Within the last minute seven new citizens were born into that great
English-speaking community which is scattered under various flags and
governments throughout the world. And according to the line of thought
developed in the previous paper we perceive that the real and ultimate
business, so far as this world goes, of every statesman, every social
organizer, every philanthropist, every business manager, every man
who lifts his head for a moment from the mean pursuit of his immediate
personal interests, from the gratification of his private desires, is,
as the first and immediate thing, to do his best for these new-comers,
to get the very best result, so far as his powers and activities can
contribute to it, from their undeveloped possibilities. And in the next
place, as a remoter, but perhaps finally more fundamental duty, he has
to inquire what may be done individually or collectively to raise the
standard and quality of the average birth. All the great concerns of
life work out with a very little analysis to that, even our wars, our
orgies of destruction, have, at the back of them, a claim, an intention,
however futile in its conception and disastrous in its consequences, to
establish a wider security, to destroy a standing menace, to open new
paths and possibilities, in the interest of the generations still
to come. One may present the whole matter in a simplified picture by
imagining all our statesmen, our philanthropists and public men, our
parties and institutions gathered into one great hall, and into this
hall a huge spout, that no man can stop, discharges a baby every eight
seconds. That is, I hold, a permissible picture of human life, and
whatever is not represented at all in that picture is a divergent and
secondary concern. Our success or failure with that unending stream of
babies is the measure of our civilization; every institution stands
or falls by its contribution to that result, by the improvement of the
children born, or by the improvement in the quality of births attained
under its influence.
To begin these speculations in logical order we must begin at the birth
point, we must begin by asking how much may we hope, now or at a later
time, to improve the supply of that raw material which is perpetually
dumped upon our hands? Can we raise, and if so, what can we do to raise
the quality of the average birth?
This speculation is as old at least as Plato, and as living as the seven
or eight babies born into the English-speaking world since the reader
began this Paper. The conclusion that if we could prevent or discourage
the inferior sorts of people from having children, and if we could
stimulate and encourage the superior sorts to increase and multiply, we
should raise the general standard of the race, is so simple, so obvious,
that in every age I suppose there have been voices asking in amazement,
why the thing is not done? It is so usual to answer that it is not done
on account of popular ignorance, public stupidity, religious prejudice
or superstition, that I shall not apologize for giving some little
space here to the suggestion that in reality it is not done for quite a
different reason.
We blame the popular mind overmuch. Earnest but imperfect men, with
honest and reasonable but imperfect proposals for bettering the world,
are all too apt to raise this bitter cry of popular stupidity, of the
sheep-like quality of common men. An unjustifiable persuasion of
moral and intellectual superiority is one of the last infirmities of
innovating minds. We may be right, but we must be provably, demonstrably
and overpoweringly right before we are justified in calling the
dissentient a fool. I am one of those who believe firmly in the
invincible nature of truth, but a truth that is badly put is not a
truth, but an infertile hybrid lie. Before we men of the study blame the
general body of people for remaining unaffected by reforming proposals
of an almost obvious advantage, it would be well if we were to change
our standpoint and examine our machinery at the point of application.
A rock-drilling machine may be excellently invented and in the most
perfect order except for a want of hardness in the drill, and yet there
will remain an unpierced rock as obdurate as the general public to so
many of our innovations.
I believe that if a canvass of the entire civilized world were put to
the vote in this matter, the proposition that it is desirable that the
better sort of people should intermarry and have plentiful children,
and that the inferior sort of people should abstain from multiplication,
would be carried by an overwhelming majority. They might disagree with
Plato’s methods, [Footnote: _The Republic_, Bk. V.] but they would
certainly agree to his principle. And that this is not a popular error
Mr. Francis Galton has shown. He has devoted a very large amount of
energy and capacity to the vivid and convincing presentation of this
idea, and to its courageous propagation. His Huxley Lecture to the
Anthropological Institute in 1901 [Footnote: _Nature_, vol. lxiv.
p. 659.] puts the whole matter as vividly as it ever can be put. He
classifies humanity about their average in classes which he indicates
by the letters R S T U V rising above the average and r s t u v falling
below, and he saturates the whole business in quantitative colour.
Indeed, Mr. Galton has drawn up certain definite proposals. He has
suggested that “noble families” should collect “fine specimens of
humanity” around them, employing these fine specimens in menial
occupations of a light and comfortable sort, that will leave a
sufficient portion of their energies free for the multiplication of
their superior type. “Promising young couples” might be given “healthy
and convenient houses at low rentals,” he suggests, and no doubt it
could be contrived that they should pay their rent partly or entirely
per stone of family annually produced. And he has also proposed that
“diplomas” should be granted to young men and women of high class--big
S and upward--and that they should be encouraged to intermarry young. A
scheme of “dowries” for diploma holders would obviously be the simplest
thing in the world. And only the rules for identifying your great S T U
and V in adolescence, are wanting from the symmetrical completeness of
his really very noble-spirited and high-class scheme.
At a more popular level Mrs. Victoria Woodhull Martin has battled
bravely in the cause of the same foregone conclusion. The work
of telling the world what it knows to be true will never want
self-sacrificing workers. The _Humanitarian_ was her monthly organ of
propaganda. Within its cover, which presented a luminiferous stark
ideal of exemplary muscularity, popular preachers, popular bishops, and
popular anthropologists vied with titled ladies of liberal outlook in
the service of this conception. There was much therein about the Rapid
Multiplication of the Unfit, a phrase never properly explained, and I
must confess that the transitory presence of this instructive little
magazine in my house, month after month (it is now, unhappily, dead),
did much to direct my attention to the gaps and difficulties that
intervene between the general proposition and its practical application
by sober and honest men. One took it up and asked time after time, “Why
should there be this queer flavour of absurdity and pretentiousness
about the thing?” Before the _Humanitarian_ period I was entirely in
agreement with the _Humanitarian’s_ cause. It seemed to me then that to
prevent the multiplication of people below a certain standard, and to
encourage the multiplication of exceptionally superior people, was the
only real and permanent way of mending the ills of the world. I think
that still. In that way man has risen from the beasts, and in that way
men will rise to be over-men. In those days I asked in amazement
why this thing was not done, and talked the usual nonsense about the
obduracy and stupidity of the world. It is only after a considerable
amount of thought and inquiry that I am beginning to understand why
for many generations, perhaps, nothing of the sort can possibly be done
except in the most marginal and tentative manner.
