[From the Morning Post of London, July 2, 1915]
Major Leonard Darwin, in his presidential address on "Eugenics During
and After the War" to the Eugenics Education Society at the Grafton
Galleries yesterday, said that our military system seemed to be
devised with the object of insuring that all who were defective should
be exempt from risks, whilst the strong, courageous, and patriotic
should be endangered. Men with noble qualities were being destroyed,
whilst the unfit remained at home to become fathers of families, and
this must deteriorate the natural qualities of the coming generations.
The chances of stopping war were small, and we must consider how to
minimize its evils. If conscription were adopted future wars would
produce less injury to the race, because the casualty lists would more
nearly represent a chance selection of the population; though whether
a conscript army would ever fight as well as our men were doing in
France was very doubtful. The injurious effects of the war on all
useful sections of the community should be mitigated. Military
training was eugenic if the men were kept with the colours only for
short periods. Officers must, of course, be engaged for long periods,
and amongst them the birth rate was very low. An increase of pay would
be beneficial in this respect, but only if given in the form of an
additional allowance for each living child. In the hope of increasing
the birth rate attempts were likely to be made to exalt the "unmarried
wife," a detestable term against which all true wives should protest.
If a change in moral standards was demanded in the hope that an
increase in the habit of forming irregular unions would result in an
increase in the population, that plea entirely failed because the
desired effect would not thus be produced. A special effort ought now
to be made on eugenic as well as on other grounds to maintain the high
standards of home life which had ever existed in our race, and which
had been in large measure the basis of our social and racial progress
in the past. If we did not now take some steps to insure our own
racial progress being at least as rapid as that of our neighbours, and
if our nation should in consequence cease in future to play a great
part in the noble and eternal struggle for human advancement, then the
fault would be ours.