procreation, as a family attains the highest culture and refinement
which civilization can yield, that family tends to die out, at all
events in the male line.[15] This is, for instance, the result which
Fahlbeck has reached in his valuable demographic study of the Swedish
nobility, _Der Adel Schwedens_. "Apparently," says Fahlbeck, "the
greater demands on nervous and intellectual force which the culture and
refinement of the upper classes produce are chiefly responsible for
this. For these are the two personal factors by which those classes are
distinguished from the lower classes: high education and refinement in
tastes and habits. The first involves predominant activity of the brain,
the last a heightened sensitiveness in all departments of nervous life.
In both respects, therefore, there is increased work for the nervous
system, and this is compensated in the other vital functions, especially
reproduction. Man cannot achieve everything; what he gains on one side
he loses on the other." We should do well to hold these wise words in
mind when we encounter those sciolists who in the presence of the finest
and rarest manifestations of civilizations, can only talk of race
"decay." A female salmon, it is estimated, lays about nine hundred eggs
for every pound of her own weight, and she may weigh fifty pounds. The
progeny of Shakespeare and Goethe, such as it was, disappeared in the
very centuries in which these great men themselves died. At the present
stage of civilization we are somewhat nearer to Shakespeare and Goethe
than to the salmon. We must set our ideals towards a very different
direction from that which commends itself to our Salmonidian sciolists.
"Increase and multiply" was the legendary injunction uttered on the
threshold of an empty world. It is singularly out of place in an age in
which the earth and the sea, if not indeed the very air, swarm with
countless myriads of undistinguished and indistinguishable human
creatures, until the beauty of the world is befouled and the glory of
the Heavens bedimmed. To stem back that tide is the task now imposed on
our heroism, to elevate and purify and refine the race, to introduce
the ideal of quality in place of the ideal of quantity which has run
riot so long, with the results we see. "As the Northern Saga tells that
Odin must sacrifice his eye to attain the higher wisdom," concludes
Fahlbeck, "so Man also, in order to win the treasures of culture and
refinement, must give not only his eye but his life, if not his own life
that of his posterity."[16] The vulgar aim of reckless racial fertility
is no longer within our reach and no longer commends itself as worthy.
It is not consonant with the stage of civilization we are at the moment
passing through. The higher task is now ours of the regeneration of the
race, or, if we wish to express that betterment less questionably, the
aggeneration of the race.[17]
The control of reproduction, we see, essential as it is, cannot by
itself carry far the betterment of the race, because it involves no
direct selection of stocks. Yet we have to remember that though this
control, with the limitation of offspring it involves, fails to answer
all the demands which Social Hygiene to-day makes of us, it yet achieves
much. It may not improve what we abstractly term the "race," but it
immensely improves the individuals of which the race is made up. Thus
the limitation of the family renders it possible to avoid the production
of undesired children. That in itself is an immense social gain, because
it tends to abolish excessive infantile mortality.[18] It means that
adequate care will be expended upon the children that are produced, and
that no children will be produced unless the parents are in a position
to provide for them.[19] Even the mere spacing out of the children in a
family, the larger interval between child-births, is a very great
advantage. The mother is no longer exhausted by perpetually bearing,
suckling, and tending babies, while the babies themselves are on the
average of better quality.[20] Thus the limitation of offspring, far from
being an egoistic measure, as some have foolishly supposed, is
imperatively demanded in the altruistic interests of the individuals
composing the race.
But the control of reproduction, enormously beneficial as it is even in
its most elementary shapes, mainly concerns us here because it furnishes
the essential condition for the development of Social Hygiene. The
control of reproduction renders possible, and leads on to, a wise
selection in reproduction. It is only by such selection of children to
be born that we can balance our indiscriminate care in the preservation
of all children that are born, a care which otherwise would become an
intolerable burden. It is only by such selection that we can work
towards the elimination of those stocks which fail to help us in the
tasks of our civilization to-day. It is only by such selection that we
can hope to fortify the stocks that are fitted for these tasks. More
than two centuries ago Steele playfully suggested that "one might wear
any passion out of a family by culture, as skilful gardeners blot a
colour out of a tulip that hurts its beauty."[21] The progress of
civilization, with the self-control it involves, has made it possible to
accept this suggestion seriously.[22] The difference is that whereas the
flowers of our gardens are bettered only by the control of an arbitrary
external will and intelligence, our human flowers may be bettered by an
intelligence and will, a finer sense of responsibility, developed within
themselves. Thus it is that human culture renders possible Social
Hygiene.