If to-morrow the whole world were to sign an unanimous round-robin
to Mr. Francis Galton and Mrs. Victoria Woodhull Martin, admitting
absolutely their leading argument that it _is_ absurd to breed our
horses and sheep and improve the stock of our pigs and fowls, while we
leave humanity to mate in the most heedless manner, and if, further,
the whole world, promising obedience, were to ask these two to gather
together a consultative committee, draw up a scheme of rules, and start
forthwith upon the great work of improving the human stock as fast as it
can be done, if it undertook that marriages should no longer be made in
heaven or earth, but only under licence from that committee, I venture
to think that, after a very brief epoch of fluctuating legislation, this
committee, except for an extremely short list of absolute prohibitions,
would decide to leave matters almost exactly as they are now; it would
restore love and private preference to their ancient authority and
freedom, at the utmost it would offer some greatly qualified advice, and
so released, it would turn its attention to those flaws and gaps in our
knowledge that at present render these regulations no more than a theory
and a dream.
The first difficulty these theorists ignore is this: we are, as a matter
of fact, not a bit clear what points to breed for and what points to
breed out.
The analogy with the breeder of cattle is a very misleading one. He
has a very simple ideal, to which he directs the entire pairing of his
stock. He breeds for beef, he breeds for calves and milk, he breeds
for a homogeneous docile herd. Towards that ideal he goes simply and
directly, slaughtering and sparing, regardless entirely of any divergent
variation that may arise beneath his control. A young calf with an
incipient sense of humour, with a bright and inquiring disposition, with
a gift for athleticism or a quaintly-marked hide, has no sort of chance
with him at all on that account. He can throw these proffered gifts
of nature aside without hesitation. Which is just what our theoretical
breeders of humanity cannot venture to do. They do not want a
homogeneous race in the future at all. They want a rich interplay of
free, strong, and varied personalities, and that alters the nature of
the problem absolutely.
This the reader may dispute. He may admit the need of variety, but he
may argue that this variety must arise from a basis of common endowment.
He may say that in spite of the complication introduced by the
consideration that a divergent variation from one ideal may be a
divergence towards another ideal, there remain certain definable points,
that could be bred for universally, for all that.
What are they?
There will be little doubt he will answer “Health.” After that probably
he may say “Beauty.” In addition the reader of Mr. Galton’s _Hereditary
Genius_ will probably say, “ability,” “capacity,” “genius,” and
“energy.” The reader of Doctor Nordau will add “sanity.” And the
reader of Mr. Archdall Reid will round up the list with “immunity” from
dipsomania and all contagious diseases. “Let us mark our human beings,”
the reader of that way of thinking will suggest, “let us give marks for
‘health,’ for ‘ability,’ for various sorts of specific immunity and so
forth, and let us weed out those who are low in the scale and multiply
those who stand high. This will give us a straight way to practical
amelioration, and the difficulty you are trying to raise,” he urges,
“vanishes forthwith.”
It would, if these points were really points, if “beauty,” “capacity,”
“health,” and “sanity” were simple and uniform things. Unfortunately
they are not simple, and with that fact a host of difficulties arise.
Let me take first the most simple and obvious case of “beauty.” If
beauty were a simple thing, it would be possible to arrange human beings
in a simple scale, according to whether they had more or less of this
simple quality--just as one can do in the case of what are perhaps
really simple and breedable qualities--height or weight. This person,
one might say, is at eight in the scale of beauty, and this at ten,
and this at twenty-seven. But it complicates the case beyond the
possibilities of such a scale altogether when one begins to consider
that there are varieties and types of beauty having very wide
divergences and made up of a varying number of elements in dissimilar
proportions. There is, for example, the flaxen, kindly beauty of the
Dutch type, the dusky Jewess, the tall, fair Scandinavian, the dark and
brilliant south Italian, the noble Roman, the dainty Japanese--to name
no others. Each of these types has its peculiar and incommensurable
points, and within the limits of each type you will find a hundred
divergent, almost unanalyzable, styles, a beauty of expression, a beauty
of carriage, a beauty of reflection, a beauty of repose, arising each
from a quite peculiar proportion of parts and qualities, and having no
definable relation at all to any of the others. If we were to imagine a
human appearance as made up of certain elements, a, b, c, d, e, f, etc.,
then we might suppose that beauty in one case was attained by a certain
high development of a and f, in another by a certain fineness of c and
d, in another by a delightfully subtle ratio of f and b.
A, b, c, d, e, F, etc.
a, b, _c_, _d_, e, f, etc.
a, _b_, c, d, e, _F_, etc.,
might all, for example, represent different types of beauty. Beauty
is neither a simple nor a constant thing; it is attainable through a
variety of combinations, just as the number 500 can be got by adding or
multiplying together a great variety of numerical arrangements. Two long
numerical formulae might both simplify out to 500, but half the length
of one truncated and put end on to the truncated end of the other, might
give a very different result. It is quite conceivable that you might
select and wed together all the most beautiful people in the world and
find that in nine cases out of ten you had simply produced mediocre
offspring or offspring below mediocrity. Out of the remaining tenth a
great majority would be beautiful simply by “taking after” one or other
parent, simply through the predominance, the _prepotency,_ of one parent
over the other, a thing that might have happened equally well if the
other parent was plain. The first sort of beauty (in my three formulae)
wedding the third sort of beauty, might simply result in a rather ugly
excess of F, and again the first sort might result from a combination of
a, b, c, d, e, _F_, etc.,
and
_A_, b, c, d, e, f, etc.,
neither of which arrangements, very conceivably, may be beautiful at all
when it is taken alone. In this respect, at any rate, personal value and
reproductive value may be two entirely different things.
