Eugenics has been defined as "the study of agencies under social control
that may improve or impair the racial qualities of future generations,
either mentally or physically." While there is no inherent conflict
between Socialism and Eugenics, the latter is, broadly, the antithesis
of the former. In its propaganda, Socialism emphasizes the evil effects
of our industrial and economic system. It insists upon the necessity of
satisfying material needs, upon sanitation, hygiene, and education to
effect the transformation of society. The Socialist insists that healthy
humanity is impossible without a radical improvement of the social--and
therefore of the economic and industrial--environment. The Eugenist
points out that heredity is the great determining factor in the lives
of men and women. Eugenics is the attempt to solve the problem from the
biological and evolutionary point of view. You may bring all the changes
possible on "Nurture" or environment, the Eugenist may say to the
Socialist, but comparatively little can be effected until you control
biological and hereditary elements of the problem. Eugenics thus aims
to seek out the root of our trouble, to study humanity as a kinetic,
dynamic, evolutionary organism, shifting and changing with the
successive generations, rising and falling, cleansing itself of
inherent defects, or under adverse and dysgenic influences, sinking into
degeneration and deterioration.
"Eugenics" was first defined by Sir Francis Galton in his "Human
Faculty" in 1884, and was subsequently developed into a science and into
an educational effort. Galton's ideal was the rational breeding of human
beings. The aim of Eugenics, as defined by its founder, is to bring
as many influences as can be reasonably employed, to cause the useful
classes of the community to contribute MORE than their proportion to the
next generation. Eugenics thus concerns itself with all influences that
improve the inborn qualities of a race; also with those that develop
them to the utmost advantage. It is, in short, the attempt to bring
reason and intelligence to bear upon HEREDITY. But Galton, in spite
of the immense value of this approach and his great stimulation to
criticism, was completely unable to formulate a definite and practical
working program. He hoped at length to introduce Eugenics "into the
national conscience like a new religion.... I see no impossibility in
Eugenics becoming a religious dogma among mankind, but its details must
first be worked out sedulously in the study. Over-zeal leading to hasty
action, would do harm by holding out expectations of a new golden
age, which will certainly be falsified and cause the science to
be discredited. The first and main point is to secure the general
intellectual acceptance of Eugenics as a hopeful and most important
study. Then, let its principles work into the heart of the nation, who
will gradually give practical effect to them in ways that we may not
wholly foresee."(1)
Galton formulated a general law of inheritance which declared that an
individual receives one-half of his inheritance from his two
parents, one-fourth from his four grandparents, one-eighth from his
great-grandparents, one-sixteenth from his great-great grandparents, and
so on by diminishing fractions to his primordial ancestors, the sum
of all these fractions added together contributing to the whole of the
inherited make-up. The trouble with this generalization, from the modern
Mendelian point of view, is that it fails to define what "characters"
one would get in the one-half that came from one's parents, or the
one-fourth from one's grandparents. The whole of our inheritance is
not composed of these indefinitely made up fractional parts. We are
interested rather in those more specific traits or characters, mental
or physical, which, in the Mendelian view, are structural and functional
units, making up a mosaic rather than a blend. The laws of heredity are
concerned with the precise behavior, during a series of generations, of
these specific unit characters. This behavior, as the study of Genetics
shows, may be determined in lesser organisms by experiment. Once
determined, they are subject to prophecy.
The problem of human heredity is now seen to be infinitely more complex
than imagined by Galton and his followers, and the optimistic hope of
elevating Eugenics to the level of a religion is a futile one. Most of
the Eugenists, including Professor Karl Pearson and his colleagues of
the Eugenics Laboratory of the University of London and of the biometric
laboratory in University College, have retained the age-old point
of view of "Nature vs. Nurture" and have attempted to show the
predominating influence of Heredity AS OPPOSED TO Environment. This
may be true; but demonstrated and repeated in investigation after
investigation, it nevertheless remains fruitless and unprofitable from
the practical point of view.
We should not minimize the great outstanding service of Eugenics for
critical and diagnostic investigations. It demonstrates, not in terms of
glittering generalization but in statistical studies of investigations
reduced to measurement and number, that uncontrolled fertility is
universally correlated with disease, poverty, overcrowding and the
transmission of hereditable taints. Professor Pearson and his associates
show us that "if fertility be correlated with anti-social hereditary
characters, a population will inevitably degenerate."
