to see eugenics whole: to treat

of this new science adequately is not for one author or one generation.

It is earnestly to be hoped that the medical profession will speedily

take up this question of the racial poisons. Already the profession is

beginning to become the great instrument of _individual hygiene_: and

every year will enhance the importance of this work, as compared with

the cure of disease. Now negative eugenics is substantially _racial

hygiene_: and the next great epoch in the evolution of medicine and the

medical profession will be the enrolment of its knowledge and influence

in the cause of racial hygiene. May this book do a little to hasten

that day.

The two next chapters are designed to introduce that aspect of our

subject which may be called National Eugenics, and especially with

reference to decadence. Here is a matter which appeals to minds of type

and training often very different from the typical medical mind. But it

is part of one's purpose to show, if possible, that the historian must

become a eugenist, just as the physician must, for eugenics needs and

claims the work and help of both.

CHAPTER XV

NATIONAL EUGENICS: RACE-CULTURE AND HISTORY[76]

The reader will not expect to be insulted here with any discussion of

the garbage and gossip, records of scoundrels, courts and courtesans,

battles, murder and theft, which we were taught at school, under the

great name of history.[77] If history be, as nearly all historians have

conceived it, and as Gibbon defined it, “little more than the register

of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind,” it is an empty and

contemptible study, save for the social pathologist. But if history,

without by any means ignoring great men or underrating their influence,

is, or should be, the record of the past life of mankind, of progress

and decadence, the rise and fall of Empires and civilisations, and

their mutual reactions; if it be the record of the intermittent ascent

of man, “sagging but pertinacious”; if this record be subject to the

law of causation, and therefore susceptible, in theory, at least, of

explanation as well as description; if its factors are at work to-day

and will shape the destiny of all the to-morrows; if it be neither

phantasmagoria nor panorama nor pageant nor procession but _process_,

in short, an organic drama,--then, indeed, it is more than worthy

of all the study and thought of all who ever study or ever think.

Especially must it appeal to us, who boast a tradition greater than the

world has ever yet seen, and kinship with men who represent the utmost

of which the human spirit has yet shown itself capable,--to us who

speak the tongue that Shakespeare spake, but to whom the names of all

our Imperial predecessors, from Babylon to Spain, serve as a perpetual

_memento mori_. Our special question here is whether there are inherent

and necessary reasons why our predecessors' fate must sooner or later

be ours. Must races die?--or, if we are sceptical about races and more

especially about the so-called Anglo-Saxon race, must civilisations,

states, or nations die? What comment does modern biology, or the theory

of organic evolution, make upon the familiar words of Byron in his

address to the ocean?--

“Thy shores are empires, changed in all save thee--

Assyria, Greece, Rome, Carthage, what are they?

Thy waters wasted them while they were free

And many a tyrant since: their shores obey

The stranger, slave, or savage.”

And these, a few pages earlier in the same poem:--

“There is the moral of all human tales;

'Tis but the same rehearsal of the past,

First Freedom and then Glory--when that fails,

Wealth, vice, corruption--barbarism at last.

And History, with all her volumes vast,

Hath but _one_ page”....

Nations, races, civilisations rise, we shall all agree, because to

inherent virtue of breed they add sound customs and laws, acquirements

of discipline and knowledge. But, these acquirements made, power

established, and crescent from year to year--why do they _then_ fall?

If they can _make_ a place for themselves, how much easier should it

not be to _maintain_ it?

Two explanations, each falsely asserting itself to be rooted in

biological fact, have long been cited and are still cited in order to

account for these supreme tragedies of history.

=The fallacy of racial senility.=--The first may claim Plato and

Aristotle as its founders, and consists of an argument from analogy.

Races may be conceived in similar terms to individuals. There are many

resemblances between a society--a “social organism,” to use Herbert

Spencer's phrase--and an individual organism. Just, then, as the

individual is mortal, so is the race. Each has its birth, its period of

youth and growth, its maturity, and, finally, its decadence, senility

and death. So runs the common argument.

We must reply, however, that biology, so far from confirming it,

declares as the capital fact which contrasts the individual and the

race that, whilst the individual is doomed to die from inherent causes,

the race is naturally immortal. The tendency of life is not to die but

to live. If individuals die, that is doubtless because, as I believe,

more life and fuller is thus attained than if life bodied itself in

immortal forms: but the germ-plasm is immortal; it has no inherent

tendency either to degenerate or to die. Species exist and flourish

now which are millions of years older than mankind. “The individual

withers, the race is more and more.”

It may be added that, in historical instances, civilisations have, on

the one hand, persisted, and, on the other, fallen, despite change,

and even substitution, in the races which created them: and, on the

other hand, the most conspicuously persistent of all races in the

historic epoch, the Jews, have survived one Empire after another of

their oppressors, but have never had an Empire of their own. Thus, so

far as the historian is concerned, it is not races at all that die,

but civilisations and Empires. Plato's argument from the individual to

the race is therefore irrelevant, as well as untrue. The fatalistic

conception to which it tempts us, saying that races must die, just as

individuals must, and that therefore it is idle to repine or oppose,

is utterly unwarrantable and extremely unhealthy. To take our own

case, despite the talk about our own racial decadence, nearly all our

babies still come into the world fit and strong and healthy--the racial

poisons apart. We kill them in scores of thousands every year, but this

infant mortality is not a sign that the race is dying, but a sign that

even the most splendid living material can be killed or damaged if you

try hard enough. The babies do not die because races are mortal, but

because individuals are and we kill them. The babies drink poison,

eat poison, and breathe poison, and in due course die. The theory of

racial senility, inapplicable everywhere because untrue, is most of all

inapplicable here. If a race became sterile, Plato and Aristotle would

be right. There is no such instance in history, apart from well-defined

external, _not inherent_, causes, as in the case of the Tasmanians.

Dismissing this analogy, we may also dismiss, as based upon nothing

better, the idea that the great tragedies of history were necessary

events at all. We must look elsewhere than amongst the inherent and

necessary factors of racial life for the causes which determine these

tragedies; and we shall be entitled to assume as conceivable the

proposition that, notwithstanding the consistent fall of all our

predecessors, the causes are not inevitable, but, being external and

environmental, may possibly be controlled: man being not only creature

but creator also.

=The Lamarckian explanation of decadence.=--The second of the two false

interpretations of history in terms of biology is still, and always

has been, widely credited. When historians have paid any attention to

the breed of a people as determining its destiny, they have invariably

added to the fallacy of racial senility this no less fecund error. It

is that, in consequence of success, a people become idle, thoughtless,

unenterprising, luxurious, and that these _acquired characters are

transmitted_ to succeeding generations so that, finally, there is

produced a degenerate people unable to bear the burden of Empire--and

then the crash comes. The historian usually introduces the idea

already dismissed by saying that a “young and vigorous race” invaded

the Imperial territories--and so forth. The terms “young” and “old,”

applied to human races, usually mean nothing at all.

The reader will recognise, of course, in this doctrine of the

transmission to children of characters acquired by their parents, the

explanation of organic evolution advanced by Lamarck rather more than

a century ago. It is employed by historians for the explanation of

both the processes they record, progress and retrogression. Thus they

suppose that for many generations a race is disciplined, and so at last

there is produced a race with discipline in its very bone; or for many

generations a nation finds it necessary to make adventure upon the sea,

and so at last there is produced a generation of predestined sailors

with blue water in its blood. And in similar terms moral and physical

retrogression or degeneration are explained.

Let us consider the contrast between the interpretation which accepts

the Lamarckian theory of the transmission of acquired characters and

that which does not. Consider the babies of a new generation. According

to Lamarck, these have in their blood and brain the consequences of

the habits of their ancestors. If these have been idle and luxurious,

the new babies are predestined to be idle and luxurious too. This,

in short, is a “dying nation.” But, if acquired characters are not

transmitted, the new generation is, on the whole, not much better, not

much worse, than its predecessors--so far as this supposed factor of

change is concerned. Each generation makes a fresh start, as we see in

the babies of our slums to-day. It does not begin where the last left

off--whether that means beginning at a higher or at a lower level than

that at which the last started: but it makes a fresh start where the

last did.

Now, in general, we have seen that Lamarck's theory is discredited.

The view of Mr. Galton is accepted, that acquired characters are not

transmitted, either for good or for evil. If there are no other factors

of racial degeneration or racial advance, then races do not degenerate

or advance, but make a fresh start every generation: and Empires rise

and fall without any relation to the breed of the Imperial people--an

incredible proposition.

=The racial poisons and decadence.=--Certain apparent, though not

real, exceptions exist to the denial of the Lamarckian theory of the

transmission of acquired characters. These exceptions are furnished by

what I have called the _racial poisons_. Alcohol, for instance, is a

substance, certainly poisonous in all but very small doses, if not in

them, which is carried by the blood to every part of the body and may

and does injure its _racial_ elements. Thus a true racial degeneration

may be caused by its means: and the possibility of this is not to

be ignored. Other poisons, such as those of certain diseases, act

similarly.

We must therefore note in passing a biological factor of historical

importance, though hitherto entirely unrecognised by historians, and

that is disease. Certain of our diseases, and especially consumption

or tuberculosis, are at present making history by their extermination

of aboriginal races. Minute living creatures, which we call microbes,

are introduced into the new and favourable environment constituted by

the blood and tissues of human races hitherto unacquainted with them:

and the consequences are known to all. But further, it has lately been

suggested as highly probable, by Professor Ross and others, that the

fall of Greece, that incalculable disaster for mankind, was due to

the invasion not of human foes but of the humble living species which

are responsible for the disease miscalled malaria. The evidence for

this view is by no means slight, and the most recent explanation of

an event so abrupt and so disastrous is in all likelihood the correct

one. Malaria, like alcohol, produces true racial degeneration, its

poisons affecting those _racial elements_ of which the individual body,

biologically conceived, is merely the ephemeral host: recalling the

great line of Lucretius, “_et quasi cursores, vitaï lampada tradunt_.”

To lame the runner is not to injure the torch he bears--acquired

characters are not transmitted; but the racial poison makes dim the

lamp ere the runner passes it on.

=Selection and racial change.=--But, leaving poisons out of the

question, races of men and animals _do_ undergo change, progressive

and retrogressive, in consequence of the action of another factor than

that advanced by Lamarck: and this is the factor of “natural selection”

or “survival of the fittest.” If, of any generation, individuals of a

certain kind are chosen by the environment for survival and parenthood,

the character of the species will change accordingly. If what we call

the best are chosen, their goodness will be transmitted in some degree,

and the race will advance: if what we call the worst are chosen,

their badness will be transmitted in some degree, and the race will

degenerate.

=The two kinds of progress.=--Now in the case of all species other than

man, the only possible progress is this racial or inherent progress,

dependent upon a choice or selection of parents, and comparable in some

measure, as Darwin showed, with the change similarly produced in the

selective breeding or “artificial selection” of the lower animals by

man. But in the case of man himself, there is a wholly different kind

of progress also attainable, which is not inherent or racial progress

at all, but yet is real progress: and which has the most important

relations to the inherent or racial progress that might be achieved by

the process of natural selection, or the choice of parents.

It has been laid down that acquired characters are not transmissible

by heredity: but man has learnt--and it is well for him--to circumvent

the laws of heredity by transmitting his spiritual acquirements through

language and art. Even before writing there was tradition, passed on

from mouth to mouth. As long as man was without writing he advanced

little faster than other creatures, we may surmise: we know that he

has an undistinguished past of probably at least six million years:

but with speech _and writing_ came the transmission of acquirements

in this special sense; not that the past education of a mother will

enlarge her baby's brain, but that she can teach her daughter what she

has learnt, and so the child can begin where the parent left off, just

as Lamarck wrongly imagined to be the case with the young giraffe, that

he supposed to profit by the stretching of the parental necks. It is

this transmission of spiritual acquirements--outside the germ-plasm

and in defiance of its laws--that explains the amazing advance of man

in the last ten or twenty thousand years as compared with the almost

speechless ages before them.

This kind of progress is peculiar to man,[78] it is the gift of

intelligence, and we may call it traditional or acquired progress. It

is an utterly different thing from inherent or racial progress, an

improvement in the breed dependent upon the happy choice of parents.

And it is surely evident, on a moment's consideration, that acquired

progress is compatible with inherent decadence. To use Coleridge's

image, a dwarf may see further than a giant if he sits on the giant's

shoulders: yet he is a dwarf and the other a giant. Any schoolboy now

knows more than Aristotle, and that is true progress of a kind, but the

schoolboy may well be a dwarf compared with Aristotle, and may belong

to a race degenerate when compared with his; _and that is inherent or

racial decadence subsisting with acquired or traditional progress_.

Now whilst the accumulation of knowledge and art and power

from age to age is real progress, it evidently depends for its

stability and persistence upon the quality of the race.[79] If the

race degenerates--through, say, the selection of the worst for

parenthood--the time will come when its heritage is too much for it.