Now what the elements of personal aspect really are, what these
elements a, b, c, d, e, f, etc., may be, we do not know with any sort
of exactness. Possibly height, weight, presence of dark pigment in the
hair, whiteness of skin, presence of hair upon the body, are simple
elements in inheritance that will follow Galton’s arithmetical treatment
of heredity with some exactness. But we are not even sure of that. The
height of one particular person may be due to an exceptional length of
leg and neck, of another to an abnormal length of the vertebral bodies
of the backbone; the former may have a rather less than ordinary
backbone, the latter a stunted type of limb, and an intermarriage may
just as conceivably (so far as our present knowledge goes) give the
backbone of the first and the legs of the second as it may a very tall
person.
The fact is that in this matter of beauty and breeding for beauty we are
groping in a corner where science has not been established. No doubt
the corner is marked out as a part of the “sphere of influence” of
anthropology, but there is not the slightest indication of an effective
occupation among these raiding considerations and uncertain facts.
Until anthropology produces her Daltons and Davys we must fumble in this
corner, just as the old alchemists fumbled for centuries before the dawn
of chemistry. Our utmost practice here must be empirical. We do not know
the elements of what we have, the human characteristics we are working
upon to get that end. The sentimentalized affinities of young persons in
their spring are just as likely to result in the improvement of the
race in this respect as the whole science of anthropology in its present
state of evolution.
I have suggested that “beauty” is a term applied to a miscellany of
synthetic results compounded of diverse elements in diverse proportions;
and I have suggested that one can no more generalize about it in
relation to inheritance with any hope of effective application than one
can generalize about, say, “lumpy substances” in relation to chemical
combination. By reasoning upon quite parallel lines nearly every
characteristic with which Mr. Galton deals in his interesting and
suggestive but quite inconclusive works, can be demonstrated to consist
in a similar miscellany. He speaks of “eminence,” of “success,” of
“ability,” of “zeal,” and “energy,” for example, and except for the
last two items I would submit that these qualities, though of enormous
personal value, are of no practical value in inheritance whatever; that
to wed “ability” to “ability” may breed something less than mediocrity,
and that “ability” is just as likely or just as unlikely to be prepotent
and to assert itself in descent with the most casually selected
partner as it is with one picked with all the knowledge, or rather
pseudo-knowledge, anthropology in its present state can give us.
When, however, we turn to “zeal” or “energy” or “go,” we do seem to be
dealing with a simpler and more transmissible thing. Let us assume that
in this matter there is a wide range of difference that may be arranged
in a direct and simple scale in quantitative relation to the gross
output of action of different human beings. One passes from the
incessant employment of such a being as Gladstone at the one extreme,
a loquacious torrent of interests and achievements, to the extreme of
phlegmatic lethargy on the other. Call the former a high energetic and
the latter low. Quite possibly it might be found that we could breed
“high energetics.” But before we did so we should have to consider
very gravely that the “go” and “energy” of a man have no ascertainable
relation to many other extremely important considerations. Your
energetic person may be moral or immoral, an unqualified egotist or as
public spirited as an ant, sane, or a raving lunatic. Your phlegmatic
person may ripen resolves and bring out truths, with the incomparable
clearness of a long-exposed, slowly developed, slowly printed
photograph. A man who would exchange the slow gigantic toil of that
sluggish and deliberate person, Charles Darwin, for the tumultuous
inconsequence and (as some people think it) the net mischief of a
Gladstone, would no doubt be prepared to substitute a Catherine-wheel
in active eruption for the watch of less adventurous men. But before
we could induce the community as a whole to make a similar exchange, he
would have to carry on a prolonged and vigorous propaganda.
For my own part--and I write as an ignorant man in a realm where
ignorance prevails--I am inclined to doubt the simplicity and
homogeneity even of this quality of “energy” or “go.” A person without
restraint, without intellectual conscience, without critical faculty,
may write and jabber and go to and fro and be here and there, simply
because every impulse is obeyed so soon as it arises. Another person
may be built upon an altogether larger scale of energy, but may be
deliberate, concentrated, and fastidious, bent rather upon truth and
permanence than upon any immediate quantitative result, and may appear
to any one but an extremely penetrating critic, as inferior in energy to
the former. So far as our knowledge goes at present, what is popularly
known as “energy” or “go” is just as likely to be a certain net
preponderance of a varied miscellany of impulsive qualities over a
varied miscellany of restraints and inhibitions, as it is to prove a
simple indivisible quality transmissible intact. We are so profoundly
ignorant in these matters, so far from anything worthy of the name of
science, that one view is just as permissible and just as untrustworthy
as the other.
Even the qualification of “health” is not sufficient. A thoughtless
person may say with the most invincible air, “Parents should, at any
rate, be healthy,” but that alone is only a misleading vague formula for
good intentions. In the first place, there is every reason to believe
that transitory ill-health in the parent is of no consequence at all
to the offspring. Neither does acquired constitutional ill-health
necessarily transmit to a child; it may or it may not react upon the
child’s nutrition and training, but that is a question to consider
later. It is quite conceivable, it is highly probable, that there are
hereditary forms of ill-health, and that they may be eliminated from the
human lot by discreet and restrained pairing, but what they are and
what are the specific conditions of their control we do not know. And
furthermore, we are scarcely more certain that the condition of “perfect
health” in one human being is the same as the similarly named condition
in another, than we are that the beauty of one type is made up of the
same essential elements as the beauty of another. Health is a balance, a
balance of blood against nerve, of digestion against secretion, of heart
against brain. A heart of perfect health and vigour put into the body
of a perfectly healthy man who is built upon a slighter scale than that
heart, will swiftly disorganize the entire fabric, and burst its way
to a haemorrhage in lung perhaps, or brain, or wherever the slightest
relative weakening permits. The “perfect” health of a negro may be
a quite dissimilar system of reactions to the “perfect health” of a
vigorous white; you may blend them only to create an ailing mass of
physiological discords. “Health,” just as much as these other things,
is, for this purpose of marriage diplomas and the like, a vague,
unserviceable synthetic quality. It serves each one of us for our
private and conversational needs, but in this question it is not hard
enough and sharp--enough for the thing we want it to do. Brought to the
service of this fine and complicated issue it breaks down altogether. We
do not know enough. We have not analyzed enough nor penetrated enough.