This degeneration has already begun. Eugenists demonstrate that
two-thirds of our manhood of military age are physically too unfit
to shoulder a rifle; that the feeble-minded, the syphilitic, the
irresponsible and the defective breed unhindered; that women are driven
into factories and shops on day-shift and night-shift; that children,
frail carriers of the torch of life, are put to work at an early
age; that society at large is breeding an ever-increasing army of
under-sized, stunted and dehumanized slaves; that the vicious circle of
mental and physical defect, delinquency and beggary is encouraged,
by the unseeing and unthinking sentimentality of our age, to populate
asylum, hospital and prison.
All these things the Eugenists sees and points out with a courage
entirely admirable. But as a positive program of redemption, orthodox
Eugenics can offer nothing more "constructive" than a renewed "cradle
competition" between the "fit" and the "unfit." It sees that the
most responsible and most intelligent members of society are the less
fertile; that the feeble-minded are the more fertile. Herein lies the
unbalance, the great biological menace to the future of civilization.
Are we heading to biological destruction, toward the gradual but certain
attack upon the stocks of intelligence and racial health by the sinister
forces of the hordes of irresponsibility and imbecility? This is not
such a remote danger as the optimistic Eugenist might suppose. The
mating of the moron with a person of sound stock may, as Dr. Tredgold
points out, gradually disseminate this trait far and wide until it
undermines the vigor and efficiency of an entire nation and an entire
race. This is no idle fancy. We must take it into account if we wish to
escape the fate that has befallen so many civilizations in the past.
"It is, indeed, more than likely that the presence of this impairment
in a mitigated form is responsible for no little of the defective
character, the diminution of mental and moral fiber at the present day,"
states Dr. Tredgold.(2) Such populations, this distinguished authority
might have added, form the veritable "cultures" not only for contagious
physical diseases but for mental instability and irresponsibility also.
They are susceptible, exploitable, hysterical, non-resistant to external
suggestion. Devoid of stamina, such folk become mere units in a mob.
"The habit of crowd-making is daily becoming a more serious menace to
civilization," writes Everett Dean Martin. "Our society is becoming
a veritable babel of gibbering crowds."(3) It would be only the
incorrigible optimist who refused to see the integral relation between
this phenomenon and the indiscriminate breeding by which we recruit our
large populations.
The danger of recruiting our numbers from the most "fertile stocks" is
further emphasized when we recall that in a democracy like that of the
United States every man and woman is permitted a vote in the government,
and that it is the representatives of this grade of intelligence who may
destroy our liberties, and who may thus be the most far-reaching peril
to the future of civilization.
"It is a pathological worship of mere number," writes Alleyne Ireland,
"which has inspired all the efforts--the primary, the direct election
of Senators, the initiative, the recall and the referendum--to cure the
evils of mob rule by increasing the size of the mob and extending its
powers."(4)
Equality of political power has thus been bestowed upon the lowest
elements of our population. We must not be surprised, therefore, at
the spectacle of political scandal and graft, of the notorious and
universally ridiculed low level of intelligence and flagrant stupidity
exhibited by our legislative bodies. The Congressional Record mirrors
our political imbecility.
All of these dangers and menaces are acutely realized by the Eugenists;
it is to them that we are most indebted for the proof that reckless
spawning carries with it the seeds of destruction. But whereas the
Galtonians reveal themselves as unflinching in their investigation and
in their exhibition of fact and diagnoses of symptoms, they do not on
the other hand show much power in suggesting practical and feasible
remedies.
On its scientific side, Eugenics suggests the reestabilishment of
the balance between the fertility of the "fit" and the "unfit." The
birth-rate among the normal and healthier and finer stocks of humanity,
is to be increased by awakening among the "fit" the realization of the
dangers of a lessened birth-rate in proportion to the reckless breeding
among the "unfit." By education, by persuasion, by appeals to racial
ethics and religious motives, the ardent Eugenist hopes to increase the
fertility of the "fit." Professor Pearson thinks that it is especially
necessary to awaken the hardiest stocks to this duty. These stocks,
he says, are to be found chiefly among the skilled artisan class, the
intelligent working class. Here is a fine combination of health and
hardy vigor, of sound body and sound mind.
Professor Pearson and his school of biometrics here ignore or at least
fail to record one of those significant "correlations" which form the
basis of his method. The publications of the Eugenics Laboratory all
tend to show that a high rate of fertility is correlated with extreme
poverty, recklessness, deficiency and delinquency; similarly, that
among the more intelligent, this rate of fertility decreases. But the
scientific Eugenists fail to recognize that this restraint of fecundity
is due to a deliberate foresight and is a conscious effort to
elevate standards of living for the family and the children of the
responsible--and possibly more selfish--sections of the community. The
appeal to enter again into competitive child-bearing, for the benefit
of the nation or the race, or any other abstraction, will fall on deaf
ears.