The pearls of the ancestral art are now cast before swine, and are

trampled on: statues, temples, books are destroyed or burnt or lost. If

an Empire has been built, the degenerate race cannot sustain it. _There

is no wealth but life: and if the quality of the life fails, neither

battleships nor libraries nor symphonies nor anything else will save a

nation._ This we all know, though no one who observed our legislation

or read our Parliamentary debates would suspect that it had ever

entered into our minds. Empires and civilisations, then, have fallen,

despite the strength and magnitude of the superstructure, because the

foundations decayed: and the bigger and heavier the superstructure the

less could it survive their failure. If the Fiji islanders degenerate,

there is little consequence: if the breed of Romans degenerate, all

their vast mass of acquired progress and power crushes them into

dramatic ruin. This image, I believe, truly expresses the relation

between the two wholly distinct kinds of progress, which we have yet

to learn to distinguish. Acquired progress will not compensate for

racial or inherent decadence. If the race is going down, it will not

compensate to add another colony to your Empire: on the contrary,

the bigger the Empire the stronger must be the race: the bigger the

superstructure the stronger the foundations. Acquired progress is real

progress, but it is always dependent for its maintenance upon racial or

inherent progress--or, at least, upon racial maintenance.

=Nothing fails like success.=--I believe, then, that civilisations

and Empires have succumbed because they represented only acquired

or traditional or educational progress and this availed not at all

when the races that built them up began to degenerate. Now the only

explanation of racial degeneration yet offered by the historians--apart

from the foolish one of racial senility--is the Lamarckian one of

the transmission of habits of luxury and idleness from parent to

child: an explanation which the modern study of heredity empowers us

to repudiate. What theory of this alleged degeneration is there to

offer in its place: and especially what theory which explains racial

degeneration amongst not the conquered but the conquerors: amongst the

successful, the Imperial, the cultured, the leisured, the well-catered

for in all respects, bodily and mental? Why is it that not enslaved but

Imperial peoples degenerate? Why is it that nothing fails like success?

What I believe to be the true and sufficient answer has been given

by no historian: but the key to it is only fifty years old. The

reason is that no race or species, vegetable or animal or human,

can maintain--much less raise--its organic level unless its best be

selected for parenthood. It is true of a race as of an individual that

it must work for its living--so to speak--if it is not to degenerate.

When the terms are too easy, down you go. The tape-worm has given

up even digesting for its living, and we know its degeneracy--all

hooks and mouth. Society works and hands over its predigested food

to such social parasites amongst ourselves. You must struggle or

you will degenerate--even if only with rhyme or counterpoint, not

necessarily for bread. “Effort is the law,” as Ruskin said: whether for

a livelihood or for enjoyment. Living things are the product of the

struggle for existence: we are thus evolved strugglers by constitution:

and directly we cease to struggle we forfeit the possibilities of our

birthright. “Thou, O God,” said Leonardo, “hast given all good things

to man at the price of labour.”

The case is the same with races. Directly the conditions become too

easy, selection ceases, and it is as successful to be incompetent or

lazy or vicious as to be worthy. The hard conditions that kept weeding

out the unworthy are now relaxed and the fine race they made goes back

again. Finally there occurs the phenomenon of _reversed selection_,

when it is fitter to be bad than good, cowardly than brave--as when

religious persecution murders all who are true to themselves and spares

hypocrites and apostates: or when healthy children are killed in

factories whilst feeble-minded children or deaf-mutes are carefully

tended until maturity and then sent into the world to reproduce their

maladies. Under reversed selection such results are obtained as a

breeder of race-horses or plants would obtain if he went to work on

similar lines: the race degenerates rapidly: and if it be an Imperial

race its Empire comes crashing down about its ears. All Empires and

civilisations hitherto have involved the partial or complete arrest

or reversal of the process of natural selection: and the racial

degeneration which necessarily ensued has been the cause of their

invariable doom.

When a primitive race is making its way by force, selection is

stringent. The weak, cowardly, diseased, stupid are expunged from

generation to generation. As civilisation advances, a higher ethical

level is reached: all true civilisation tending to abrogate and

ameliorate the struggle for existence. The diseased and weakly and

feeble-minded are no longer left to pay the penalty sternly exacted

by Nature for unfitness: they are allowed to survive and multiply. A

successful race can apparently afford to permit this, as a race that is

fighting for its existence cannot. But in reality no race can afford

this absolutely fatal process.

There is thus a real risk involved in the accumulation of acquired,

traditional or educational progress. Not only does it tend to

abrogate or even to reverse selection, but it serves to disguise

the consequences of this abrogation. If a subhuman race degenerates

the fact is evident: but such a nation as our own may quite well

degenerate whilst the accumulation of acquired progress, transmitted

by education, almost completely cloaks the fact _for a time_. We may

be congratulating ourselves upon our progress, upon our knowledge, our

science and art, our institutions, legal and charitable, whilst all

the time the breed is undergoing retrogression.

We see now, I think, the explanation of the truth expressed by

Gibbon,--“all that is human must retrograde if it do not advance.” Why

should this be so? Why should it not be possible merely to maintain

a position gained? The answer is that the civilisation which merely

maintains its position is one in which selection has ceased: if

selection had not ceased, the position would be more than maintained,

there would be advance. But without selection the breed will certainly

degenerate, the lower individuals multiplying more rapidly than higher

ones, in accordance with Spencer's law that the higher the type of the

individual the less rapidly does he multiply; and thus the race which

is not advancing is retrograding, as Gibbon declared.

Natural selection is the sole factor of efficient and permanent

progress, but the traditional or acquired progress which we call

civilisation tends to thwart or abrogate or even invert this process. I

thus believe that the conditions necessary for the _secure_ ascent of

any race, an ascent secured in its very blood, made stable in its very

bone, have not yet been achieved in history: _and I advance this as the

reason why history records no enduring Empire_.

=Some historical instances.=--In the face of certain facts of

contemporary history I do not for a moment assert that there are

no other causes of Imperial failure than the arrest or reversal of

selection. But I do assert that if this is not the cause, then, in

the absence of the transmission of acquired characters, the race has

not degenerated, and is capable of reasserting itself. Only by the

arrest or reversal of selection can a race degenerate--apart from the

racial poisons. If, then, a civilisation or Empire has fallen through

causes altogether non-biological--through carelessness, or neglect

of motherhood or alteration of ideals--the changes in character so

produced are not transmitted to the children, and the race is not

degenerate but merely deteriorated in each generation.

For instance, we have been brought up to believe that there is no

possible future for Spain; it is a dying nation, a senile individual,

a people of degenerates; it has had its day, which can never return.

The historian explains this by the false analogy between a race and

an individual, and by the false Lamarckian theory of heredity. To

these the biologist retorts with comments upon their falsity, and with

the conviction that since Spain, even allowing for the anti-eugenic

labours of the Inquisition, has not been subjected to the only

process which can ensure real degeneration--viz., the consistent and

stringent selection of the worst--she is yet capable of regeneration.

Regeneration is not really the word, because there has been little real

degeneration, but only the successive deterioration of successive and

undegenerate generations.

If we took an animal species that _has_ degenerated, such as the

intestinal parasites, and endeavoured to regenerate them, we

should begin to realise the magnitude of our task. That is not

the task for Spain, the biologist asserts. Merely the environment

must be altered,--not the mountain ranges and the rivers, Buckle

notwithstanding, but the really potent factors in the environment, the

spiritual and psychical and social factors--and the deterioration of

each new generation, inherently undegenerate, will cease. I am using

these opposed terms with great care and of set purpose.

And the biologist is right. The facts concerning which so many

historians have shaken their heads, and upon which they have based

so many moralisings and theories of history, the facts which they

have cited in support of their false analogies and misconceptions of

heredity--due, of course, to the errors of former biology--turn out to

be not facts at all, or, at any rate, only facts of the moment. The

“dying nation,” as Lord Salisbury called it, has occasion to alter

its psychical environment. It introduces the practice of education;

it begins to shake off the yoke of ecclesiasticism; and what are the

consequences?

The new generation is found to be potentially little worse and little

better than its predecessors of the sixteenth century. There has been

no national or racial degeneration. The environment is modified for

the better, _i.e._, so as to choose the better, and Spain, as they say

in misleading phrase, “takes on a new lease of life.” The historian of

the present day, knowing as a historian what qualities of blood have

been in the Spanish people, and basing his theories upon sound biology,

must confidently assert that that blood, incapable, as he knows, of

degeneration by any Lamarckian process, may still retain its ancient

quality and will yet make history.

But the historian might well write a volume upon the same thesis

as applied to China and Japan. We know historically what were the

immediate effects in one generation of a total change of environment in

Japan. That change has not yet occurred in China, but must inevitably

occur. Consider for a moment how the historian, made far-sighted

and clear-sighted by biology, must contemplate the history of this

astounding people. The popular belief used to be that China illustrated

the so-called law of nations. It was the decadent, though monstrous,

relic of an ancient civilisation; it had had its day. Inevitable

degeneration, which must befall all peoples, had come upon it. Behold

it in the paralysis which precedes death!

But in the light of the facts of Japan, the man in the street and the

historian alike have in this case found modern biology superfluous in

enabling them to arrive at sound conclusions. They now believe what

the Darwinian has been compelled to believe for half a century, and

more strongly than ever during the latter part of that period, when the

doctrine of the transmission of modifications was finally discredited.

A clever writer invents the phrase “the yellow peril,” and people

discard their old theories. The metaphor must be changed. This is not

paralysis, but merely slumber. Doubtless, it is an unnatural slumber;

doubtless, it is not the slumber which brings renewed strength. It

is suspense or stupor, not recuperation; but assuredly it is not

paralysis. Who now would dare to say that China has had its day, even

if he still clings to the old fictions about Spain?

=Motherhood and history.=--Here, also, reference must again be made

to another factor of history to which, as I think, the biologist must

attach enormous importance, but which no historian yet has adequately

reckoned with. Our prime assumption from beginning to end is that

“there is no wealth but life,” or, if one may venture to improve upon

Ruskin, _there is no wealth but mind_; and in the attempt to suggest

interpretations of history based upon this truth, so little recked of

by the historian, we have considered the life in question from the

point of view of its determination by heredity, and its varying value

according to the inherent and transmissible characters selected in each

generation. But a word must be said as to the other factor which, with

heredity, determines the character of the individual--and that factor

is the environment. I wish merely to note the most important aspect

of the environment of human beings, and to observe that historians

hitherto have wholly ignored it; yet its influence is incalculable. I

refer to motherhood.

One might have the most perfect system of selection of the finest

and highest individuals for parenthood; but the babies whose

potentialities--heredity gives no more--are so splendid, are always,

will be always, dependent upon motherhood. What was the state of

motherhood during the decline and fall of the Roman Empire? This factor

counts in history; and always will count so long as, three times in

every century, the only wealth of nations is reduced to dust, and is

raised again from helpless infancy. As to Rome we know little, whatever

may be suspected: but we know that here in the heart of the greatest

Empire in history--and it is at the heart that Empires rot--thousands

of mothers go out every day to tend dead machines, whilst their own

flesh and blood, with whom lies the Imperial destiny, are tended anyhow

or not at all. It may yet be said by some enlightened historian of the

future that the living wealth of this people, in the twentieth century,

began to be eaten away by the cancer which we call “married women's

labour,” and that, as will be evident to that historian's readers, its

damnation was sure. To-day our historians and politicians think in

terms of regiments and tariffs and “Dreadnoughts”: the time will come

when they must think in terms of babies and motherhood. We must think

in such terms too if we wish Great Britain to be much longer great.

Meanwhile some of us see the perennial slaughter of babies in this

land, and the deterioration of many for every one killed outright, the

waste of mothers' travail and tears: and we recall Ruskin's words:--

“Nevertheless, it is open, I repeat, to serious question, which

I leave to the reader's pondering, whether, among national

manufactures, that of Souls of a good quality may not at last turn

out a quite leadingly lucrative one? Nay, in some far-away and yet

undreamt-of hour, I can even imagine that England may cast all

thoughts of possessive wealth back to the barbaric nations among whom

they first arose; and that, while the sands of the Indus and adamant

of Golconda may yet stiffen the housings of the charger, and flash

from the turban of the slave, she, as a Christian mother, may at last

attain to the virtues and the treasures of a Heathen one, and be able

to lead forth her Sons, saying:--

“These are MY Jewels.”

Had all Roman mothers been Cornelias, would Rome have fallen?[80]

Consider the imitation mothers--no longer mammalia--to be found in

certain classes to-day--mothers who should be ashamed to look any

tabby-cat in the face; consider the ignorant and downtrodden mothers

amongst our lower classes; and ask whether these things are not making

history.

