laziness, lack of vitality, and unfitness for organized activity,
contain the people who complain that they are starving for want of work,
though they will never perform any work that is given them.
Feeble-mindedness is an absolute dead-weight on the race. It is an evil
that is unmitigated. The heavy and complicated social burdens and
injuries it inflicts on the present generation are without compensation,
while the unquestionable fact that in any degree it is highly
inheritable renders it a deteriorating poison to the race; it
depreciates the quality of a people. The task of Social Hygiene which
lies before us cannot be attempted by this feeble folk. Not only can
they not share it, but they impede it; their clumsy hands are for ever
becoming entangled in the delicate mechanism of our modern civilization.
Their very existence is itself an impediment. Apart altogether from the
gross and obvious burden in money and social machinery which the
protection they need, and the protection we need against them, casts
upon the community,[38] they dilute the spiritual quality of the
community to a degree which makes it an inapt medium for any high
achievement. It matters little how small a city or a nation is, provided
the spirit of its people is great. It is the smallest communities that
have most powerfully and most immortally raised the level of
civilization, and surrounded the human species (in its own eyes) with a
halo of glory which belongs to no other species. Only a handful of
people, hemmed in on every side, created the eternal radiance of Athens,
and the fame of the little city of Florence may outlive that of the
whole kingdom of Italy. To realize this truth in the future of
civilization is one of the first tasks of Social Hygiene.[39]
It is here that the ideals of Eugenics may be expected to work
fruitfully. To insist upon the power of heredity was once considered to
indicate a fatalistic pessimism. It wears a very different aspect
nowadays, in the light of Eugenics. "To the eugenist," as Davenport
observes, "heredity stands as the one great hope of the human race: its
saviour from imbecility, poverty, disease, immorality."[40] We cannot,
indeed, desire any compulsory elimination of the unfit or any centrally
regulated breeding of the fit.[41] Such notions are idle, and even the
mere fact that unbalanced brains may air them abroad tends to impair the
legitimate authority of eugenic ideals. The two measures which are now
commonly put forward for the attainment of eugenic ends--health
certificates as a legal preliminary to marriage and the sterilization of
the unfit--are excellent when wisely applied, but they become
mischievous, if not ridiculous, in the hands of fanatics who would
employ them by force. Domestic animals may be highly bred from outside,
compulsorily. Man can only be bred upwards from within through the
medium of his intelligence and will, working together under the control
of a high sense of responsibility. The infinite cunning of men and women
is fully equal to the defeat of any attempt to touch life at this
intimate point against the wish of those to whom the creation of life is
entrusted. The laws of marriage even among savages have often been
complex and strenuous in the highest degree. But it has been easy to
bear them, for they have been part of the sacred and inviolable
traditions of the race; religion lay behind them. And Galton, who
recognized the futility of mere legislation in the elevation of the
race, believed that the hope of the future lies in rendering eugenics a
part of religion. The only compulsion we can apply in eugenics is the
compulsion that comes from within. All those in whom any fine sense of
social and racial responsibility is developed will desire, before
marriage, to give, and to receive, the fullest information on all the
matters that concern ancestral inheritance, while the registration of
such information, it is probable, will become ever simpler and more a
matter of course.[42] And if he finds that he is not justified in aiding
to carry on the race, the eugenist will be content to make himself, in
the words of Jesus, "a eunuch for the kingdom of Heaven's sake,"
whether, under modern conditions, that means abstention in marriage from
procreation, or voluntary sterilization by operative methods.[43] For, as
Giddings has put it, the goal of the race lies, not in the ruthless
exaltation of a super-man, but in the evolution of a super-mankind. Such
a goal can only be reached by resolute selection and elimination.[44]
The breeding of men lies largely in the hands of women. That is why the
question of Eugenics is to a great extent one with the woman question.