Three centuries ago an inspired monk set forth his ideal of an ennobled
world in _The City of the Sun_. Campanella wrote that prophetic book in
prison. But his spirit was unfettered, and his conception of human
society, though in daring it outruns all the visions we may compare it
with, is yet on the lines along which our civilization lies. In the City
of the Sun not only was the nobility of work, even mechanical
work,--which Plato rejected and More was scarcely conscious of,--for the
first time recognized, but the supreme impulse of procreation was
regarded as a sacred function, to be exercised in the light of
scientific knowledge. It was a public rather than a private duty,
because it concerned the interests of the race; only valorous and
high-spirited men ought to procreate, and it was held that the father
should bear the punishments inflicted on the son for faults due to his
failure by defects in generation.[23] Moreover, while unions not for the
end of procreation were in the City of the Sun left to the judgment of
the individuals alone concerned, it was not so with unions for the end
of procreation. These were arranged by the "great Master," a physician,
aided by the chief matrons, and the public exercises of the youths and
maidens, performed in a state of nakedness, were of assistance in
enabling unions to be fittingly made. No eugenist under modern
conditions of life proposes that unions should be arranged by a supreme
medical public official, though he might possibly regard such an
official, if divested of any compulsory powers, a kind of public trustee
for the race, as a useful institution. But it is easy to see that the
luminous conception of racial betterment which, since Galton rendered it
practicable, is now inspiring social progress, was already burning
brightly three centuries ago in the brain of this imprisoned Italian
monk. Just as Thomas More has been called the father of modern
Socialism, so Campanella may be said to be the prophet of modern
Eugenics.
By "Eugenics" is meant the scientific study of all the agencies by which
the human race may be improved, and the effort to give practical effect
to those agencies by conscious and deliberate action in favour of better
breeding. Even among savages eugenics may be said to exist, if only in
the crude and unscientific practice of destroying feeble, deformed, and
abnormal infants at birth. In civilized ages elaborate and more or less
scientific attempts are made by breeders of animals to improve the
stocks they breed, and their efforts have been crowned with much
success. The study of the same methods in their bearing on man proceeded
out of the Darwinian school of biology, and is especially associated
with the great name of Sir Francis Galton, the cousin of Darwin. Galton
first proposed to call this study "Stirpiculture." Under that name it
inspired Noyes, the founder of the Oneida Community, with the impulse to
carry it into practice with a thoroughness and daring--indeed a
similarity of method--which caused Oneida almost to rival the City of
the Sun. But the scheme of Noyes, excellent as in some respects it was
as an experiment, outran both scientific knowledge and the spirit of the
times. It was not countenanced by Galton, who never had any wish to
offend general sentiment, but sought to win it over to his side, and
before 1880 the Oneida Community was brought to an end in consequence of
the antagonism it aroused. Galton continued to develop his conceptions
slowly and cautiously, and in 1883, in his _Inquiries into Human
Faculty_, he abandoned the term "Stirpiculture" and devised the term
"Eugenics," which is now generally adopted to signify Good Breeding.
Galton was quite well aware that the improved breeding of men is a very
different matter from the improved breeding of animals, requiring a
different knowledge and a different method, so that the ridicule which
has sometimes been ignorantly flung at Eugenics failed to touch him. It
would be clearly undesirable to breed men, as animals are bred, for
single points at the sacrifice of other points, even if we were in a
position to breed men from outside. Human breeding must proceed from
impulses that arise, voluntarily, in human brains and wills, and are
carried out with a human sense of personal responsibility. Galton
believed that the first need was the need of knowledge in these matters.
