Parenthood and Race Culture: An Outline of Eugenics
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Title: Parenthood and Race Culture: An Outline of Eugenics
Author: C. W. Saleeby
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE: AN OUTLINE OF EUGENICS ***
PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE
BOOKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR
“WORRY: THE DISEASE OF THE AGE”
“EVOLUTION: THE MASTER KEY”
“HEALTH, STRENGTH, AND HAPPINESS”
Etc., Etc.
PARENTHOOD
AND
RACE CULTURE
An Outline of Eugenics
BY
CALEB WILLIAMS SALEEBY
M.D., Ch.B., F.Z.S., F.R.S. Edin.
FELLOW OF THE OBSTETRICAL SOCIETY OF EDINBURGH, MEMBER OF
COUNCIL OF THE EUGENICS EDUCATION SOCIETY, OF THE
SOCIOLOGICAL SOCIETY, AND OF THE NATIONAL LEAGUE
FOR PHYSICAL EDUCATION AND IMPROVEMENT
MEMBER OF THE ROYAL INSTITUTION
AND OF THE SOCIETY FOR THE
STUDY OF INEBRIETY
ETC., ETC.
[Illustration: Logo]
CASSELL AND COMPANY, LTD.
LONDON, NEW YORK, TORONTO AND MELBOURNE
1909
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Dedicated
TO
FRANCIS GALTON
THE
AUGUST MASTER OF ALL EUGENISTS
PREFACE
This book, a first attempt to survey and define the whole field of
eugenics, appears in the year which finds us celebrating the centenary
of the birth of Charles Darwin and the jubilee of the publication
of _The Origin of Species_. It is a humble tribute to that immortal
name, for it is based upon the idea of _selection for parenthood_
as determining the nature, fate and worth of living races, which is
Darwin's chief contribution to thought, and which finds in eugenics its
supreme application. The book is also a tribute to the august pioneer
who initiated the modern study of eugenics in the light of his cousin's
principle. A few years ago I all but persuaded Mr. Galton himself to
write a general introduction to eugenics, but he felt bound to withdraw
from that undertaking, and has given us instead his Memories, which we
could ill have spared.
The present volume seeks to supply what is undoubtedly a real need
at the present day--a general introduction to eugenics which is at
least considered and responsible. I am indebted to more than one
pair of searching and illustrious eyes, which I may not name, for
reading the proofs of this volume. My best hopes for its utility are
based upon this fact. If there be any other reason for hope it is
that during the last six years I have not only written incessantly on
eugenics, but have spoken upon various aspects of it some hundreds
of times to audiences as various as one can well imagine--a mainly
clerical assembly at Lambeth Palace with the Primate in the Chair,
drawing-rooms of title, working-class audiences from the Clyde to
the Thames. It has been my rule to invite questions whenever it was
possible. Such a discipline is invaluable. It gives new ideas and
points of view, discovers the existing forms of prejudice, sharply
corrects the tendency to partial statement. It is my hope that these
many hours of cross-examination will be profitable to the present
reader.
It has been sought to define the scope of eugenics, and my consistent
aim has been, if possible, to preserve its natural unity without
falling into the error, which I seem to see almost everywhere, of
excluding what is strictly eugenic. Our primary idea, beyond dispute,
is selection for parenthood based upon the facts of heredity. This,
however, is not an end, but a means. Some eugenists seem to forget
the distinction. Our end is a better race. If then, beyond selecting
for parenthood, it be desirable to take care of those selected--as,
for instance, to protect the expectant mother from alcohol, lead or
syphilis--that is strict eugenics on any definition worth a moment's
notice. It then appears, of course, that our demands come into contact
with those prejudices which political parties call their principles.
A given eugenic proposal or argument, for instance, may be stamped
as “Socialist” or as “Individualist,” and people who have labelled
their eyes with these catchwords, which eugenics will ere long make
obsolete, proceed to judge eugenics by them. But the question is not
whether a given proposal is socialistic, individualistic or anything
else, but whether it is eugenic. If it is eugenic, that is final. To
this all parties will come, and by this all parties will be judged.
The question is not whether eugenics is, for instance, socialist, but
whether socialism is eugenic. I claim for eugenics that it is the final
and only judge of all proposals and principles, however labelled, new
or old, orthodox or heterodox. Some years ago I ventured to coin
the word eugenist, which is now the accepted term. With that label I
believe any man or woman may well be content. If this be granted, the
old catchwords and the bias they create forgotten, we may be prepared
to consider what the scope of eugenics really is.
Eugenics is not, for instance, a sub-section of applied mathematics.
It is at once a science, and a religion, based upon the laws of life,
and recognising in them the foundation of society. We shall some day
have a eugenic sociology, to which the first part of this volume seeks
to contribute: and the sociology and politics which have not yet
discovered that man is mortal will go to their own place.
Only when we begin to think and work continuously at eugenics is its
range revealed. The present volume is a mere introduction to the
principles of the subject: the full elucidation of its practice is a
problem for generations to come. Nor is it easy to set logical limits
to our inquiry. We may say that eugenics deals with conceptions: and
that the care of the expectant mother is outside its scope: but of what
use is it to have a eugenic conception if its product is thereafter
to be ruined by, for instance, the introduction of lead into the
mother's organism? Again, the care of the individual is, in part, a
eugenic concern: for if we desire his offspring we desire that he shall
not contract transmissible disease nor vitiate his tissues with such
a racial poison as alcohol. Plainly, everything that affects every
possible parent is a matter of eugenic concern: and not only those
factors which affect the choice for parenthood.
It follows that the second portion of this volume, which deals with the
practice of eugenics, cannot be more than merely indicative. In the
available space it has been attempted to define certain constituents
of practical eugenics, but in any case the entire ground has not been
surveyed. The concept of the _racial poisons_ may be commended to
special consideration. Whether a poison be so-called “chemical,” as
lead, or made by a living organism, as the poison of syphilis, is of
great practical importance, because of the infection involved in the
second case: but, in principle, both cases belong to the same category.
Sooner or later, eugenists must face the transmissible infections,
and repudiate as hideous and devilish the so-called morality which
discountenances any attempt to save unborn innocence from a nameless
fate. He or she who would rather leave this matter is placing
“religion” or “morality” or “politics” above the welfare of the life
to come, and therein continuing the daily prostitution of those great
names.
Again, the practice of eugenics may be commended and accepted as the
business of the patriot: and two chapters have been devoted to the
question as seen from the national point of view. I am of nothing
more certain than that the choice for Great Britain to-day is between
national eugenics and the fate of all her Imperial predecessors from
Babylon to Spain. The whole book might have been written from this
standpoint, but such a book would have been beneath the true eugenic
plane, which is not national but human. I believe in the patriotism of
William Watson, who desires the continuance of his country because, as
he addresses her,
“O England, should'st thou one day fall,
. . . . . . .
Justice were thenceforth weaker throughout all
The world, and truth less passionately free,
And God the poorer for thine overthrow.”
This is a patriotism as splendid and vital as the patriotism of the
music-halls and of the political and journalistic makers of wars is
foul and fatal: and it is only in terms of such patriotism that the
appeal to love of country is permissible in the advocacy of eugenics,
which is a concern for all mankind.
The prophet of that kind of Imperialism which has destroyed so many
Empires, has lately approved the emigration of our best to the
Colonies, on the ground that “it is good to give the second eleven
a chance.” But as students of history know, it is at the heart that
Empires rot. The case of Ireland is at present an insoluble one
because the emigration of the worthiest has had full sway. So with the
agricultural intellect: the “first eleven” having gone to the towns.
Rome sent her “first eleven” to her Colonies: if you were not good
enough to be a Roman soldier you could at least remain and be a Roman
father: and the children of such fathers perished in the downfall of
the Empire which they could no longer sustain. I can imagine no more
foolish or disastrous advice than this of Mr. Kipling's, in commending
that transportation of the worthiest which, thoroughly enough persisted
in, must inevitably mean our ruin.
The national aspect of eugenics suggests its international aspect, and
its inter-racial aspect. Not having spent six weeks rushing through
the United States, I am unfortunately dubious as to the worth of any
opinions I may possess regarding the most urgent form of this question
to-day. I mistrust not merely the brilliant students who, unhampered
by biological knowledge, pierce to the bottom of this question in
the course of such a tour, but also the humanitarian bias of those
who, like M. Finot, or the distinguished American sociologist, Mr.
Graham Brooks, would almost have us believe that the negro is mentally
and morally the equal of the Caucasian. Least of all does one trust
the vulgar opinions of the man in the street. Wisdom on this matter
waits for the advent of real knowledge. Similarly in the matter of
Caucasian-Mongolian unions. I question whether any living man knows
enough to warrant the expression of any decided opinion on this
subject. Merely I here recognise miscegenation in general as a problem
in eugenics, to which increasing attention must yearly be devoted.
But it would have been ridiculous to attempt to deal with that great
subject here. As for the marriage of cousins, to take the opposite
case, I always reply to the question, “Should cousins marry?” that it
depends upon the cousins. The good qualities of a good stock, the bad
qualities of a bad stock, are naturally accentuated by such unions: I
doubt whether there is much more to be said about them.
* * * * *
In the following general study of a subject to which no human affair
is wholly alien, it has been impossible to deal adequately with the
great question of eugenic education--that is to say, education _as for
parenthood_. If only to emphasise its overwhelming importance, one
must here insist upon the argument. There is, I believe, no greater
need for society to-day than to recognise that education must include,
_must culminate in_, preparation for the supreme duty of parenthood.
This involves instruction regarding those bodily functions which exist
not for the body nor for the present at all, but for the future life
of mankind. The exercise of these functions depends upon an instinct
which I have for some time been in the habit of terming the _racial
instinct_--a name which at once suggests to us that we are to represent
this instinct, to the boy or girl at puberty, not as something the
satisfaction of which is an end in itself--that is the false and
degrading assertion which will be made by the teachers whom youth will
certainly find, if we fail in our duty--but as existing for what is
immeasurably higher than any selfish end. Youth must be taught that
it is for man the self-conscious, “made with such large discourse,
looking before and after,” as Hamlet says, to deal with his instincts
in terms of their purpose, as no creature but man can do. The boy and
girl must learn that the racial instinct exists for the highest of
ends--the continuance and ultimate elevation of the life of mankind.
It is a sacred trust for the life of this world to come. We must teach
our boys what it is to be really “manly”--the fine word used by the
tempter of youth when he means “beast-ly.” To be manly is to be master
of this instinct. And the “higher education” of our girls, as we must
teach ourselves, will be lower, not higher, if it does not serve and
conserve the future mother, both by teaching her how to care for and
guard her body, which is the temple of life to come, and how afterwards
to be a right educator of her children. The leading idea upon which one
would insist is that the key to any of the right and useful methods
of eugenic education is to be found in the conception of the racial
instinct as existing for parenthood, and to be guarded, reverenced,
educated for that supreme end. It is for the reader who may be
responsible for youth of either sex with this key to solve the problem
on the lines best suited to his or her particular case.
By the application of mathematical methods to statistics we can
ascertain their real meaning, if they have any. If, as frequently
happens, they have none, mathematical analysis is worse than useless.
Mr. Galton is the pioneer of this study, which Professor Karl Pearson
has named biometrics. Biometrics is not eugenics, as some have
supposed, but is a branch of scientific enquiry which, like genetics,
obstetrics and many more, contributes to the foundations of eugenics.
In the Appendix reference is made to various publications, mostly
inexpensive, which deal with biometrics. In the text I have availed
myself of biometric, genetic and other results impartially. Differences
of opinion between this school and that of scientific workers are to
be regretted by the eugenist; but it is for him to accept and use
knowledge of eugenic significance no matter by what method it has been
obtained. Directly he fails to do so he ceases to be a eugenist and
becomes the ordinary partisan. No reference is made in the following
pages, for instance, to the _law of ancestral inheritance_, formulated
by the Master to whom the volume is dedicated and of whom all eugenists
are the followers. I believe that law, despite its beauty, to be
without basis in fact and incompatible with demonstrated Mendelian
phenomena: and though the book is dedicated to Mr. Galton, it is more
deeply dedicated to the Future. This, indeed, is the _Credo_ of the
eugenist: _Expecto resurrectionem mortuorum, et vitam venturi saeculi._
* * * * *
Woman is Nature's supreme instrument of the future. The eugenist is
therefore deeply concerned with her education, her psychology, the
conditions which permit her to exercise her great natural function
of choosing the fathers of the future, the age at which she should
marry, and the compatibility between the discharge of her incomparable
function of motherhood and the lesser functions which some women now
assume. Obstetrics, and the modern physiology and psychology of sex,
must thus be harnessed to the service of eugenics, and I hope to employ
them for the elucidation, in a future volume, of the problems of woman
and womanhood, thus regarded.
CONTENTS
PART I
THE THEORY OF EUGENICS
CHAPTER PAGE
1. Introductory 1
2. The Exchequer of Life 17
3. Natural Selection and the Law of Love 35
4. The Selection of Mind 52
5. The Multiplication of Man 71
6. The Growth of Individuality 86
7. Heredity and Race-Culture 99
8. Education and Race-Culture 120
9. The Supremacy of Motherhood 145
10. Marriage and Maternalism 160
PART II
THE PRACTICE OF EUGENICS
11. Negative Eugenics 171
12. Selection through Marriage 184
13. The Racial Poisons: Alcohol 205
14. The Racial Poisons: Lead, Narcotics, Syphilis 246
15. National Eugenics: Race-Culture and History 254
16. National Eugenics: Mr. Balfour on Decadence 279
17. The Promise of Race-Culture 287
APPENDIX Concerning Books to Read 305
INDEX 321
PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE
PART I.--THE THEORY OF EUGENICS
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTORY
“A little child shall lead them”
This book will be mere foolishness to those who repeat the inhuman and
animal cry that we have to take the world as we find it--the motto of
the impotent, the forgotten, the cowardly and selfish, or the merely
vegetable, in all ages. The capital fact of man, as distinguished
from the lower animals and from plants, is that he does not have to
take the world as he finds it, that he does not merely adapt himself
to his environment, but that he himself is a creator of his world. If
our ancestors had taken and left the world as they found it, we should
be little more than erected monkeys to-day. For none who accept the
hopeless dogma is this book written. They are welcome to take and leave
the world as they find it; they are of no consequence to the world; and
their existence is of interest only in so far as it is another instance
of that amazing wastefulness of Nature in her generations, with which
this book will be so largely concerned.
Beginning, perhaps, some six million years ago, the fact which we call
human life has persisted hitherto, and shows no signs of exhaustion,
much less impending extinction, being indeed more abundant numerically
and more dominant over other forms of life and over the inanimate
world to-day than ever before. It is a continuous phenomenon. The
life of every blood corpuscle or skin cell of every human being now
alive is absolutely continuous with that of the living cells of the
first human beings--if not, indeed, as most biologists appear to
believe, of the first life upon the earth. Yet this continuous life
has been and apparently always must be lived in a tissue of amazing
discontinuity--amazing, at least, to those who can see the wonderful in
the commonplace. For though the world-phenomenon which we call Man has
been so long continuous, and is at this moment perhaps as much modified
by the total past as if it were really a single undying individual,
yet only a few decades ago, a mere second in the history of the earth,
no human being now alive was in existence. “As for man, his days are
as grass: as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth. For the wind
passeth over it, and it is gone; and the place thereof shall know it
no more.” Indeed, not merely are we individually as grass, but in a
few years the hand that writes these words, and the tissues of eye
and brain whereby they are perceived, will actually _be_ grass. Here,
then, is the colossal paradox: absolute and literal continuity of life,
every cell from a preceding cell throughout the ages--_omnis cellula e
cellula_; yet three times in every century the living and only wealth
of nations is reduced to dust, and is raised up again from helpless
infancy. Where else is such catastrophic continuity?