=The survival of the Jews.=--The principles the discussion of which has

here been attempted had all been set down before it suddenly seemed

clear that they found their warrant and application in the unexampled

riddle of the persistence and success, throughout more than two

thousand years and a thousand vicissitudes, of the Jewish people. It is

true that we have here no exception to the apparent law that Empires

are mortal, for within this period there never was a Jewish Empire: the

Jews were never subject to the risk involved for racial or inherent

progress by the possession of great acquired powers. But just as the

fall of Empires has often _not_ been the fall of races--various races

having at various times carried on the same Imperial tradition--so

the persistence of the Jews, as contrasted with the impermanence of

Empires, _has_ been the persistence of a race. I believe that the

principles already laid down offer us an adequate explanation of this

unique case: and further, that if we had begun with the case of the

Jews, endeavouring, by the investigation of their case, to explain the

contrasted case of other races and of all Empires hitherto, we should

have arrived at the same principles.

It has been asserted that that race or people decays in which selection

ceases or is reversed; that in the absence of selection of the

worthy for parenthood, no species, vegetable, animal or human, can

prosper--much less progress. Now the Jews, the one human race of which

we know assuredly that it has persisted unimpaired, have been the most

continuously and stringently selected of any race, I suppose, that can

be named. Every measure of persecution and repression practised against

them by the people amongst whom they have lived, has directly tended

towards the very end which those people least desired to compass.

Other peoples found themselves prosperous through the efforts of their

fathers; the struggle for existence abated; it was, so to say, as fit

to be unfit as to be fit--with the inevitable result. But this has

never been the case of the Jews. They have always had to struggle for

life intensely: and their unexampled struggle has been a great source

of their unexampled strength. The Jew who was a weakling or a fool

had no chance at all; the weaklings and the fools being weeded out,

intensity and strength of mind became the common heritage of this

amazing people.

Secondly, there was everything to favour motherhood. Here religious

precept and ethical tradition joined with stem necessity to the same

end--the end which always meant a new and strong beginning for the next

generation. Even to-day all observers are agreed that infant mortality

is at a minimum amongst the Jews; their children are superior in height

and weight and chest measurement to Gentile children brought up amidst

poverty far less intense in our own great cities; _in a better material

environment, but a far inferior maternal environment_. The Jewish

mother is the mother of children innately superior, on the average,

since they are the fruit of such long ages of stringent parental

selection, and she makes more of them because she fails to nurse them

only in the rarest cases, when she has no choice, and because in

every detail her maternal care is incomparably superior to that of

her Gentile sister. Given a high standard of motherhood in a highly

selected race, what other result than that we daily witness and envy

can we expect?

Thirdly, the Jews do not abuse alcohol, and thus avoid one of the few

causes of true racial degeneration apart from selection of the worst

for parenthood.

* * * * *

If these principles are valid, it is evident that our redemption from

the fate of all our predecessors is to be found only in Eugenics--the

selection of the best for parenthood. In his address to the

Sociological Society in 1904, in which he defined this term, Mr. Galton

named as one of the duties before the Society, “historical enquiry

into the rates with which the various classes of society (classified

according to civic usefulness) have contributed to the population at

various times, in ancient and modern nations.” “There is strong reason

for believing,” he continued, “that national rise and decline is

closely connected with this influence.”[81]

=What is a good environment?=--Using the word environment in its widest

sense, including, for instance, public opinion--and its use in any

sense less wide is always erroneous and misleading--we may say that it

is our business to provide the environment which selects the best for

parenthood and discourages the parenthood of the worst--say the deaf

and dumb, the feeble-minded, the insane, the epileptic, the inebriate,

those afflicted with hereditary disease of other kinds, and so forth.

Our principles should enable us, also, I think, to define what we

mean by a good environment. Comprehensive and indiscriminate charity

means a good environment for many in a sense, but it may also mean the

selection of the worst for parenthood--_e.g._, the feeble-minded. This

“good” environment _then_ means the degeneration of the race. We must

therefore _appraise environment in terms of its selective action_.

A good environment is that which selects the good, and the best

environment is that which selects the best; discovers them, makes the

utmost of them, and confers upon them the supreme privilege and duty of

parenthood. That and that alone is the best environment, and all other

moral judgments upon environment are fallacious and will be disastrous.

=The necessary conclusion.=--National Eugenics teaches that the first

duty of all governments and patriots and good citizens is, to quote

Ruskin again, “the production and recognition of human worth, the

detection and extinction of human unworthiness.” The idea is not

new-fangled, but was clearly laid down by Plato, and by Theognis two

centuries before him.

Eugenics is a project of the most elevated and provident morality,

aiming at no object less sublime than the ennoblement of mankind; and

if one may suggest its motto it would be, _The products of progress

are not mechanisms but men_. It is based upon the principle of the

selection or choice of the superior for parenthood, which has been

the essential factor of all progress in the world of life, but which

all civilisations have tended in some degree to abrogate--or even to

reverse, as when the feeble-minded child is cared for till maturity and

sent out into the world to produce its like, whilst healthy children

are daily destroyed by ignorance and neglect.

“Through Nature only can we ascend”--and the merit of the eugenic

proposal is that it is built upon “the solid ground of nature.”

To the economist, it declares that _the culture of the racial life is

the vital industry of any people_.

It is to work through marriage, an institution more ancient than

mankind, and supremely valuable in its services to childhood--with

which lies all human destiny.

Eugenics appeals to the individual, asking for a little imagination,

which will make us realise that the future will one day be the present

and that to serve it is to serve no fiction or phantom, but a reality

as real as the present generation.

It teaches the responsibility of the noblest and most sacred of all

professions, which is parenthood, and it makes a sober and dignified

claim to be regarded as a constituent of the religion of the future.

It goes to the root of the matter; where the well-meaning, but

short-sighted, pin their faith on the hospitals, the eugenist seeks

to brand the transmission of hereditary disease as a crime, and thus

literally to extirpate it altogether.

That its methods are practicable is proved by the fact that it is

practised--as by the northern society for the “_permanent_ care of the

feeble-minded,” which serves the present and the future simultaneously

and reconciles the law of love with the earlier law of nature--which

asserts that parenthood must be denied to the unworthy--without blame

or malice, but without exception. It suggests the principles of a New

Imperialism, and offers, I submit, our sole chance of escape from the

fate which has overtaken all previous civilisations. It honours men and

women by declaring that human parenthood is crowned with responsibility

to the unborn, and to all time coming, and that man, the animal in

body, is also a self-conscious being, “looking before and after,” who

is human because he is responsible, and to whom the laws of nature have

been revealed, not to satisfy an intellectual curiosity, but for the

highest end conceivable--the elevation of his race.

Let me quote a fine passage from Wordsworth's “Prelude”:--

“With settling judgments now of what would last

And what would disappear; prepared to find

Presumption, folly, madness, in the men

Who thrust themselves upon the passive world

As Rulers of the world; to see in these,

Even when the public welfare is their aim,

Plans without thought, or built on theories

Vague and unsound; and having brought the books

Of modern statists to their proper test,

Life, human life, with all its sacred claims

Of sex and age, and heaven-descended rights,

Mortal, or those beyond the reach of death;

And having thus discerned how dire a thing

Is worshipped in that idol proudly named

‘The Wealth of Nations’; where alone that wealth

Is lodged, and how increased; and having gained

A more judicious knowledge of the worth

And dignity of individual man,

No composition of the brain, but man

Of whom we read, the man whom we behold

With our own eyes--I could not but enquire--

Not with less interest than heretofore,

But greater, though in spirit more subdued--

Why is this glorious creature to be found

One only in ten thousand? What one is,

Why may not millions be? What bars are thrown

By Nature in the way of such a hope?”

Consider how far we have come, the base degrees by which we did ascend,

and answer with Shakespeare, “There are many events in the womb of

time which will be delivered.”

CHAPTER XVI

NATIONAL EUGENICS: MR. BALFOUR ON DECADENCE

(1) “If the various checks specified in the two last paragraphs,

and perhaps others as yet unknown, do not prevent the reckless, the

vicious, and otherwise inferior members of society from increasing

at a quicker rate than the better class of men, the nation will

retrograde, as has too often occurred in the history of the world.

We must remember that progress is no invariable rule. It is very

difficult to say why one civilised nation rises, becomes more

powerful, and spreads more widely, than another; or why the same

nation progresses more quickly at one time than at another. We can

only say that it depends on an increase in the actual number of the

population, on the number of the men endowed with high intellectual

and moral faculties, as well as on their standard of excellence.

Corporeal structure appears to have little influence, except so far

as vigour of body leads to vigour of mind.”--Darwin, _The Descent of

Man_, 1871.

(2) Referring to “the rates with which the various classes of

society (classified according to civic usefulness) have contributed

to the population at various times, in ancient and modern nations,”

Mr. Francis Galton said “there is strong reason for believing

that national rise and decline is closely connected with this

influence.”--Galton, _Sociological Papers_, 1904, p. 47.

(3) “The inexplicable decline and fall of nations following from no

apparent external cause receives instant light from the relative

fertility of the fitter and unfitter elements combined with what we

now know of the laws of inheritance.”[82]--Pearson, 1904.

(4) To the question, What were the causes of the fall of

Rome? Mr. Balfour replies, “I feel disposed to answer,

Decadence.”[83]--Balfour, 1908.

The lecture of which the previous chapter is the written form was

prepared and delivered before I had an opportunity of seeing Mr. A. J.

Balfour's lecture on “Decadence” delivered a few days before. That has

since been printed, and is well worthy of our attention. In Mr. Balfour

we have a representative political thinker, an experimental statesman

and, furthermore, a former President of the British Association, deeply

interested in, and favourably disposed towards, scientific enquiry and

the scientific method. Further, this lecture has been widely noticed,

though all the criticisms I have seen seem to me to miss the point.

No apology, then, is necessary for a special discussion of this most

suggestive lecture in direct relation with the foregoing theory of its

subject.

Political and national decadence is Mr. Balfour's theme, and we note

first that here is a contemporary thinker, not unread in recent

biology, including the work of Weismann, who is prepared to make use

of the idea that societies are inherently mortal, as individuals are.

One wonders when we shall be rid of this pernicious instance of the

argument from analogy, which is already much more than two thousand

years old.

Next it may be noticed that, though Mr. Balfour has deliberately

discussed the idea of natural selection, he has been led wholly

astray from its true relation to the question under discussion by

reason of falling into the common error which Sir E. Ray Lankester

has recently exposed, as Huxley did several decades ago. Mr. Balfour

conceives natural selection to issue from the struggle for existence

between species or societies. It has already been pointed out that the

all-important natural selection is not between species or societies

but within them. The struggle for existence is fought out mainly

between the immature individuals of any species or society. Its issue

determines the survivors for parenthood and the future. Mr. Balfour

must have read Professor Ray Lankester's recent Romanes Lecture in

which all this is so clearly shown, but he has unfortunately retained

the popular conception of natural selection as acting between species

or societies, and has in consequence failed, I will not say to find,

but even to discuss in any adequate measure, the theory of racial

and national decadence, defined in the preceding chapter. He merely

discusses “competition between groups of communities,” and rightly

finds it inadequate to account for the great tragedies of history.

There follows a passage which may be heartily assented to, on the very

grounds on which the entire lecture may be welcomed, namely, that

it suggests the inadequacy of the common explanations of national

decadence advanced by historians. Says Mr. Balfour:--

“It is in vain that historians enumerate the public calamities which

preceded, and no doubt contributed to, the final catastrophe. Civil

dissensions, military disasters, pestilences, famines, tyrants,

tax-gatherers, growing burdens, and waning wealth--the gloomy

catalogue is unrolled before our eyes, yet somehow it does not in all

cases wholly satisfy us: we feel that some of these diseases are of a

kind which a vigorous body politic should easily be able to survive,

that others are secondary symptoms of some obscurer malady, and that

in neither case do they supply us with the full explanation of which

we are in search.”

One must heartily thank the author for the abundant demonstration

which follows, well warranting our feeling that these explanations do

not suffice--nor yet, in the case of Rome, diminution of population,

nor the “brutalities of the gladiatorial shows,” nor “the gratuitous

distribution of bread to the urban mobs,” nor yet slavery, lately

declared, by Mr. W. R. Paterson, in his _Nemesis of Nations_, to be

_the_ cause of the fall of empires. As Mr. Balfour says, “Who can

believe that this immemorial custom could, in its decline, destroy

the civilisation which, in its vigour, it had helped to create?” It

would have been more important, perhaps, to consider, as Mr. Balfour

does not, the latest view, advanced by Professor Ronald Ross, that the

incursion of malaria may have had something to do with the fall of Rome.