The realization of eugenics in our social life can only be attained with
the realization of the woman movement in its latest and completest phase
as an enlightened culture of motherhood, in all that motherhood involves
alike on the physical and the psychic sides. Motherhood on the eugenic
basis is a deliberate and selective process, calling for the highest
intelligence as well as the finest emotional and moral aptitudes, so
that all the best energies of a long evolution of womanhood in the paths
of modern culture here find their final outlet. The breeding of children
further involves the training of children, and since the expansion of
Social Hygiene renders education a far larger and more delicate task
than it has ever been before, the responsibilities laid upon women by
the evolution of civilization become correspondingly great.
For the men who have been thus born and taught the tasks imposed by
Social Hygiene are in no degree lighter. They demand all the best
qualities of a selectively bred race from which the mentally and
physically weak have, so far as possible, been bred out. The
substitution of law for war alike in the relations of class to class,
and of nation to nation, and the organization of international methods
of social intercourse between peoples of different tongues and unlike
traditions, are but two typical examples of the tasks, difficult but
imperative, which Social Hygiene presents and the course of modern
civilization renders insistent. Again, the adequate adjustment of the
claims of the individual and the claims of the community, each carried
to its farthest point, can but prove an exquisite test of the quality of
any well-bred and well-trained race. It is exactly in that balancing of
apparent opposites, the necessity of pushing to extremes both opposites,
and the consequent need of cultivating that quality of temperance the
Greeks estimated so highly, that the supreme difficulties of modern
civilization lie. We see these difficulties again in relation to the
extension of law. It is desirable and inevitable that the sphere of law
should be extended, and that the disputes which are still decided by
brutal and unreasoning force should be decided by humane and reasoning
force, that is to say, by law. But, side by side with this extension of
law, it is necessary to wage a constant war with the law-making
tendency, to cherish an undying resolve to maintain unsullied those
sacred and intimate impulses, all the finest activities of the moral
sphere, which the generalizing hand of law can only injure and stain.
It is these fascinating and impassioning problems, every day becoming of
more urgent practical importance, which it is the task of Social Hygiene
to solve, having first created the men and women who are fit to solve
them. It is such problems as these that we are to-day called upon to
illuminate, as far as we may--it may not yet be very far--by the dry
light of science.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Muralt, _Lettres sur les Anglais_. Lettre V.
[2] In the reign of Richard II (1388) an Act was passed for "the
punishment of those which cause corruption near a city or great town to
corrupt the air." A century later (in Henry VII's time) an Act was
passed to prevent butchers killing beasts in walled towns, the preamble
to this Act declaring that no noble town in Christendom should contain
slaughter-houses lest sickness be thus engendered. In Charles II's time,
after the great fire of London, the law provided for the better paving
and cleansing of the streets and sewers. It was, however, in Italy, as
Weyl points out (_Geschichte der Sozialen Hygiene im Mittelalter_, at a
meeting of the Gesellschaft für Soziale Medizin, May 25, 1905), that the
modern movement of organized sanitation began. In the thirteenth century
the great Italian cities (like Florence and Pistoja) possessed _Codici
Sanitarii_; but they were not carried out, and when the Black Death
reached Florence in 1348, it found the city altogether unprepared. It
was Venice which, in the same year, first initiated vigorous State
sanitation. Disinfection was first ordained by Gian Visconti, in Milan,
in 1399. The first quarantine station of which we hear was established
in Venice in 1403.
[3] The rate of infant mortality in England and Wales has decreased from
149 per 1000 births in 1871-80 to 127 per 1000 births in 1910. In
reference to this remarkable fall which has taken place _pari passu_
with the fall in the birth-rate, Newsholme, the medical officer to the
Local Government Board, writes: "There can be no reasonable doubt that
much of the reduction has been caused by that 'concentration' on the
mother and the child which has been a striking feature of the last few
years. Had the experience of 1896-1900 held good there would have been
45,120 more deaths of infants in 1910 than actually occurred." In some
parts of the country, however, where the women go out to work in
factories (as in Lancashire and parts of Staffordshire) the infantile
mortality remains very high.
[4] Mrs. Bertrand Russell, "The Ghent School for Mothers," _Nineteenth
Century_, December, 1906.