Each individual enters the world in a fashion the dramatic and
sensational character of which can be realised by none who have not
witnessed it; and in a few years the individual dies, scarcely less
dramatically as a rule, and sometimes more so. This continuous and
apparently invincible thing, human life, which began so humbly and to
the sound of no trumpets, in Southern Asia or the neighbourhood of the
Caspian Sea, but which has never looked back since its birth, and
is now the dominant fact of what might well be an astonished earth,
depends in every age and from moment to moment upon here a baby, there
a baby and there yet another; these curious little objects being of all
living things, animal or vegetable, young or old, large or small, the
most utterly helpless and incompetent, incapable even of finding for
themselves the breasts that were made for them. If but one of all the
“hungry generations” that have preceded us had failed to secure the
care and love of its predecessor, the curtain would have come down and
a not unpromising though hitherto sufficiently grotesque drama would
have been ended for ever.
This discontinuity it is which persuades many of us to conceive
human life to be not so much a mighty maze without a plan, as a mere
stringing of beads on an endless cord of which one end arose in Mother
Earth, whilst the other may come at any time--but goes nowhere. The
beads, which we call generations, vary in size and colour, no doubt,
but on no system; each one makes a fresh start; the average difference
between them is merely one of position; and the result is merely to
make the string longer. Or the generations might be conceived as the
links of an indeterminate chain, necessarily held to each other:
but suggesting not at all the idea of a living process such that
its every step is fraught with eternal consequence. In a word, we
incline to think that History merely goes on repeating itself, and we
have to learn that History never repeats itself. Every generation is
epoch-making.
It is thus to the conception of parenthood as the vital and organic
link of life that we are forced: and the whole of this book is
really concerned with parenthood. We shall see, in due course, that
no generation, whether of men or animals or plants, determines or
provides, as a whole, the future of the race. Only a percentage, as
a rule a very small percentage indeed, of any species reach maturity,
and fewer still become parents. Amongst ourselves, one-tenth of any
generation gives birth to one-half the next. These it is who, in the
long run, make History: a Kant or a Spencer, dying childless, may
leave what we call immortal works; but unless the parents of each new
generation are rightly chosen or “selected”--to use the technical
word--a new generation may at any time arise to whom the greatest
achievements of the past are nothing. The newcomers will be as swine
to these pearls, the immortality of which is always conditional upon
the capacity of those who come after to appreciate them. There is
here expressed the distinction between two kinds of progress: the
traditional progress which is dependent upon transmitted achievement,
but in its turn is dependent upon racial progress--this last being the
kind of progress of which the history of pre-human life upon the planet
is so largely the record and of which mankind is the finest fruit
hitherto.
* * * * *
It is possible that a concrete case, common enough, and thus the more
significant, may appeal to the reader, and help us to realise afresh
the conditions under which human life actually persists.
Forced inside a motor-omnibus one evening, for lack of room outside,
I found myself opposite a woman, poorly-clothed, with a wedding-ring
upon her finger and a baby in her arms. The child was covered with a
black shawl and its face could not be seen. It was evidently asleep.
It should have been in its cot at that hour. The mother's face roused
feelings which a sonnet of Wordsworth's might have expressed, or a
painting by some artist with a soul, a Rembrandt or a Watts, such as
we may look for in vain amongst the be-lettered to-day. Here was the
spectacle of mother and child, which all the great historic religions,
from Buddhism to Christianity, have rightly worshipped; the spectacle
which more nearly symbolises the sublime than any other upon which the
eye of a man, himself once such a child, can rest; the spectacle which
alone epitomises the life of mankind and the unalterable conditions of
all human life and all human societies, reminding us at once of our
individual mortality, and the immortality of our race--
“While we, the brave, the mighty and the wise,
We Men, who in our morn of youth defied
The Elements, must vanish;--be it so!
Enough, if something from our hands have power
To live, and act, and serve the future hour:”
--the spectacle which alone, if any can, may reconcile us to death;
the spectacle of that which alone can sanctify the love of the sexes;
the spectacle of motherhood in being, the supreme duty and supreme
privilege of womanhood--“a mother is a mother still, the holiest thing
alive.”
This woman, utterly unconscious of the dignity of her attitude and of
the contrast between herself and the imitation of a woman, elegantly
clothed, who sat next her, giving her not a thought nor a glance, nor
yet room for the elbow bent in its divine office, was probably some
thirty-two or three years old, as time is measured by the revolutions
of the earth around the sun. Measured by some more relevant gauge,
she was evidently aged, her face grey and drawn, desperately tired,
yet placid--not with due exultation but with the calm of one who has
no hope. She was too weary to draw the child to her bosom, and her
arms lay upon her knees; but instead she bent her body downwards to
her baby. She looked straight out in front of her, not at me nor at
the passing phantasms beyond, but at nothing. The eyes were open but
they were too tired to see. The face had no beauty of feature nor of
colour nor of intelligence, but it was wholly beautiful, made so by
motherhood; and I think she must have held some faith. The tint of her
skin and of her eyeballs spoke of the impoverishment of her blood, her
need of sleep and rest and ease of mind. She will probably be killed
by consumption within five years and will certainly never hold a
grand-child in her arms. The pathologist may lay this crime at the door
of the tubercle bacillus; but a prophet would lay it at the reader's
door and mine.
While we read and write, play at politics or ping-pong, this woman
and myriads like her are doing the essential work of the world. _The
worm waits for us as well as for her and them: and in a few years her
children and theirs will be Mankind._ We need a prophet to cry aloud
and spare not; to tell us that if this is the fate of mothers in the
ranks which supply the overwhelming proportion of our children, our
nation may number Shakespeare and Newton amongst the glories of its
past, and the lands of ancient empires amongst its present possessions,
but it can have no future; that if, worshipping what it is pleased to
call success, it has no tears nor even eyes for such failures as these,
it may walk in the ways of its insensible heart and in the sight of
its blind eyes, yet it is walking not in its sleep but in its death,
is already doomed and damned almost past recall; and that, if it is to
be saved, there will avail not “broadening the basis of taxation,” nor
teaching in churches the worship of the Holy Mother and Holy Child,
whilst Motherhood is blasphemed at their very doors, but this and this
only--the establishment, not in statutes but in the consciences of men
and women, of a true religion based upon these perdurable and evident
dogmas--that all human life is holy, all mothers and all children,
that history is made in the nursery, that the individual dies, that
therefore children determine the destinies of all civilisations, that
the race or society which succeeds with its mammoth ships and its
manufactures but fails to produce men and women, is on the brink of
irretrievable doom; that the body of man is an animal, endowed with
the inherited animal instincts necessary for self-preservation and the
perpetuation of the race, but that, if the possession of this body by a
conscious spirit, “looking before and after,” is anything more than a
“sport” of the evolutionary forces, it demands that, the blind animal
instincts notwithstanding, the desecration of motherhood, the perennial
slaughter and injury of children, the casual unconsidered birth of
children for whom there is no room or light or air or food, and of
children whose inheritance condemns them to misery, insanity or crime,
must cease; and that the recurrent drama of human love and struggle
reaches its happy ending not when the protagonists are married, but
when they join hands over a little child that promises to be a worthy
heir of all the ages. This religion must teach that the spectacle of a
prematurely aged and weary and hopeless mother, which he who runs or
rides may see, produced by our rude foreshadowings of civilisation, is
an affront to all honest and thoughtful eyes: that where there are no
mothers, such as mothers should be, the people will assuredly perish,
though everything they touch should turn to gold, though science and
art and philosophy should flourish as never before. I believe that
history, rightly read, teaches these tremendous lessons.
* * * * *
In our own day the bounds of imagination are undoubtedly widening.
Means of communication, the press, the camera, the decadence of
obsolete dogmas, making room for the simple daily truths of morality
which have “the dignity of dateless age” and are too hard for the teeth
of time--these account in large measure for the fact that the happier
half of the world is at last beginning to realise how the other half
lives. There is perhaps more divine discontent with things as they are
than ever heretofore: this being due, as has been suggested, perhaps
as much to the modern aids of imagination as to any inherent increase
of sympathy. Science, too, in the form of sociology and economics,
adds warrant to the demand for some radical reform of the conditions
of life. It teaches that all forms of life are interdependent; that
society is thus an organism in more than merely loose analogy; that
the classes pay abundantly for the state of the masses: whilst
medicine teaches that the tuberculosis, for instance, which slays
so many members of the middle and upper classes, is bred by and in
the overcrowding of the lower classes, this and many other diseases
promising to resist all measures less radical than the abolition of
half our current social practice.
Hence it is that we hear so much of social reform; and the promises of
representatives of many political -isms jostle one another at the gates
of our ears. The Anarchist at one extreme, and the Collectivist at the
other, with the Individualist and the Socialist somewhere between,
offer their panaceas. To me, I confess, they seem little better than
the scholastic metaphysicians of old days, like them mistaking words
for things, incapable of understanding each other, evading precise
definition and using terms which never mean the same thing twice as
missiles and weapons of abuse: and, above all, mistaking means for ends.
But the leading error common to them all, as I seem to see it, is their
conception of society as a stable thing--a piece of machinery which
must be properly “assembled,” as the engineers say; forgetful of the
extraordinary discontinuity which inheres in the swift-approaching
death of all its parts, and their replacement by helpless immaturity.
The first fact of society really is that all its individuals are
mortal. This we all know, but I question whether even Herbert Spencer
fully reckoned with it; and certainly the common run of social
speculators have not begun to realise what it means. Human life is
made up of generations, and the key to all progress lies in the nature
of the relation between one generation and another. Spencer records
the case of an Oxford graduate, desirous to be his secretary, who did
not know that the population of Great Britain is increasing. Here is
a capital present fact of the--merely quantitative--relation between
successive generations. So far as any influence on their theory or
practice is concerned, it is still unknown to nearly all our advisers.
Yet this fact of the ceaseless multiplication of man, which has
distinguished him from the first, and is absolutely peculiar to him of
all living species, animal or vegetable, as Sir E. Ray Lankester has
lately pointed out, is the source of the major facts of history and the
besetting condition of every social problem that can be named at this
hour.
The professional and dedicated teachers of morality seem to be in
little better case. They believe in babies, perhaps, as the prime
and only really valid source of the weal and wealth and strength of
nations, and as the great moralisers and humanisers of the generation
that gives them birth. They are beginning to join in that public outcry
against infant mortality which will yet abolish this abominable stain
upon our time. But they are lamentably uninformed. They do not know,
for instance, that a high infant mortality habitually goes with a high
birth-rate, not only in human society but in all living species; and
they have yet to appreciate the proposition which I have so often
advanced and which, to me at any rate, seems absolutely self-evident,
that until we have learnt how to keep alive all the healthy babies
now born--that is to say, not less than ninety per cent. of all, the
babies in the slums included--it is monstrous to cry for more, _to
be similarly slain_. These bewailings about our mercifully falling
birth-rate, uncoupled with any attention to the slaughter of the
children actually born, are pitiable in their blindness and would be
lamentable if they had any effect--of which there is fortunately no
sign whatever, but indeed the contrary.
Humanitarian sentiment, also, is terribly misguided. “Why always the
benefit of the future, has the present no claim upon us?” I have been
asked. Assuredly all sentient life, and therefore pre-eminently all
human life, in which sentiency is so incommensurably intensified by
self-consciousness, the power of “looking before and after,” has a
claim upon us: but the question could have been asked by no one whose
imagination had been worthily employed. Our posterity will in due
course be as actual and present as we, their deeds and sufferings and
hopes as actual and present as ours. They outnumber us as the ocean
outweighs a raindrop; to avert evil from one of them is as much as to
relieve evil in one of us,--how much more to prevent the misery of five
in the next generation, fifty in the next and unnumbered hosts beyond?
To serve the future of the race is not to benefit a fiction: the men
and women of a hundred and a thousand years hence will be as real
as we. And to serve the future is to put out our talent at compound
interest a thousand-fold compounded. The weak imagination would rather
build a sanatorium for consumptives and see it filled with grateful
patients. This is a palpable, sensible good, for which the meanest
visual faculty suffices: but the strong imagination would rather open
the closed windows of nurseries or work at the mechanical problems
of ventilation, aye, or even at the structure of the bacteriological
microscope--finding the spectacle, in the mind's eye, of healthy men
and women fifty years hence as grateful and as real a reward as the
sight of a sanatorium in the present. The pace of progress will be
incalculably hastened when men, whether workers or bequeathers or
administrators, enlarge their imaginations so as to perceive that the
future will be, and therefore indeed is, as real as the present.[1] I
appeal to the reason of the kind-hearted reader. Would you rather make
one man or child happy now, or two or a thousand a century hence?
It is, in a word, the idea of continuous causation or evolution that
explains the remarkable contrast between our outlook on the future and
our fathers'. In older--that is to say, younger--days, men's interest
in posterity was most naïvely and quaintly selfish. If they raised a
monument or did any piece of work which obviously would endure beyond
the span of their own lives, their chief motive seems to have been
that we should think well of them, nor forget how well they thought
of themselves. They were not concerned with us, but with our opinion
of them. They were anxious about the verdict of posterity; and the
verdict is that they little realised their responsibility for us,
or betrayed it if they did. There is also the frank attitude of Sir
Boyle Roche's famous bull, “What has posterity done for us?” This is
a quite familiar and conspicuous sentiment--as familiar as any other
form of selfishness: but it is as if a father should say, “What have
my children done for me?” and is open to the same condemnation. We
are assuredly responsible for posterity as any parent for any child.
Before the nineteenth century this fact could be realised by very few.
To-day, when the truth of organic evolution is a commonplace, and when
the plasticity of the forces of evolution is slowly becoming realised,
we must face our tremendous responsibility and privilege in a spirit
worthy of those to whom such mighty truths have been revealed.
Parenthood and birth--in these the whole is summed. At the mercy of
these are all past discovery, all past achievement in art or science,
in action or in thought. The human species, secure though it be, is
only a race after all; only a sequence of runners who _quasi cursores,
vitaï lampada tradunt_--like runners, hand on the lamp of life, as
Lucretius said. This it is which, to the thoughtful observer, makes
each birth such an overwhelming event. It is a great event for the
mother and the father, but how much greater if its consequences be
only half realised. Education in its full sense, “the provision of an
environment,” as I would define it, is a mighty and necessary force,
for nothing but potentiality is given at birth: but no education, no
influence of traditional progress, can avail, unless the potentialities
which these must unfold are worthy. The baby comes tumbling headlong
into the world. The fate of all the to-morrows depends upon it.
Hitherto its happening has depended upon factors animal and casual
enough, utterly improvident, concerned but rarely with this tremendous
consequence. Fate may be mistress, but she works only too often by
Chance, as Goethe remarked. Fate and Chance hitherto have never
failed to keep up the supply which the death of the individual makes
imperative: and forces have been at work determining for progress,
to some extent, but most imperfectly, the parentage of these headlong
babies. Yet the human intelligence cannot remain satisfied with their
working--and much less so when it realises how they can be controlled,
how effectively, and to what high ends. The physician may and must
concern himself, on these occasions, with the immediate needs of the
mother and the child, and when these are satisfied he may feel that
his duty has been done; but, as he journeys homewards, he must surely
reflect--that this astonishing thing, then, has happened again, as
indeed it has happened many times this very day; that whilst this baby
is to become an individual man or woman, an end in himself or herself,
in its young loins and in those of its like are the hosts of all the
unborn who are yet to be. If, then, these babies differ widely from
each other, as they do; if these differences are, on the whole, capable
of prediction in terms of heredity; if the future state of mankind is
involved in these differences, which will in their turn be transmitted
to the children of such as themselves become parents; and if this
business of parenthood will be confined to only a _small_ proportion
of these babies, _of whom one-half will never reach puberty_; if
these things be so, as they are, cannot these babies be chosen in
anticipation, there being thus effected an enormous vital economy,
Nature being commanded to the highest ends by the only method, which
is to obey her, as Bacon said; and the human intelligence thus making
its supreme achievement--the ethical direction and vast acceleration of
racial progress? What man can do for animals and plants, can he not do
for himself? Give imagination its fleetest and strongest wing, it can
never conceive a task so worth the doing.