=Mr. Balfour's theory--decadence the cause of decadence.=--Mr. Balfour

then falls back upon “decadence "as the explanation, and to the

critic of this elegant hypothesis that decadence is due to decadence,

replies that it is something to recognise the possibility of "subtle

changes in the social tissues of old communities.” One regrets all

the more that he should not have considered anti-eugenic practices

as possibly accounting for these subtle changes. One must, however,

quote the excellent passage in which Mr. Balfour supports his use of

the word decadence, though one utterly disagrees with the suggestion

that the term “old age” might be its equivalent. He says: “The facile

generalisations with which we so often season the study of dry historic

fact; the habits of political discussion which induce us to catalogue

for purposes of debate the outward signs that distinguish (as we are

prone to think) the standing from the falling state, hide the obscurer,

but more potent, forces which silently prepare the fate of empires.”

We may note with interest (and surely with surprise when we consider

Japan and Spain and the China of to-morrow), Mr. Balfour's rejection

of the doctrine that “arrested progress, and even decadence, may be

but the prelude to a new period of vigorous growth. So that even those

races or nations which seem frozen into eternal immobility may base

upon experience their hopes of an awakening spring.” It is, I fancy,

Mr. Balfour's fondness for the Platonic idea of senility in the race

as in the individual, that leads him to question what can surely

be no longer denied. Thus a little later we find him saying, “_If

civilisations wear out, and races become effete_, why should we expect

to progress indefinitely, why for us alone is the doom of man to be

reversed?”

Nowhere in this lecture is there any recognition of what, I confess,

seems to me to be an obvious and necessary truth, the distinction

between the two kinds of progress--racial progress due to the choice

of the best for parenthood, and acquired or traditional progress. It

may be suggested that no one can usefully discuss decadence or progress

until he has seen and perceived this absolutely cardinal distinction,

suggested in my Royal Institution lectures in February, 1907, as one

of the great lessons taught by the study of biology to the student of

progress.

Mr. Balfour does indeed avoid all those false solutions which depend

upon a Lamarckian belief in the transmission of acquired characters.

This, however, instead of leading him to insist upon the Darwinian

contribution to the study of decadence--the idea of _selection_--causes

him to regard the racial question as unimportant. He notes one or

two of the fashions in which the quality of a race may be modified,

thus influencing national character, and then dismisses this question

(wherein, as I cannot doubt, everything material lies) with the remark,

“But such changes are not likely, I suppose, to be considerable,

except perhaps those due to the mixture of races--and that only in new

countries.”--Reaching page 45, the reader finds himself confident that

now at length the writer has put his finger on the crux of the problem.

Yet that is how he dismisses it; adding, indeed, to make it quite

clear, the following words: “The flexible element in any society, that

which is susceptible of progress or decadence, must therefore be looked

for rather in the physical and psychical conditions affecting the life

of its component units, than in their inherited constitution.”

Not a word as to cessation of selection! This omission, which is,

indeed, the omission of _the_ fact of decadence, mainly depends, one

fancies, upon that erroneous conception of natural selection as acting

between species and societies rather than within them, which for so

many decades the biologist has been at pains to correct. One would

indeed have thought that, for a scholar and student like Mr. Balfour,

Wordsworth's great sonnet would have sufficed to set up a train of

thought which, fusing with ordinary biological principles, would have

led him to what I believe to be the truth. Let us for a moment turn to

its consideration:--

“When I have borne in memory what has tamed

Great Nations, how ennobling thoughts depart

When men change swords for ledgers....”

Should not this be enough to suggest to us the real meaning of the

consequence which has followed when men changed swords for ledgers,

and which even those who hate war as a vile blasphemy against life

must recognise? It is that, as we have seen, when a nation is making

its way there is selection of the fittest by the stern arbitrament of

war, in which the battle is to the individually strong and fleet and

brave and quick-witted. Later, “when men change swords for ledgers,”

selection ceases; and that is why nothing fails like success. Yet later

still, as France should know, selection by war must take the form of

reversed selection, the flower of a nation's youth being immolated on

the battle-field, whilst its future is determined by the weak and small

and diseased, whom the recruiting sergeant rejects. “You are not good

enough to be a soldier,” he says; “stay at home and be a father.” That

was what Napoleon did for France.

But to return--for the relations of war to eugenics would really demand

a volume--it may be noted that, though rejecting the Lamarckian

theory--the theory on which nothing should succeed like success--Mr.

Balfour nowhere emphasises the amazing paradox of history that nothing

fails like success. If we consider this fact with the idea of natural

selection in our minds (not between societies but within them), we

cannot fail to perceive that success involves failure because it

involves failure of selection, and therefore indiscriminate survival;

or indeed, survival of the worst.

=Politics and domestics.=--It is, perhaps, a noteworthy comment upon

what may be called the political state of mind, that even when the idea

of natural selection has entered it, the bias is towards associating it

with international and not with intra-national or domestic politics.

The time will come, however, when the politician--or shall we say

the statesman?--realises that it is the domestic policy, it is the

internal struggle for survival within a society, that conditions

and fore-ordains all international politics. The history of nations

is determined not on the battlefield but in the nursery, and the

battalions which give lasting victory are battalions of babies. _The

politics of the future will be domestics._

Having rejected so many solutions of his problem, and having ignored

the solution which is advanced in this volume, Mr. Balfour is reduced

to such desperate resorts as phrases like this: “The point at which

the energy of advance is exhausted”--a mere meaningless phrase; and

even such an explanation as that through “mere weariness of spirit the

community resigns itself to ... stagnation.” One is inclined to throw

up one's hands and ask--Do you, then, who deny the Lamarckian theory,

suppose that the fresh children come into the world with this “mere

weariness of spirit”? Has this been observed in children? Is there

anything conceivable that has been less observed in children, in all

times and all places? And if that be so, what kind of explanation of

decadence is this?

=Science and industry.=--Lastly, in a series of fine passages, Mr.

Balfour offers us some hope in the help of science. Politics, says our

ex-Premier, too often means “the barren exchange of one set of tyrants

or jobbers, for another”: a Daniel come to judgment. We owe the modern

spirit and modern progress, he tells us, neither to politicians nor to

political institutions, nor to theologians nor to philosophers, but

to science, which, he well says, “is the great instrument of social

change, all the greater because its object is not change but knowledge;

and its silent appropriation of this dominant function, amid the

din of political and religious strife, is the most vital of all the

revolutions which have marked the development of modern civilisation.”

And our cause of hope is “a social force, new in magnitude if not in

kind ... the modern alliance between pure science and industry.” To

this I answer a thousand times yes, but I must define the kind of

industry. It is the culture of the racial life which is the vital

industry of any nation, and which Mr. Balfour has not even distantly

alluded to. I agree that our hope for the future is to be found in

science: that, as has been said already, perchance our acquired or

traditional progress in knowledge has now reached the point at which we

have sufficient to reveal to us the necessity of racial progress and

the means by which that may be effected.

“Science and industry,”--yes, indeed! But the industry is to be the

making not of machines but men. _The products of progress are not

mechanisms but men_, and one may now ask, What is the industry whose

products can be named in the same breath with the men and women who

shall yet be produced by the supreme industry of race-culture?

CHAPTER XVII

THE PROMISE OF RACE-CULTURE

“The best is yet to be.”

In its form of what we have called _negative_ eugenics, the practice

of our principle would assuredly reduce to an incalculable extent the

amount of human defect, mental and physical, which each generation

now exhibits. This alone, as has been said, would be far more than

sufficient to justify us. A world without hereditary disease of mind

and body, and its grave social consequences, would alone warrant the

hint of Ruskin that posterity may some day look back upon us with

“incredulous disdain.” Yet, assuming that this could be accomplished,

as it will be accomplished, what more is to be hoped for? Must

race-culture cease merely when it has raised the average of the

community by reducing to a minimum the proportion of those who are

thus grossly defective in mind or body? Such disease apart, are we to

be content, must we be content, with the present level of mediocrity

in respect of intelligence and temper and moral sentiment? Can we

anticipate a London in which the present ratio of musical comedy

to great opera will be reversed, in which the works of Mr. George

Meredith will sell in hundreds of thousands, whilst some of our popular

novelists will have to find other means of earning a living? Can we

make for a critical democracy which no political party can fool, and

which will choose its best to govern it? Yet more, can we undertake,

now or hereafter, to provide every generation with its own Shakespeare

and Beethoven and Tintoretto and Newton? What, in a word, is the

promise of _positive_ eugenics? It is to this aspect of the question

that Mr. Galton has mainly directed himself. Indeed he was led to

formulate the principles and ideals of the new science by his study of

hereditary genius some four decades ago. Let us now attempt to answer

some of these questions.

=The production of genius.=--And first as to the production of genius.

It is this, perhaps, that has been the main butt of the jesters who

pass for philosophers with some of us to-day. It may be said at once

that neither Mr. Galton nor any other responsible person has ever

asserted that we can produce genius at will. The difficulties in the

way of such a project--at present--are almost innumerable. One or two

may be cited.

In the first place, there is the cardinal--but by no means

universal--difficulty that the genius is too commonly so occupied with

the development and expansion of his own individuality that he has

little time or energy for the purposes of the race. This, of course, is

an example of Spencer's great generalisation as to the antagonism or

inverse ratio between individuation and genesis.

Again, there is the generalisation of heredity formulated by Mr.

Galton, and named by him the _law of regression towards mediocrity_.

It asserts that the children of those who are above or below the mean

of a race, tend to return towards that mean. The children of the born

criminal will be probably somewhat less criminal in tendency than he,

though more criminal than the average citizen. The children of the

man of genius, if he has any, will probably be nearer mediocrity than

he, though on the average possessing greater talent than the average

citizen. It is thus not in the nature of sheer genius to reproduce

on its own level. It is only the critics who are wholly ignorant of

the elementary facts of heredity that attribute to the eugenist an

expectation of which no one knows the absurdity so well as he does.

On the other hand, it is impossible to question that the hereditary

transmission of genius or great talent does occur. One may cite at

random such cases as that of the Bach family, Thomas and Matthew

Arnold, James and John Stuart Mill: and the reader who is inclined

to believe that there is no law or likelihood in this matter, must

certainly make himself acquainted with Mr. Galton's _Hereditary

Genius_, and with such a paper as that which he printed in

_Sociological Papers_, 1904, furnishing an “index to achievements of

near kinsfolk of some of the Fellows of the Royal Society.” There is,

of course, the obvious fallacy involved in the possibility that not

heredity but environment was really responsible for many of these

cases. It must have been a great thing to have such a father as James

Mill. But it would be equally idle to imagine that the evidence can

be dismissed with this criticism. A Matthew Arnold, a John Stuart

Mill, could not be manufactured out of any chance material by an ideal

education continued for a thousand years.

=The transmission of genius.=--One single instance of the transmission

of genius or great talent in a family may be cited. We shall take the

family which produced Charles Darwin, the discoverer of the fundamental

principle of eugenics, and his first cousin, Francis Galton. Darwin's

grandfather was Erasmus Darwin, physician, poet and philosopher, and

independent expounder of the doctrine of organic evolution. Darwin's

father was a distinguished physician, described by his son as “the

wisest man I ever knew.” Darwin's maternal grandfather was Josiah

Wedgwood, the famous founder of the pottery works. Amongst his first

cousins is Mr. Francis Galton. He has five living sons, each a man of

great distinction, including Mr. Francis Darwin and Sir George Darwin,

both of them original thinkers, honoured by the presidency of the

British Association. No one will put such a case as this down to pure

chance or to the influence of environment alone. This is evidently,

like many others, a greatly distinguished stock. The worth of such

families to a nation is wholly beyond any one's powers of estimation.

What if Erasmus Darwin had never married!

No student of human heredity can doubt that, however limited our

immediate hopes, facts such as those alluded to furnish promise of

great things for the future. But let us turn now from genius to what we

usually call talent.

=The production of talent.=--There can be no question that amongst

the promises of race-culture is the possibility of breeding such

things as talent and the mental energy upon which talent so largely

depends. In his _Inquiries into Human Faculty_, Mr. Galton shows the

remarkable extent to which energy or the capacity for labour underlies

intellectual achievement. He says, of energy--

“It is consistent with all the robust virtues, and makes a large

practice of them possible. It is the measure of fulness of life; the

more energy the more abundance of it; no energy at all is death;

idiots are feeble and listless. In the enquiries I made on the

antecedents of men of science no points came out more strongly than

that the leaders of scientific thought were generally gifted with

remarkable energy, and that they had inherited the gift of it from

their parents and grandparents. I have since found the same to be

the case in other careers.... It may be objected that if the race

were too healthy and energetic there would be insufficient call

for the exercise of the pitying and self-denying virtues, and the

character of men would grow harder in consequence. But it does not

seem reasonable to preserve sickly breeds for the sole purpose of

tending them, as the breed of foxes is preserved solely for sport

and its attendant advantages. There is little fear that misery will

ever cease from the land, or that the compassionate will fail to

find objects for their compassion; but at present the supply vastly

exceeds the demand: the land is over-stocked and over-burdened with

the listless and the incapable. In any scheme of eugenics, energy is

the most important quality to favour; it is, as we have seen, the

basis of living action, and it is eminently transmissible by descent.”