[5] It is scarcely necessary to say that other classifications of social
reform on its more hygienic side may be put forward. Thus W.H. Allen,
looking more narrowly at the sanitary side of the matter, but without
confining his consideration to the nineteenth century, finds that there
are always seven stages: (1) that of racial tutelage, when sanitation
becomes conscious and receives the sanction of law; (2) the introduction
of sanitary comfort, well-paved streets, public sewers, extensive
waterworks; (3) the period of commercial sanitation, when the mercantile
classes insist upon such measures as quarantine and street-cleaning to
check the immense ravages of epidemics; (4) the introduction of
legislation against nuisances and the tendency to extend the definition
of nuisance, which for Bracton, in the fourteenth century, meant an
obstruction, and for Blackstone, in the eighteenth, included things
otherwise obnoxious, such as offensive trades and foul watercourses; (5)
the stage of precaution against the dangers incidental to the slums that
are fostered by modern conditions of industry; (6) the stage of
philanthropy, erecting hospitals, model tenements, schools, etc.; (7)
the stage of socialistic sanitation, when the community as a whole
actively seeks its own sanitary welfare, and devotes public funds to
this end. (W.H. Allen, "Sanitation and Social Progress," _American
Journal of Sociology_, March, 1903.)
[6] Dr. F. Bushee has pointed out ("Science and Social Progress,"
_Popular Science Monthly_, September, 1911) that there is a kind of
related progression between science and practice in this matter: "The
natural sciences developed first, because man was first interested in
the conquest of nature, and the simpler physical laws could be grasped
at an early period. This period brought an increase of wealth, but it
was wasteful of human life. The desire to save life led the way to the
study of biology. Knowledge of the physical environment and of life,
however, did not prevent social disease from flourishing, and did not
greatly improve the social condition of a large part of society. To
overcome these defects the social sciences within recent years have been
cultivated with great seriousness. Interest in the social sciences has
had to wait for the enlarged sympathies and the sense of solidarity
which has appeared with the growing interdependence of dense
populations, and these conditions have been dependent upon the advance
of the other sciences. With the cultivation of the social sciences, the
chain of knowledge will be complete, at least so far as the needs which
have already appeared are concerned. For each group of sciences will
solve one or more of the great problems which man has encountered in the
process of development. The physical sciences will solve the problems of
environment, the biological sciences the problems of life, and the
social sciences the problems of society."
[7] This exclusive pre-occupation with the improvement of the
environment has been termed Euthenics by Mrs. Ellen H. Richards, who has
written a book with this title, advocating euthenics in opposition to
eugenics.
[8] Not one of the four stages of social reform already summarized can
be neglected. On the contrary, they all need to be still further
consolidated in a completely national organization of health. I may
perhaps refer to the little book on _The Nationalization of Health_, in
which, many years ago, I foreshadowed this movement, as well as to the
recent work of Professor Benjamin Moore on the same subject. The
gigantic efforts of Germany, and later of England, to establish National
Insurance systems, bear noble witness to the ardour with which these two
countries, at all events, are moving towards the desired goal.
[9] In some countries, however, the decline, although traceable about
1876, only began to be pronounced somewhat later, in Austria in 1883, in
the German Empire, Hungary and Italy in 1885, and in Prussia in 1886.
Most of these countries, though late in following the modern movement of
civilization initiated by France, are rapidly making their way in the
same direction. Thus the birth-rate in Berlin is already as low as that
of Paris ten years ago, although the French decline began at a very
early period. In Norway, again, the decline was not marked until 1900,
but the birth-rate has nevertheless already fallen as low as that of
Sweden, where the fall began very much earlier.
[10] "Foresight and self-control is, and always must be, the ground and
medium of all Moral Socialism," says Bosanquet (_The Civilization of
Christendom_, p. 336), using the term "Socialism" in the wide and not in
the economic sense. We see the same civilized growth of foresight and
self-control in the decrease of drunkenness. Thus in England the number
of convictions for drunkenness, while varying greatly in different parts
of the country, is decreasing for the whole country at the rapid rate of
5000 to 8000 a year, notwithstanding the constant growth of the
population. It is incorrect to suppose that this decrease has any
connection with decreased opportunities for drinking; thus in London
County and in Cardiff the proportion of premises licensed for drinking
is the same, yet while the convictions for drunkenness in 1910 were in
London 83 per 10,000 inhabitants, in Cardiff they were under 6 per
10,000.