There is no science yet, worthy of the name, in any of these
things. [Footnote: This idea of attempting to define the elements in
inheritance, although it is absent from much contemporary discussion,
was pretty evidently in mind in the very striking researches of the Abbé
Mendel to which Mr. Bateson--with a certain intemperance of manner--has
recently called attention. (Bateson, _Mendel’s Principles of Heredity_,
Cambridge University Press, 1902.)]
These considerations should at least suffice to demonstrate the entire
impracticability of Mr. Galton’s two suggestions. Moreover, this idea of
picking out high-scale individuals in any particular quality or group of
qualities and breeding them, is not the way of nature at all. Nature
is not a breeder; she is a reckless coupler and--she slays. It was a
popular misconception of the theory of the Survival of the Fittest,
a misconception Lord Salisbury was at great pains to display to the
British Association in 1894, that the average of a species in any
respect is raised by the selective inter-breeding of the individuals
above the average. Lord Salisbury was no doubt misled, as most people
who share his mistake have been misled, by the grammatical error of
employing the Survival of the Fittest for the Survival of the Fitter, in
order to escape a scarcely ambiguous ambiguity. But the use of the
word “Survival” should have sufficed to indicate that the real point of
application of the force by which Nature modifies species and raises
the average in any quality, lies not in selective breeding, but in the
disproportionately numerous deaths of the individuals below the average.
And even the methods of the breeder of cattle, if they are to produce a
permanent alteration in the species of cattle, must consist not only
in breeding the desirable but in either killing the undesirable, or
at least--what is the quintessence, the inner reality of death--in
preventing them from breeding.
The general trend of thought in Mrs. Martin’s _Humanitarian_ was
certainly more in accordance with this reading of biological science
than were Mr. Galton’s proposals. There was a much greater insistence
upon the need of “elimination,” upon the evil of the “Rapid
Multiplication of the Unfit,” a word that, however, was never defined
and, I believe, really did not mean anything in particular in this
connection. And directly one does attempt to define it, directly one
sits down in a businesslike way to apply the method of elimination
instead of the method of selection, one is immediately confronted by
almost as complex an entanglement of difficulties in defining points to
breed out as one is by defining points to breed for. Almost, I say, but
not quite. For here there does seem to be, if not certainties, at least
a few plausible probabilities that a vigorous and systematic criticism
may perhaps hammer into generalizations of sufficient certainty to go
upon.
I believe that long before humanity has hammered out the question of
what is pre-eminently desirable in inheritance, a certain number of
things will have been isolated and defined as pre-eminently undesirable.
But before these are considered, let us sweep out of our present
regard a number of cruel and mischievous ideas that are altogether too
ascendant at the present time.
Anthropology has been compared to a great region, marked out indeed as
within the sphere of influence of science, but unsettled and for the
most part unsubdued. Like all such hinterland sciences, it is a happy
hunting-ground for adventurers. Just as in the early days of British
Somaliland, rascals would descend from nowhere in particular upon
unfortunate villages, levy taxes and administer atrocity in the name of
the Empire, and even, I am told, outface for a time the modest heralds
of the government, so in this department of anthropology the public mind
suffers from the imposition of theories and assertions claiming to be
“scientific,” which have no more relation to that organized system of
criticism which is science, than a brigand at large on a mountain has
to the machinery of law and police, by which finally he will be hanged.
Among such raiding theorists none at present are in quite such urgent
need of polemical suppression as those who would persuade the heedless
general reader that every social failure is necessarily a “degenerate,”
and who claim boldly that they can trace a distinctly evil and
mischievous strain in that unfortunate miscellany which constitutes “the
criminal class.” They invoke the name of “science” with just as much
confidence and just as much claim as the early Victorian phrenologists.
They speak and write with ineffable profundity about the “criminal” ear,
the “criminal” thumb, the “criminal” glance. They gain access to gaols
and pester unfortunate prisoners with callipers and cameras, and quite
unforgivable prying into personal and private matters, and they hold
out great hopes that by these expedients they will evolve at last a
“scientific” revival of the Kaffir’s witch-smelling. We shall catch our
criminals by anthropometry ere ever a criminal thought has entered their
brains. “Prevention is better than cure.” These mattoid scientists
make a direct and disastrous attack upon the latent self-respect of
criminals. And not only upon that tender plant, but also upon the
springs of human charity towards the criminal class. For the complex
and varied chapter of accidents that carries men into that net of
precautions, expedients, prohibitions, and vindictive reprisals, the
net of the law, they would have us believe there is a fatal necessity
inherent in their being. Criminals are born, not made, they allege. No
longer are we to say, “There, but for the grace of God, go I”--when the
convict tramps past us--but, “There goes another sort of animal that
is differentiating from my species and which I would gladly see
exterminated.”
Now every man who has searched his heart knows that this formulation of
“criminality” as a specific quality is a stupidity, he knows himself to
be a criminal, just as most men know themselves to be sexually rogues.