Need it be pointed out that any political system which ceases to favour

or actively disfavours energy, making it as profitable to be lazy as to

be active, is anti-eugenic, and must inevitably lead to disaster? That,

however, by the way. Our present point is that eugenics can reasonably

promise, when its principles are recognised, to multiply the human[84]

and diminish the vegetable type in the community. In so doing, it

will greatly further the production of talent, and therefore of that

traditional or acquired progress which men of talent and genius create.

Such a result will also further, though indirectly, the production

of genius itself. For, as Mr. Galton points out, “men of an order of

ability which is now very rare, would become more frequent, because the

level out of which they rose would itself have risen.”

This is by no means the only fashion in which an effective and

practicable race-culture would serve genius, and I shall not be blamed

for considering this matter further by any reader who realises, however

faintly, what the man of genius is worth to the world. If it were shown

possible to establish such social conditions that genius could never

flower in them, we should realise that their establishment would mean

the putting of an end to progress and the blasting of all the highest

hopes of the highest of all ages.

The immediate need of this age, as of all ages, is perhaps not so much

the birth of babies capable of developing into men and women of genius,

as the full exploitation of the possibilities of genius with which,

as I fancy, every generation on the average is about as well endowed

as any other. There is, of course, the popular doctrine that there are

no mute inglorious Miltons, that “genius will out,” and that therefore

if it does not appear, it is not there to appear. In expressing the

compelling power of genius in many cases, this doctrine is not without

truth. Yet history abounds in instances where genius has been destroyed

by environment--and we can only guess how many more instances there

are of which history has no record. To take the single case of musical

genius, it is a lamentable thought that there may be those now living

whose natural endowments, in a favourable environment, would have

enabled them to write symphonies fit to place beside Beethoven's, but

whom some environmental factors--conventional, economic, educational,

or what not--have silenced; or worse, have persuaded to write such

sterile nullities as need not here be instanced. There is surely no

waste in all this wasteful world so lamentable as this waste of genius.

If, then, anyone could devise for us a means by which the genius,

potentially existing at any time, were realised, he would have

performed in effect a service equivalent to that of which eugenics

repudiates the present possibility--the actual creation of genius. But

if we consider what the conditions are which cause the waste of genius,

we realise at once that they mainly inhere in the level of the human

environment of the priceless potentiality in question. As we noted

elsewhere, in an age like that of Pericles genius springs up on all

hands. It is encouraged and welcomed because the average level of the

human environment in which it finds itself is so high. But if eugenics

can raise the average level of intelligence, in so doing not merely

does it render more likely, as Mr. Galton points out, the production

of men of the highest ability, but it provides those conditions in

which men of genius, now swamped, can swim. We could not undertake

to produce a Shakespeare, but we might reasonably hope to produce a

generation which would not damage or destroy its Shakespeares. And even

if men of genius still found it necessary, as men of genius have found

it necessary, to “play to the gallery,” they would play, as Mr. Galton

says of the demagogue in a eugenic age, “to a more sensible gallery

than at present.”

Darwin somewhere points out that it is not the scientific, but the

unscientific man who denies future possibilities. Thus though an

advocate of eugenics may be applauded for his judgment if he declares

that the creation of genius will for ever be impossible, yet I should

not care to assert that the ultimate limitations of eugenics can thus

be defined. We have yet to hear the last of Mendelism.

=Eugenics and unemployment.=--Let us look now at another aspect of

the promise of race-culture. When the time comes that quality rather

than quantity is the ideal of those who concern themselves with the

population question, it is quite evident that not a few of the social

problems which we now find utterly insoluble will disappear. In

this brief outline, we can only allude to one or two points. Take,

for instance, the question of unemployment. We know that some by no

means small proportion of the unemployed were really destined to be

unemployable from the first, as for instance by reason of hereditary

disease. It were better for them and for us had they never been

born. Many more of the unemployed have been made unemployable by the

influence of over-crowding, to which they were subjected in their

years of development. Is there, can there be, any real and permanent

remedy for over-crowding, but the erection of parenthood into an act of

personal and provident responsibility?

=Eugenics and woman.=--Take, again, the woman question. No one will

deny that in many of its gravest forms, especially in its economic

form, and the question of the employment of women, wisely or horribly,

this depends (to a degree which few, I think, realise) upon the

fact that there are now, for instance, 1,300,000 women in excess in

this country. Is it then proposed, the reader will say, by means of

race-culture to exterminate the superfluous woman? Indeed, no. But is

the reader aware that Nature is not responsible for the existence of

the superfluous woman? There are more boys than girls born in the ratio

of about 103 or 104 to 100: and Nature means them all to live, boys and

girls alike. If they did so live, we should have merely the problem of

the superfluous man, which would not be an economic problem at all.

But we destroy hosts of all the children that are born, and since male

organisms are in general less resistant than female organisms, we

destroy a disproportionate number of boys, so that the natural balance

of the sexes is inverted. Unlike ancient societies, we largely practise

_male_ infanticide. Can the reader believe that there is any permanent

and final means of arresting this wastage of child-life, with its

singular and far-reaching consequences,--other than the elevation of

parenthood, on the principles which race-culture enjoins, even wholly

apart from the question of the selection of parents? We shall not

succeed in keeping all the children alive (with a trivial number of

exceptions), thereby abolishing the superfluous woman by keeping alive

the boy who should have grown up to be her partner, until we greatly

reduce the birth-rate; as it must and will be reduced when the ideal of

race-culture is realised, and no child comes into the world that is not

already loved and desired in anticipation.

=Eugenics and cruelty to children.=--This ideal, also, offers us in its

realisation the only complete remedy for the present ghastly cruelty

under which so many children suffer even in Great Britain, even in the

twentieth century. Is the reader aware that the National Society for

the Prevention of Cruelty to Children enquired into the ill-treatment

or cruel neglect of 115,000 children in the year beginning April 1st,

1906? It has been reasonably and carefully estimated that “over half a

million children are involved in the total of the wastage of child-life

and the torture and neglect of child-life in a single year.” Surely

Mr. G. R. Sims, to whom I would offer a hearty tribute for his recent

services to childhood, is justified in saying, “Against the guilt of

race-suicide our men of science are everywhere preaching their sermons

to-day. It is against the guilt of race-murder that the cry of the

children should ring through the land.” As regards race suicide and the

men of science, I am not so sure as to the assertion. But the truth of

the second sentence quoted is as indisputable as it is horrible.

Now no legislation conceivable will wholly cure this evil nor avert its

consequences. At bottom it depends upon human nature, and you can cure

it only by curing the defect of human nature. This, in general, is of

course beyond the immediate powers of man, but evidently we should gain

the same end if only we could confine the advent of children to those

parents who desired them--that is to say, those in whom human nature

displayed the first, if not indeed almost the only, requisite for

the happiness of childhood. To this most beneficent and wholly moral

end we shall come, notwithstanding the blind and pitiable guidance

of most of our accredited moral teachers to-day. By no other means

than the realisation of the ideal defined, that every new baby shall

be loved and desired in anticipation--an ideal which is perfectly

practicable--can the black stain of child murder and child torture and

child neglect be removed from our civilisation.

=Ruskin and race-culture.=--The name of Ruskin, perhaps, would not

occur to the reader as likely to afford support to the fair hopes of

the eugenist. Consider then, these words from _Time and Tide_:--

“You leave your marriages to be settled by supply and demand,

instead of wholesome law. And thus, among your youths and maidens,

the improvident, incontinent, selfish, and foolish ones marry,

whether you will or not; and beget families of children necessarily

inheritors in a great degree of these parental dispositions; and

for whom, supposing they had the best dispositions in the world,

you have thus provided, by way of educators, the foolishest fathers

and mothers you could find; (the only rational sentence in their

letters, usually, is the invariable one, in which they declare

themselves ‘incapable of providing for their children's education’).

On the other hand, whosoever is wise, patient, unselfish, and pure

among your youth, you keep maid or bachelor; wasting their best days

of natural life in painful sacrifice, forbidding them their best

help and best reward, and carefully excluding their prudence and

tenderness from any offices of parental duty. Is not this a beatific

and beautifully sagacious system for a Celestial Empire, such as that

of these British Isles?”

Apart from the point as to wholesome law rather than the education of

opinion as the eugenic means, the foregoing passage must win the assent

and respect of every eugenist. It indicates the promise of race-culture

as it appeared to John Ruskin. The passage has been quoted in full not

for the benefit of the ordinary thoughtful reader but for that of the

professional literary man who, in this remarkable age, so far as I can

judge, reads nothing but what he writes, and thus qualifies himself for

dismissing Spencer or Darwin or Galton in any casual phrase--meanwhile

condemning Ruskin, whom he probably professes to adore.

=Race-culture and human variety.=--Now let us turn to another question.

Let it be asserted most emphatically that, if there is anything in the

world which eugenics or race-culture does _not_ promise or desire, it

is the production of a uniform type of man. This delusion, for which

there has never been any warrant at all, possesses many of the critics

of eugenics, and they have made pretty play with it, just as they do

with their other delusions. Let us note one or two facts which bear

upon this most undesirable ideal.

In the first place, it is unattainable because of the existence of what

we call variation. No apparatus conceivable would suffice to eliminate

from every generation those who varied from the accepted type.

In the second place, this uniformity is supremely undesirable from

the purely evolutionary point of view, because its attainment would

mean the arrest of all progress. All organic evolution, as we know,

depends upon the struggle between creatures possessing variations and

the consequent selection of those variations which constitute their

possessors best adapted or fitted to the particular environment.

If there is no variation there can be no evolution. To aim at the

suppression of variation, therefore, on supposed eugenic grounds (which

would be involved in aiming at any uniform type of mankind) would be to

aim at destroying the necessary condition of all racial progress. The

mere fact that the critics of race-culture attribute to evolutionists,

of all people, the desire to suppress variation, is a pathognomic

symptom of their critical quality.

And, of course, quite independently of the evolutionary function of

variation--though this is cardinal and must never be forgotten by the

politician of any school, since what we call individuality is variation

on the human plane--the value of variation in ordinary life is wholly

incalculable. It is not merely that, as Mr. Galton says, “There are

a vast number of conflicting ideals, of alternative characters, of

incompatible civilisations; but they are wanted to give fulness and

interest to life. Society would be very dull if every man resembled the

highly estimable Marcus Aurelius or Adam Bede.” The question is not

merely as to the interest of life. Much more important is the fact that

it takes all sorts to make a world. What is the development of society

but the result of the psychological division of labour in the social

organism? And how could such division of labour be carried out if we

had not various types of labourers? What would be the good of science

if there were no poetry or music to live for? How would poetry and

music help us if we had not men of science to protect our shores from

plague?

Obviously the existence of men of most various types is a necessity

for any highly organised society. Even if eugenics were capable--as

it is not--of producing a complete and balanced type, fit up to a

point to turn out a satisfactory poem, a satisfactory symphony or a

satisfactory sofa, the utmost could not be expected of such a man in

any of these directions. In a word, as long as their activities are

not anti-social, men cannot be of too various types. We require mystic

and mathematician, poet and pathologist. Only, we want good specimens

of each. “The aim of eugenics,” says Mr. Galton, “is to represent

each class or sect by its best specimens; that done, to leave them

to work out their common civilisation in their own way.... Special

aptitudes would be assessed highly by those who possessed them, as the

artistic faculties by artists, fearlessness of enquiry and veracity by

scientists, religious absorption by mystics, and so on. There would be

self-sacrificers, self-tormentors, and other exceptional idealists.”

But at least it is better to have good rather than bad specimens of

any kind, whatever that kind may be. Mr. Galton thinks that all except

cranks would agree as to including health, energy, ability, manliness

and courteous disposition amongst qualities uniformly desirable--alike

in poet and pathologist. We should desire also uniformity as to the

absence of the anti-social proclivities of the born criminal. So much

uniformity being granted, let us have with it the utmost conceivable

variety,--more, indeed, than most of us can conceive.

This point, of course, is cardinal from the point of view of practice.

No progress could be made with eugenics, it would be impossible even

to form a Eugenics Education Society, if each of us were to regard the

particular type he belongs to as the ideal, and were to seek merely to

obtain the best specimens of that type. The doctrine that it takes all

sorts to make a world--a doctrine very hard for youth to learn, yet

unconsciously learnt by all who are capable of learning at all--must be

regarded as a cardinal truth for the eugenist. But he wisely seeks good

specimens rather than bad. Poets certainly, but not poetasters; jesters

certainly, but not clever fools, who stand Truth on her head and then

make street-boy gestures at her.

=Time and its treasure.=--Taking the modern estimates of the

physicists, we are assured that the total period of past human

existence is very brief compared with what may reasonably be predicted.

