people still have great confidence in their quacks and witch-doctors.
The elementary rules of sanitation are generally neglected, water
supplies are polluted, filth is piled up in the streets and the
courtyards, as it was in England and Western Europe generally until a
century ago, and the framing of regulations or the incursions of the
police have little effect on the habits of the people. Neglect of the
ordinary precautions of cleanliness is responsible for the wide
extension of syphilis by the use of drinking vessels, towels, etc., in
common. Not only is typhoid prevalent in nearly every province of
Russia, but typhus, which is peculiarly the disease of filth,
overcrowding, and starvation, and has long been practically extinct in
England, still flourishes and causes an immense mortality. The workers
often have no homes and sleep in the factories amidst the machinery, men
and women together; their food is insufficient, and the hours of labour
may vary from twelve to fourteen. When famine occurs these conditions
are exaggerated, and various epidemics ravage the population.
[126] It must, however, be remembered that in small and unstable
communities a considerable margin for error must be allowed, as the
crude birth-rate is unduly raised by an afflux of immigrants at the
reproductive age.
[127] Arsène Dumont, _Dépopulation et Civilisation_, 1890, chap. VI. The
nature of the restraint on fertility has been well set forth by Dr.
Bushee ("The Declining Birth-rate and its Causes," _Popular Science
Monthly_, August, 1903), mainly in the terms of Dumont's "social
capillarity" theory.
[128] Even Dr. Newsholme, usually so cautious and reliable an investigator
in this field, has been betrayed into a reference in this connection
(_The Declining Birth-rate_, 1911, p. 41) to the "increasing rarity of
altruism," though in almost the next paragraph he points out that the
large families of the past were connected with the fact that the child
was a profitable asset, and could be sent to work when little more than
an infant. The "altruism" which results in crushing the minds and bodies
of others in order to increase one's own earnings is not an "altruism"
which we need desire to perpetuate. The beneficial effect of legislation
against child-labour in reducing an unduly high birth-rate has often
been pointed out.
[129] It may suffice to take a single point. Large families involve the
birth of children at very short intervals. It has been clearly shown by
Dr. R.J. Ewart ("The Influence of Parental Age on Offspring," _Eugenics
Review_, October, 1911) that children born at an interval of less than
two years after the birth of the previous child, remain, even when they
have reached their sixth year, three inches shorter and three pounds
lighter than first-born children.
[130] For instance, Goldscheid, in _Höherentwicklung und
Menschenökonomie_; it is also, on the whole, the conclusion of
Newsholme, though expressed in an exceedingly temperate manner, in his
_Declining Birth-rate_.
[131] If, however, our birth-rate fanatics should hear of the results
obtained at the experimental farm at Roseville, California, by Professor
Silas Wentworth, who has found that by placing ewes in a field under the
power wires of an electric wire company, the average production of lambs
is more than doubled, we may anticipate trouble in many hitherto small
families. Their predecessors insisted, in the cause of religion and
morals, on burning witches; we must not be surprised if our modern
fanatics, in the same holy cause, clamour for a law compelling all
childless women to live under electric wires.
[132] J. Holt Schooling, "The English Marriage Rate," _Fortnightly
Review_, June, 1901.
[133] G. Udny Yule, "Changes in the Marriage-and Birth-rate in England,"
_Journal of the Royal Statistical Society_, March, 1906.
[134] At an earlier period Hooker had investigated the same subject
without coming to any very decisive conclusions ("Correlation of the
Marriage-rate with Trade," _Journ. Statistical Soc._, September, 1901).
Minor fluctuations in marriage and in trade per head, he found, tend to
be in close correspondence, but on the whole trade has risen and the
marriage-rate has fallen, probably, Hooker believed, as the result of
the gradual deferment of marriage.
[135] The higher standard need not be, among the mass of the population,
of a very exalted character, although it marks a real progress.
Newsholme and Stevenson (_op. cit._) term it a higher "standard of
comfort." The decline of the birth-rate, they say, "is associated with a
general raising of the standard of comfort, and is an expression of the
determination of the people to secure this greater comfort."
[136] Ploss, _Das Weib_, Vol. I, chap. XX.
[137] It must not, however, be assumed that the rural immigrants are in
the mass better suited to urban life than the urban natives. It is
probable that, notwithstanding their energy and robustness, the
immigrants are less suited to urban conditions than the natives.
Consequently a process of selection takes place among the immigrants,
and the survivors become, as it were, immunized to the poisons of urban
life. But this immunization is by no means necessarily associated with
any high degree of nervous vigour or general physical development.
[138] Havelock Ellis, _A Study of British Genius_, pp. 22, 43.