Pearson has done invaluable work in pointing out the fallacies and the
false conclusions of the ordinary statisticians. But when he attempts to
show by the methods of biometrics that not only the first child but
also the second, are especially liable to suffer from transmissible
pathological defects, such as insanity, criminality and tuberculosis,
he fails to recognize that this tendency is counterbalanced by the high
mortality rate among later children. If first and second children reveal
a greater percentage of heritable defect, it is because the later born
children are less liable to survive the conditions produced by a large
family.
In passing, we should here recognize the difficulties presented by the
idea of "fit" and "unfit." Who is to decide this question? The grosser,
the more obvious, the undeniably feeble-minded should, indeed, not only
be discouraged but prevented from propagating their kind. But among the
writings of the representative Eugenists one cannot ignore the distinct
middle-class bias that prevails. As that penetrating critic, F. W.
Stella Browne, has said in another connection, "The Eugenics Education
Society has among its numbers many most open-minded and truly
progressive individuals but the official policy it has pursued for years
has been inspired by class-bias and sex bias. The society laments with
increasing vehemence the multiplication of the less fortunate classes at
a more rapid rate than the possessors of leisure and opportunity. (I do
not think it relevant here to discuss whether the innate superiority of
endowment in the governing class really is so overwhelming as to justify
the Eugenics Education Society's peculiar use of the terms `fit' and
`unfit'!) Yet it has persistently refused to give any help toward
extending the knowledge of contraceptives to the exploited classes.
Similarly, though the Eugenics Review, the organ of the society,
frequently laments the `selfishness' of the refusal of maternity by
healthy and educated women of the professional classes, I have yet
to learn that it has made any official pronouncement on the English
illegitimacy laws or any organized effort toward defending the unmarried
mother."
This peculiarly Victorian reticence may be inherited from the founder of
Eugenics. Galton declared that the "Bohemian" element in the Anglo-Saxon
race is destined to perish, and "the sooner it goes, the happier for
mankind." The trouble with any effort of trying to divide humanity
into the "fit" and the "unfit," is that we do not want, as H. G. Wells
recently pointed out,(5) to breed for uniformity but for variety. "We
want statesmen and poets and musicians and philosophers and strong
men and delicate men and brave men. The qualities of one would be the
weaknesses of the other." We want, most of all, genius.
Proscription on Galtonian lines would tend to eliminate many of the
great geniuses of the world who were not only "Bohemian," but actually
and pathologically abnormal--men like Rousseau, Dostoevsky, Chopin, Poe,
Schumann, Nietzsche, Comte, Guy de Maupassant,--and how many others?
But such considerations should not lead us into error of concluding that
such men were geniuses merely because they were pathological specimens,
and that the only way to produce a genius is to breed disease and
defect. It only emphasizes the dangers of external standards of "fit"
and "unfit."
These limitations are more strikingly shown in the types of so-called
"eugenic" legislation passed or proposed by certain enthusiasts.
Regulation, compulsion and prohibitions affected and enacted by
political bodies are the surest methods of driving the whole problem
under-ground. As Havelock Ellis has pointed out, the absurdity and even
hopelessness of effecting Eugenic improvement by placing on the statute
books prohibitions of legal matrimony to certain classes of people,
reveal the weakness of those Eugenists who minimize or undervalue the
importance of environment as a determining factor. They affirm that
heredity is everything and environment nothing, yet forget that it is
precisely those who are most universally subject to bad environment who
procreate most copiously, most recklessly and most disastrously. Such
marriage laws are based for the most part on the infantile assumption
that procreation is absolutely dependent upon the marriage ceremony,
an assumption usually coupled with the complementary one that the only
purpose in marriage is procreation. Yet it is a fact so obvious that it
is hardly worth stating that the most fertile classes who indulge in the
most dysgenic type of procreating--the feeble-minded--are almost totally
unaffected by marriage laws and marriage-ceremonies.
As for the sterilization of habitual criminals, not merely must we
know more of heredity and genetics in general, but also acquire
more certainty of the justice of our laws and the honesty of their
administration before we can make rulings of fitness or unfitness merely
upon the basis of a respect for law. On this point the eminent William
Bateson writes:(6) "Criminals are often feeble-minded, but as regards
those that are not, the fact that a man is for the purposes of Society
classified as a criminal, tells me little as to his value, still less
as to the possible value of his offspring. It is a fault inherent in
criminal jurisprudence, based on non-biological data, that the law must
needs take the nature of the offenses rather than that of the offenders
as the basis of classification. A change in the right direction has
begun, but the problem is difficult and progress will be very slow.... We
all know of persons convicted, perhaps even habitually, whom the
world could ill spare. Therefore I hesitate to proscribe the criminal.