Granted, then, practically unlimited time, what inherent limits are

there to the upward development of man as a moral and intellectual

being? Shall we answer this question by a study of the nature of

matter? Plainly not. Shall we answer it by a study of the nature of

mind? Surely not, for the study of existing mind cannot inform us as

to what mind might be. One source of guidance alone we have, and this

is the amazing contrast which exists between the mind of man at its

highest, and mind in its humblest animal forms: or shall we say even

between the highest and lowest manifestations of mind within the human

species? The measureless height of the ascent thus indicated offers

us no warrant for the conclusion that, as we stand on the heights

of our life, our “glimpse of a height that is higher” is only an

hallucination. On the contrary.

There is no warrant whatever for supposing that the forces which have

brought us thus far are yet exhausted: they have their origin in the

inexhaustible. Who, gazing on the earth of a hundred million years

ago, could have predicted life--could have recognised, in the forces

then at work and the matter in which they were displayed, the promise

and potency of all terrestrial life? Who, contemplating life at a much

later stage, even later mammalian, could have seen in the simian the

prophecy of man? Who, examining the earliest nervous ganglia, could

have foreseen the human cerebrum? The fact that we can imagine nothing

higher than ourselves, that we make even our gods in our own image,

offers no warrant for supposing that nothing higher will ever be,

What ape could have predicted man, what reptile the bird, what amœba

the bee? “There are many events in the womb of time which will be

delivered,” and the fairest of her sons and daughters are yet to be.

But even grant, for the sake of the argument, that the intelligence of

a Newton, the musical faculty of a Bach, the moral nature of any good

mother anywhere, represent the utmost limits of which the evolution

of the psychical is capable. There is every reason to deny this, but

let us for the moment assume it true. There still remains the thought

of Wordsworth, “What one is, why may not millions be?”--a thought to

which Spencer has also given utterance. What is shown possible for

human nature here and there, he says, is conceivable for human nature

at large. It is possible for a human being, whilst still remaining

human, to be a Shakespeare or a St. Francis: these things are thus

demonstrably within the possibilities of human nature. It is therefore

at the least conceivable that, in the course of almost infinite time

(even assuming, say, that intelligence must ever be limited, as even

Newton's intelligence was limited), some such capacities as his may be

common property amongst men of the scientific type; and so with other

types. We may answer Wordsworth that there is no bar thrown by Nature

in the way of such a hope.

=What is possible?=--This, of course, is speculation and of no

immediate value. I would merely remind the reader that the doctrine of

optimism, as regards the future of mankind, which the principles of

race-culture assume and which they desire to justify, was definitely

shared by the great pioneers to whom we owe our understanding of those

principles. Notwithstanding grave nervous disorder, such as makes

pessimists of most men, both Darwin and Spencer were compelled by their

study of Nature to this rational optimism as regards man's future.

The doctrine of organic evolution, and of the age-long ascent of man

through the selection of the fittest (who have, _on the whole_, been

the _best_) for parenthood, is one not of despair but of hope. Exactly

half a century ago it struck horror into the minds of our predecessors.

Man, then, is only an erected ape, they thought--as if any historical

doctrine, however true, could shorten the dizzy distance to which man

has climbed since he was simian: and man being an ape, they thought

his high dreams palpably vain. But the measure of the accomplished

hints at the measure of the possible, and the value of the historical

facts lies not in themselves, all facts as such being as dead as are

the individual atoms of the living body, but in the principles which

grow out of them. It is of no importance as such that man has simian

ancestors; it is of immeasurable importance that he should learn by

what processes he has become human, and by what, indeed, they became

simian--which would have been a proud adjective for its own day. The

principles of organic progress matter for us because they are the

principles of race-culture, the only sure means of human progress. Our

looking backwards does not turn us into pillars of salt, but teaches us

that the best is yet to be, and how alone it is to be attained.

Elsewhere the optimistic argument of Wordsworth is quoted. Hear also

John Ruskin:--

“There is as yet no ascertained limit to the nobleness of person and

mind which the human creature may attain, by persevering observance

of the laws of God respecting its birth and training.”[85]

and Herbert Spencer:--

“What now characterises the exceptionally high may be expected

eventually to characterise all. For that which the best human nature

is capable of, is within the reach of human nature at large.”[86]

and Francis Galton:--

“There is nothing either in the history of domestic animals or in

that of evolution to make us doubt that a race of sane men may be

formed, who shall be as much superior, mentally and morally, to the

modern European, as the modern European is to the lowest of the Negro

races.

“It is earnestly to be hoped that enquiries will be increasingly

directed into historical facts, with the view of estimating the

possible effects of reasonable political action in the future, in

gradually raising the present miserably low standard of the human

race to one in which the Utopias in the dreamland of philanthropists

may become practical possibilities.”[87]

=Conclusion--Eugenics and Religion.=--In an early chapter it was

attempted to show that eugenics is not merely moral, but is of the

very heart of morality. We saw that it involves taking no life, that,

rather, it desires to make philanthropy more philanthropic, that, at

any rate so far as this eugenist is concerned, it recognises and bows

to the supreme law of love: and claims to serve that law, and the ideal

of social morality, which is the making of human worth. Eugenics may or

may not be practicable, it may or may not be based upon natural truth,

but it is assuredly moral: though I, for one, would proclaim eternal

war between this real morality and the damnable sham which approves the

unbridled transmission of the most hideous diseases, rotting body and

soul, in the interests of good.

And if religion, whatever its origin and the more questionable chapters

in its past, be now “morality touched with emotion,” I claim that

eugenics is religious, is and will ever be a religion. Elsewhere[88]

I have attempted to show that religion has survived and will survive

because of its survival-value--its services to the life of the

societies wherein it flourishes. The religion of the future, it was

sought to argue, will be that which “best serves Nature's unswerving

desire--fulness of life.” The Founder of the Christian religion said,

“I am come that ye might have life, and that ye might have it more

abundantly.” It is higher and more abundant life that is the eugenic

ideal. Progress I define as the emergence and increasing dominance of

mind. Of progress, thus conceived, man is the highest fruit hitherto.

He is also its appointed agent, and eugenics is his instrument.

To this end he must use all the powers which have blossomed in him from

the dust. He must claim Art: and indeed in Wagner's great music-drama,

at the moment when the prophetic Brünnhilde tells Sieglinde who has

just lost her mate that she, the expectant mother, may look for the

resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come in the child

Siegfried; and when the heroic theme is pronounced for the first time

and followed by that which signifies redemption by love--then, I think,

the eugenist may thrill not merely to the music, or to the humanity

of the story, but to the spiritual and scientific truth which it

symbolises.

If the struggle towards individual perfection be religious, so,

assuredly, is the struggle, less egoistic, indeed, towards racial

perfection. If the historic meaning and purport of religion are as I

conceive them, and if its future evolution may thence be inferred,

there can be no doubt in the prophecy that in ages to come those high

aspirations and spiritual visions which astronomy has dishoused from

amongst the stars, and which, at their best, were ever selfish, will

find a place on this human earth of ours. If we have transferred our

hopes from heaven to earth and from ourselves to our children, they are

not less religious. And they that shall be of us shall build the old

waste places; for we shall raise up the foundations of many generations:

“We feed the high tradition of the world,

And leave our spirits in our children's breasts.”

APPENDIX

CONCERNING BOOKS TO READ

The preceding pages are of course only tentative, preliminary and

introductory. I have merely tried to make a beginning. No better

purpose can be achieved than that the reader should proceed to study

the subject for himself. A few pages may therefore be devoted to the

names of some of the books which will be found useful. This is in no

sense a complete bibliography, nor even a tithe of such a bibliography.

But the reader who makes a beginning with the books here named, or even

with a well-chosen half dozen of them, will thereafter need no one to

tell him that the culture of the human race on scientific principles

will be the supreme science of all the future, the supreme goal of all

statesmen, the object and the final judge of all legislation.

Where it is thought that useful remarks can be made they will be made,

but neither their presence nor absence nor their length is to be taken

as any index to the writer's opinion of the relative value of the works

in question.

_Heredity._ (The Progressive Science Series, 1908.) By Professor J. A.

Thomson, M.A.

This is the most recent and most valuable for general purposes of all

books on the subject of heredity. No layman should express opinions

on heredity or eugenics until he has read it, for it is extremely

improbable that they will be valuable. Professor Thomson covers the

whole ground with extreme lucidity and care and impartiality. The book

is readable, nay more, fascinating from end to end, and it is liberally

and usefully illustrated. It is the first general treatise on heredity

which leads consciously, yet as of necessity, towards eugenics as the

crown and goal of the whole study, and in this respect it undoubtedly

marks an epoch.

_The Methods and Scope of Genetics._ (1908.) By W. Bateson, M.A., F.R.S.

This is the inaugural lecture, destined, I have little doubt, to become

historic, which was delivered by Professor Bateson on his appointment

to the new Darwin Chair of Biology at Cambridge. It is purposely

included here for very good reasons. The reader who begins his serious

study of heredity with Professor Thomson's work must be informed that

though the author gives an interesting account of Mendelism, he is not

a Mendelian, and neither his account of Mendelism nor his estimate of

it is at all adequate for the present day. In truth there is the study

of heredity before Mendelism and after, and though eugenics owes its

modern origin to the founder of the school of biometrics, and though

among his followers there are to be found many who decry and oppose the

Mendelians, it is for the eugenist of single purpose to take the truth

wherever it is to be found. It is now idle to deny either the general

truth or the stupendous promise of Mendelism. Many vital phenomena

besides heredity are studied by the statistical method, and are put

down by it to heredity. The Mendelians take seeds of known origin, and

plant them and note the result. They carry out experimental breeding

not only amongst plants but amongst the higher animals, including

mammals who, in all essentials of structure and function, are one with

ourselves. It is not possible, I believe, to over-estimate the supreme

importance of Mendelian enquiry for eugenics. Eugenics is founded

upon heredity, and genetics, which is Professor Bateson's name for

the physiology of heredity and variation, is now working at the very

heart of those natural phenomena upon which eugenics depends. This

lecture of Professor Bateson's is by the far the best introduction

to Mendelism that exists, besides being the most recent and the most

authoritative possible. With the lucidity of the born teacher (whose

faculty, I have no doubt, is a Mendelian unit, not always inherited

by the born observer) the author explains the essence of Mendelism.

The usual expositor has not proceeded far upon his way before he is

encumbering himself and the learner with the phenomena of dominance

and recessiveness, which are not cardinal and are highly involved.

Professor Bateson makes no allusion to them. But he gives an account

of Mendelism which it is impossible to put down without finishing, and

which is elementary in the highest sense of the word. In the later

pages the author preaches eugenics with a vigour and conviction not

unworthy of notice as coming from the leader of a school which is

utterly opposed in principle and in methods, if not in results, to the

school of biometrics founded by the founder of eugenics. I insist upon

this because there is a half-instructed ignorance abroad which has

heard the name of Mendel, and seeks thereby to discredit Darwin and

natural selection, Mr. Galton and eugenics. Hear Professor Bateson:--

“If there are societies which refuse to apply the new knowledge,

the fault will not lie with Genetics. I think it needs but little

observation of the newer civilisations to foresee that _they_ will

apply every scrap of scientific knowledge which can help them, or seems

to help them in the struggle, and I am good enough selectionist to know

that in that day the fate of the recalcitrant communities is sealed.”

_Hereditary Genius, An Inquiry into its Laws and Consequences._ By

Francis Galton.

This is the classical and pioneer enquiry, far beyond my praise

or appraisement. The main text is not long, is easily read and is

extremely interesting. The reader should acquaint himself also with Mr.

Constable's recent criticism, _Poverty and Hereditary Genius_.

_A Study of British Genius._ (1904.) By Havelock Ellis.

This is an extremely interesting book, which should be read in

association with the foregoing, to which it is a criticism and

supplement. The greater part of the volume is concerned with the

study of genius from the point of view of heredity--in terms of

nationality and race, and of individual parentage. Very great labour

and scholarship have been expended to very high purpose in this work.

_Inquiries into Human Faculty._ (1883.) By Francis Galton.

This is the next in order of Mr. Galton's works, _Hereditary Genius_

dating from 1869. It has recently been reprinted in Dent's “Everyman's

Library,” and can thus be purchased for one shilling.

_Natural Inheritance._ (1889.) By Francis Galton.

_Memories of my Life._ (1908.) By Francis Galton.

This is Mr. Galton's latest book, and apart from its personal

fascination must be read by the serious eugenist if only on account

of its last five chapters, and especially the last two, which deal

with Heredity and Race Improvement. What could be more interesting

and significant, for instance, than to find Mr. Galton in 1908 saying

of himself in 1865, “I was too much disposed to think of marriage

under some regulation, and not enough of the effects of self-interest

and of social and religious sentiment.” Mr. Galton comments on the

wrongheadedness of objectors to eugenics. I fancy, however, that the

familiar misrepresentations will soon cease to be possible. The whole

of this brief last chapter must be carefully read and studied. At

least I must quote the following paragraph:--

“What I desire is that the importance of eugenic marriages should be

reckoned at its just value, neither too high nor too low, and that

eugenics should form one of the many considerations by which marriages

are promoted or hindered, as they are by social position, adequate

fortune, and similarity of creed. I can believe hereafter that it will

be felt as derogatory to a person of exceptionally good stock to marry

into an inferior one as it is for a person of high Austrian rank to

marry one who has not sixteen heraldic quarterings. I also hope that

social recognition of an appropriate kind will be given to healthy,

capable, and large families, and that social influence will be exerted

towards the encouragement of eugenic marriages.”