He was not anxious to invoke legislation.[24] The compulsory presentation
of certificates of health and good breeding as a preliminary to marriage
forms no part of Eugenics, nor is compulsory sterilization a demand made
by any reasonable eugenist. Certainly the custom of securing
certificates of health and ability is excellent, not only as a
preliminary to marriage, but as a general custom. Certainly, also, there
are cases in which sterilization is desirable, if voluntarily
accepted.[25] But neither certification nor sterilization should be
compulsory. They only have their value if they are intelligent and
deliberate, springing out of a widened and enlightened sense of personal
responsibility to society and to the race.
Eugenics constitutes the link between the Social Reform of the past,
painfully struggling to improve the conditions of life, and the Social
Hygiene of the future, which is authorized to deal adequately with the
conditions of life because it has its hands on the sources of life. On
this plane we are able to concentrate our energies on the finer ends of
life, because we may reasonably expect to be no longer hampered by the
ever-increasing burdens which were placed upon us by the failure to
control life; while the more we succeed in our efforts to purify and
strengthen life, the more magnificent become the tasks we may reasonably
hope to attempt and compass.
A problem which is often and justly cited as one to be settled by
Eugenics is that presented by the existence among us of the large class
of the feeble-minded. No doubt there are some who would regret the
disappearance of the feeble-minded from our midst. The philosophies of
the Bergsonian type, which to-day prevail so widely, place intuition
above reason, and the "pure fool" has sometimes been enshrined and
idolized. But we may remember that Eugenics can never prevent absolutely
the occurrence of feeble-minded persons, even in the extreme degree of
the imbecile and the idiot.[26] They come within the range of variation,
by the same right as genius so comes. We cannot, it may be, prevent the
occurrence of such persons, but we can prevent them from being the
founders of families tending to resemble themselves. And in so doing, it
will be agreed by most people, we shall be effecting a task of immense
benefit to society and the race.
Feeble-mindedness is largely handed on by heredity. It was formerly
supposed that idiocy and feeble-mindedness are mainly due to
environmental conditions, to the drink, depravity, general disease, or
lack of nutrition of the parents, and there is no doubt an element of
truth in that view. But serious and frequent as are the results of bad
environment and acquired disease in the parentage of the feeble-minded,
they do not form the fundamental factor in the production of the
feeble-minded.[27]
Feeble-mindedness is essentially a germinal variation, belonging to the
same large class as all other biological variations, occurring, for the
most part, in the first place spontaneously, but strongly tending to be
inherited. It thus resembles congenital cataract, deaf-mutism, the
susceptibility to tuberculous infection, etc.[28]
Exact investigation is now showing that feeble-mindedness is passed on
from parent to child to an enormous extent. Some years ago Ashby,
speaking from a large experience in the North of England, estimated that
at least seventy-five per cent of feeble-minded children are born with
an inherited tendency to mental defect. More precise investigation has
since shown that this estimate was under the mark. Tredgold, who in
England has most carefully studied the heredity of the feeble-minded,[29]
found that in over eighty-two per cent cases there is a bad nervous
inheritance. In a large number of cases the bad heredity was associated
with alcoholism or consumption in the parentage, but only in a small
proportion of cases (about seven per cent) was it probable that
alcoholism and consumption alone, and usually combined, had sufficed to
produce the defective condition of the children, while environmental
conditions only produced mental defect in ten per cent cases.[30]
Heredity is the chief cause of feeble-mindedness, and a normal child is
never born of two feeble-minded parents. The very thorough investigation
of the heredity of the feeble-minded which is now being carried on at
the institution for their care at Vineland, New Jersey, shows even more
decisive results. By making careful pedigrees of the families to which
the inmates at Vineland belong it is seen that in a large proportion of
cases feeble-mindedness is handed on from generation to generation, and
is traceable through three generations, though it sometimes skips a
generation. In one family of three hundred and nineteen persons, one
hundred and nineteen were known to be feeble-minded, and only forty-two
known to be normal. The families tended to be large, sometimes very
large, most of them in many cases dying in infancy or growing up
weak-minded.[31]
Not only is feeble-mindedness inherited, and to a much greater degree
than has hitherto been suspected even by expert authorities, but the