No man is born with an instinctive respect for the rights of any
property but his own, and few with a passion for monogamy. No man who
is not an outrageously vain and foolish creature but will confess
to himself that but for advantages and accidents, but for a chance
hesitation or a lucky timidity, he, too, had been there, under the
ridiculous callipers of witless anthropology. A criminal is no doubt of
less personal value to the community than a law-abiding citizen of the
same general calibre, but _it does not follow for one moment that he
is of less value as a parent._ His personal disaster may be due to the
possession of a bold and enterprising character, of a degree of pride
and energy above the needs of the position his social surroundings have
forced upon him. Another citizen may have all this man’s desires and
impulses, checked and sterilized by a lack of nervous energy, by an
abject fear of the policeman and of the consequences of the disapproval
of his more prosperous fellow-citizens. I will frankly confess that for
my own part I prefer the wicked to the mean, and that I would rather
trust the future to the former strain than to the latter. Whatever
preference the reader may entertain, there remains this unmistakable
objection to its application to breeding, that “criminality” is not a
specific simple quality, but a complex that may interfuse with other
complexes to give quite incalculable results in the offspring it
produces. So that here again, on the negative side, we find a general
expression unserviceable for our use. [Footnote: No doubt the home of
the criminal and social failure is generally disastrous to the children
born into it. That is a question that will be fully dealt; with in
a subsequent paper, and I note it here only to point out that it is
outside our present discussion, which is concerned not with the fate of
children born into the world, but with the prior question whether we
may hope to improve the quality of the average birth by encouraging some
sorts of people to have children and discouraging or forbidding others.
It is of vital importance to keep these two questions distinct, if we
are to get at last to a basis for effective action.]
But it will be alleged that although criminality as a whole means
nothing definite enough for our purpose, there can be picked out and
defined certain criminal (or at any rate disastrous) tendencies that
are simple, specific and transmissible. Those who have read Mr. Archdall
Reid’s _Alcoholism_, for example, will know that he deals constantly
with what is called the “drink craving” as if it were such a specific
simple inheritance. He makes a very strong case for this belief, but
strong as it is, I do not think it is going to stand the pressure of
a rigorously critical examination. He points out that races which
have been in possession of alcoholic drinks the longest are the least
drunken, and this he ascribes to the “elimination” of all those whose
“drink craving” is too strong for them. Nations unused to alcoholic
drink are most terribly ravaged at its first coming to them, may even be
destroyed by it, in precisely the same way that new diseases coming to
peoples unused to them are far more malignant than among peoples who
have suffered from them generation after generation. Such instances
as the terrible ravages of measles in Polynesia and the ruin worked by
fire-water among the Red Indians, he gives in great abundance. He infers
from this that interference with the sale of drink to a people may
in the long run do more harm than good, by preserving those who would
otherwise be eliminated, permitting them to multiply and so, generation
by generation, lowering the resisting power of the race. And he proposes
to divert temperance legislation from the persecution of drink makers
and sellers, to such remedies as the punishment of declared and
indisputable drunkards if they incur parentage, and the extension of the
grounds of divorce to include this ugly and disastrous habit.
I am not averse to Mr. Reid’s remedies because I think of the wife and
the home, but I would not go so far with him as to consider this “drink
craving” specific and simple, and I retain an open mind about the sale
of drink. He has not convinced me that there is an inherited “drink
craving” any more than there is an inherited tea craving or an inherited
morphia craving.
In the first place I would propound a certain view of the general
question of habits. My own private observations in psychology incline me
to believe that people vary very much in their power of acquiring habits
and in the strength and fixity of the habits they acquire. My most
immediate subject of psychological study, for example, is a man of
untrustworthy memory who is nearly incapable of a really deep-rooted
habit. Nothing is automatic with him. He crams and forgets languages
with an equal ease, gives up smoking after fifteen years of constant
practice; shaves with a conscious effort every morning and is capable
of forgetting to do so if intent upon anything else. He is generally
self-indulgent, capable of keen enjoyment and quite capable of
intemperance, but he has no invariable delights and no besetting sin.
Such a man will not become an habitual drunkard; he will not become
anything “habitual.” But with another type of man habit is indeed second
nature. Instead of the permanent fluidity of my particular case, such
people are continually tending to solidify and harden. Their memories
set, their opinions set, their methods of expression set, their delights
recur and recur, they convert initiative into mechanical habit day by
day. Let them taste any pleasure and each time they taste it they
deepen a need. At last their habits become imperative needs. With such
a disposition, external circumstances and suggestions, I venture to
believe, may make a man either into an habitual church-goer or
an habitual drunkard, an habitual toiler or an habitual rake. A
self-indulgent rather unsocial habit-forming man may very easily become
what is called a dipsomaniac, no doubt, but that is not the same thing
as an inherited specific craving. With drink inaccessible and other
vices offering his lapse may take another line. An aggressive, proud and
greatly mortified man may fall upon the same courses. An unwary youth of
the plastic type may be taken unawares and pass from free indulgence to
excess before he perceives that a habit is taking hold of him.
I believe that many causes and many temperaments go to the making of
drunkards. I have read a story by the late Sir Walter Besant, in which
he presents the specific craving as if it were a specific magic curse.
The story was supposed to be morally edifying, but I can imagine this
ugly superstition of the “hereditary craving”--it is really nothing
more--acting with absolutely paralyzing effect upon some credulous
youngster struggling in the grip of a developing habit. “It’s no good
trying,”--that quite infernal phrase!
It may be urged that this attempt to whittle down the “inherited
craving” to a habit does not meet Mr. Reid’s argument from the gradual
increase of resisting power in races subjected to alcoholic temptation,
an increase due to the elimination of all the more susceptible
individuals. There can be no denying that those nations that have had
fermented drinks longest are the soberest, but that, after all, may be
only one aspect of much more extensive operations. The nations that have
had fermented drinks the longest are also those that have been civilized
the longest. The passage of a people from a condition of agricultural
dispersal to a more organized civilization means a very extreme change
in the conditions of survival, of which the increasing intensity
of temptation to alcoholic excess is only one aspect. Gluttony, for
example, becomes a much more possible habit, and many other vices tender
death for the first time to the men who are gathering in and about
towns. The city demands more persistent, more intellectualized and less
intense physical desires than the countryside. Moral qualities that were
a disadvantage in the dispersed stage become advantageous in the
city, and conversely. Rugged independence ceases to be helpful, and an
intelligent turn for give and take, for collaboration and bargaining,
makes increasingly for survival. Moreover, there grows very slowly an
indefinable fabric of traditional home training in restraint that is
very hard to separate in analysis from mental heredity. People who have
dwelt for many generations in towns are not only more temperate and less
explosive in the grosser indulgences, but more _urbane_ altogether. The
drunken people are also the “uncivil” peoples and the individualistic
peoples. The great prevalence of drunkenness among the upper classes two
centuries ago can hardly have been bred out in the intervening six or
seven generations, and it is also a difficult fact for Mr. Reid that
drunkenness has increased in France. In most of the cases cited by
Mr. Reid a complex of operating forces could be stated in which the
appearance of fermented liquors is only one factor, and a tangle of
consequent changes in which a gradually increasing insensibility to the
charms of intoxication was only one thread. Drunkenness has no doubt
played a large part in eliminating certain types of people from the
world, but that it specifically eliminates one specific definable type
is an altogether different matter.