This, and this alone, is what requires to be brought home to the
general reader and the reformer alike. Says Mr. H. G. Wells: “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.” And then, in a few sketchy pages, Mr. Wells
discredits, as with one glance of great eyes, the very proposal which
he thinks to be the only real and permanent way of mending the ills
of the world. Not one man in thousands has got so far as to hold this
opinion; and it is the more lamentable that Mr. Wells, having reached
it, should hold it in the loose, formal, and inoperative fashion in
which the man in the street or the woman in the pew holds the dogmas of
orthodox theology. We need to educate public opinion--that “chaos of
prejudices”--up to Mr. Wells' standard, and then we need to accomplish
the much harder task of converting a mere intellectual speculation into
a living belief.
But so surely as this belief, the crowning and practical conclusion
to which all the teachings of modern biology converge, comes to life
in men's minds, so surely the difficulties will be met, not only on
paper but also in practice. “Where there's a will there's a way.”
Meanwhile men are content to work at the impermanent, if not indeed
at measures which directly war against the selection of the best for
parenthood: they do not realise the stern necessity of obeying Nature
in this respect--for it is Her selection of parents that alone has
raised us from the beast and the worm--and since necessity alone,
whether inner or outer, whether of character or circumstance, is the
mother of invention, they fail to find the methods by which our ideal
can be carried out. There is nothing, either in the character of
the individual man and woman, or in the structure of society, that
makes the ideal of race-culture impossible to-day: nor must action
wait for further knowledge of heredity. Little though we surely know
so far, we have abundance of assured knowledge for immediate action
in many directions--knowledge which is agreed upon by Lamarckians
and neo-Lamarckians, Darwinians and Weismannians, Mendelians and
biometricians alike. All of these agree, for instance, as to the
fact that the insane tendency is transmissible and is transmitted by
heredity. We need only public opinion to say, “Then most surely those
who have such a tendency must forgo parenthood.”
For it is public opinion that governs the world. If it were, as it will
be one day--which may these pages hasten--an elementary and radical
truth, as familiar and as cogent to all, man in the House or man in
the public-house, as the fact of the earth's gravitation--that racial
maintenance, much more racial progress, depends absolutely upon the
selection of parents; if the establishment of this selective process in
the best and widest manner were the admitted goal of all legislation
and all social and political speculation--who can question that the
thing would be practicable and indeed easy? Without the formation of
public opinion this is as hopelessly Utopian and inaccessible an ideal
as words ever framed; public opinion once formed, nothing could be more
palpably feasible. Hence Mr. Galton's wisdom in demanding that, before
we dictate courses of procedure, and even before we can expect profit
from scientific investigation, whether by the biometric method of which
he is the founder, or by any other, _public opinion must be formed_;
that the idea of eugenics or good-breeding must be instilled into the
conscience of civilisation like a new religion--a religion of the most
lofty and austere, because the most unselfish, morality, a religion
which sets before it a sublime ideal, terrestrial indeed in its chosen
theatre, but celestial in its theme, human in its means, but literally
superhuman in its goal. If the intrinsic ennoblement of mankind does
not answer to this eulogy, where is the ideal that does?
CHAPTER II
THE EXCHEQUER OF LIFE
“This last lustrum has enabled us to make an astounding discovery,
of which neither Adam Smith nor Cobden nor Malthus dreamed--that
a nation is composed not of property nor of provinces, but of
men.”--Tille (1904), quoted by Forel.
The main thesis which the last chapter was intended to introduce is, in
the words of Ruskin, simply this: “There is no wealth but life.” The
assumption throughout this book is that Ruskin is the real founder of
political economy, he first of moderns having seen this supreme truth.
We speak of a nation's possessions, but possessions imply a possessor
or possessors. Wealth, as Ruskin teaches us, is “the possession of the
valuable by the valiant.” If our national possessions were made over
to a race of monkeys, “they being inherently and eternally incapable
of wealth,” what would they be worth? Furthermore, to possess and to
be possessed by, are totally diverse things. Says Ruskin, “Lately in
a wreck of a Californian ship, one of the passengers fastened a belt
about him with two hundred pounds of gold in it, with which he was
found afterwards at the bottom. Now, as he was sinking--had he the gold
or had the gold him?”
=Vital economics.=--We have already alluded to the unique property
of mankind in virtue of which the radical character of the essential
wealth, which is life, has only too commonly been forgotten. In the
case of any animal or vegetable species we should have no difficulty,
if asked regarding its “success” and “prospects,” in directing our
enquiry to essentials. We should examine the individuals of that
species, young and old, its death-rate and its birth-rate, and these
would supply us with the answer. In the case of man there is the almost
incalculable complication involved in the fact that he is capable of
making external acquirements,--material possessions and spiritual
possessions which, so long as he remains capable of possessing them,
are of real value, and, on account of what they mean for life, are a
true though secondary wealth. Amongst civilised mankind, therefore, the
essential question as to the breed of men and women is obscured by the
secondary question as to their traditional or transmitted possessions
or external acquirements. But if we remember the case of the drowning
man and his gold we shall realise that, fundamentally, the case is the
same for the human as for any other species. No one can openly question
this, but not one publicist or politician in a thousand believes it in
any living sense. The true function of government, said Ruskin, is the
production and recognition of human worth. This has only to be said to
be admitted; it is one of the thoughts that shine, as Joubert says. No
one denies it and no one acts upon it.
In this sense such a phrase as the National Exchequer begins to take on
a new meaning, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer loses every whit of
his importance, except in so far as his proceedings tend towards, or
away from, the production and recognition of human worth. He plays with
money, whereas the Chancellor of the real Exchequer would work for life.
=The facts of childhood to-day.=--But since human life is
discontinuous, since three times in a century the essential wealth of
nations is reduced to dust, and raised again from helpless infancy,
our urgent business is with the children of the nation. What, then, in
general, are the facts of the National Exchequer thus conceived?
We find that, so far as ordinary physical health is concerned,
the majority of human babies--including, for instance, so-called
Anglo-Saxon babies--are physically healthy at birth. On the other hand,
a certain proportion are as definitely and obviously unhealthy at the
very start as the more fortunate majority are healthy. If certain
influences, such as alcohol and _some few_ diseases, have been in
operation, the babies may be already doomed--not national wealth, but
national _illth_. In the absence of these pernicious factors, there is,
on the whole, _physical_ fitness. The ratio is perhaps as ninety to ten
per cent.
Here then, is, on the whole, a ceaseless supply of essential wealth;
physically, at any rate, of good enough quality. As every one knows, or
should know, the greater part of it we immediately proceed to deface
and destroy. Our mouths are full of argument concerning the principles
of what we are pleased to conceive as political economy. The principles
of vital economy we do not enquire into but outrage and defy at every
turn. So horribly and wastefully are we misguided that in point of
fact we actually destroy altogether the greater number, not of all
the children merely, but even of the fit and healthy children; and
it may forcibly be argued that, before any one proceeds to attempt
any choice amongst the children, as to which shall in their turn
become parents and which shall not, it would be well, apart from any
question of discrimination, to revise radically the methods which at
present permit this wholesale destruction. Whilst we kill outright
by hundreds of thousands every year, we damage for life far more,
including a very large proportion of those who, as things at present
are, will in their turn become the parents who alone are the makers
of the real wealth of nations. If this destructive process had the
effect which common notions of heredity would lead us to expect, then
most certainly not merely would Britain, for instance, be doomed, but
the very name would long ago have become “one with Nineveh and Tyre.”
But though this destructive process (which it is best to describe as
resulting in deterioration rather than degeneration) has been long
continued, and though, in consequence of the great economic changes of
last century and the rush into the cities with their over-crowding,
it is perhaps more disastrous now than ever before: _yet_ it remains
true that most of the babies born in the slums are splendid little
specimens of humanity--so far as physique is concerned--bearing no
marks of degeneration to correspond with the deterioration of their
parents. In a word, heredity works--the racial poisons apart, as we
shall see--so that each generation gets a fresh start. _If there be no
process of selection_, each new generation begins where its predecessor
began and is as a whole neither worse nor better, whether physically or
psychically.
=Eugenics and infant mortality.=--In the face of the foregoing, which
merely outlines the appalling indictment that ought to be framed
against civilisation for its treatment of its children, it is evidently
incumbent upon us to answer the objector who should say that the
whole purpose and argument of our present enquiry is premature, and
that surely our first business should be not to propose any novel and
revolutionary doctrine as to the choice of parents and of children, but
rather to stop this child slaughter and child damage--in other words,
that we should devote ourselves rather, not to providing children
with a good heredity, but to providing them with a good environment,
it being only too demonstrable that the environment we at present
provide for the great majority of them is deadly and abominable in the
extreme. This argument is all the stronger because most of the children
are admittedly fit physically at birth. It would seem as if there were
little to complain of in their heredity, whilst there is certainly
almost everything to complain of in their environment.
If this objection is to be met at all, we must be most careful and
serious in our going. Whatever conclusions we come to we must at any
rate be sure that we do not impugn or deny the instant, immediate and
constant law of love which declares that there can be no adequate ideal
short of doing our best for all children, once they are born--nay,
more, from the very moment, months before, at which their individual
history starts. Whoso suggests that, as a present and immediate
policy, it is not right to care for all children, healthy or diseased,
welcome or unwelcome, nurseried in Park Lane or in the slums, may have
plausible and even so-called eugenic arguments on his side, but his
proposal is essentially immoral and therefore essentially false. For
all children actually in being--whether they await or have passed the
particular moment of birth--it is our duty, ideal and real, to do our
utmost. The believer in the principle of race-culture or eugenics--whom
I shall hereafter, as for some years past, call the eugenist--may
believe that it would have been better had some of these children never
been born; he may believe that, in the present unorganised state of
society, in the present dethroned state of motherhood, it were vastly
better had many even of the healthy majority never been born. He may
be convinced that, since so many of them will certainly die, failing
our feeble efforts to save childhood, their birth is a misfortune: but
on no terms and for no objects whatever does, or can, the eugenist
propose that any of these children, even though from the moment of
birth they be riddled with disease, should be allowed to die. Though
some will say that the keeping alive of diseased children, or even of
many children at first healthy, is a disaster, I maintain that no such
question of choice, selection or discrimination can find any warrant
in any form of morality--eugenic or other--from the moment at which
the child in question began its individual existence. Those of us who
advocate the eugenic idea must be perpetually on our guard against the
insidious alliance of any who, agreeing with our premises, declare
that it is a mistake, for instance, to prosecute a campaign against
infant mortality. I myself have had a share--by a continuous propaganda
started in 1902--in making this last a publicly recognised question,
whilst, on the other hand, I have done my best to popularise the idea
of eugenics. Let me repeat here what I have already said elsewhere:
that I strenuously repudiate any suggestion that the eugenic end is
legitimately or effectively to be served by permitting the infant
mortality to continue. The distinguished Egyptologist, Professor
Flinders Petrie, in his recent book _Janus in Modern Life_, describes
as follows the results of the present crusade against infant mortality,
as he conceives them:--“We must agree that it would be of the lower or
lowest type of careless, thriftless, dirty, and incapable families that
the increase [of surviving children] would be obtained. Is it worth
while to dilute our increase of population by ten per cent. more of the
most inferior kind? Will England be stronger for having one-thirtieth
more, and that of the worst stock, added to the population every year?
This movement is doing away with one of the few remains of natural
weeding out of the unfit that our civilisation has left to us. And it
will certainly cause more misery than happiness in the course of a
century.”
Here, plainly, is a serious argument. We are bound to sympathise with
its underlying assumption, viz., that not all babies are such as we
can desire to carry on the race. Still more must we sympathise with
any author whatever who has imagination and foresight enough to write
anywhere, on any subject, wrongly or rightly, such a sentence as “and
it will certainly cause more misery than happiness in the course of
a century.” We need more such authors. But without going into the
whole argument here--as, for instance, regarding the singular use of
the word “natural”--I do most entirely deny the right of the eugenic
idea to any voice or place as to the fate of children _once they have
come into being_. Another writer, arguing on the same lines, says _à
propos_ of the abolition of infant mortality: “This last change which,
as the Huddersfield experiment shows, is easy of accomplishment, is
likely to be completely effected in the next few years, and we shall
then have abolished the one factor which in any important degree at
present tends to redress the balance between the rates of reproduction
of the superior and the inferior classes.” These are the words of
Dr. W. McDougall, the distinguished psychologist. Dr. McDougall has
subsequently shown that he repudiates the apparent deduction from them,
and entirely approves of the present campaign of mercy to childhood.
Nevertheless, these arguments, plainly derived from the principle
of natural selection, do express a most important truth--viz., that
indiscriminate survival must lead to racial decadence, whether in man,
microbe or moss. I submit that the difficulty can be solved only by the
eugenic principle.
The fittest must become parents, and the unfit[2] must not; then kill
the unfit, says Nature. And this indeed, in all living species other
than man, is what Nature does. But “thou shalt not kill,” says the
moral law--not even the unfit. As the foregoing will have shown, some
thinkers to-day propose to avail themselves in this dilemma of the “New
Decalogue”:--
“Thou shalt not kill but need'st not strive
Officiously to keep alive.”
This is no solution of the problem. There is only one solution, and
that is the eugenic solution. Nature can preserve a race only by
destroying the unfit. We who are intelligent must preserve and elevate
the race by preventing the unfit from ever coming into existence at
all. We must replace Nature's selective death-rate by a selective
birth-rate. This is merciful and supremely moral; it means vast economy
in life and money and time and suffering; it is natural at bottom, but
it is Nature raised to her highest power in that almost supra-natural
fact--the moral intelligence of man.
=The dilemma defined.=--The moral law, and our natural human sympathy,
insist that we should seek to preserve all the children that come into
the world, to amplify the health of the healthy, and to neutralise,
as far as possible, the unfitness of the unfit. A mother brings her
malformed baby to the surgeon, and he does his best to patch up the
gaps left by the imperfect processes of development. Otherwise the
baby will die. Who dares look that mother in the face and say “Ah,
but it is better for the race that your child should die!” Such a
doctrine, I submit, blasphemes our humanity; it is intolerable to
any decent person who will pause to think what it means: and yet,
in so saying, we seem to defy Nature with her imperative law of the
survival of the fittest only. Pre-eugenic writers on evolution state
the case in all its hardness. Dr. Archdall Reid says that “If we
wish to improve the individual, we must attend to his acquirements by
providing proper shelter, food, and training.” Well, we do wish to
improve the individual, and to preserve the individual! We do not wish
the super-man on the terms of Nietzsche--the super-man obtained at
the cost of love would turn out to be inferior to any brute-beast, an
intellectual fiend. But, Dr. Reid goes on to say, “such means will not
effect an improvement of the race.... On the contrary, they will cause
deterioration[3] by an increased survival of the unfit.” The provision
of “proper shelter, food and training” will cause racial decadence!
Is it not evident, then, that such provisions must rather be styled
improper, and that we must refrain from doing anything for the defects
and needs of the individual, lest a worse thing befall the race? This
is an outrageous proposition, yet it is offered us as a necessary
inference from the principle of natural selection or the survival of
the fittest--which no one now dares to dispute.
Herbert Spencer, to whom we owe the phrase “the survival of the
fittest,” expresses this critical difficulty as follows: “The law
that each creature shall take the benefits and the evils of its own
nature has been the law under which life has evolved thus far. Any
arrangements which, in a considerable degree, prevent superiority from
profiting by the rewards of superiority, or shield inferiority from the
evils it entails--any arrangements which tend to make it as well to be
inferior as to be superior, are arrangements diametrically opposed to
the progress of organisation, and the reaching of a higher life.” This
is permanently and necessarily true, and in our care for childhood we
have to reckon with it. Yet even Spencer himself did not pursue this
supremely important enquiry to what I shall in a moment submit to be
its logical and almost incredibly hopeful conclusion.