[11] Thus Heron finds that in London during the past fifty years there
has been 100 per cent increase in the intensity of the relation between
low social birth and high birth-rate, and that the high birth-rate of
the lower social classes is not fully compensated by their high
death-rate (D. Heron, "On the Relation of Fertility in Man to Social
Status," _Drapers' Company Research Memoirs_, No. I, 1906). As, however,
Newsholme and Stevenson point out (_Journal Royal Statistical Society_,
April, 1906, p. 74), the net addition to the population made by the best
social classes is at so very slightly lower a rate than that made by the
poorest class that, even if we consent to let the question rest on this
ground, there is still no urgent need for the wailings of Cassandra.
[12] _Sociological Papers_ of the Sociological Society, 1904, p. 35.
[13] There is a certain profit in studying one's own ancestry. It has
been somewhat astonishing to me to find how very slight are the social
oscillations traceable in a middle-class family and the families it
intermarries with through several centuries. A professional family tends
to form a caste marrying within that caste. An ambitious member of the
family may marry a baronet's daughter, and another, less pretentious, a
village tradesman's daughter; but the general level is maintained
without rising or falling. Occasionally, it happens that the ambitious
and energetic son of a prosperous master-craftsman becomes a
professional man, marries into the professional caste, and founds a
professional family; such a family seems to flourish for some three
generations, and then suddenly fails and dies out in the male line,
while the vigour of the female line is not impaired.
[14] The new social adjustment of a family, it is probable, is always
difficult, and if the change is sudden or extreme, the new environment
may rapidly prove fatal to the family. Lorenz (_Lehrbuch der
Genealogie_, p. 135) has shown that when a peasant family reaches an
upper social class it dies out in a few generations.
[15] See, on this point, Reibmayr, _Entwicklungsgeschichte des Talentes
und Genies_, Vol. I, ch. VII.
[16] Fahlbeck, _op. cit._, p. 168.
[17] Regeneration implies that there has been degeneration, and it cannot
be positively affirmed that such degeneration has, on the whole,
occurred in such a manner as to affect the race. Reibmayr (_Die
Entwicklungsgeschichte des Talentes und Genies_, Bd. I, p. 400) regards
degeneration as a process setting in with urbanization and the tendency
to diminished population; if so, it is but another name for
civilization, and can only be condemned by condemning civilization,
whether or not physical deterioration occurs. The Inter-departmental
Commission on Physical Deterioration held in 1904, in London, concluded
that there are no sufficient statistical or other data to prove that the
physique of the people in the present, as compared with the past, has
undergone any change; and this conclusion was confirmed by the
Director-General of the Army Medical Service. There is certainly good
reason to believe that urban populations (and especially industrial
workers in factories) are inferior in height and weight and general
development to rural populations, and less fit for military or similar
service. The stunted development of factory workers in the East End of
London was noted nearly a century ago, and German military experience
distinctly shows the inferiority of the town-dweller to the
country-dweller. (See e.g. Weyl, _Handbuch der Hygiene_, Supplement, Bd.
IV, pp. 746 _et seq._; _Politisch-Anthropologische Revue_, 1905, pp. 145
_et seq._) The proportion of German youths fit for military service
slowly decreases every year; in 1909 it was 53.6 per cent, in 1910 only
53 per cent; of those born in the country and engaged in agricultural or
forest work 58.2 were found fit; of those born in the country and
engaged in other industries, 55.1 per cent; of those born in towns, but
engaged in agricultural or forest work, 56.2 per cent; of those born in
towns and engaged in other industries 47.9 per cent. It is fairly clear
that this deterioration under urban and industrial conditions cannot
properly be termed a racial degeneration. It is, moreover, greatly
improved even by a few months' training, and there is an immense
difference between the undeveloped, feeble, half-starved recruit from
the slums and the robust, broad-shouldered veteran when he leaves the
army. The term "aggeneration"--not beyond criticism, though it is free
from the objection to "regeneration"--was proposed by Prof. Christian
von Ehrenfels ("Die Aufsteigende Entwicklung des Menschen,"
_Politisch-Anthropologische Revue_, April, 1903, p. 50).