Even if we admit Mr. Reid’s conception, this by no means solves the
problem. It is quite conceivable that the world could purchase certain
sorts of immunity too dearly. If it was a common thing to adorn the
parapets of houses in towns with piles of loose bricks, it is certain
that a large number of persons not immune to fracture of the skull by
falling bricks would be eliminated. A time would no doubt come
when those with a specific liability to skull fracture would all be
eliminated, and the human cranium would have developed a practical
immunity to damage from all sorts of falling substances. But there
would have been far more extensive suppressions than would appear in the
letter of the agreement.
This no doubt is a caricature of the case, but it will serve to
illustrate my contention that until we possess a far more subtle and
thorough analysis of the drunkard’s physique and mind--if it really is a
distinctive type of mind and physique--than we have at present, we
have no justification whatever in artificial intervention to increase
whatever eliminatory process may at present be going on in this respect.
Even if there is such a specific weakness, it is possible it has a
period of maximum intensity, and if that should be only a brief phase
in development--let us say at adolescence--it might turn out to be much
more to the advantage of humanity to contrive protective legislation
over the dangerous years. I argue to establish no view in these matters
beyond a view that at present we know very little.
Not only do ignorance and doubt bar our way to anything more than a
pious wish to eliminate criminality and drunkenness in a systematic
manner, but even the popular belief in ruthless suppression whenever
there is “madness in the family” will not stand an intelligent scrutiny.
The man in the street thinks madness is a fixed and definite thing, as
distinct from sanity as black is from white. He is always exasperated
at the hesitation of doctors when in a judicial capacity he demands: “Is
this man mad or isn’t he?” But a very little reading of alienists will
dissolve this clear assurance. Here again it seems possible that we have
a number of states that we are led to believe are simple because they
are gathered together under the generic word “madness,” but which
may represent a considerable variety of induced and curable and
non-inheritable states on the one hand and of innate and incurable and
heritable mental disproportions on the other.
The less gifted portion of the educated public was greatly delighted
some years ago by a work by Dr. Nordau called _Degeneration_, in which
a great number of abnormal people were studied in a pseudo-scientific
manner and shown to be abnormal beyond any possibility of dispute.
Mostly the samples selected were men of exceptional artistic and
literary power. The book was pretentious and inconsistent--the late Lord
Tennyson was quoted, I remember, as a typically “sane” poet in spite
of the scope afforded by his melodramatic personal appearance and his
morbid passion for seclusion--but it did at least serve to show that if
we cannot call a man stupid we may almost invariably call him mad with
some show of reason. The public read the book for the sake of its abuse,
applied the intended conclusion to every success that awakened its envy,
and failed altogether to see how absolutely the definition of madness
was destroyed. But if madness is indeed simply genius out of hand and
genius only madness under adequate control; if imagination is a snare
only to the unreasonable and a disordered mind only an excess of
intellectual enterprise--and really none of these things can be
positively disproved--then just as reasonable as the idea of suppressing
the reproduction of madness, is the idea of breeding it! Let us take all
these dull, stagnant, respectable people, one might say, who do nothing
but conform to whatever rule is established about them and obstruct
whatever change is proposed to them, whose chief quality is a sheer
incapacity to imagine anything beyond their petty experiences, and let
us tell them plainly, “It is time a lunatic married into your family.”
Let no one run away from this with the statement that I propose such a
thing should be done, but it is, at any rate in the present state of
our knowledge, as reasonable a proposal, to make as its quite frequently
reiterated converse.
If in any case we are in a position to intervene and definitely forbid
increase, it is in the case of certain specific diseases, which I
am told are painful and disastrous and inevitably transmitted to the
offspring of the person suffering from these diseases. If there are such
diseases--and that is a question the medical profession should be able
to decide--it is evident that to incur parentage while one suffers
from one of them or to transmit them in any avoidable way, is a cruel,
disastrous and abominable act. If such a thing is possible it seems to
me that in view of the guiding principle laid down in these papers it
might well be put at the nadir of crime, and I doubt if any step the
State might take to deter and punish the offender, short of torture,
would meet with opposition from sane and reasonable men. For my own part
I am inclined at times almost to doubt if there are such diseases. If
there are, the remedy is so simple and obvious, that I cannot but blame
the medical profession for very discreditable silences. I am no believer
in the final wisdom of the mass of mankind, but I do believe enough in
the sanity of the English-speaking peoples to be certain that any clear
statement and instruction they received from the medical profession, as
a whole, in these matters, would be faithfully observed. In the face
of the collective silence of this great body of specialists, there is
nothing for it but to doubt such diseases exist.