Proscription... is a weapon with a very nasty recoil. Might not some
with equal cogency proscribe army contractors and their accomplices,
the newspaper patriots? The crimes of the prison population are petty
offenses by comparison, and the significance we attach to them is a
survival of other days. Felonies may be great events, locally, but they
do not induce catastrophies. The proclivities of the war-makers are
infinitely more dangerous than those of the aberrant beings whom from
time to time the law may dub as criminal. Consistent and portentous
selfishness, combined with dullness of imagination is probably just as
transmissible as want of self-control, though destitute of the amiable
qualities not rarely associated with the genetic composition of persons
of unstable mind."
In this connection, we should note another type of "respectable"
criminality noted by Havelock Ellis: "If those persons who raise the cry
of `race-suicide' in face of the decline of the birth-rate really had
the knowledge and the intelligence to realize the manifold evils which
they are invoking, they would deserve to be treated as criminals."
Our debt to the science of Eugenics is great in that it directs our
attention to the biological nature of humanity. Yet there is too great
a tendency among the thinkers of this school, to restrict their ideas
of sex to its expression as a purely procreative function. Compulsory
legislation which would make the inevitably futile attempt to prohibit
one of the most beneficent and necessary of human expressions, or
regulate it into the channels of preconceived philosophies, would reduce
us to the unpleasant days predicted by William Blake, when
"Priests in black gowns will be walking their rounds And binding with
briars our joys and desires."
Eugenics is chiefly valuable in its negative aspects. It is "negative
Eugenics" that has studied the histories of such families as the Jukeses
and the Kallikaks, that has pointed out the network of imbecility and
feeble-mindedness that has been sedulously spread through all strata
of society. On its so-called positive or constructive side, it fails to
awaken any permanent interest. "Constructive" Eugenics aims to arouse
the enthusiasm or the interest of the people in the welfare of the world
fifteen or twenty generations in the future. On its negative side it
shows us that we are paying for and even submitting to the dictates of
an ever increasing, unceasingly spawning class of human beings who never
should have been born at all--that the wealth of individuals and of
states is being diverted from the development and the progress of human
expression and civilization.
While it is necessary to point out the importance of "heredity" as
a determining factor in human life, it is fatal to elevate it to the
position of an absolute. As with environment, the concept of heredity
derives its value and its meaning only in so far as it is embodied
and made concrete in generations of living organisms. Environment and
heredity are not antagonistic. Our problem is not that of "Nature vs.
Nurture," but rather of Nature x Nurture, of heredity multiplied by
environment, if we may express it thus. The Eugenist who overlooks the
importance of environment as a determining factor in human life, is as
short-sighted as the Socialist who neglects the biological nature of
man. We cannot disentangle these two forces, except in theory. To the
child in the womb, said Samuel Butler, the mother is "environment." She
is, of course, likewise "heredity." The age-old discussion of "Nature
vs. Nurture" has been threshed out time after time, usually fruitlessly,
because of a failure to recognize the indivisibility of these biological
factors. The opposition or antagonism between them is an artificial and
academic one, having no basis in the living organism.
The great principle of Birth Control offers the means whereby the
individual may adapt himself to and even control the forces of
environment and heredity. Entirely apart from its Malthusian aspect or
that of the population question, Birth Control must be recognized, as
the Neo-Malthusians pointed out long ago, not "merely as the key of the
social position," and the only possible and practical method of human
generation, but as the very pivot of civilization. Birth Control which
has been criticized as negative and destructive, is really the greatest
and most truly eugenic method, and its adoption as part of the program
of Eugenics would immediately give a concrete and realistic power to
that science. As a matter of fact, Birth Control has been accepted by
the most clear thinking and far seeing of the Eugenists themselves as
the most constructive and necessary of the means to racial health.(7)
(1) Galton. Essays in Eugenics, p. 43.
(2) Eugenics Review, Vol. XIII, p. 349.
(3) Cf. Martin, The Behavior of Crowds, p. 6.
(4) Cf. Democracy and the Human Equation. E. P. Dutton &
Co., 1921.
(5) Cf. The Salvaging of Civilization.
(6) Common Sense in Racial Problems. By W. Bateson, M. A.
A., F. R. S.
(7) Among these are Dean W. R. Inge, Professor J. Arthur
Thomson, Dr. Havelock Ellis, Professor William Bateson,
Major Leonard Darwin and Miss Norah March.