[139] "National Health: a Soldier's Study," _Contemporary Review_,
January, 1903. The Reports of the Inspector-General of Recruiting are
said to show that the recruits are every year smaller, lighter, and
narrower-chested.
[140] This has been well illustrated during the past forty years in the
flourishing county of Glamorgan in Wales, as is shown by Dr. R.S.
Stewart ("The Relationship of Wages, Lunacy, and Crime in South Wales,"
_Journal of Mental Science_, January, 1904). The staple industry here is
coal, 17 per cent of the population being directly employed in
coal-mining, and wages are determined by the sliding scale as it is
called, according to which the selling price of coal regulates the
wages. This leads to many fluctuations and sudden accesses of
prosperity. It is found that whenever wages rise there is a concomitant
increase of insanity and at the same time a diminished output of coal
due to slacking of work when earnings are greater; there is also an
increase of drunkenness and of crime. Stewart concludes that it is
doubtful whether increased material prosperity is conducive to
improvement in physical and mental status. It must, however, be pointed
out that it is a sudden and unstable prosperity, not necessarily a
gradual and stable prosperity, which is hereby shown to be pernicious.
[141] The relationship is sometimes expressed by saying that the more
highly differentiated the organism the fewer the offspring. According to
Plate we ought to say that, the greater the capacity for parental care
the fewer the offspring. This, however, comes to the same thing, since
it is the higher organisms which possess the increased capacity for
parental care. Putting it in the most generalized zoological way,
diminished offspring is the response to improved environment. Thus in
Man the decline of the birth-rate, as Professor Benjamin Moore remarks
(_British Medical Journal_, August 20, 1910, p. 454), is "the simple
biological reply to good economic conditions. It is a well-known
biological law that even a micro-organism, when placed in unfavourable
conditions as to food and environment, passes into a reproductive phase,
and by sporulation or some special type produces new individuals very
rapidly. The same condition of affairs in the human race was shown even
by the fact that one-half of the births come from the least favourably
situated one-quarter of the population. Hence, over-rapid birth-rate
indicates unfavourable conditions of life, so that (so long as the
population was on the increase) a lower birth-rate was a valuable
indication of a better social condition of affairs, and a matter on
which we should congratulate the country rather than proceed to
condolences."
[142] "The accumulations of racial experience tend to show," remarks Woods
Hutchinson ("Animal Marriage," _Contemporary Review_, October, 1904),
"that by the production of a smaller and smaller number of offspring,
and the expenditure upon those of a greater amount of parental care,
better results can be obtained in efficiency and capacity for survival."
[143] Toulouse, _Causes de la Folie_, p. 91; Magri, _Archivio di
Psichiatria_, 1896, fasc. vi-vii; Havelock Ellis, _A Study of British
Genius_, pp. 106 et seq.
[144] Emile Macquart, "Mortalité, Natalité, Dépopulation," _Bulletin de la
Société d'Anthropologie_, 1902.
[145] It is interesting to observe how Lafcadio Hearn, during the last
years of his life, was compelled, however unwillingly, to recognize this
change. See e.g. his _Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation_, 1904, ch.
XXI, on "Industrial Dangers." The Japanese themselves have recognized
it, and it is the feeling of the decay of their ancient ideals which has
given so great an impetus to new ethical movements, such as that,
described as a kind of elevated materialism, established by Yukichi
Fukuzawa (see _Open Court_, June, 1907).
[146] _Athenæum_, October 7, 1911.
VI
EUGENICS AND LOVE
Eugenics and the Decline of the Birth-rate--Quantity and Quality in
the Production of Children--Eugenic Sexual Selection--The Value of
Pedigrees--Their Scientific Significance--The Systematic Record of
Personal Data--The Proposal for Eugenic Certificates--St.
Valentine's Day and Sexual Selection--Love and Reason--Love Ruled
by Natural Law--Eugenic Selection not opposed to Love--No Need for
Legal Compulsion--Medicine in Relation to Marriage
I
During recent years the question of the future of the human race has
been brought before us in a way it has never been brought before. The
great expansive movement in civilized countries is over. Whereas, fifty
years ago, France seemed to present a striking contrast to other
countries in her low and gradually falling birth-rate, to-day, though
she has herself now almost reached a stationary position, France is seen
merely to have been the leader in a movement which is common to all the
more highly civilized nations. They are all now moving rapidly in the
direction in which she moved slowly. It was inevitable that this
movement, world-wide as it is, should call forth energetic protests, for
there is no condition of things so bad but it finds some to advocate its
perpetuation. There has, therefore, been much vigorous preaching against
"race suicide" by people who were deaf to the small voice of reason,
who failed to understand that this matter could not be settled by mere
consideration of the crude birth-rates, and that, even if it could, we
should have still to realize that, as an economist remarks, it is to the
decline of the birth-rate only that we probably owe it that the modern
civilized world has been saved from economic disaster.[147]
But whatever the causes of the declining birth-rate it is certain that
even when they are within our control they are of far too intimate a
character for the public moralist to be permitted to touch them, even
though we consider them to be in a disastrous state. It has to be
recognized that we are here in the presence, not of a merely local or
temporary tendency which might be shaken off with an effort, but of a
great fundamental law of civilization; and the fact that we encounter it
in our own race merely means that we are reaching a fairly high stage of
civilization. It is far from the first time, in the history of the
world, that the same phenomenon has been witnessed. It was seen in
Imperial Rome; it was seen, again, in the "Protestant Rome," Geneva.