Such a systematic suppression of a specific disease or so is really the
utmost that could be done with any confidence at present, so far as the
State and collective action go. [Footnote: Since the above was written,
a correspondent in Honolulu has called my attention to a short but most
suggestive essay by Doctor Harry Campbell in the _Lancet_, 1898, ii.,
p. 678. He uses, of course, the common medical euphemism of “should not
marry” for “should not procreate,” and he gives the following as a list
of “bars to marriage”: pulmonary consumption, organic heart disease,
epilepsy, insanity, diabetes, chronic Bright’s disease, and rheumatic
fever. I wish I had sufficient medical knowledge to analyze that
proposal. He mentions inherited defective eyesight and hearing also, and
the “neurotic” quality, with which I have dealt in my text. He adds two
other suggestions that appeal to me very strongly. He proposes to bar
all “cases of non-accidental disease in which life is saved by the
surgeon’s knife,” and he instances particularly, strangulated hernia and
ovarian cyst. And he also calls attention to apoplectic breakdown
and premature senility. All these are suggestions of great value for
individual conduct, but none of them have that quality of certainty
that justifies collective action.] Until great advances are made in
anthropology--and at present there are neither men nor endowments to
justify the hope that any such advances will soon be made--that is as
much as can be done hopefully for many years in the selective breeding
of individuals by the community as a whole. [Footnote: If at any time
certainties should replace speculations in the field of inheritance,
then I fancy the common-sense of humanity will be found to be in favour
of the immediate application of that knowledge to life.] At present
almost every citizen in the civilized State respects the rules of the
laws of consanguinity, so far as they affect brothers and sisters, with
an absolute respect--an enormous triumph of training over instinct, as
Dr. Beattie Crozier has pointed out--and if in the future it should be
found possible to divide up humanity into groups, some of which could
pair with one another only to the disadvantage of the offspring, and
some of which had better have no offspring, I believe there would
be remarkably little difficulty in enforcing a system of taboos in
accordance with such knowledge. Only it would have to be absolutely
certain knowledge proved and proved again up to the hilt. If a truth is
worth application it is worth hammering home, and we have no right to
expect common men to obey conclusions upon which specialists are as
yet not lucidly agreed. [Footnote: It has been pointed out to me by my
friend, Mr. Graham Wallas, that although the State may not undertake
any positive schemes for selective breeding in the present state of our
knowledge, it can no more evade a certain reaction upon these things
than the individual can evade a practical solution. Although we
cannot say of any specific individual that he or she is, or is not, of
exceptional reproductive value to the State, we may still be able, he
thinks, to point out classes which are very probably, as a whole, _good_
reproductive classes, and we may be able to promote, or at least to
avoid hindering, their increase. He instances the female elementary
teacher as being probably, as a type, a more intelligent and more
energetic and capable girl than the average of the stratum from which
she arises, and he concludes she has a higher reproductive value--a view
contrary to my argument in the text that reproductive and personal value
are perhaps independent. He tells me that it is the practice of many
large school boards in this country to dismiss women teachers on
marriage, or to refuse promotion to these when they become mothers,
which is, of course, bad for the race if personal and reproductive value
are identical. He would have them retain their positions regardless of
the check to their efficiency maternity entails. This is a curiously
indirect way towards what one might call Galtonism. Practically he
proposes to endow mothers in the name of education. For my own part I do
not agree with him that this class, any more than any other class, can
be shown to have a high reproductive value--which is the matter under
analysis in this paper--though I will admit that an ex-teacher will
probably do infinitely more for her children than if she were an
illiterate or untrained woman. I can only reiterate my conviction that
nothing really effective can be organized in these matters until we are
much clearer than we are at present in our ideas about them, and that
a public body devoted to education has no business either to impose
celibacy, or subsidize families, or experiment at all in these affairs.
Not only in the case of elementary teachers, but in the case of
soldiers, sailors, and so on, the State may do much to promote or
discourage marriage and offspring, and no doubt it is also true, as Mr.
Wallas insists, that the problems of the foreign immigrant and of racial
intermarriage, loom upon us. But since we have no applicable science
whatever here, since there is no certainty in any direction that any
collective course may not be collectively evil rather than good, there
is nothing for it, I hold, but to leave these things to individual
experiment, and to concentrate our efforts where there is a clearer hope
of effective consequence. Leave things to individual initiative and some
of us will, by luck or inspiration, go right; take public action on
an insufficient basis of knowledge and there is a clear prospect of
collective error. The imminence of these questions argues for nothing
except prompt and vigorous research.]
That, however, is only one aspect of this question. There are others
from which the New Republican may also approach this problem of the
quality of the birth supply.
In relation to personal conduct all these things assume another colour
altogether. Let us be clear upon that point. The state, the community,
may only act upon certainties, but the essential fact in individual life
is experiment. Individuality is experiment. While in matters of public
regulation and control it is wiser not to act at all than to act upon
theories and uncertainties; while the State may very well wait for
a generation or half a dozen generations until knowledge comes up to
these--at present--insoluble problems, the private life _must_ go on
now, and go upon probabilities where certainties fail. When we do not
know what is indisputably right, then we have to use our judgments
to the utmost to do each what seems to him probably right. The New
Republican in his private life and in the exercise of his private
influence, must do what seems to him best for the race; [Footnote: He
would certainly try to discourage this sort of thing. The paragraph is
from the _Morning Post_ (Sept., 1902):--
“_Wedded in Silence_.--A deaf and dumb wedding was celebrated at Saffron
Walden yesterday, when Frederick James Baish and Emily Lettige King,
both deaf and dumb, were married. The bride was attended by deaf and
dumb bridesmaids, and upwards of thirty deaf and dumb friends were
present. The ceremony was performed by the Rev. A. Payne, of the Deaf
and Dumb Church, London.”] he must not beget children heedlessly and
unwittingly because of his incomplete assurance. It is pretty obviously
his duty to examine himself patiently and thoroughly, and if he feels
that he is, on the whole, an average or rather more than an average man,
then upon the cardinal principle laid down in our first paper, it is
his most immediate duty to have children and to equip them fully for
the affairs of life. Moreover he will, I think, lose no opportunity of
speaking and acting in such a manner as to restore to marriage something
of the solemnity and gravity the Victorian era--that age of nasty
sentiment, sham delicacy and giggles--has to so large an extent refused
to give it.