This volume, a model for all future autobiographers, ends with the

following splendid statement of the eugenic creed:--

“A true philanthropist concerns himself not only with society as a

whole, but also with as many of the individuals who compose it as the

range of his affections can include. If a man devotes himself solely to

the good of a nation as a whole, his tastes must be impersonal and his

conclusions so far heartless, deserving the ill title of ‘dismal’ with

which Carlyle labelled statistics. If, on the other hand, he attends

only to certain individuals in whom he happens to take an interest, he

becomes guided by favouritism and is oblivious of the rights of others

and of the futurity of the race. Charity refers to the individual;

Statesmanship to the nation; Eugenics cares for both.

“It is known that a considerable part of the huge stream of British

charity furthers by indirect and unsuspected ways the production of the

Unfit; it is most desirable that money and other attention bestowed

on harmful forms of charity should be diverted to the production and

well-being of the Fit. For clearness of explanation we may divide newly

married couples into three classes, with respect to the probable civic

worth of their offspring. There would be a small class of ‘desirables,’

a large class of ‘passables,’ of whom nothing more will be said here,

and a small class of ‘undesirables.’ It would clearly be advantageous

to the country if social and moral support as well as timely material

help were extended to the desirables, and not monopolised as it is now

apt to be by the undesirables.

“I take eugenics very seriously, feeling that its principles ought to

become one of the dominant motives in a civilised nation, much as if

they were one of its religious tenets. I have often expressed myself in

this sense, and will conclude this book by briefly reiterating my views.

“Individuals appear to me as partial detachments from the infinite

ocean of Being, and this world as a stage on which Evolution takes

place, principally hitherto by means of Natural Selection, which

achieves the good of the whole with scant regard to that of the

individual.

“Man is gifted with pity and other kindly feelings; he has also the

power of preventing many kinds of suffering. I conceive it to fall well

within his province to replace Natural Selection by other processes

that are more merciful and not less effective.

“This is precisely the aim of eugenics. Its first object is to check

the birth-rate of the Unfit, instead of allowing them to come into

being, though doomed in large numbers to perish prematurely. The second

object is the improvement of the race by furthering the productivity

of the Fit by early marriages and healthful rearing of their children.

Natural Selection rests upon excessive production and wholesale

destruction; Eugenics on bringing no more individuals into the world

than can be properly cared for, and those only of the best stock.”

_Heredity and Selection in Sociology._ (1907.) By George

Chatterton-Hill.

This is a useful and interesting work, the nature of which is well

indicated by its title. It contains many purely eugenic chapters, and

cannot be ignored by the student.

_The Germ-plasm, A Theory of Heredity._ (The Contemporary Science

Series. 1893.) By August Weismann.

This is Weismann's great work. It should be studied by politicians and

others who still interpret all social phenomena in terms of Lamarckian

theory, and also by modern writers who are so much more Weismannian

than Weismann.

_The Evolution Theory._ (1904.) Translated by J. Arthur Thomson and M.

R. Thomson. By August Weismann.

_The Principles of Heredity._ (1905.) By G. Archdall Reid.

This is a very interesting and extremely Weismannian book which

contains the most recent statement of the author's remarkable enquiries

into the influence of disease as a factor of human selection.

_Variation in Animals and Plants._ (The International Scientific

Series. 1903.) By H. M. Vernon.

_Variation, Heredity and Evolution._ (1906.) By R. H. Lock.

_The Origin of Species._ (1869. Last (sixth) edition. Reprinted 1901.)

By Charles Darwin.

_The Descent of Man._ (1871. Second edition, 1874. Reprinted 1906.) By

Charles Darwin.

These classics now cost only half-a-crown apiece.

The beginner should read _The Descent of Man_ first, I think. Some

of the earlier chapters are of the utmost eugenic value, and would be

found immensely interesting by modern lecturers on decadence, and the

like.

_Darwinism To-day._ (1907.) By Vernon L. Kellogg.

An interesting and scholarly recent criticism, containing much matter

strictly relevant to eugenics.

_The Evolution of Sex._ (The Contemporary Science Series. Revised

edition, 1901. Originally published in 1899.) By Patrick Geddes and J.

Arthur Thomson.

A famous book, yet to be discovered by most “authorities” on the Woman

Question.

_A History of Matrimonial Institutions._ (1904.) By G. E. Howard.

This is a three-volume treatise, extremely comprehensive, and

especially valuable as a guide to the literature of the subject. Only

the professional student can be expected to read it from cover to

cover, but it is invaluable for purposes of reference.

_The History of Human Marriage._ By E. Westermarck.

This rightly celebrated and epoch-making work demonstrates in especial

the survival-value of monogamy, and its historical dominance as a

marriage form.

_The Evolution of Marriage._ (The Contemporary Science Series.) By

Professor Letourneau.

_The Principles of Population._ By T. R. Malthus.

The substance of this may be conveniently read in the extracts

published in the _Economic Classics_ by Macmillan (1905).

_The Principles of Biology._ By Herbert Spencer.

The last section, “The Laws of Multiplication,” _must_ be read as the

expression of the missing half of the truth discovered by Malthus. It

is tiresome, nearly half a century after Spencer's enunciation of his

law, to have to read the remarks of some modern writers who continue

to assume that Malthus expressed not merely the truth but the whole

truth.

_The Republic of Plato._

Apart from the lines of Theognis quoted by Darwin in _The Descent of

Man_, which are some two centuries older than Plato, the fifth book of

the _Republic_ is the earliest discussion in literature of the idea of

eugenics, and utterly wild though we may consider most of the proposals

of Plato--or Socrates--to be, these early thinkers are yet more modern

and more scientific and more fundamental than all their successors,

even including our modern Utopia makers who have come after Darwin,

in recognising that it is the quality of the citizen which will make

a Utopia possible. The following will suffice to show that after more

than two thousand years we can still learn from the fundamental idea of

Plato's fifth chapter:--

“It is plain, then, that after this we must make marriages as much

as possible sacred; but the most advantageous should be most sacred.

By all means. How then shall they be most advantageous? Tell me

that, Glauco, for I see in your houses dogs of chace, and a great

many excellent birds. Have you then indeed ever attended at all,

in any respect, to their marriages, and the propagation of their

species? How? said he. First of all, that among these, although they

be excellent themselves, are there not some who are most excellent?

There are. Whether then do you breed from all of them alike? or are

you careful to breed chiefly from the best? From the best. But how?

From the youngest or from the oldest, or from those who are most

in their prime? From those in their prime. And if the breed be not

of this kind, you reckon that the race of birds and dogs greatly

degenerates. I reckon so, replied he. And what think you as to

horses, said I, and other animals? is the case any otherwise with

respect to these? That, said he, were absurd.”

Plato proposed to destroy the family, and to “practise every art that

no mother should know her own child.” He also approved of infanticide.

Nevertheless, this fifth book of the _Republic_ is interesting and

valuable reading, and it is especially well to note that this pioneer

of Utopianism and Socialism possessed the idea which almost all living

Socialists, except Dr. A. R. Wallace and Professors Forel and Pearson,

lack, that we must first make the Utopian and Utopia will follow.

_The Family._ (1906.) By Elsie Clews Parsons.

This recent, scholarly and lucid book, of which any living man might

well be proud, may follow the reading of the utterly unconcerned and

taken-for-granted fashion in which Socrates and Plato proposed to

destroy the family. Lecture VIII., on “Sexual Choice,” is brief, but

the references following it are extremely valuable and complete. It is

evident that one of the books which will have to be written on eugenics

in the near future must deal with the whole question of marriage and

human selection both in its historical and in its contemporary aspects.

“The Possible Improvement of the Human Breed under Existing Conditions

of Law and Sentiment.” _Nature_, 1901, p. 659; _Smithsonian Report_,

Washington, 1901, p. 523. By Francis Galton.

This was the Huxley Lecture of the Anthropological Institute in 1901,

and the contemporary interest in eugenics may be said to date from it.

“Eugenics, its Definition, Scope and Aims.” (_Sociological Papers._

1904.) By Francis Galton.

This remarkable lecture constituted a further introduction of the

subject, and it is somewhat of the nature of an impertinence for

the professional jester, who is not acquainted with a line of it,

to dismiss eugenics with a phrase as if this lecture had never been

written or were unobtainable. Mr. Galton there defined eugenics as

“the science which deals with all influences that improve the inborn

qualities of a race....” The definition given in the _Century

Dictionary_ is unauthoritative, incorrect, and misses the entire point.

An extremely valuable discussion follows this lecture, and it is

absolutely necessary for the student to acquaint himself with the whole

of these pages (45-99).

_Restrictions in Marriage: Studies in National Eugenics: Eugenics as a

Factor in Religion._ By Francis Galton.

These are memoirs communicated to the Sociological Society in 1905, and

published together with the subsequent discussions in _Sociological

Papers_ (1905). The three memoirs are also published separately under

one cover.

_Probability, the Foundation of Eugenics._ The Herbert Spencer Lecture

of 1907. By Francis Galton.

This lecture contains a very brief historical outline of the recent

progress of eugenic enquiry and a simple discussion of the mathematical

method of studying heredity. It must, of course, be read by every

serious student.

_National Life from the Standpoint of Science._ (1905.) By Karl Pearson.

This is a reprint of a lecture delivered by Professor Pearson in 1900,

together with some other valuable contributions of his to the subject.

There is scarcely a better introduction to eugenics.

_The Scope and Importance to the State of the Science of National

Eugenics._ The Robert Boyle Lecture, 1907. (Second edition, 1909.) By

Karl Pearson.

This fine lecture should be carefully read. It gives some index to the

quantity and quality of the work done by Professor Pearson and his

followers since the Francis Galton Eugenics Laboratory was founded.

_Population and Progress._ (1907.) By Montague Crackanthorpe, K.C.

Though only published recently, part of this book goes back far. The

first chapter is indeed a reprint of a eugenic article published in the

_Fortnightly Review_ as far back as 1872. Some of us may perhaps be

inclined to forget that more than a generation ago Mr. Crackanthorpe

had grasped the great truths which we are now trying to spread, and

had courageously expressed them in the face of ignorance and prejudice

even greater than those of to-day. This is unquestionably a book which

every student must read, but the press generally, with some notable

exceptions, have fought rather shy of it. It was sent to the present

writer at his request from a leading morning paper which trusts him,

and he wrote a column on it, most careful in diction and moderate in

opinion, which was, nevertheless, not printed. One of the leading

medical papers devoted a long article to the book, written on the

general principle that it is right for a medical paper to differ

from any non-medical person who approaches the closed neighbourhood

of medical enquiry. Another leading medical paper considered Mr.

Crackanthorpe's “ideal” to be “beyond present accomplishment,” and

feared it must have “many generations of probation before it could

hope to enter the sphere of practical politics.” I venture to say that

_Population and Progress_, dealing, as it does, with a subject that

really matters, contains more fundamental practical politics--in the

true sense of that word--than has been discussed in most of our current

newspapers since they were first established.

_Race-Culture or Race-Suicide._ (1906.) By R. R. Rentoul.

This is a second and enlarged edition of a remarkable pamphlet

published by Dr. Rentoul in 1903 under the title _Proposed

Sterilisation of Certain Mental and Physical Degenerates. An Appeal

to Asylum Managers and Others._ Dr. Rentoul's own description of this

pamphlet is as follows:--“In it I called attention to the large

and increasing number of the insane in the United Kingdom; to our

disgraceful system of child-marriages; to the growing suicide rate;

to our disgusting system of inducing certain mentally and physically

diseased persons to marry; and to a slight operation which I was the

first to propose as a means of checking the increase in the number of

the insane, and in preventing innocent offspring from being cursed by

some parental blemish.”

_Education._ (Originally published in 1861. New edition, with the

author's latest corrections, 1906.) By Herbert Spencer.

This is the classic which marks an epoch in the personal development

of every one who reads it, and which made an epoch in the history of

education: the book was probably of more service to woman, owing to its

liberation of girlhood, than any other of its century.

_The Study of Sociology._ (International Scientific Series. Originally

published in 1873. Twentieth edition, 1903.) By Herbert Spencer.

This is, of course, _the_ introduction to sociology, written for that

purpose by a master, and in every respect a masterpiece. It contains

many eugenic references and arguments. As far as the eugenic education

of the adult is concerned, this is rightly the preliminary work.