Huxley, writing his well-known Romanes Lecture, “Evolution and Ethics,”
at a time when, unfortunately, he had somewhat parted company with
Spencer, and was too ready to accept any argument that made against
Spencer's political views, cuts the Gordian knot in an astonishingly
unsatisfactory fashion. He declares that “the ethical progress of
society depends, not on imitating the cosmic process [that is, the
selection of the fittest], still less in running away from it, but in
combating it.” This is shallow thinking and very poor philosophy. One
wonders how Huxley can have forgotten the great dictum of Bacon that
Nature can be commanded only by obeying her. He declares that moral
evolution is the direct contradiction and antithesis of the process of
organic evolution hitherto. He says, “Social progress means a checking
of the cosmic process at every step and the substitution for it of
another, which may be called the ethical process;” and he declares
it to be a fallacy to suppose “that because on the whole animals and
plants have advanced in perfection of organisation, by means of the
struggle for existence and the consequent survival of the fittest;
therefore men in society, men as ethical beings, must look to the same
process to help them towards perfection.”
With all this Huxley offers us no real solution whatever, no hint
that he has realised in any degree what must be the consequences of
indiscriminate survival. It is astonishing how personal bias, so alien
to the whole character of the man as a rule, blinded him to a solution
which, as it seems to me, stared him in the face. Assuredly we can
transmute and elevate and raise to its highest power what he calls
the cosmic process, and can reconcile cosmic with ethical evolution,
_by extending to the unfit all our sympathy but forbidding them
parenthood_. I deny that the provision of a proper environment for the
individual entails racial deterioration. Cosmic and moral evolution
are compatible if, whilst caring for each individual, whether maim,
halt, blind, or insane, and whilst admitting the categorical imperative
of the law of love which demands our care for him, we continue to
obey the indication of Nature, which forbids such an individual to
perpetuate his infirmity. Nature has no choice; if she is to avert the
coming of the unfit race she must summarily extinguish its potential
ancestor, but we can prohibit the reproduction of his infirmity whilst
doing all we can for the success of his individual life. This is the
ideal course indicated and approved by biology and morality alike.
=The eugenic reconciliation.=--I submit, then, that there is no
inconsistency in fighting simultaneously for the preservation and
care of all babies and all children without discrimination of any
kind--and, on the other hand, in declaring that, if the degeneration
of the race is to be averted, still more if racial, which is the only
sure, progress, is to be attained, we must have the worthy and only the
worthy to be the parents of the future. I submit further that only the
eugenist can maintain his position in this matter at the present day.
On his one hand is the improvident humanitarian with his feeling
heart, he who, seeing misery and disease and death, whether in
babyhood, childhood, or at any other time of life, seeks to improve
the environment and so relieve these evils. Close beside this wholly
indiscriminate humanitarianism is that which declares that with
childhood is the future and therefore devotes its energies especially
to the young, is grateful for every baby born, whatever its state, and
when adult years are reached, assumes that all will be well for the
future, though the principle of natural selection is thus made of none
effect.
On the other side of the eugenists stand those whom we may for short
call the Nietzscheans. They see one-half of the truth of natural
selection; they see that through struggle and internecine war, species
have hitherto maintained themselves or ascended. They declare that all
improvement of the environment, or at any rate all humanitarian effort,
tends to abrogate the struggle for existence, and even, as is only
too often true, to select unworth and let worth go to the wall. This
school then declares that infant mortality is a blessing and charity
an unmitigated curse. In short, that we must go back as quickly as
possible to the order of the beast.
Between these two, surely, the eugenist stands, declaring that each has
a great truth, but that his teaching, and his alone, involves their
co-ordination and reconciliation. He agrees with the humanitarian that
no child should cry or starve or work or die--or at any rate this
particular eugenist does--and he agrees with the Nietzschean that
to abrogate, and still more, to reverse, the principle of natural
selection, is to set our faces for the goal of racial death. But
further, the eugenist declares that the indiscriminate humanitarian,
blind to the truth which the Nietzschean sees, would heap up, if
permitted, disaster upon disaster; whilst he repudiates as horrible and
ghastly the Nietzschean doctrine that morality must go by the board if
the race is to be raised:--that we must be damned to be saved.
Our age is now awakening, at last, to the cry of the children. The
tendency of legislation and opinion in every civilised country is
one and the same. For this humanitarianism let only him who thinks
of any child as a brat refuse to give thanks. But it is the business
of all who, whilst loving children and still in love with love, are
yet acquainted with the principles of organic evolution--in short,
the business of all humane men of science, men of science who have
not ceased to be human--whilst aiding, abetting and directing this
humanitarian effort by every means in their power, to teach and preach,
in season and out of season, that unless meanwhile we make terms with
the principle of selection, the choice of worth for parents, and the
rejection of the unworthy, _not as individuals but as parents_, we
shall assuredly breed for posterity, whose lives and happiness and
moral welfare are in our hands, evils that can adequately neither be
named nor numbered. Already, together with much blessed good, this
indiscriminate humanitarianism has done much evil. Many of our most
instant and, for this generation, insoluble problems are the lamentable
fruit of this inherently good thing. The eugenist declares that this
fruit is not necessary, that if it were necessary he could see no way
out of our morass and would echo the half-wish of Huxley for some
kindly comet that should put a term to human history altogether; and,
in short, that only by the eugenic means can the humanitarian end be
attained.
During the last year or two of the campaign against infant mortality
many things have become clear, and none clearer than the fundamental
compatibility between this campaign and the principles of eugenics. As
these two efforts wall be predominant in the real politics of all the
years to come, a few more words must here be devoted to the relation
between them.
Granted that the highest of all objects is the making of worthy human
beings, it is quite evident that we must attend equally to the two
factors which determine all human life--heredity and environment.
Eugenics stands for the principle of heredity--the principle that the
right children shall be born. The campaign against infant mortality
stands for a good environment[4]--so that children, when born, may
survive and thrive. Obviously eugenics would be of no use if the
children could not survive, and no human infant can survive unless
it be born into a moral environment: no motherhood, no man. The two
campaigns, then, are strictly complementary. We must endeavour to rid
ourselves of the popular notion that the whole result of the campaign
against infant mortality can be measured by the number of babies
whose death is prevented. The infant mortality is merely an index of
a widespread social disease--an index and an extreme symptom. But
for every baby killed many are damaged; and to remove the causes of
infant mortality is to remove the causes which at present effect the
deterioration of millions of human beings. The eugenic campaign, then,
without the other would be almost futile.
=The time for eugenics.=--On our principles the eugenic question can
be decently raised only _before conception_. The unyoked germ-cells
of any individual, though alive, are not entitled to claim protection
from the principle that life is sacred. It is permitted to allow them
to die; but from the moment of conception a new individual has been
formed--a new living human individual, even though it only consists of
a single cell, product of the union of the parental germ-cells: and
we shall not be safe unless we regard this being as sacred and its
destruction--except in order to save the life of the mother--as murder,
even at this as at any later stage. If the eugenist should raise his
voice, and say that this individual should not be born, he must be
regarded exactly as if he were to recommend infanticide or the lethal
chamber for unfit individuals. In such a case he would have entirely
mistaken the whole principle of (negative) eugenics, which is _not_
to elevate the race by the destruction of the unfit, at any stage,
ante-natal or post-natal, but to do so by prohibiting the conception
of the unfit. Directly the new human individual is formed the eugenic
question is too late in that case. It is now the eugenist's duty,
because it is every one's duty, to regard the new individual, whether
born or yet unborn, as an end in himself or herself. But when the
question arises whether that individual is to become a parent, then the
eugenic question can and must be raised.
Circumstances might arise in which “case-law” might be applicable. It
might be thought better to destroy the syphilitic child rather than
allow it to come into the world. But we cannot make these distinctions.
The question is simply one of expediency, and the only expedient thing
is that there shall be no paltering with the principle that when a
new human life is conceived our duty is to preserve it, whether it
were conceived only twenty-four hours ago or whether it be a decrepit
and helpless centenarian. The instant we let this principle go we are
proposing to revert to Nature's method of keeping up the level of a
race by murder. It is improper, then, for any one on eugenic grounds to
protest against proposals for the arrest of infant mortality. He should
have spoken sooner; at this stage he must hold his peace.
=The two campaigns complementary.=--Yet further: not only is it evident
that the campaign against infant mortality (which is, in a word, the
campaign for the provision of a proper environment for the young) is
obviously necessary for the fulfilment of the eugenic ideal--since
what would be the good of choosing the right parents if their children
are then to be slain?--but it can be shown conversely that the object
of those who are working against infant mortality can never be fully
attained except by means of eugenics. Eugenics apart, we can and
shall reduce the infant mortality to a mere fraction of what it is
at present, by preventing the destruction of that great majority of
babies who are born healthy. Even, however, when we have provided an
ideal environment for every baby that comes into the world, we shall
not have abolished infant mortality, since there will always remain a
proportion, say ten per cent., whom not even an ideal environment can
save. They should never have been conceived. At the Infantile Mortality
Conference held in London in 1908, this was clearly recognised by more
than one speaker. The maternalist must have the eugenist to help him if
his ideal is to be attained.
Not only is the ideal of the two campaigns one and the same; not only
is each necessary for the other, but their methods are the same.
It is true that at first this was not evident, since when we began
to fight against infant mortality many temporary expedients of no
eugenic relevance were adopted, such as the _crèche_ and the infant
milk depot. But in the interval between the Conferences of 1906 and
1908 many things became clear: so that, whereas the papers at the
first Conference were only accidentally connected, the programme
of the second proceeded upon a principle--the principle of the
supremacy of motherhood. We see now that the one fundamental method
by which infantile mortality may be checked is by the elevation of
motherhood. In the words of our President, Mr. John Burns, “you
must glorify, dignify, and purify motherhood by every means in your
power.” Thus the first two papers read at the first morning's meeting
of the Conference--a brief paper by the present writer on “The Human
Mother,” and an admirable paper by Miss Alice Ravenhill on “Education
for Motherhood”--might equally well have been read at a Eugenics
Conference. The opponent of infant mortality and the eugenist appeal
to the same principle and avow the same creed: that parenthood is
sacred, that it must not be casually undertaken, that it demands the
most assiduous preparation of body and intellect and emotions. When, at
last, these principles are believed and acted upon, infant mortality
will be a thing of the past and national eugenics a thing of the
present.
It is essential in this first general study of the subject to state
the true nature of the relation between these two campaigns, to
which every succeeding year of the present century will find more
and more attention devoted. Between them they succeed in beginning
at the beginning, and it would be a disaster, indeed, if they were
incompatible. On the contrary, they are complementary and mutually
indispensable. As the years go on they will engage between them the
sympathy and the assistance of all serious people. In the year 1907
infant mortality was first named in a speech by a Prime Minister, and
in that same year it was first mentioned in the Christmas-Day sermon
at St. Paul's Cathedral; in that year also Parliament passed the Early
Notification of Births Act, the first substantial legislative provision
which sets our feet on the road towards the goal of a true national
estimate of the value of parenthood. We are about to discover that
the true politics is domestics, since there is no wealth but life and
life begins at home. We are going to have the right kind of life born,
and we are going to take care of it when it is born. We shall raise a
generation which looks upon the ordinary money-changing politician as
an impudent public nuisance, and the brutal, blood-stained Imperialist,
shouting about the Empire which his very existence almost suffices to
condemn, whilst he battens on the cannibal sale of alcoholic poison
to babies and the mothers of future babies, as the very type of those
traitors--they of its own household--who have helped to destroy every
Empire in history. We propose to rebuild the living foundations of
empire. To this end we shall preach a New Imperialism, warning England
to beware lest her veins become choked with yellow dirt, and demanding
that over all her legislative chambers there be carved the more than
golden words, “There is no Wealth but Life.”
CHAPTER III
NATURAL SELECTION AND THE LAW OF LOVE
“Truth justifies herself; and as she dwells
With hope, who would not follow where she leads?”
Wordsworth.
“La plus haute tâche de l'action morale est le travail pour le bien
des générations futures.”--Forel.
Before looking more closely than we are commonly apt to do at the
meaning of the phrases “natural selection” and “survival of the
fittest,” let us exercise the right of man the moral being, as
distinguished from man the scientist or observer of Nature, to pass
ethical judgments upon the facts which it is the business of all the
sciences, except ethics itself, merely to record and interpret in and
for themselves. We are beginning at last, half a century after the
publication of the _Origin of Species_ in 1859, to realise the power
of the law of selection; what is the moral judgment which is to be
passed upon it? In a passage from the last page of Herbert Spencer's
Autobiography, we find words which may be quoted on both sides: “When
we think of the myriads of years of the Earth's past, during which have
arisen and passed away low forms of creatures, small and great, which,
_murdering and being murdered, have gradually evolved_,[5] how shall we
answer the question--To what end?”
“Murdering and being murdered” suggests the adverse, and “have
gradually evolved,” the favourable, ethical judgment.
Many thinkers, finding Nature “so careless of the single life,” finding
the murderous struggle for existence the dominant fact of the history
of the living world, return an adverse verdict. Amongst them are to be
found not merely those who are inclined, by temperament or imperfect
education, to rebellion against any conclusions of science, but also,
as we saw in the second chapter, such a great biologist as Huxley.
In another part of the lecture already cited he says that the Stoics
failed to see
“... that cosmic nature is no school of virtue, but the headquarters
of the enemy of ethical nature. The logic of facts was necessary to
convince them that the cosmos works through the lower nature of man,
not for righteousness, but against it.... The practice of that which
is ethically best--what we call goodness or virtue--involves a course
of conduct which, in all respects, is opposed to that which leads to
success in the cosmic struggle for existence.”
In other words, honesty is the _worst_ policy: and to worship natural
selection is to deify the devil.
The reader will realise that, if we are to succeed in establishing
the claim of natural selection to be the natural model upon which
those who desire the progress of society are to base their policy, it
is necessary to controvert the doctrine that natural selection is an
anti-moral process. But let us hear the other side.
The directly contrary view, then, is taken that though, truly
enough, there has been and is much “murdering and being murdered,”
yet organisms “have gradually evolved” towards fitness for their
surroundings, or the _milieu environnant_ of Lamarck, which we
translate environment; and that since fitness or adaptation obviously
makes for happiness, and since the moral being man has himself been
thus evolved, the process of natural selection, “murdering and being
murdered” notwithstanding, is essentially beneficent.
The controversy is embittered and complicated by the fact that ultimate
questions of religion and philosophy are involved. Is the Universe
moral, as Emerson asserted it was, or is it immoral? A recent opponent
of the orthodox creed of a benevolent Deity teaches that “The Lesson
of Evolution” is to disprove the idea of benevolence behind or in
Nature: “The story of life has been a story of pain and cruelty of the
most ghastly description.” The age-long fact of “murdering and being
murdered” is the weapon with which he attacks the theist: who, _per
contra_, points to the beneficent result, the exquisite adaptation of
all species to the circumstances of their life, and the evolution of
love itself.
We may remind ourselves of those great lines of Mr. George Meredith,
“... sure reward
We have whom knowledge crowns;
Who see in mould the rose unfold,
_The soul through blood and tears_.”
The one camp points to the “blood and tears” and asks for a verdict
accordingly. The other points to “the soul” as their product, and asks
for a verdict accordingly. But surely we need only to have the case
fairly stated, in order to realise that the “blood and tears” are true
but only half the truth, “the soul” true but only half the truth.
Natural Selection is a colossal paradox--the doing evil that good may
come. The evil is undoubtedly done, and the good undoubtedly comes. Is
not this the only verdict that is in consonance with all the facts? Is
it not less than philosophic to look at the process alone, or to look
at the result alone? Is any real end to be served by the incessant cry
that we should keep our eyes fixed on the “blood and tears” alone, or
on “the soul” alone? Is not the poet right when he says that the sure
reward of knowledge is not to see either half of the truth as if it
were the whole, but to see unfold “the soul through blood and tears?”