And though the New Republicans, in the existing lack of real guiding
knowledge, will not dare to intervene in specific cases, there is
another method of influencing parentage that men of good intent may
well bear in mind. To attack a specific type is one thing, to attack a
specific quality is another. It may be impossible to set aside selected
persons from the population and say to them, “You are cowardly, weak,
silly, mischievous people, and if we tolerate you in this world it is on
condition that you do not found families.” But it may be quite possible
to bear in mind that the law and social arrangements may foster and
protect the cowardly and the mean, may guard stupidity against the
competition of enterprise, and may secure honour, power and authority
in the hands of the silly and the base; and, by the guiding principle we
have set before ourselves, to seek every conceivable alteration of such
laws and such social arrangements is no more than the New Republican’s
duty. It may be impossible to select and intermarry the selected best
of our race, but at any rate we can do a thousand things to equalize the
chances and make good and desirable qualities lead swiftly and clearly
to ease and honourable increase.
At present it is a shameful and embittering fact that a gifted man from
the poorer strata of society must too often buy his personal development
at the cost of his posterity; he must either die childless and
successful for the children of the stupid to reap what he has sown, or
sacrifice his gift--a wretched choice and an evil thing for the world at
large. [Footnote: This aspect of New Republican possibilities comes in
again at another stage, and at that stage its treatment will be resumed.
The method and possibility of binding up discredit and failure with
mean and undesirable qualities, and of setting a premium upon the
nobler attributes, is a matter that touches not only upon the quality of
births, but upon the general educational quality of the State in which
a young citizen develops. It is convenient to hold over any detailed
expansions of this, therefore, until we come to the general question,
how the laws, institutions and customs of to-day go to make or unmake
the men of to-morrow.]
So far at least we may go, towards improving the quality of the average
birth now, but it is manifestly only a very slow and fractional advance
that we shall get by these expedients. The obstacle to any ampler
enterprise is ignorance and ignorance alone--not the ignorance of a
majority in relation to a minority, but an absolute want of knowledge.
If we knew more we could do more.
Our main attack in this enterprise of improving the birth supply must
lie, therefore, through research. If we cannot act ourselves, we may
yet hold a light for our children to see. At present, if there is a man
specially gifted and specially disposed for such intricate and laborious
inquiry, such criticism and experiment as this question demands, the
world offers him neither food nor shelter, neither attention nor help;
he cannot hope for a tithe of such honours as are thrust in profusion
upon pork-butchers and brewers, he will be heartily despised by
ninety-nine per cent. of the people he encounters, and unless he has
some irrelevant income, he will die childless and his line will perish
with him, for all the service he may give to the future of mankind.
And as great mental endowments do not, unhappily, necessarily involve
a passion for obscurity, contempt and extinction, it is probable that
under existing conditions such a man will give his mind to some pursuit
less bitterly unremunerative and shameful. It is a stupid superstition
that “genius will out” in spite of all discouragement. The fact that
great men have risen against crushing disadvantages in the past proves
nothing of the sort; this roll-call of survivors does no more than give
the measure of the enormous waste of human possibility human stupidity
has achieved. Men of exceptional gifts have the same broad needs as
common men, food, clothing, honour, attention, and the help of their
fellows in self-respect; they may not need them as ends, but they need
them by the way, and at present the earnest study of heredity produces
none of these bye-products. It lies before the New Republican to tilt
the balance in this direction.
There are, no doubt, already a number of unselfish and fortunately
placed men who are able to do a certain amount of work in this
direction; Professor Cossar Ewart, for example, one of those fine,
subtle, unhonoured workers who are the glory of British science and
the condemnation of our social order, has done much to clarify the
discussion of telegony and prepotency, and there are many such medical
men as Mr. Reid who broaden their daily practice by attention to
these great issues. One thinks of certain other names. Professors Karl
Pearson, Weldon, Lloyd Morgan, J. A. Thomson and Meldola, Dr. Benthall
and Messrs. Bateson, Cunningham, Pocock, Havelock Ellis, E. A. Fay
and Stuart Menteath occur to me, only to remind me how divided their
attention has had to be. As many others, perhaps, have slipped my
memory now. Not half a hundred altogether in all this wide world of
English-speaking men! For one such worker we need fifty if this science
of heredity is to grow to practicable proportions. We need a literature,
we need a special public and an atmosphere of attention and discussion.
Every man who grasps the New Republican idea brings these needs nearer
satisfaction, but if only some day the New Republic could catch the
ear of a prince, a little weary of being the costumed doll of grown-up
children, the decoy dummy of fashionable tradesmen, or if it could
invade and capture the mind of a multi-millionaire, these things might
come almost at a stride. This missing science of heredity, this unworked
mine of knowledge on the borderland of biology and anthropology, which
for all practical purposes is as unworked now as it was in the days of
Plato, is, in simple truth, ten times more important to humanity than
all the chemistry and physics, all the technical and industrial science
that ever has been or ever will be discovered.
So much for the existing possibilities of making the race better by
breeding. For the rest of these papers we shall take the births into the
world, for the most part, as we find them.
[Mr. Stuart Menteath remarks _apropos_ of this question of the
reproduction of exceptional people that it is undesirable to suggest
voluntary extinction in any case. If a man, thinking that his family
is “tainted,” displays so much foresighted patriotism, humility, and
lifelong self-denial as to have no children, the presumption is that the
loss to humanity by the discontinuance of such a type is greater than
the gain. “Conceit in smallest bodies strongest works,” and it does
not follow that a sense of one’s own excellence justifies one’s utmost
fecundity or the reverse. Mr. Vrooman, who, with Mrs. Vrooman, founded
Ruskin Hall at Oxford, writes to much the same effect. He argues that
people intelligent enough and moral enough to form such resolutions are
just the sort of people who ought not to form them. Mr. Stuart Menteath
also makes a most admirable suggestion with regard to male and female
geniuses who are absorbed in their careers. Although the genius may not
have or rear a large family, something might be done to preserve the
stock by assisting his or her brothers and sisters to support and
educate their children.]