Wherever are gathered together an exceedingly fine race of people, the
flower of the race, individuals of the highest mental and moral
distinction, there the birth-rate falls steadily. Vice or virtue alike
avails nothing in this field; with high civilization fertility
inevitably diminishes.
II
Under these circumstances it was to be expected that a new ideal should
begin to flash before men's eyes. If the ideal of _quantity_ is lost to
us, why not seek the ideal of _quality_? We know that the old rule:
"Increase and multiply" meant a vast amount of infant mortality, of
starvation, of chronic disease, of widespread misery. In abandoning that
rule, as we have been forced to do, are we not left free to seek that
our children, though few, should be at all events fit, the finest, alike
in physical and psychical constitution, that the world has seen?
Thus has come about the recent expansion of that conception of
_Eugenics_, or the science and art of Good Breeding in the human race,
which a group of workers, pioneered by Francis Galton[148]--at first in
England and later in America, Germany and elsewhere--have been
developing for some years past. Eugenics is beginning to be felt to
possess a living actuality which it failed to possess before. Instead of
being a benevolent scientific fad it begins to present itself as the
goal to which we are inevitably moving.
The cause of Eugenics has sometimes been prejudiced in the public mind
by a comparison with the artificial breeding of domestic animals. In
reality the two things are altogether different. In breeding animals a
higher race of beings manipulates a lower race with the object of
securing definite points that are of no use whatever to the animals
themselves, but of considerable value to the breeders. In our own race,
on the other hand, the problem of breeding is presented in an entirely
different shape. There is as yet no race of super-men who are prepared
to breed man for their own special ends. As things are, even if we had
the ability and the power, we should surely hesitate before we bred men
and women as we breed dogs or fowls. We may, therefore, quite put aside
all discussion of eugenics as a sort of higher cattle-breeding. It would
be undesirable, even if it were not impracticable.
But there is another aspect of Eugenics. Human eugenics need not be, and
is not likely to be, a cold-blooded selection of partners by some
outside scientific authority. But it may be, and is very likely to be, a
slowly growing conviction--first among the more intelligent members of
the community and then by imitation and fashion among the less
intelligent members--that our children, the future race, the
torch-bearers of civilization for succeeding ages, are not the mere
result of chance or Providence, but that, in a very real sense, it is
within our power to mould them, that the salvation or damnation of many
future generations lies in our hands since it depends on our wise and
sane choice of a mate. The results of the breeding of those persons who
ought never to be parents is well known; the notorious case of the Jukes
family is but one among many instances. We could scarcely expect in any
community that individuals like the Jukes would take the initiative in
movements for the eugenic development of the race, but it makes much
difference whether such families exist in an environment like our own
which is indifferent to the future of the race, or whether they are
surrounded by influences of a more wholesome character which can
scarcely fail to some extent to affect, and even to control, the
reckless and anti-social elements in the community.
In considering this question, therefore, we are justified in putting
aside not only any kind of human breeding resembling the artificial
breeding of animals, but also, at all events for the present, every
compulsory prohibition on marriage or procreation. We must be content to
concern ourselves with ideals, and with the endeavour to exert our
personal influence in the realization of these ideals.
III
Such ideals cannot, however, be left in the air; if they depend on
individual caprice nothing but fruitless confusion can come of them.
They must be firmly grounded on a scientific basis of ascertained fact.