Besides _The Evolution of Sex_ and Mrs. Parson's book on _The Family_,

there are many others relevant to the question of woman and eugenics,

of which one or two may be noted here.

_Sex and Society, Studies in the Social Psychology of Sex._ (1907.) By

W. I. Thomas.

This is a very readable and recent work, and for the general reader

much the most suitable of any that I know.

_Man and Woman._ (Contemporary Science Series.) By Havelock Ellis.

A very clear and readable book.

_Youth--its Education, Regimen and Hygiene._ (1907.) By Stanley Hall.

This is a new and abbreviated version of Professor Stanley Hall's two

well-known volumes on _Adolescence_, published in 1904. For the general

reader this much smaller work is very suitable, and especial attention

may be directed to Chapter XI., “The Education of Girls.”

It would have been presumptuous and absurd to attempt, in the course of

a merely introductory volume, to deal, by anything more than allusion

to its existence, with the great question of human parenthood in

relation to race. Most urgently this question, of course, concerns the

negro problem in America. The student who has to trust entirely to

second-hand knowledge had best be silent. Lest, however, the reader

should imagine that the older doctrines of race can be accepted without

reserve, he will do well to study very carefully the latter part of Dr.

Archdall Reid's book, already referred to, and, with extreme caution,

the following:--

_Race Prejudice._ (1906.) By Jean Finot.

This book most of us must believe to be extreme, but it should be read:

it bears on what may be called international eugenics, and the whole

question of inter-racial marriage.

* * * * *

On matters of transmissible disease and racial poisons there is much

literature. Only one or two books can be referred to here.

_The Diseases of Society: The Vice and Crime Problem._ (1904.) By G. F.

Lydston.

This, of course, is not a pleasant book, and it is open to much

criticism in many respects, but it is well worth reading, especially

in association with Dr. Rentoul's work.

_Malaria--A Neglected Factor in the History of Greece and Rome._

(1907.) By W. H. S. Jones, with an introduction by Ronald Ross.

This is a recent historical study and may be a very substantial

contribution to the study of decadence.

_Alcoholism._ (1906.) By W. C. Sullivan.

This little book of Dr. Sullivan's contains a useful and scrupulously

moderate chapter on the relation of alcohol to human degeneration.

_The Drink Problem._ (1907.) By Fourteen Medical Authorities.

_The Children of the Nation._ (1906.) By Sir John Gorst.

_Infant Mortality._ (1906.) By George Newman.

_The Hygiene of Mind._ (1906.) By T. S. Clouston.

_Diseases of Occupation._ (1908.) By Sir T. Oliver.

_The Prevention of Tuberculosis._ (1908.) By A. Newsholme.

These volumes all deal in part with questions of racial poisoning and

racial hygiene.

_Alcoholism--A Study in Heredity._ (1901.) By Archdall Reid.

_Alcohol and the Human Body._ (1907.) By Sir Victor Horsley and Mary D.

Sturge.

_Hygiene of Nerves and Mind._ (The Progressive Science Series. 1907.)

By August Forel.

_Inebriety--Its Causation and Control._ (The second Norman Kerr

Memorial Lecture, published in the _British Journal of Inebriety_,

January, 1908.) By R. Welsh Branthwaite.

_Reports of the Inspector under the Inebriates Acts._ Especially those

for the years 1904, 1905, 1906.

_The Cry of the Children: The Black Stain._ (1907.) By G. R. Sims.

The above are especially recommended to politicians. Sooner or later,

as never yet, knowledge will have to be applied to the drink question

as it bears upon the quality of the race. The knowledge exists, and is

not difficult to acquire or understand. The references given are quite

sufficient to enable any one of mediocre intelligence to frame a bill

dealing with alcohol which would be worth all its predecessors put

together, and would arouse far less opposition than any one of them.

_Reports of the National Conference on Infantile Mortality_ 1906

and 1908 (P. S. King & Co.). In the 1906 Report note especially Dr.

Ballantyne's paper on the unborn infant, and in the 1908 Report, Miss

Alice Ravenhill's paper on the education of girls.

It must be repeated that the foregoing names are merely noted as

including, perhaps, the greater number of the books with which the

serious beginner would do well to make a start. That is all. It would

be both unfair and unwise, however, to omit any mention of at least

three wonderful little books of John Ruskin's: _Unto this Last_,

_Munera Pulveris_ and _Time and Tide_, which add to their great

qualities of soul and style some of the most forcible and wisest

things that have ever been written on race-culture and its absolutely

fundamental relation to morality, patriotism and true economics.

If the reader desires the name of only one book, that is certainly _The

Sexual Question_ (1908), by Professor August Forel. This has no rival

anywhere, and cannot be overpraised.

Footnotes:

[1] A tribute is due to the anonymous pioneer of sane and provident

philanthropy who lately gave £20,000 to the London Hospital

for research. Such a thing is a commonplace in New York, it is

unprecedented in London.

[2] The word is used in the ordinary loose sense, to which there

is no objection provided that there be no misunderstanding of its

exact scientific meaning, as in Spencer's phrase “survival of the

fittest”--_i.e._ not the best, but the best adapted. See p. 43.

[3] “Degeneration,” I think, is the best word for the racial,

“deterioration” for the individual, change.

[4] That is in the ordinary sense of the words, not in the more exact

sense--as I think--in which a good environment would be defined as that

which selects the good for parenthood.

[5] Italics mine.

[6] We have seen that Huxley's assertion of the fundamental opposition

between moral and cosmic evolution is unwarrantable. We do recognise,

however, that in our present practice this opposition exists. Our

ancestors were cruel to the insane, but at least they prevented them

from multiplying. We are blindly kind to them, and therefore in the

long run cruel. But the dilemma, kind to be cruel, or cruel to be kind,

is not necessary. It is quite possible, as we have asserted, to be

at once kind to the individual and protective of the future. On the

other hand, it is also possible to be cruel to both. The London County

Council offers us, at the time of writing, a demonstration of this.

Sending wretched inebriates on the round of police-court, prison and

street, with intermittent gestations, rather than expend a shilling a

day, per individual, in decently detaining them, it serves at least the

philosophic purpose of demonstrating that it is possible to combine the

maximum of brutality to the individual and the present with the maximum

of injury to the race and the future.

[7] Reprinted in _The Kingdom of Man_ (Constable).

[8] _Sociological Papers_, 1905, p. 59.

[9] Whilst allowing due weight to Mr. Wells' opinion, we may also

note that of Charles Darwin who, referring to his own phrase, natural

selection, says, “But the expression often used by Mr. Herbert Spencer

of the Survival of the Fittest is more accurate.” (_Origin of Species_,

popular edition, p. 76.)

[10] _Collected Essays_, vol. i. p. 493. A valuable controversy but

poor sport. Thinker _versus_ politician is scarcely a match.

[11] This is discussed at length in the writer's paper, “The Obstacles

to Eugenics,” read before the Sociological Society, March 8, 1909.

[12] Spencer introduced the non-moral word evolution in 1857, _in order

to_ avoid the moral connotation of the word progress, which he had

formerly employed.

[13] In his recent work, _The Origin of Vertebrates_, Dr. W. H.

Gaskell, F.R.S., has adduced much evidence in support of this thesis.

He says, “The law of progress is this: The race is not to the swift nor

to the strong, but to the wise.” And again; “As for the individual,

so for the nation; as for the nation, so for the race; the law of

evolution teaches that in all cases brain-power wins. Throughout, from

the dawn of animal life up to the present day, the evidence given in

this book suggests that the same law has always held. In all cases,

upward progress is associated with the development of the central

nervous system. The law for the whole animal kingdom is the same as for

the individual. ‘Success in this world depends upon brains.’”

[14] We may recall the words of Lear:--

“Is man no more than this? Consider him well: Thou owest the worm no

silk, the beast no hide, the sheep no wool, the cat no perfume:....

Thou art the thing itself: unaccommodated man is no more but such a

poor, bare, forked animal as thou art.”

[15] Says Darwin, “So little is this subject understood, that I have

heard surprise repeatedly expressed at such great monsters as the

Mastodon ... having become extinct; as if mere bodily strength gave

victory in the battle of life. Mere size, on the contrary, would in

some cases determine ... quicker extermination from the greater amount

of requisite food.” In the Russo-Japanese War, one of the effective

factors was the greater area of the Russian soldier as a target, and

the disparity between the food requirements of the little victors and

the big losers.

[16] Quoted from a Paper read by Mr. Galton before the Eugenics

Education Society, October 14, 1908, and published in _Nature_, October

22, 1908.

[17] See the author's paper, “The Psychology of Parenthood,” _Eugenics

Review_, April, 1909.

[18] An authoritative statement on this point has already been quoted

from Sir E. Ray Lankester's Romanes Lecture of 1905, p. 42.

[19] The exception of one or two large animals, like the elephant, is

not important. In proportion to body weight man's birth-rate is lower

than theirs. And it is to be noted that the “infant” mortality is very

low in this case, where the birth-rate is so low. Says Darwin, of the

young elephant. “None are destroyed by beasts of prey; for even the

tiger in India most rarely dares to attack a young elephant protected

by its dam.” The dam has no factory to go to, and no beast of prey to

sell her alcohol.

[20] “The fulmar petrel lays but one egg, yet it is believed to be

the most numerous bird in the world.” (_Origin of Species_, popular

edition, p. 81).

[21] _The Wheat Problem_, by Sir Wm. Crookes, F.R.S., 2nd edition,

1905. The _Chemical News_ Office, 15, Newcastle St., Farringdon St.,

E.C.

[22] See Chap. iii. of the _Origin of Species_.

[23] Including even such an exceptional student as Dr. George Newman,

who, in his book on _Infant Mortality_, regards a falling birth-rate

as an essential evil, and actually declares without qualification

that the factors “which lower the birth-rate tend to raise the infant

death-rate.”

[24] It is not necessary to point out again the exception of the

elephant, nor to explain it.

[25] Mr. Galton believes their number has been exaggerated.

[26] Quoted from the author's lectures on _Individualism and

Collectivism_ (Williams and Norgate, 1906).

[27] As is usually the case, except when the mother or the father is

alcoholic or syphilitic.

[28] If we make a diagram of society, with the social strata labelled,

and then proceed to make a eugenic comment upon it, certainly the

line dividing the sheep from the goats, _as for parenthood_, would

not be horizontal, at any level. Nor would it be vertical--as if the

proportions of worth and unworth were the same in all classes. Some

would draw it diagonally, counting most of the aristocracy good and

most of the lowest strata bad: others would slope it the other way.

I should not venture to draw it at all: there are individuals good

and bad in all classes and races, and their relative proportions are

unknown, at least to me.

[29] “For words are wise men's counters, they do but reckon by them;

but they are the money of fools” (Hobbes, _Leviathan_, Pt. I. chap iv.).

[30] It might be supposed that the words “inherent” and “inherited”

were allied etymologically. This is not so. “Inherit” is derived from

“heir,” and this from a verb meaning “to take.” In natural inheritance

the heir inherits what is inherent in the germ-cells which make him.

Says Professor Thomson: “The organisation of the fertilised ovum is the

inheritance”--_and the heir_, we may add.

[31] Unless indeed it be an organism so lowly as only to consist of one

cell throughout.

[32] The reader will remember the chapter, “A Berry to the Rescue.”

“Says Lucy demurely: ‘Now you know why I read history, and that sort

of books.... I only read sensible books and talk of serious things ...

because I have heard say ... dear Mrs. Berry! don't you understand

now?’”

[33] Contrast Mr. Galton, the propounder of the now accepted view:--

“As a general rule, with scarcely any exception that cannot be ascribed

to other influences, such as bad nutrition or transmitted microbes,

the injuries or habits of the parents are found to have no effect on

the natural form or faculties of the child.” (_Hereditary Genius_,

Prefatory Chapter to the Edition of 1892, p. xv.)

[34] In the later edition Mr. Galton discusses the question of the

title, and says that if it could now be altered, it should appear as

_Hereditary Ability_. We may note that, as the author says himself,

“The reader will find a studious abstinence throughout the work from

speaking of genius as a special quality.”

[35] The reader may note “A Eugenic Investigation: Index to

Achievements of Near Kinsfolk of some of the Fellows of the Royal

Society,” _Sociological Papers_, 1904, pp. 85-99 (Macmillan); also

_Noteworthy Families_ (John Murray, 1906).

[36] These researches have not yet been published.

[37] In the later chapters of a former book, “Health, Strength, and

Happiness” (Grant Richards, London; Mitchell Kennerley, New York,

1908), I have discussed various aspects of heredity from the eugenic

point of view more fully than has been possible here.

[38] See the last sentence of the quotation from Forel on p. 130.

[39] For definition of these terms see Chap. xi.

[40] By some such means we may hope that man too may some day become

domesticated without losing his fertility!

[41] 1 Corinthians xii. 22, 23, 24.