feeble-minded thus tend (though, as Davenport and Weeks have found, not
invariably) to have a larger number of children than normal people. That
indeed, we might expect, apart altogether from the question of any
innate fertility. The feeble-minded have no forethought and no
self-restraint. They are not adequately capable of resisting their own
impulses or the solicitations of others, and they are unable to
understand adequately the motives which guide the conduct of ordinary
people. The average number of children of feeble-minded people seems to
be frequently about one-third more than in normal families, and is
sometimes much greater. Dr. Ettie Sayer, when investigating for the
London County Council the family histories of one hundred normal
families and one hundred families in which mentally defective children
had been found, ascertained that the families of the latter averaged 7.6
children, while in the normal families they averaged 5. Tredgold,
specially investigating 150 feeble-minded cases, found that they
belonged to families in which 1269 children had been born, that is to
say 7.3 per family, or, counting still-born children, 8.4. Nearly
two-thirds of these abnormally large families were mentally defective,
many showing a tendency to disease, pauperism, criminality, or else to
early death.[32]
Here, indeed, we have a counterbalancing influence, for, in the large
families of the feeble-minded, there is a correspondingly large
infantile mortality. A considerable proportion of Tredgold's group of
children were born dead, and a very large number died early. Eichholz,
again, found that, in one group of defective families, about sixty per
cent of the children died young. That is probably an unusually high
proportion, and in Eichholz's cases it seems to have been associated
with very unusually large families, but the infant mortality is always
very high.
This large early mortality of the offspring of the feeble-minded is,
however, very far from settling the question of the disposal of the
mentally defective, or we should not find families of them propagated
from generation to generation. The large number who die early merely
serves, roughly speaking, to reduce the size of the abnormal family to
the size of a normal family, and some authorities consider that it
scarcely suffices to do this, for we must remember that there is a
considerable mortality even in the so-called normal family during early
life. Even when there is no abnormal fertility in the defective family
we may still have to recognize that, as Davenport and Weeks argue, their
defectiveness is intensified by heredity. Moreover, we have to consider
the social disorder and the heavy expense which accompany the large
infantile mortality. Illegitimacy is frequently the result of
feeble-mindedness, since feeble-minded women are peculiarly unable to
resist temptation. A great number of such women are continually coming
into the workhouses and giving birth to illegitimate children whom they
are unable to support, and who often never become capable of supporting
themselves, but in their turn tend to produce a new feeble-minded
generation, more especially since the men who are attracted to these
feeble-minded women are themselves--according to the generally
recognized tendency of the abnormal to be attracted to the
abnormal--feeble-minded or otherwise mentally defective. There is thus
generated not only a heavy financial burden, but also a perpetual danger
to society, and, it may well be, a serious depreciation in the quality
of the community.[33]
It is not only in themselves that the feeble-minded are a burden on the
present generation and a menace to future generations. In large measure
they form the reservoir from which the predatory classes are recruited.
This is, for instance, the case as regards prostitutes. Feeble-minded
girls, of fairly high grade, may often be said to be predestined to
prostitution if left to themselves, not because they are vicious, but
because they are weak and have little power of resistance. They cannot
properly weigh their actions against the results of their actions, and
even if they are intelligent enough to do that, they are still too weak
to regulate their actions accordingly. Moreover, even when, as often
happens among the high-grade feeble-minded, they are quite able and
willing to work, after they have lost their "respectability" by having a
child, the opportunities for work become more restricted, and they drift
into prostitution. It has been found that of nearly 15,000 women who
passed through Magdalen Homes in England, over 2500, or more than
sixteen per cent--and this is probably an under-estimate--were
definitely feeble-minded. The women belonging to this feeble-minded
group were known to have added 1000 illegitimate children to the
population. In Germany Bonhoeffer found among 190 prostitutes who passed
through a prison that 102 were hereditarily degenerate and 53
feeble-minded. This would be an over-estimate as regards average
prostitutes, though the offences were no doubt usually trivial, but in
any case the association between prostitution and feeble-mindedness is
intimate. Everywhere, there can be no doubt, the ranks of prostitution