This was always emphasized by Galton. He not only initiated schemes for
obtaining, but actually to some extent obtained, a large amount of
scientific knowledge concerning the special characteristics and
aptitudes of families, and his efforts in this direction have since been
largely extended and elaborated.[149] The feverish activities of modern
life, and the constant vicissitudes and accidents that overtake families
to-day, have led to an extraordinary indifference to family history and
tradition. Our forefathers, from generation to generation, carefully
entered births, baptisms, marriages, and deaths in the fly-leaf of the
Family Bible. It is largely owing to these precious entries that many
are able to carry their family history several centuries further back
than they otherwise could. But nowadays the Family Bible has for the
most part ceased to exist, and nothing else has taken its place. If a
man wishes to know what sort of stocks he has come from, unless he is
himself an antiquarian, or in a position to employ an antiquarian to
assist him, he can learn little, and in the most favourable position he
is helpless without clues; though with such clues he might often learn
much that would be of the greatest interest to him. The entries in the
Family Bible, however, whatever their value as clues and even as actual
data, do not furnish adequate information to serve as a guide to the
different qualities of stocks; we need far more detailed and varied
information in order to realize the respective values of families from
the point of view of eugenics. Here, again, Galton had already realized
the need for supplying a great defect in our knowledge, and his
Life-history Albums showed how the necessary information may be
conveniently registered.
The accumulated histories of individual families, it is evident, will in
time furnish a foundation on which to base scientific generalizations,
and eventually, perhaps, to justify practical action. Moreover, a vast
amount of valuable information on which it is possible to build up a
knowledge of the correlated characteristics of families, already lies at
present unused in the great insurance offices and elsewhere. When it is
possible to obtain a large collection of accurate pedigrees for
scientific purposes, and to throw them into a properly tabulated form,
we shall certainly be in a position to know more of the qualities of
stocks, of their good and bad characteristics, and of the degree in
which they are correlated.[150]
In this way we shall, in time, be able to obtain a clear picture of the
probable results on the offspring of unions between any kind of people.
From personal and ancestral data we shall be able to reckon the probable
quality of the offspring of a married couple. Given a man and woman of
known personal qualities and of known ancestors, what are likely to be
the personal qualities, physical, mental and moral, of the children?
That is a question of immense importance both for the beings themselves
whom we bring into the world, for the community generally, and for the
future race.
Eventually, it seems evident, a general system, whether private or
public, whereby all personal facts, biological and mental, normal and
morbid, are duly and systematically registered, must become inevitable
if we are to have a real guide as to those persons who are most fit, or
most unfit, to carry on the race.[151] Unless they are full and frank such
records are useless. But it is obvious that for a long time to come such
a system of registration must be private. According to the belief which
is still deeply rooted in most of us, we regard as most private those
facts of our lives which are most intimately connected with the life of
the race, and most fateful for the future of humanity. The feeling is no
doubt inevitable; it has a certain rightness and justification. As,
however, our knowledge increases we shall learn that we are, on the one
hand, a little more responsible for future generations than we are
accustomed to think, and, on the other hand, a little less responsible
for our own good or bad qualities. Our fiat makes the future man, but,
in the same way, we are ourselves made by a choice and a will not our
own. A man may indeed, within limits, mould himself, but the materials
he can alone use were handed on to him by his parents, and whether he
becomes a man of genius, a criminal, a drunkard, an epileptic, or an
ordinarily healthy, well-conducted, and intelligent citizen, must depend
at least as much on his parents as on his own effort or lack of effort,
since even the aptitude for effective effort is largely inborn. As we
learn to look on the facts from the only sound standpoint of heredity,
our anger or contempt for a failing and erring individual has to give
way to the kindly but firm control of a weakling. If the children's
teeth have been set on edge it is because the parents have eaten sour
grapes.
If, however, we certainly cannot bring legal or even moral force to
compel everyone to maintain such detailed registers of himself, his
ancestral stocks, and his offspring--to say nothing of inducing him to
make them public--there is something that we can do. We can make it to
his interest to keep such a record.[152] If it became an advantage in
life to a man to possess good ancestors, and to be himself a good
specimen of humanity in mind, character, and physique, we may be sure
that those who are above the average in these matters will be glad to
make use of that superiority. Insurance offices already make an
inquisition into these matters, to which no one objects, because a man
only submits to it for his own advantage; while for military and some
other services similar inquiries are compulsory. Eugenic certificates,
according to Galton's proposal, would be issued by a suitably
constituted authority to those candidates who chose to apply for them
and were able to pass the necessary tests. Such certificates would imply
an inquiry and examination into the ancestry of the candidate as well as
into his own constitution, health, intelligence and character; and the
possession of such a certificate would involve a superiority to the
average in all these respects. No one would be compelled to offer
himself for such examination, just as no one is compelled to seek a
university degree. But its possession would often be an advantage. There
is nothing to prevent the establishment of a board of examiners of this
kind to-morrow, and we may be sure that, once established, many
candidates would hasten to present themselves.[153] There are obviously
many positions in life wherein a certificate of this kind of superiority
would be helpful. But its chief distinction would be that its possession
would be a kind of patent of natural nobility; the man or woman who held
it would be one of Nature's aristocrats, to whom the future of the race
might be safely left without further question.
IV