Any attempt to cast up accounts between the evil of the process and
the good of the result--especially any attempt based on the assumption
that the process has yet achieved its final result--would be not
only premature in the eyes of those who can look forwards, but would
be irrelevant to our present enquiry. I certainly am with those who
repudiate as misleading Mill's description of Nature as a “vast
slaughter-house,” and will declare that, apart from self-conscious
and supremely sensitive man, it is easy to exaggerate the misery and
to minimise the joy of the sub-human world. But our business here
is with the process and its results in man himself, in whom alone
are possible the heights of ecstasy and the depths of agony: and the
thesis--the sublime thesis, we may avouch--of the present discussion
is that, whatever the balance between the evil of the process of
Natural Selection and the good of its results in the natural state,
yet when it is transmuted, as it may be, by the moral intelligence of
man, according to the principles of race-culture or eugenics, the good
of the result can be attained, more abundantly and incomparably more
rapidly, than ever heretofore, _whilst the evil of the process can be
abolished altogether_. True or false, is this not a sublime thesis?
=Nature must be cruel to be kind.=--If organic fitness or adaptation
to the circumstances of life is to be secured, Nature must choose
for future parents, out of every new generation, only those whose
inborn characters make for this adaptation, and who, in virtue of
the fact we call heredity, will tend to transmit this fitness to
their offspring. Now it is often convenient to personify Nature,
but we must not be misled. The process is really an automatic, not
an intelligently directed one. In order that it shall be possible,
certain conditions must obtain. The choice or selection depends not
merely upon the provision of a variety from which to choose--this
being afforded by what is called variation, which is the correlative
of heredity, both being obvious facts in any well-filled nursery--but
also upon the production of _more_ young creatures than there is or
will be room for. (If there be room for all, so that all survive,
there can be no selection, and instead of survival of the fittest
there will be indiscriminate survival.) The choice is effected amongst
this superfluity by an internecine “struggle for existence”: hence
the “murdering and being murdered,” hence the “blood and tears.” The
motor force of the whole process may be symbolised as the “will to
life,” ever seeking to realise itself in more abundance and with more
success--with more and more approximation to perfect adaptation. The
will to death is no ingredient of the will to life. Nature is, so
to say, by no means desirous of the process of “murdering and being
murdered”: very much on the contrary. It is life, more life, and
fitter life, that is her desire: the “murdering and being murdered,”
the “blood and tears” are no part of her aim. But they are inevitable,
though lamentable, if her aim is to be realised. She _must_ be cruel to
be kind--a little cruel to be very kind.[6]
It is _imaginable_, though no more, that natural selection, in certain
circumstances, might have worked otherwise: the penalty for less as
against greater fitness might _imaginably_ have been not death but
merely sterility--the denial of future parenthood. This is the ideal
of race-culture. Had this been possible, Nature could have effected
her end, which is fitter and fuller life, without having incidentally
to mete out premature death to such an overwhelming majority of all
her creatures. But, actually, this was not possible: and, unless
the end was to be sacrificed, Nature was compelled--to keep up the
figure--summarily to kill right and left. Permitted to reach maturity,
the unfit as well as the fit would multiply; and since, in general, the
lower the form of life the greater its fertility, the species could not
possibly advance, or even maintain itself at the level already gained.
To drop the figure, the process is a mechanical and automatic one, and
its appalling wastefulness and indisputable cruelty are inevitably
involved, whilst it so remains.
=Intelligence may be kind to be kinder.=--But--and here is the
great event--this mechanical, automatic, non-intelligent process
has latterly given birth to intelligence, the moral intelligence of
man: and the question now to be answered is, what modification can
intelligence effect in the moral-immoral process that has created
it? Must intelligence abrogate that process altogether, as Huxley
declares, on the grounds of its murderous methods? Must intelligence
simply look on, recognise, but not reconstruct? Must intelligence
reverse the process--as indeed it is now doing in many cases--so
that in the new environment of which itself is a factor, that which
formerly was unfitness shall become fitness, and _vice versâ_? _Or_
is it conceivable that intelligence can transmute the process, so
that, whilst hitherto mechanical, automatic, and therefore inevitably
murderous, it shall become _intelligent_, pressing towards the sublime
end, and reforming the murderous means?
Hear Mr. Galton himself (_Sociological Papers_, 1905, p. 52):--
“Purely passive, or what may be styled mechanical evolution, displays
the awe-inspiring spectacle of a vast eddy of organic turmoil ... it
is moulded by blind and wasteful processes, namely, by an extravagant
production of raw material and the ruthless rejection of all that
is superfluous, through the blundering steps of trial and error....
Evolution is in any case a grand phantasmagoria, but it assumes an
infinitely more interesting aspect under the knowledge that the
intelligent action of the human will is, in some small measure,
capable of directing its course. Man has the power of doing this
largely so far as the evolution of humanity is concerned; he has
already affected the quality and distribution of organic life so
widely that the changes on the surface of the earth, merely through
his disforestings and agriculture, would be recognisable from a
distance as great as that of the moon.”
Hear also Sir E. Ray Lankester, in the Romanes Lecture[7] for 1905:
“Man is ... a product of the definite and orderly evolution which is
universal, a being resulting from and driven by the one great nexus of
mechanism which we call Nature. He stands alone, face to face with that
relentless mechanism. It is his destiny to understand and to control
it.”
“Nature's insurgent son,” Professor Lankester calls man in this
lecture: and yet again there recurs that mighty aphorism of Bacon,
which might well be printed on every page of these chapters, “Nature
is to be commanded only by obeying her.” The struggle for existence is
the terrible fact of Nature, but is only a means to an end. It is our
destiny to command the end whilst _humanising_ the means.
=The struggle for existence.=--The ideal of eugenics or race-culture
is to abolish the brutal elements of the struggle for existence
whilst gaining its great end. The nature of this struggle is commonly
misapprehended and, as I cannot improve upon the words of Professor
Lankester, I shall freely use them in the attempt to show what it
really is. He says:--
“The world, the earth's surface, is practically full, that is to
say, fully occupied. Only one pair of young can grow up to take the
place of the pair--male and female--which have launched a dozen, or
it may be as many as a hundred thousand, young individuals on the
world.... The ‘struggle for existence’ of Darwin is the struggle
amongst all the superabundant young of a given species, in a given
area, to gain the necessary food, to escape voracious enemies, and
gain protection from excesses of heat, cold, moisture, and dryness.
One pair in the new generation--only one pair--survive for every
parental pair. Animal population does not increase: ‘Increase and
multiply’ has never been said by Nature to her lower creatures.
Locally, and from time to time, owing to exceptional changes, a
species may multiply here and decrease there; but it is important
to realise that the ‘struggle for existence’ in Nature--that is to
say, among the animals and plants of this earth untouched by man--is
a desperate one, however tranquil and peaceful the battlefield may
appear to us. The struggle for existence takes place, not as a
clever French writer glibly informs his readers, between different
species, but between individuals of the same species, brothers and
sisters and cousins.... In Nature's struggle for existence, death,
immediate obliteration, is the fate of the vanquished, whilst the
only reward to the victors--few, very few, but rare and beautiful in
the fitness which has carried them to victory--is the permission to
reproduce their kind--to carry on by heredity to another generation
the specific qualities by which they triumphed.
“It is not generally realised how severe is the pressure and
competition in Nature--not between different species, but between the
immature population of one and the same species, precisely because
they are of the same species and have exactly the same needs.... A
distinctive quality in the beauty of natural productions (in which
man delights) is due to the unobtrusive yet tremendous slaughter of
the unfit which is incessantly going on and the absolute restriction
of the privilege of parentage to the happy few who attain to the
standard described as ‘the fittest.’”
=The survival of the fittest.=--Now let us look closely at this most
famous of all Spencer's phrases, “the survival of the fittest,” and try
to understand its full and exact meaning. There is no phrase in any
language so frequently misinterpreted. Even a writer who should know
better makes this mistake. Mr. H. G. Wells speaks[8] of “that same lack
of a fine appreciation of facts that enabled Herbert Spencer to coin
those two most unfortunate terms _Evolution_ and the _Survival of the
Fittest_. The implication is that the _best_ reproduces and survives.
Now really it is the _better_ that survives and not the _best_.” What
the correction is supposed to signify I do not know, but the whole
passage is nonsense. The implication is neither that the _best_ nor
the _better_ survive, but the fittest--or if Mr. Wells prefers, for it
matters not one whit--the fitter. This lack of a fine appreciation of
words is not, unfortunately, peculiar to Mr. Wells. There is no word
in the language that more exactly expresses the fact than the word
fittest: as Darwin recognised when he promptly incorporated Spencer's
phrase in the second edition of the _Origin of Species_ as the best
interpretation of his own phrase “natural selection”![9] Fitness is
the capacity to fit: a thing that is fit is a thing that _fits_. A
living creature survives in proportion as it fits its environment--the
physical environment in the case of vegetables and the lower animals,
the physical, social, intellectual and moral environment in the case
of man. The kind of glove that most perfectly fits the hand is the
fittest glove and will survive in the struggle for existence between
gloves. If, instead of a glove, we take a living creature, say a
microbe, the kind of microbe that best fits into the environment
provided by, say, human blood, is the fittest and will survive and be
the cause of our commonest disease. Thus the tubercle bacillus is at
once the _fittest_ microbe and, not the best, but the worst. Among
ourselves, the newspaper devoted to yesterday's murder is the fittest
and survives, ousting the newspaper which reckons with the crucifixion,
or the murder of Socrates or Bruno. In a society of blackguardism, the
biggest blackguard is the fittest man and will survive: he is also the
worst. In another society the best man is the fittest and survives. The
capacity to fit into the environment is the capacity that determines
survival: it has no moral connotation whatever. If Herbert Spencer had
written the survival of the better, as Mr. Wells desires, he would have
written palpable nonsense: as it was he used the fittest word--in this
case also the best, because the truest. Referring to the queen-bee,
who destroys her own daughters, Darwin says, “undoubtedly this is for
the good of the community; maternal love or maternal hatred, though
the latter fortunately is most rare, is all the same to the inexorable
principle of natural selection.”
If natural selection were the survival of the better, as Mr. Wells
would have us believe, there would be nothing for eugenics or
race-culture to do: and heaven would long ago have come to earth. If
in all ages the better men and women had survived and become parents,
earth would long ago have become a demi-paradise indeed, there would
have been no arrests, no reversals in the history of human progress,
and life would be already what, some day, it will be, when there is
achieved the eugenic ideal--which is precisely that the best or better
members of our race shall be the selected for the supreme profession
of parenthood. In other words, the eugenic ideal, the ideal of
race-culture, is _to ensure that the fittest shall be the best_.
Always, everywhere, without a solitary exception, human, animal or
vegetable, the fittest have ultimately survived and must survive. Once
realise what is the meaning of the word fit--best seen in the verb “to
fit”--and we shall see that, as Herbert Spencer pointed out in his
overwhelming reply to the late Lord Salisbury's attack on evolution,
the idea of the survival of the fittest is a necessity of thought.[10]
But, alas, the idea of the survival of the best or the better is not
a necessity of thought! The fittest microbes are the worst from our
point of view, because they are most inimical to the highest forms
of life; the fittest newspaper may be the worst, because it panders
to the worst but most widespread and irresponsible elements in human
nature; everything and every one that succeeds, succeeds because it or
he fits the conditions: but to succeed is not necessarily to be good.
Indeed everything that exists at all, living or lifeless, an atom or an
animal, a molecule or a moon, exists because it can exist, because it
fits the conditions of existence: there is no moral question involved,
but only a mechanical one. The business of eugenics or race-culture is
to make an environment, conditions of law and public opinion, _such
that the fittest shall be the best and the best the fittest therein_.
If memory may be trusted, the primary meaning of the word _fit_ has
not hitherto been called in by any one to elucidate the meaning of
Spencer's phrase: perhaps it may be hoped that we shall at last begin
to understand it, if we remember that a thing is fit because it fits.
It is best not to be too sanguine, however, and therefore we may
attempt to illustrate the case from another aspect.
=Survival-value.=--Every living thing and nearly every character
or feature of a living thing that survives, survives because it
has value or capacity for life--which may be called, in Professor
Lloyd Morgan's phrase, _survival-value_. The character that gives
an organism survival-value, or value for life, the character that
enables it to fit its environment, may be of any order. The atom, as
I have said elsewhere, is an organism writ small. The kinds of atoms
that have survived in the age-long struggle for existence between
atoms are those that have survival-value on account of their internal
stability: as Empedocles argued ages ago. In the case of living
things, which individually die, it is evident that the capacity to
reproduce themselves is one of supreme survival-value. If mankind lost
this capacity, all its other characters of survival-value, such as
intelligence, would obviously avail it nought. Certain valuable members
of society may fall short in this cardinal respect, and therefore
become extinct. Indeed, other forms of survival-value, as we shall see,
seem to be in large measure inimical to fertility: and this is perhaps
the chief obstacle to eugenics.[11]
Fertility apart, the character having survival-value may take a
thousand forms. In the case of the parasitic microbe it is an evil
character, the power to produce toxins or poisons. In the case of
the tiger it is the possession of large and powerful bones and claws
and muscles and teeth. In the case of the ox it is a complicated
and efficient digestive apparatus, enabling it to fit into a
food-environment which is too innutritious to sustain the life of
creatures not so endowed. Nature seeks only the fittest; not the best
but the best-adapted; she asks no moral questions. A Keats, a Spinoza,
or a Schubert must go under if his factors of survival-value do not
enable him to resist those of the tubercle bacillus, its toxins or
poisons. She welcomes the parasitic tapeworm, all hooks and mouth or
stomach, because these give it survival-value; and so on.
The business of eugenics or race-culture, then, is to create an
environment such that those characters which we desire as moral
and intelligent beings shall be endowed with the highest possible
survival-value, as against those which ally so many men with the
microbe and the tapeworm. There are those who live in society to-day,
and reproduce their like, in virtue of the poisons they produce, in
virtue of their tenacious hooks and voracious stomachs. If society be
organised so that these are factors of more survival-value than the
disinterested search for truth, or mother-love, or the power to create
great poetry or music--then, according to the inevitable and universal
law of the survival of the fittest, our parasites will oust our poets
and our poisoners our philosophers. These things have happened and may
happen again at any time. It does not matter that the good thing, in
virtue of survival-value then superior, has been evolved. Nature never
gives a final verdict in favour of good or bad but only and always in
favour of the fit. Let the conditions change, so that rapacity fits
them better than righteousness, or--as in a completely “collectivist”
state--vegetableness rather than virility, and the thing we call high
will go under before the thing we call low. Nature recognises neither
high nor low but only fitness or value for life in the conditions that
actually obtain. These laws enthroned and dethroned the civilisations
of the past: they have enthroned and may dethrone us. But this end is
not inevitable, since man--and this is his great character--not merely
reacts to his environment, as all creatures must, but can create and
recreate it. The business of eugenics or race-culture is to create an
environment such that the human characters of which the human spirit
approves shall in it outweigh those of which we disapprove. Make it
fittest to be best and the best will win--not because it is the best,
but because it is the fittest: had the worst been the fittest it would
have won. In society to-day both forms of the process may be observed.
The balance between them determines its destiny. It is the business of
eugenics to throw the whole weight of human purpose into the scale of
the good.
=Evolution not necessarily progress.=--No excessive space has been
devoted to this distinction between the fittest and the best and to
the real meaning of Spencer's famous phrase, if perchance it should
avail in any degree to dispel one of the commonest of the many common
delusions regarding the nature of organic evolution and its outcome.
This delusion is that progress is an inevitable law of nature.[12]
The great process of history, as revealed by biology, displays as its
supreme fact the occurrence of progress. The principles of evolution
teach that this progress--as, for instance, in the evolution of man--is
a product of the survival of the fittest; whilst we are also reminded
that the survival of the fittest is a necessary truth: but it does not
follow that progress is inevitable.
In the first place, natural selection involves selection. Where all
the young members of a new generation of any species survive, and
parenthood becomes not a privilege but a common and universal function,
plainly the process is in abeyance: and, in the second place, since
the survival of the fittest is not the survival of the best, but only
the survival of the best adapted, the process may at any time take the
form of retrogression rather than that of progress. The assumption
that, because progress has been effected through natural selection, we
need do no more than fold our hands, or unfold them merely to applaud,
involves the denial of one of the most familiar facts of natural
history--the fact of racial degeneration. The parasitic microbes, the
parasitic worms, the barnacles, innumerable living creatures both
animal and vegetable, individuals and races of mankind, to-day as in
all ages--these prove only too clearly that the process of the survival
of the fittest may make as definitely for retrogression in one case as
for progress in another.