contain a considerable proportion of women who were, at the very outset,
in some slight degree feeble-minded, mentally and morally a little
blunted through some taint of inheritance.[34]
Criminality, again, is associated with feeble-mindedness in the most
intimate way. Not only do criminals tend to belong to large families,
but the families that produce feeble-minded offspring also produce
criminals, while a certain degree of feeble-mindedness is extremely
common among criminals, and the most hopeless and typical, though
fortunately rare, kind of criminal, frequently termed a "moral
imbecile," is nothing more than a feeble-minded person whose defect is
shown not so much in his intelligence as in his feelings and his
conduct. Sir H.B. Donkin, who speaks with authority on this matter,
estimates that, though it is difficult to obtain the early history of
the criminals who enter English prisons, about twenty per cent of them
are of primarily defective mental capacity. This would mean that every
year some 35,000 feeble-minded persons are sent to English prisons as
"criminals." The tendency of criminals to belong to the feeble-minded
class is indeed every day becoming more clearly recognized. At
Pentonville, putting aside prisoners who were too mentally affected to
be fit for prison discipline, eighteen per cent of the adult prisoners
and forty per cent of the juvenile offenders were found to be
feeble-minded. This includes only those whose defect is fairly obvious,
and is not the result of methodical investigation. It is certain that
such methodical inquiry would reveal a very large proportion of cases of
less obvious mental defect. Thus the systematic examination of a number
of delinquent children in an Industrial School showed that in
seventy-five per cent cases they were defective as compared to normal
children, and that their defectiveness was probably inborn. Even the
possession of a considerable degree of cunning is no evidence against
mental defect, but may rather be said to be a sign of it, for it shows
an intelligence unable to grasp the wider relations of life, and
concentrated on the gratification of petty and immediate desires. Thus
it happens that the cunning of criminals is frequently associated with
almost inconceivable stupidity.[35]
Closely related to the great feeble-minded class, and from time to time
falling into crime, are the inmates of workhouses, tramps, and the
unemployable. The so-called "able-bodied" inmates of the workhouses are
frequently found, on medical examination, to be, in more than fifty per
cent cases, mentally defective, equally so whether they are men or
women. Tramps, by nature and profession, who overlap the workhouse
population, and are estimated to number 20,000 to 30,000 in England and
Wales, when the genuine unemployed are eliminated, are everywhere found
to be a very degenerate class, among whom the most mischievous kinds of
feeble-mindedness and mental perversion prevail. Inebriates, the people
who are chronically and helplessly given to drink, largely belong to the
same great family, and do not so much become feeble-minded because they
drink, but possess the tendency to drink because they have a strain of
feeble-mindedness from birth. Branthwaite, the chief English authority
on this question, finds that of the inebriates who come to his notice,
putting aside altogether the group of actually insane persons, about
sixty-three per cent are mentally defective, and scarcely more than a
third of the whole number of average mental capacity. It is evident that
these people, even if restored to sobriety, would still retain their
more or less inborn defectiveness, and would remain equally, unfit to
become the parents of the coming generation.
These are the kind of people--tramps, prostitutes, paupers, criminals,
inebriates, all tending to be born a little defective--who largely make
up the great degenerate families whose histories are from time to time
recorded. Such a family was that of the Jukes in America, who, in the
course of five generations, by constantly intermarrying with bad stocks,
produced 709 known descendants who were on the whole unfit for society,
and have been a constant danger and burden to society.[36] A still larger
family of the same kind, more recently studied in Germany, consisted of
834 known persons, all descended from a drunken vagabond woman, probably
somewhat feeble-minded but physically vigorous. The great majority of
these descendants were prostitutes, tramps, paupers, and criminals (some
of them murderers), and the direct cost in money to the Prussian State
for the keep and care of this woman and her family has been a quarter of
a million pounds. Yet another such family is that of the "Zeros." Three
centuries ago they were highly respectable people, living in a Swiss
valley. But they intermarried with an insane stock, and subsequently
married other women of an unbalanced nature. In recent times 310 members
of this family have been studied, and it is found that vagrancy,
feeble-mindedness, mental troubles, criminality, pauperism, immorality
are, as it may be termed, their patrimony.[37]