[18] It is unnecessary to touch here on the question of infant mortality,
which has already been referred to, and will again come in for
consideration in a later chapter. It need only be said that a high
birth-rate is inextricably combined with a high death-rate. The European
countries with the highest birth-rates are, in descending order: Russia,
Bulgaria, Roumania, Servia, and Hungary. The European countries with the
highest death-rates are, in descending order, almost the same: Russia,
Hungary, Spain, Bulgaria, and Servia, It is the same outside Europe.
Thus Chile, with a birth-rate which comes next after Roumania, has a
death-rate that is only second to Russia.
[19] Nyström (_La Vie Sexuelle_, 1910, p. 248) believes that "the time is
coming when it will be considered the duty of municipal authorities, if
they have found by experience or have reason to suspect that children
will be thrown upon the parish, to instruct parents in methods of
preventive conception."
[20] The directly unfavourable influences on the child of too short an
interval between its birth and that of the previous child has been
shown, for instance, by Dr. R.J. Ewart ("The Influence of Parental Age
on Offspring," _Eugenics Review_, October, 1911). He has found at
Middlesbrough that children born at an interval of less than two years
after the birth of the previous child still show at the age of six a
notable deficiency in height, weight, and intelligence, when compared
with children born after a longer interval, or with first-born children.
[21] _Tatler_, Vol. II, No. 175, 1709.
[22] "Write Man for Primula, and the stage of the world for that of the
greenhouse," says Professor Bateson (_Biological Fact and the Structure
of Society_, 1912, p. 9), "and I believe that with a few generations of
experimental breeding we should acquire the power similarly to determine
how the varieties of men should be represented in the generations that
succeed." But Bateson proceeds to point out that our knowledge is still
very inadequate, and he is opposed to eugenics by Act of Parliament.
[23] E. Solmi, _La Città del Sole di Campanella_, 1904, p. xxxiv.
[24] Only a year before his death Galton wrote (Preface to _Essays in
Eugenics_): "The power by which Eugenic reform must chiefly be effected
is that of Popular Opinion, which is amply strong enough for that
purpose whenever it shall be roused."
[25] It may perhaps be necessary to remark that by sterilization is here
meant, not castration, but, in the male vasectomy (and a corresponding
operation in the female), a simple and harmless operation which involves
no real mutilation and no loss of power beyond that of procreation. See
on this and related points, Havelock Ellis, _Studies in the Psychology
of Sex_, Vol. VI, "Sex in Relation to Society," chap. XII.
[26] The term "feeble-minded" may be used generally to cover all degrees
of mental weakness. In speaking a little more precisely, however, we
have to recognize three main degrees of congenital mental weakness:
_feeble-mindedness_, in which with care and supervision it is possible
to work and earn a livelihood; _imbecility_, in which the subject is
barely able to look after himself, and sometimes only has enough
intelligence to be mischievous (the moral imbecile); and _idiocy_, the
lowest depth of all, in which the subject has no intelligence and no
ability to look after himself. More elaborate classifications are
sometimes proposed. The method of Binet and Simon renders possible a
fairly exact measurement of feeble-mindedness.
[27] Mott (_Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry_, Vol. V, 1911) accepts
the view that in some cases feeble-mindedness is simply a form of
congenital syphilis, but he points out that feeble-mindedness abounds in
many rural districts where syphilis, as well as alcoholism, is very
rare, and concludes by emphasizing the influence of heredity; the
prevalence of feeble-mindedness in these rural districts is thus due to
the fact that the mentally and physically fit have emigrated to the
great industrial centres, leaving the unfit to procreate the race.