By all means let us infer from the facts of organic evolution the
conclusion that further progress must surely be possible, so much
progress having already been achieved as is represented by the
difference between inorganic matter or the amœba or microbe on the one
hand, and man on the other hand. But let us most earnestly beware of
the false and disastrous optimism which should suppose that because
the survival of the fittest has often, and indeed most often, meant
the survival of the best, it means always that and nothing else. On
the contrary, we must learn that, even in natural circumstances,
apart from any interference by man, the survival of the fittest often
means racial degeneration--a tapeworm kept in spirits should stand
upon the study mantelpiece of all who think with Mr. Wells that the
survival of the fittest means the survival of the better; and still
more notably we must learn that the interference of man in the case of
his own species, sometimes of evil intent, sometimes for the highest
ends, with the process of natural selection, has repeatedly led, and
is now in large part leading, to nothing other than that process of
racial degeneration of which the tapeworm and the barnacle should be
our perpetual reminders. The case becomes serious enough when man
interferes with the process of selection merely with the effect of
suspending it, wholly or in part: but it becomes far more serious
when his interference constitutes a reversal of the process. This
most supremely disastrous of all conceivable consequences of man's
intelligence and moral sense is known as reversed selection, and must
be carefully studied hereafter. Meanwhile, we must devote some space to
a most important consideration--namely, that though Nature is impartial
in her choice, and will, for instance, allow the poisons of a microbe
such as the tubercle bacillus to destroy the life of a Spinoza or a
Keats or a Schubert, yet, on the whole, the survival-value of the
mental, spiritual, or psychical in all its forms does persistently tend
to outweigh that of the physical or material--of this great truth the
evolution and dominance of man himself being the supreme example.
The very fact of progress, which I would define as the emergence
and increasing dominance of mind, demonstrates--it being remembered
that natural selection has no moral prejudices--that even in a world
of claws and toxins the psychical must have possessed sufficient
survival-value to survive. It is quite evident that even the lowliest
psychical characters, such as sharpness of sensation, discrimination,
and memory, must be of value in the struggle for life. More and more we
might expect to find, and do actually find in the course of evolution,
that creatures live by their wits, rather than by force of bone or
muscle. The psychical was certainly given no unfair start--on the
contrary. It has had to struggle for its emergence; it has emerged only
where there has been struggle and has done so because it could--because
of its superior survival-value. It has the right which belongs to
might--in the world of life there is no other.[13]
By no means less evident is the inherently superior survival-value
of the psychical, if we turn from its aspects of sensation and
intelligence to those which are all summed up under the word love.
Notwithstanding Nietzsche's mad misconception of the Darwinian theory,
no one who has studied the facts of reproduction and its conditions
in the world of life can question the incalculable survival-value
of love in animal history. The success of those most ancient of all
societies, of which the ant-heap and the bee-hive are the types,
depends absolutely upon the self-sacrifice of the individual. If we
pass upwards from the insects to the lowest vertebrates, we find
the survival-value of love proved by the comparison between various
species of fish, and its increasing importance may be traced upwards
through amphibia, reptiles, birds and mammals in succession, up to
man. Natural selection thus actually selects morality. Without love no
baby could live for twenty-four hours. Every human being that exists
or ever has existed or ever will exist is a product of mother-love or
foster-mother-love, and I am well entitled to say, as I have so often
said, _no morals, no man_. The creature in whom organic morality is at
its height has become the lord of the earth in virtue of that morality
which natural selection has selected, not from any moral bias, but
because of its superior survival-value.
CHAPTER IV
THE SELECTION OF MIND
“Many are the mighty things, but none is mightier than man.... He
conquers by his devices the tenant of the fields.”--Sophocles.
“L'homme n'est qu'un roseau, le plus faible de la Nature; mais c'est
un roseau pensant.”--Pascal.
“The soul of all improvement is the improvement of the
soul.”--Burchell.
Whereas, in its beginning, _mind_, or the psychical in all its aspects,
was merely a useful property of _body_, all organic progress may be
conceived in terms of a change in this original relation between them.
In man, the mental or psychical has become the essential thing, and the
body its servant. We are well prepared, then, to accept the proposition
that in our own day and for our own species, the plane upon which
natural selection works has largely been transferred, and, indeed, if
any further progress is to be effected, _must_ be transferred, from
the bodily or physical to the mental or psychical. A certain most
remarkable fact in the anatomy of man may be cited, as we shall see, in
support of this proposition.
We need not venture upon the controversial ground of the relation or
ultimate unity of mind and body; nor need we set up any suggestion of
antagonism between them. All, however, are absolutely agreed that the
psychical in all its forms, whatever it really be, has a consistent
relation of the most intimate kind with that part of the body which
we call the nervous system. For our present purposes the nature of
this relation matters nothing at all, and in place of the phrase,
the “selection of mind,” I should be quite content, if the reader so
prefers, to speak of the selection of nerve or nervous selection. And
if I may for a moment anticipate the conclusion, we may say that, in
and for the future, the process of selection for life and parenthood,
as it occurs in mankind, must be based, if the highest results are to
be obtained, upon the principle that the selection of bodily qualities
other than those of the nervous system is of value only in so far as
these serve the nervous or psychical qualities. For practical and for
theoretical purposes we must accept the dictum of Professor Forel that
“the brain is the man”--or, to be more accurate and less epigrammatic,
the nervous system is the man. If, then, we counsel or approve of any
selection of bone or muscle or digestion, or any other bodily organ or
function; if we select for physical health, physical energy, longevity,
or immunity from disease--our estimate of these things, one and all,
must be wholly determined by the services which they can perform for
the nervous system, whether as its instruments, its guarantors of
health and persistence, or otherwise. But we are not to regard any of
these things as ends in themselves--notwithstanding the fact that this
temptation will constantly beset us. So to do is implicitly to deny and
renounce the supreme character of man--which is that, in him, mind or
nervous system is the master, and the rest of the body, with all its
attributes, the servant.
=The body still necessary.=--Should anyone suppose that the principles
here laid down would speedily involve us, if executed, in a host
of disasters, let him reconsider that conclusion. Utterly ignorant
or jocose persons have hinted, more or less definitely, that if a
race of mankind were to be bred for brains, the product would be a
most misbegotten creature approaching as near as possible--and that
imperfectly enough--to the ideal of disembodied thought, a creature
monstrous as to head, impotent and puny as to limbs, and, in effect,
the least effective of living creatures. This supposition may be
commended as the last word in the way of nonsense. It depends upon
an abysmal ignorance of the necessary and permanent relations which
subsist between mind and body. It assumes that the healthy mind can
be obtained without the healthy body; it is totally unaware that the
nervous system cannot work properly unless the blood be well aerated by
active lungs and distributed by a healthy heart; that unless certain
glands, of which these people have never heard, are acting properly,
the nervous system falls into decadence, and the man becomes an
imbecile. To breed for brains is most assuredly to breed for body too:
only that the end in view will guide us as to what points of body to
breed for. For instance, it would prevent us from having any foolish
ambitions as to increasing the stature of the race, or the average
weight of its muscular apparatus. Stature may be a point to breed for
in the race-culture of giraffes and muscle in the race-culture of the
hippopotamus: but such bodily characters are of no moment for man,
who is above all things a mind. Whilst we shall pay little attention
to these, we or our descendants will be abundantly concerned with the
preservation and culture of those many bodily characters upon which
the health and vigour and sanity and durability of the nervous system
depend.
Further, notwithstanding all the nonsense that has been written
concerning the man of the future, with bald and swollen head,
be-goggled eyes, toothless gums, and wicker-work skeleton, those
who know the alphabet of physiology and psychology are warranted in
believing that wisely to breed for brains will be to breed for beauty
too--not of the skin-deep but of the mind-deep variety--and also for
grace and energy and versatility of physique. Those who worship brawn
as brawn may be commended to the ox; those who respect brawn as the
instrument of brain, and value it not by its horse-power but by its
capacity as the agent of purpose, will find nothing to complain of in
the kinds of men and women whom a wise eugenics has for its ideal.
=The erect attitude.=--And now we must briefly consider that “most
remarkable fact in the anatomy of man” to which allusion was made in
the first paragraph. It is that, as the most philosophic anatomists are
now coming to believe, the body of man actually represents the goal of
physical evolution. Of course the common opinion is, quite apart from
science, that man is the highest of creatures, and that there is no
more to be expected. But the doctrine of evolution regards man as the
latest, not necessarily the last, term in an age-long process which is
by no means completed, and from the evolutionary point of view it is
thus a daring and, at first hearing, a preposterous thing to say that,
so far as the physical aspects of organic evolution are concerned, the
body of man apparently represents the logical and final conclusion of
the age-long process which has produced it. Let us attempt very briefly
to outline the argument.
We may say that a great step was taken when from the chaos of the
invertebrate or backbone-less animals there emerged the first
vertebrates. This unquestionably occurred in the sea, the first
backbone being evolved in a fish-like creature which, in the course of
time, developed two lateral fins. These became modified into two pairs
of limbs, the sole function of which was locomotion. In the next group
of vertebrates, the amphibia--such as the frog--we see these limbs
terminating each in five digits. (The frog, so to say, decided that
we should count in tens.) Now some creatures have specialised their
limbs at the cost of certain fingers. The horse, for instance, walks
on the nails (the hoofs) of its middle fingers and its middle toes.
In the main line of ascent, however, none of these precious fingers
(and toes)--how precious let the typist or the pianist say--have been
sacrificed. There has been, however, in later ages a tendency towards
the specialisation of the front limbs. Used for locomotion at times,
they are also used for grasping and tearing and holding, as in the
case of the tiger, a member of the carnivora, a relatively late and
high group of mammals. But the carnivore does not carry its food to
its mouth, and the cat carries her kittens in her mouth and not with
her paws. In the apes and monkeys, however, this specialisation goes
further, and things are actually carried by the hands to the mouth--a
very great advance on the tiger, who fixes his food with his “hands,”
and then carries his mouth to it. Food to mouth instead of mouth to
food is a much later stage in evolution, a fact which may be recalled
when we watch the table manners of certain people. Finally, in man the
specialisation reaches its natural limit by the _complete_ liberation
of the fore-limbs from the purposes of locomotion--though the crawling
gait of a child recalls the base degrees by which we did ascend.
This great change depends upon an alteration in the axis of the body.
The first fishes, like present fishes, were horizontal animals, but
gradually the axis has become altered, in the main line of progress,
until the semi-erect apes yield to man the erect, or “man the erected,”
as Stevenson called him. The son of horizontal animals, he is himself
vertical: the “pronograde” has become “orthograde.” Thus the phrase,
“the ascent of man,” may be read in two senses. This capital fact has
depended upon a shifting of the centre of gravity of the body, which
in adult man lies behind the hip-joints, whereas in his ancestors and
in the small baby (still in the four-footed stage) it lies in front
of the hip-joints. Thus, whilst other creatures tend naturally to
fall forwards, so that they must use their fore-limbs for support and
locomotion, the whole body of man above the hip-joints tends naturally
to fall backwards, being prevented from doing so by two great ligaments
which lie in front of the hip-joints and have a unique development in
man. The complete erection of the spine means that the skull, instead
of being suspended in front, is now poised upon the top of the spinal
column. The field of vision is enormously enlarged, and it is possible
to sweep a great extent of horizon at a moment's notice. But the
complete discharge of the fore-limbs from the function of locomotion
has far vaster consequences, especially as they now assume the function
of educating their master, the brain, and enabling him to employ them
for higher and higher purposes.
Thus, when we ask ourselves whether there is any further goal for
physical evolution, the answer is that none can be seen. So far as
physical evolution is concerned the goal has been attained with the
erect attitude. Future changes in the anatomy of man will not be
positive but negative. There doubtless will be a certain lightening of
the ship, the casting overboard of inherited superfluities, but that is
all: except that we may hope for certain modifications in the way of
increasing the adaptation of the body to the erect attitude, which at
present bears very hardly in many ways upon the body of man, and much
more so upon the body of woman.
Thus race-culture will certainly not aim at the breeding of physical
freaks of any kind, nor yet at such things as stature. It must begin by
clearly recognising what are the factors which in man possess supreme
survival-value, and it must aim at their reinforcement rather than at
the maintenance of those factors which, of dominant value in lower
forms of life, have been superseded in him. A few words will suffice
to show in what fashion man has already shed vital characters which,
superfluous and burdensome for him, have in former times been of the
utmost survival-value.
=The denudation of man.=--As contrasted with the whole mass of his
predecessors, man comes into the world denuded of defensive armour,
destitute of offensive weapons, possessed alone of the potentialities
of the psychical. So far as defence is concerned, he has neither fur
nor feathers nor scales, but is the most naked and thinnest skinned of
animals. In his _Autobiography_, Spencer tells us how he and Huxley,
sitting on the cliff at St. Andrews and watching some boys bathing,
“marvelled over the fact, seeming especially strange when they are no
longer disguised by clothes, that human beings should dominate over all
other creatures and play the wonderful part they do on the earth.”[14]
But man is not only without armour against either living enemies or
cold; he is also without weapons of attack. His teeth are practically
worthless in this respect, not only on account of their small size but
also because his chin, a unique possession, and the shape of his jaws,
make them singularly unfit for catching or grasping. For claws he has
merely nails, capable only of the feeblest scratching; he can discharge
no poisons from his mouth; he cannot envelop himself in darkness
in order to hide himself; his speediest and most enduring runner is
a breathless laggard. And, lastly, he is at first almost bereft of
instinct, has to be burnt in order to dread the fire, and cannot find
his own way to the breast. His sole instrument of dominance is his mind
in all its attributes.
On the grounds thus indicated, we must be wholly opposed to all
proposals for race education and race-culture, and to all social
practices, which assume more or less consciously that, for all his
boasting, man is after all only an animal: whilst we must applaud the
selection and culture of the physical exactly in so far as, but no
further than, it makes for health and strength of the psychical--or, if
the reader dislikes these expressions, the health and strength of that
particular part of the physical which we call the nervous system.
It used to be generally asserted that whilst, in a civilised community,
we do not expect to find the biggest or most muscular man King or
Prime Minister, yet amongst savage tribes it _is_ the physical, muscle
and bone and brutality, that determines leadership. This, however, we
now know to be untrue even for the earliest stages of society that
anthropologists can recognise. The leader of the savage tribe is not
the biggest man but the cleverest. The suggestion is therefore that,
even in the earliest stages of human society, the plane of selection
has already been largely transferred from brawn to brain or from
physique to _psyche_. It has always been so, we may be well sure. The
Drift men of Taubach, living in the inter-glacial period, could kill
the full-grown elephant and rhinoceros. Says Professor Ranke: “It is
the mind of man that shows itself superior to the most powerful brute
force, even where we meet him for the first time.” This remains true
whether the brute force be displayed in brutes or in other men.
The great fact of intelligence, as against material apparatus of
any kind and even as against rigid instinct, is its limitless
applicability. With this one instrument man achieves what without it
could be achieved only by a creature who combined in his own person
every kind of material apparatus, offensive and defensive, locomotor or
what not, which animal life, and vegetable life too, have invented in
the past--and not even by such a creature. Man is a poor pedestrian,
but his mind makes locomotives which rival or surpass the fish of the
sea, the antelope on land, if not yet the bird of the air; his teeth
are of poor quality, but his mind supplies him with artificial ones and
enables him to cook and otherwise to prepare his food. All the physical
methods are self-limited, but the method of mind has no limits; it is
even more than cumulative, and multiplies its capacities by geometrical
progression.
