The key fact in the new development of plutocracy is that it will use
its own blunder as an excuse for further crimes. Everywhere the very
completeness of the impoverishment will be made a reason for the
enslavement; though the men who impoverished were the same who enslaved.
It is as if a highwayman not only took away a gentleman’s horse and all
his money, but then handed him over to the police for tramping without
visible means of subsistence. And the most monstrous feature in this
enormous meanness may be noted in the plutocratic appeal to science, or,
rather, to the pseudo-science that they call Eugenics.
The Eugenists get the ear of the humane but rather hazy cliques by
saying that the present “conditions” under which people work and breed
are bad for the race; but the modern mind will not generally stretch
beyond one step of reasoning, and the consequence which appears to
follow on the consideration of these “conditions” is by no means what
would originally have been expected. If somebody says: “A rickety cradle
may mean a rickety baby,” the natural deduction, one would think, would
be to give the people a good cradle, or give them money enough to buy
one. But that means higher wages and greater equalisation of wealth; and
the plutocratic scientist, with a slightly troubled expression, turns
his eyes and pince-nez in another direction. Reduced to brutal terms of
truth, his difficulty is this and simply this: More food, leisure, and
money for the workman would mean a better workman, better even from the
point of view of anyone for whom he worked. But more food, leisure, and
money would also mean a more independent workman. A house with a decent
fire and a full pantry would be a better house to make a chair or mend
a clock in, even from the customer’s point of view, than a hovel with a
leaky roof and a cold hearth. But a house with a decent fire and a full
pantry would also be a better house in which to refuse to make a chair
or mend a clock--a much better house to do nothing in--and doing nothing
is sometimes one of the highest of the duties of man. All but the
hard-hearted must be torn with pity for this pathetic dilemma of the
rich man, who has to keep the poor man just stout enough to do the work
and just thin enough to have to do it. As he stood gazing at the leaky
roof and the rickety cradle in a pensive manner, there one day came into
his mind a new and curious idea--one of the most strange, simple, and
horrible ideas that have ever risen from the deep pit of original sin.
The roof could not be mended, or, at least, it could not be mended much,
without upsetting the capitalist balance, or, rather, disproportion in
society; for a man with a roof is a man with a house, and to that extent
his house is his castle. The cradle could not be made to rock easier,
or, at least, not much easier, without strengthening the hands of the
poor household, for the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world--to
that extent. But it occurred to the capitalist that there was one sort
of furniture in the house that could be altered. The husband and wife
could be altered. Birth costs nothing, except in pain and valour and
such old-fashioned things; and the merchant need pay no more for mating
a strong miner to a healthy fishwife than he pays when the miner mates
himself with a less robust female whom he has the sentimentality to
prefer. Thus it might be possible, by keeping on certain broad lines
of heredity, to have some physical improvement without any moral,
political, or social improvement. It might be possible to keep a
supply of strong and healthy slaves without coddling them with decent
conditions. As the mill-owners use the wind and the water to drive their
mills, they would use this natural force as something even cheaper; and
turn their wheels by diverting from its channel the blood of a man in
his youth. That is what Eugenics means; and that is all that it means.
Of the moral state of those who think of such things it does not become
us to speak. The practical question is rather the intellectual one:
of whether their calculations are well founded, and whether the men
of science can or will guarantee them any such physical certainties.
Fortunately, it becomes clearer every day that they are, scientifically
speaking, building on the shifting sand. The theory of breeding slaves
breaks down through what a democrat calls the equality of men, but which
even an oligarchist will find himself forced to call the similarity of
men. That is, that though it is not true that all men are normal, it is
overwhelmingly certain that most men are normal. All the common Eugenic
arguments are drawn from extreme cases, which, even if human honour
and laughter allowed of their being eliminated, would not by their
elimination greatly affect the mass. For the rest, there remains the
enormous weakness in Eugenics, that if ordinary men’s judgment or
liberty is to be discounted in relation to heredity, the judgment of
the judges must be discounted in relation to their heredity. The Eugenic
professor may or may not succeed in choosing a baby’s parents; it is
quite certain that he cannot succeed in choosing his own parents. All
his thoughts, including his Eugenic thoughts, are, by the very principle
of those thoughts, flowing from a doubtful or tainted source. In short,
we should need a perfectly Wise Man to do the thing at all. And if he
were a Wise Man he would not do it.