=The cult of muscle.=--A word must really be said here, in accordance
with all the foregoing argument, against the recent revival of what
may be called the Cult of Muscle. This cult of muscle, or belief
in physical culture, so called, as the true means of race-culture,
undoubtedly requires to have its absurd pretensions censured. We now
have many flourishing schools of physical culture which desire to
persuade us to a belief in the monstrous anachronism that, even in man,
muscle and bone are still pre-eminent. They want as many people as
possible to believe that the only thing really worth aiming at is what
they understand by physical culture. They pride themselves upon knowing
the names and positions of all the muscles in the body, and on being
able to provide us with instruments to develop all these muscles: they
are there and they ought to be developed, and you are a mere parody of
what a man ought to be unless they are developed--none of them must
be neglected. Many people have been persuaded of these doctrines, and
there is no doubt that the physical culture schools do thus develop a
large number of muscles which have no present service for man and would
otherwise have been allowed to rest in a decent obscurity.
In order to prove this point, let us instance a few muscles which it
is utterly absurd to regard as still possessing any survival-value for
man. In the sole of the foot there are four distinct layers of muscles,
by means of which it is theoretically possible to turn each individual
toe to the left or the right, independently of its neighbours, and to
move the various parts of each toe upon themselves, just as in the case
of the fingers. All this muscular apparatus is a mere survival, worth
nothing at all for the special purposes of the human foot. In point of
fact the human foot is now decadent, and probably not more than two
or three specimens of feet in a hundred contain the complete normal
equipment of muscles, bones and joints--as Sir William Turner showed
many years ago. Thus many feet are possessed of muscles designed to
act upon joints which have not been developed at all in the feet in
question and which, if they were there, would not be of the smallest
use. To take another instance, we do not now use our external ears
for the purpose of catching sound, though we still possess muscles
which, if thrown into action, would move the external ear in various
directions. Again, there is a flat, thin stratum of muscle on the
front of the neck, corresponding to a muscle which in the dog and the
horse is quite important, but which is of no use to us. All would be
agreed as to the absurdity of devoting continued conscious effort to
the development of these particular muscles; but in point of fact we
have a whole host of muscles which are in a similar case, and which
are nevertheless objects of the most tender solicitude on the part of
the physical culturist. In general, this modern craze, whilst highly
profitable to those who foster it, is most misguided and reactionary.
Modern knowledge of heredity teaches us that our descendants will not
profit muscularly in the slightest degree because of our devotion to
these relics: the blacksmith's baby has promise of no bigger biceps
than any one else's. Further, the over-doing of muscular culture
is responsible for the consumption of a large amount of energy. A
muscle is a highly vital and active organ, requiring a large amount
of nourishment, which its possessor has to obtain, consume, digest
and distribute. The more time and energy spent in sustaining useless
muscles, the less is available for immeasurably more important
concerns. Man does not live by brawn alone: he _does_ live by brain
alone.
=Strength versus skill.=--So far as true race-culture is concerned,
we should regard our muscles merely as servants or instruments of the
will. Since we have learnt to employ external forces for our purposes,
the mere bulk of a muscle is now a matter of little importance. Of the
utmost importance, on the other hand, is the power to co-ordinate and
graduate the activity of our muscles, so that they may become highly
trained servants. This is a matter, however, not of muscle at all but
of nervous education. Its foundation cannot be laid by mechanical
things like dumb-bells and exercises, but by games, in which will and
purpose and co-ordination are incessantly employed. In other words, the
only physical culture worth talking about is nervous culture.
The principles here laid down are daily defied in very large measure in
our nurseries, our schools, and our barrack yards. The play of a child,
spontaneous and purposeful, is supremely human and characteristic.
Although, when considered from the outside, it is simply a means of
muscular development, properly considered it is really _the_ means of
nervous development. Here we see muscles used as human muscles should
alone be used--as instruments of mind. In schools the same principles
should be recognised. From the biological and psychological point of
view the playing-field is immeasurably superior to the gymnasium.
But it is in the barrack yard that the pitiable confusion between
the survival-value of mind and muscle respectively in man is most
ludicrously and disastrously exemplified.
The glorious truth upon which we appear to act is that man is an
animated machine; that the business of the soldier is not to think,
not to be an individual, but to be an assemblage of muscles. We see
the marks of this idea even in a fine poem: “Their's not to reason
why, their's but to do or die”--which, of course, might just as well
be said of a stud of horses or motor-cars. Further, our worship of the
machine is, consistently enough, an unintelligent worship. We do not
even recognise the best conditions for its action. Every year hundreds
of young soldiers, originally healthy, have their hearts and lungs and
other vital organs permanently injured by the imbecile attitude of
chest--that of abnormal expansion--which they are required to adopt
during hard work. Army doctors are now protesting against this, but it
is in accordance with the fitness of things that the cult of muscle as
against intelligence should be unintelligent.
I repeat that whilst in the study of race-culture the physical cannot
be ignored, since the psychical is so largely dependent upon it,
yet the physical is of worth to us only in so far as it serves the
psychical. The race the culture of which we propose to undertake has
long ago determined to abandon the physical in itself as an instrument
of success. We are not attempting the culture of the cretaceous
reptiles, which staked their all upon muscle, and finally, having
become as large as houses--and as agile--suffered extinction. We are
attempting the culture of a species which, so far as the physical is
concerned, has long ago crossed the Rubicon or burnt its boats. Even
if Mr. Sandow and the drill-sergeant had their way to the utmost, and,
having finally eliminated all traces of mind, succeeded in producing
the strongest and most perfect physical machine that could be made from
the human body, the species so produced would go down in a generation
before the elements or before any living species that may be named.
Man has staked his all upon mind. The only physical development
that is really worth anything to such a race is that which educates
intelligence and morality, on the one hand, and serves for their
expression, on the other.
If there is any salient and irresistible tendency in our civilisation
to-day, it is the persistent decadence of muscle and of all of which
muscle is the type, as an instrument of survival-value. The development
of machinery, much deplored by the short-sighted, is in the direct line
of progress, because it reduces the importance of muscle and throws
all its weight into the scale of mind. Hewers of wood and drawers of
water are becoming less and less necessary, not because mechanical
force is not needed but because the human intelligence is learning how
to supersede the human machine as its source. Every development of
machinery makes the man who can merely offer his muscles of less value
to the community. Long ago--not so very long ago in some cases--it was
quite sufficient for a man to be able to say “I am a good machine:” he
was worth his keep and had his chance of becoming a parent; but the man
whom society wants now-a-days is not the man who is a good machine but
the man who can make one. These elementary truths are hidden, however,
from the political quacks who discourse to us upon unemployment.
Herbert Spencer's remark that it is necessary to be a good animal
has an element of truth in it which was utterly ignored and needed
proclamation at that time; but it is necessary to be a good animal only
in so far as that state makes for being a good man--and not an iota
further.
The present interest in many most important aspects of physical
education, such as may be summed up under the phrase “school hygiene,”
must not blind us to the great principle that physical education is a
means and not an end. Our present educational system, which permits
schooling to end just when it should begin, or rather sooner, and
which, even through our Government Departments, permits boys to be
used as little more than animated machines, such as telegraph boys--is
very largely responsible for the great national evil of unemployment,
which we treat with soup-kitchens. We shall revise a large proportion
of our educational, political and social methods just so soon as--but
not before--we get into our heads the idea that in human society,
and pre-eminently in society to-day, the survival-value of mind
and consequently the selection of mind must predominate over the
survival-value and consequent selection of muscle. Further, whatever
factors tend to enhance the survival-value of the physical are _ipso
facto_ making for retrogression and a return to the order of the beast.
Whatever tend to enhance the survival-value of the psychical--by which
I most assuredly include not only intelligence but, for instance,
motherhood--are _ipso facto_ forces of progress. The products of
progress are not machinery but men, and the well-drilled-machine idea
of a man ought to be as obsolete as more than one recent war has proved
it disastrous.
There is here to be read no pessimistic suggestion that the psychical
is in any permanent danger. No one can think so who knows its strength
and the relative impotence of the physical, but it is certainly
possible that the course of progress may be greatly delayed in any
given nation or race by worship of the physical, or even, as Sparta
shows, by worship of what may be called the physical virtues as against
the moral and intellectual virtues. But those who are interested in the
survival of any particular race or nation have to remember that arrest
or retardation of progress therein, relatively to its wiser neighbours,
must, before long, result in its utter downfall.
=What are we to choose?=--The argument that the selection of mind has
been dominant throughout human history is reinforced by such knowledge
of that history as we possess. There is no record of any race that
established itself in virtue of great stature or exceptional muscular
strength. Even in cases of the most purely military dominance, it was
not force as such, but discipline and method, that determined success;
whilst some of the greatest soldiers in history have been physically
the smallest. The statement of the anthropologists, already alluded to,
regarding the selection of the leading men in primitive tribes, may
safely be taken as always true: selection in human society has always
been, in the main, selection of that which, for survival-value, is the
dominant character of man, _mind_ in its widest sense. We shall see,
later, that _physical eugenics_ can by no means be ignored: but our
guiding principle must be that the physical is of worth only in so far
as it serves the psychical, and is worse than worthless in so far as it
does not. It would surely be well, for instance, that we should breed
for “energy,” to use Mr. Galton's term: but the energy we desire, and
the energy he commends, is nervous, not muscular. The confusion between
two radically different things, vitality and muscularity, is, however,
almost universal, though it will not stand a moment's examination.
In a volume devoted to personal hygiene I have discussed this point,
which is of real moment both for the individual and for the theory of
eugenics.[15]
It is of interest to note, in passing from this question, that inherent
facts of the human constitution would interdict us if we thought it
a fit ideal to breed for stature or bulk. Giants are essentially
morbid--not favourable but unfavourable variations. They are very
frequently childless and almost constantly slow-witted. Their condition
is really a mild form of a well-marked and highly characteristic
disease known as acromegaly, and distinguished by great enlargement
of the face and extremities. The malady depends upon peculiarities in
the glandular activities of the body: _and the state of these which
makes for great stature and bulk makes against intelligence_. It is
suggested, then, that any considerable increase of human bulk and
stature could only be obtained at the cost of intelligence. It would be
very dear at the price.
When we come to the subject of selection for parenthood in man through
the preferences exhibited by individuals for members of the opposite
sex, we shall see that what Darwin called “sexual selection” is
certainly a reality in the case of man, whether or not it be so in the
case of the lower animals. We shall see that this most potent factor
in human evolution acts even now very favourably, and is capable of
having its value enormously enhanced. In the selection of husbands,
nervous or psychical factors are notably of high survival-value in
civilised communities. In the selection of wives the survival-value of
the physical is still very high: but it may be hoped and believed that
the present tendency is to attach relatively less importance to them
and more to the psychical elements of the chosen. This tendency must be
furthered to the utmost point beyond which the physical requisites for
motherhood would suffer weakening--but no further.
=How are we to estimate civic worth?=--We have already observed that
it is incorrect to use the word “fit” as if it were synonymous with
“worthy.” If we insist on using this term, which means only “adapted
to conditions,” we must define those conditions. We must say that we
desire to further the production of those who are fit for citizenship,
and to disfavour the production of those who are unfit for citizenship.
We shall thereby dispose at least of those vexatious objectors who
tell us that many eminent criminals are individually superior to many
eminent judges. The statement is doubtless untrue, but if it were
true it would still be irrelevant. A criminal may be individually a
remarkable personality, but in so far as he is a criminal he is unfit
for citizenship.
It is far better to use consistently Mr. Galton's phrase, “civic
worth,” or, for short, “worth.” We may here note Mr. Galton's most
recent remarks on what he means by worth:--
“By this I mean the civic worthiness, or the Value to the State of a
person, as it would probably be assessed by experts or, say, by such
of his fellow-workers as have earned the respect of the community
in the midst of which they live. Thus the worth of soldiers would
be such as it would be rated by respected soldiers, students by
students, business men by business men, artists by artists, and so
on. The State is a vastly complex organism, and the hope of obtaining
a Proportional Representation of its best parts should be an avowed
object of issuing invitations to these gatherings.
“Speaking only for myself, if I had to classify persons according
to Worth, I should consider each of them under the three heads of
Physique, Ability, and Character, subject to the provision that
inferiority in any one of the three should outweigh superiority in
the other two. I rank Physique first, because it is not only very
valuable in itself and allied to many other good qualities, but has
the additional merit of being easily rated. Ability I should place
second on similar grounds, and Character third, though in real
importance it stands first of all.”[16]
We shall certainly misunderstand this quotation unless we clearly
realise that Mr. Galton is speaking of eugenic worth--that is to say,
of worth in relation to parenthood and heredity. No one, of course,
would assert for a moment that inferiority in the matter of physique
outweighed superiority in ability and character, so far as our estimate
of an individual as an individual is concerned, nor yet so far as
our estimate of him as a citizen is concerned. But from the eugenic
standpoint, as a parent of citizens to come, such a person, though
he may have himself saved the State, is on the average rightly to be
regarded as unworthy on the eugenic scale--it being assumed, of course,
that the inferiority of physique in the person in question is either
native and therefore transmissible, or else due to forms of disease, or
poisoning, such as, according to our knowledge of ante-natal pathology,
will probably involve degeneracy on the part of his children. I would
add that love is as precious as ability, if not more so, and that we
should aim at its increase by making parenthood the most responsible
act in life, so that children are born only to those who love children
and who will transmit their high measure of the parental instinct and
the tender emotion which is its correlate.[17]
CHAPTER V
THE MULTIPLICATION OF MAN
“Increase and multiply”
The ceaseless multiplication of man is one of the facts which
distinguish him from all other living species, animal or vegetable.[18]
We must not be misled by such a case as that of the multiplication
of rabbits in Australia. Apart from such circumstances as human
interference, the earth is already crammed with life of a kind, not the
highest life nor the most intense life, but at any rate fully extended
life. Man alone multiplies persistently, irresistibly, and has done
so from the very first, so that, arising locally, he is now diffused
over the whole surface of the earth. To quote from Professor Lankester
again: “Man is Nature's rebel. Where Nature says Die! Man says I will
live! According to the law previously in universal operation man should
have been limited in geographical area, killed by extremes of cold or
of heat, subject to starvation if one kind of diet were unobtainable,
and should have been unable to increase and multiply, just as are his
animal relatives, without losing his specific structure.... But man's
wits and his will have enabled him ... to ‘increase and multiply,’ as
no other animal, without change of form.”
Not only has man made himself the only animal which constantly
increases in numbers, but this increase, as Professor Lankester points
out in another part of his lecture, already threatening certain
difficulties, will be much more rapid than at present, assuming the
birth-rate to remain where it is, when disease is controlled. It
is within our power, as Pasteur declared long ago, to abolish all
parasitic, infectious or epidemic disease. This must be and will
be done--within a century, I have little doubt. The problem of the
increase of human population will become more pressing than ever.
Professor Lankester suggests that in one or five centuries the
difficulty raised by our multiplication “would, if let alone, force
itself upon a desperate humanity, brutalised by over-crowding and the
struggle for food. A return to Nature's terrible selection of the
fittest may, it is conceivable, be in this way in store for us. But
it is more probable that humanity will submit to a restriction by the
community in respect of the right to multiply.” The lecturer added that
we must therefore perfect our knowledge of heredity in man, as to which
“there is absolutely no provision in any civilised community, and no
conception among the people or their leaders, that it is a matter which
concerns anyone but farmers.”
=The secret of multiplication.=--Professor Lankester, however, omits
to point out the astonishing paradox involved in the fact that--as
I pointed out at the Royal Institution in 1907--man, the only
ceaselessly multiplying animal, has the lowest birth-rate of any living
creature.[19] From the purely arithmetical point of view, what does it
mean? We may defer at present any deeper interpretation.
It means necessarily and obviously that the effective means of
multiplication is not a high birth-rate but a low death-rate. It is
a necessary inference from the paradox in question that the infant
death-rate and the general death-rate in man are the lowest anywhere
to be found. Producing fewer young he alone multiplies.[20] It follows
that a smaller proportion of those young must die. Unless it is
supposed by bishops and others, then, that a peculiar value attaches to
the production of a baby shortly to be buried, the suggestion evidently
is the same as that to which every humanitarian and social and
patriotic impulse guides us, namely, the reduction of the death-rate
and especially the infant mortality. This is the true way in which
to insure the more rapid multiplication of man, if that be desired.
I believe it is not to be desired, but in any case the reduction of
the death-rate and especially of the infant mortality is a worthy and
necessary end in itself, and need not inevitably lead to our undue
multiplication provided that the birth-rate falls. Hence the eugenists
and the Episcopal Bench may join hands so far as the reduction of the
death-rate is concerned, and the only persons with whom a practical
quarrel remains are those who--in effect--applaud the mother who boasts
that she has buried twelve.
=The facts of human multiplication.=--Human population continues to
increase notwithstanding any changes in the birth-rate. This fact
remains true, as shown by the latest obtainable figures. It should be
one of the dogmas never absent from the foreground of the statesman's
mind. Apparently nothing, however, will induce us to take this little
forethought. When we build a bridge across the Thames, we ignore it;
when we widen a bridge we ignore it likewise. When we make a new street
we ignore it; when we build railways and railway stations we ignore
it--excusably, perhaps, in this case; when we build hospitals we ignore
it: four times out of five there is no room for the addition of a
single ward in time to come. We have not yet even learnt, as they are
learning in America and Germany, how to acquire the outlying lands of
cities for the public possession, so that they may be properly employed
as the city grows. The man who builds himself a villa on the outskirts
of a city, ignores it, and is staggered by it in ten years. The lover
of nature and the country ignores it: “Just look at this,” he says,
“this was in the country when first I knew it, look at these horrible
rows of villas!” The only possible reply to such a person is simply,
“Well, my dear sir, what do you propose? General infanticide?” Most
important of all, this fact, that, to take the case of Great Britain,
some half million babies are born every year in excess over the number
of all who die at all ages, is forgotten by our statesmen--or rather by
our politicians. It could, of course, not be forgotten by a statesman.
Quite apart from remoter consequences, especially in relation to the
wheat supply, this persistent multiplication--which one has actually
heard denied on the ground that the birth-rate is falling--is of urgent
moment to all of us.
In 1907 the Census Bureau of Washington published some figures on the
mortality statistics of nations, a summary of which may be quoted:
“In all parts of the civilised world both the birth-rates and the
death-rates tend to decrease, and, as a rule, those countries having
the lowest death-rates have also the lowest birth-rates. In Europe
the lowest birth-rate is that of France, the highest those of Servia
and Roumania. The lowest death-rates are in Sweden and Norway; the
highest in Russia and Spain. The downward tendency of the birth-
and death-rates is best shown by diagrams prepared by the French
Government, and it is probable that the downward tendency is actually
steeper than the diagrams show, because both births and deaths are more
accurately registered than formerly.”
But these statements are by no means necessarily incompatible with
steady increase of population, which, of course, increases so long as
the birth-rate exceeds the death-rate. I quote a few figures from the
_Science Year Book_ of 1908:
In 1890 the total population of the world was estimated at
1,487,900,000.
Aryan (Europe, Persia, India, etc.) 545,000,000
Mongolian (N. and E. Asia) 630,000,000
Semitic (N. Africa) 65,000,000
Negro (C. Africa) 150,000,000
Malay and Polynesian 35,000,000
American Indian 15,000,000
The total figure now must be something like sixteen hundred millions at
least.
Density of population, in so far as it means what is commonly called
over-crowding, is an important factor in the death-rate, and has a most
inimical influence upon race-culture--in virtue of the opportunity
afforded to the racial poisons--syphilis, alcohol, etc. Thus Sweden
has the lowest death-rate in Europe, and has much the least density
of population--only 29 per square mile as compared with our own 341.
If now the fact of the increase of population, with all that it means
and will mean, may be taken as dealt with and accepted, there will be
no danger of leading the reader to false conclusions if we insist upon
the fall of the birth-rate, which in Great Britain in 1908 was the
lowest on record. The death-rate, however, persistently falls also.
The reader who thinks that the birth-rate alone determines the increase
of population, and those who believe in polygamy on the ground that it
necessarily makes for the rapid multiplication and therefore strength
of a nation, should compare the death-rate of London, which is under
16, with that of Bombay, which is just under 79. It is asserted that in
many large Indian cities the infant mortality approaches one-half of
all the children born. What it amounts to in such cities as Canton and
Pekin we can only surmise with horror.
Notwithstanding the persistent fall in the birth-rate of London the
rate of increase in population remains stupendous, according to the
calculations of Mr. Cottrell, which may be quoted from the _Science
Year Book_ of 1908. He estimates the population of Greater London in
1910 at about 7½ millions, and in 1920 at well over 8½ millions--the
falling birth-rate notwithstanding.
The increase of population of five great countries may be briefly noted
here. In all, with the possible exception of Russia, the birth-rate is
rapidly falling. In the course of the nineteenth century the population
of
Russia (in Europe) rose from 38 to 105,000,000
France " " 26 " 38,000,000
Germany " " 23 " 55,000,000
Great Britain " " 15 " 40,000,000
United States " " 5 " 75,000,000
These are merely approximate figures, but accurate enough to be of
value. It need hardly be pointed out that immigration accounts for the
disproportionate increase of population in the United States. But it
may be added that the imminent arrest or control of this immigration
will assuredly have the most serious and pressing consequences for
Europe. Plainly it must hasten the coming of national eugenics.
=The case of Germany.=--Especial interest and importance attach for
many reasons to the case of Germany in this connection, and, as
might be expected, many precise facts are available. Here I shall
avail myself freely of the paper contributed by Dr. Sombart to the
_International_ for December, 1907. In the first seven years of this
century the population of Germany increased almost ten per cent.
The figure in 1870 was 40.8 millions and in 1907 61 millions. The
population is increasing yearly at the rate of about 800,000, as
compared with about half a million in the case of Great Britain. In
France in 1907 the population actually declined by a few thousands. In
regard to the growth of population Germany is now at the head of all
civilised countries, excepting those cases in which immigration has
augmented the number of inhabitants. Does this expansion of population
depend upon an increasing birth-rate or a diminishing death-rate?
The fact, in strict parallel with the biological generalisation
already made, is that “Germany's population is increasing so swiftly
because the death-rate has been falling steadily. At the beginning
of the period, 1870-1880, there were nearly 30 deaths per thousand
inhabitants, while in recent years only about 20 deaths in every
thousand inhabitants have taken place each year.... Notwithstanding,
the birth-rate during the last ten years, during which the principal
growth of population occurs, has not in anywise increased in Germany.
Indeed, by careful investigation it becomes apparent that it has
declined almost unintermittently for a generation.” The average
birth-rate for the ten years 1871-1880 was 40.7, for 1891-1900 the
average was 37.4. Since then it has fallen further, and in 1905 the
figure was 34, the lowest on record. As Dr. Sombart observes, we shall
only appreciate these figures if we regard them as an expression of
a tendency which will continue, and that this is so he proves. He
observes that “the more highly advanced the country, the lower its
birth-rate.... From this we may already draw the conclusion that a
diminution of births is a concomitant of our progress in civilisation.
Secondly, this is confirmed by the fact that the falling-off in the
birth-rate must be attributed largely to the big cities.... As a third
statistical argument that the birth-rate declines with the advance
of civilisation, the fact may be cited that in the quarters of the
well-to-do still fewer children are born than in those of the poor.”
(In London, as we have seen, the birth-rate is highest in Stepney and
lowest in Hampstead).
Dr. Sombart finally points out what must never be forgotten--that an
increase in population, dependent upon a fall in the death-rate, whilst
the birth-rate also falls, is necessarily self-limited. The decrease
of the death-rate is limited by definite natural age-limits, and “this
indicates that the increase of population in Germany is gradually
entering upon a period of less activity, and will perhaps quite cease
within a conceivable period unless other causes operate in the opposite
direction.”
=The yellow peril.=--The facts regarding the yellow races are extremely
difficult to ascertain. It appears, however, that the birth-rate in
Japan has almost doubled in 27 years--rising from 17.1 to 31. (I
doubt the accuracy of the earlier figure.) In China the population
is largely controlled by infanticide, but there is little doubt that
the main contention of Pearson was correct, and that the yellow races
are multiplying much more rapidly than the white races. It does
not necessarily follow, however, as we shall see, that this means
yellow ascendancy, any more than a similar comparison would mean
microbic ascendancy. It is not quantity but quality of life that
gives survival-value and dominance. This disparity between white and
yellow rates of increase is by far the most pregnant of contemporary
phenomena. In the present introductory volume it can merely be named.
But since we shall not survive in virtue of quantity, I, for one, am
well assured that the choice for Western civilisation will ere long be
the final one between eugenics or extinction.
=The wheat problem.=--Meanwhile, we must consider briefly the question
evidently raised by this fact of human multiplication. As an expert
has lately said, the rise in the price of wheat “is not the transitory
result of market manipulation and ‘corners,’ forcing prices up to an
unnatural level, but of perfectly natural and irresistible causes
which, for all that, are the more anxious and disquieting. The truth is
we are for the first time beginning to feel individually the effect of
a great natural process--the race which started long ago between the
population of the world and the growth of the world's wheat supply. In
this race the growth of the world's population has been outstripping
the growth of its wheat-food production, and the consequence has been
a total growing shortage, in spite of the opening of vast new areas in
Canada and the Argentina.” In this connection one of the best papers
in Great Britain--the _Westminster Gazette_--cheerfully remarked in
a leading article that, after all, we need not be alarmed as to the
difficulty in increasing the supply of wheat, since population would,
in any case, adapt itself to the food-supply. This is true, indeed:
there will never be more human beings than there is food to feed. But
the question is, how will the population be kept down? In a word, is it
to be by the awful and bloody processes of Nature or by the conscious,
provident and humane methods of man?
We are reminded of the argument advanced by Sir William Crookes in
his Presidential Address to the British Association in 1898. The
distinguished author has himself written an invaluable book on the
subject which has been carefully revised and supplemented, and must be
read by the serious student.[21] We may note from the point of view of
the student of dietetics that wheat is and remains, on physiological
examination, what the proverb suggests. Bread is the staff of life,
wheat being, in proportion to its price, by far the best and cheapest
of all foods.
The argument of Sir William Crookes was advanced exactly a century
after the publication of the great essay of Malthus which we must soon
consider. In the whole intervening century no one, capable of being
heard, had considered the question. The relation of Crookes to the
earlier thinker remains, though it is curious that Malthus was not
mentioned by his successor. Writing now, a decade later, I wish merely
to point out that Sir William's argument is found valid. He observed
that “the actual and potential wheat-producing capacity of the United
States is--and will be, for years to come--the dominant factor in the
world's bread-supply.” Now the recent expert from whom we have already
quoted declares that “former great wheat exporting countries like the
United States, as well as Russia and India, while their production
remains as high, are sending far less abroad under the pressure of
their own increasing needs. In this connection it may be recorded
that a great American corn expert declares that in twenty-five years
the United States will want all, or very nearly all, of her wheat
production for herself, and will have very little indeed to send us.”
In 1898 Sir William said, “A permanently higher price for wheat is,
I fear, a calamity that ere long must be faced.” As everyone knows,
this prophecy is now being fulfilled. Sir William declared that “the
augmentation of the world's eating population in a geometrical ratio”
is a proved fact. The phrase means, of course, simply that the yearly
increase increases. On the other hand, the wheat supply is subject to
a yearly increase which does not itself increase--in other words the
increase is in an arithmetical ratio. This, a century later, precisely
illustrates the principle of Malthus. Sir William also declared that
exports of wheat from the United States are only of present interest,
and that “within a generation the ever-increasing population of the
United States will consume all the wheat grown within its borders, and
will be driven to import, and, like ourselves, will scramble for the
lion's share of the wheat crop of the world.”
Next to the United States Russia is the greatest wheat exporter, but
the Russian peasant population increases more rapidly than any other in
Europe, even though it is inadequately fed, and this source of supply
must fail ere very long. As Sir William points out, the Caucasian
civilisation is indeed founded upon bread. “Other races vastly superior
to us in numbers, but differing widely in material and intellectual
progress, are eaters of Indian corn, rice, millet and other
grains; but none of these grains have the food-value, concentrated
health-sustaining power of wheat.” Sir William's argument was, and is,
that we must learn how to fix the nitrogen of the atmosphere--that is
to say, how to combine it in forms on which the plant can feed. “The
fixation of nitrogen is a question of the not far distant future.
Unless we can class it among certainties to come, the great Caucasian
race will cease to be foremost in the world, and will be squeezed out
of existence by races to whom wheat and bread is not the staff of life.”
Sir William Crookes was himself the pioneer in the discovery of the
electric method of fixing the atmospheric nitrogen, and now, a decade
after the delivery of his address, this method is in successful
commercial employment in Scandinavia. There is also a method of sowing
the bacteria which are capable of fixing nitrogen and this, according
to some, has been already proved practicable. Further, the Mendelians
offer us the possibility of new varieties of wheat having more grains
to the stalk than we obtain at present. By these methods the output
of the land devoted to wheat may be doubled or trebled, but it is
evident that even then there will be an impassable limit. We have to
face, indeed, the evident but unconsidered fact that _there must be a
maximum possible human population for this finite earth_, whether a
bread-eating population or any other. I do not propose to speculate
regarding this evident truth. If human life is worth living and is the
highest life we know, we may desire to obtain that maximum population,
but it must be obtained, and its limits observed, by the humane and
decent processes which man is capable of putting into practice, and not
by the check of starvation.
It is of great interest to the British reader to look at the question
briefly from his point of view. At the present time our wheat
production is no more than one-eighth of our needs, and in twenty-five
years, when the supply from the United States will probably have
ceased, we shall require 40,000,000 quarters of wheat per annum. Yet
already, in time of peace, careful observers such as the Rt. Hon.
Charles Booth and Mr. Seebohm Rowntree declare that thirty per cent.
of our own population are living on the verge of starvation. Our
available supply of food of all kinds at any moment would last us
about three weeks. How many of us realise what a war would mean for
this country? Yet in the face of facts such as these, the majority of
those who attempt to guide public opinion are urging us to increase our
birth-rate and still pin their faith to quantity rather than quality of
population as our great need.
=The theory of Malthus.=--The reader who is interested in general
biology will realise, of course, that we are here back to the great
argument of Malthus, advanced in 1798 in his _Essay on the Principle of
Population_. Malthus was a great and sincere thinker, a high and true
moralist, and the people who have a vague notion that his name has some
connection with immoral principles of any kind have no acquaintance
with the subject. It is of the deepest interest for the history of
thought to know that it was the work of Malthus which suggested,
independently, both to Charles Darwin and to Dr. Alfred Russel Wallace,
that principle of natural selection, the survival of the fittest and
their choice for parenthood, the discovery of which constituted one of
the great epochs in the history of human knowledge, and which is the
cardinal principle underlying the whole modern conception of eugenics
or race-culture.
Malthus found in all life the constant tendency to increase beyond the
nourishment available. In a given area, not even the utmost imaginable
improvement in developing the resources of the soil can or could keep
pace with the unchecked increase of population.[22] This applies alike
to Great Britain and to the whole world. At bottom, then, the check
to population--and this is true of microbes or men--is want of food,
notwithstanding that this is never the immediate and obvious check
except in cases of actual famine. There must therefore be a “struggle
for existence,” and as Darwin and Wallace saw, it follows as a
necessary truth that, to use Spencer's term, the fittest must survive.
The question is whether we are to accept starvation as, at bottom,
the factor controlling population (which, in any case, must be and
is controlled) or whether we can substitute something better--as for
instance, the moral self-control which Malthus recommended. The single
precept of this much maligned thinker was “Do not marry till you have a
fair prospect of supporting a family”--a fairly decent and respectable
doctrine. In the words of Mr. Kirkup, “the greatest and highest moral
result of his principle is that it clearly and emphatically teaches the
responsibility of parentage, and it declares the sin of those who bring
human beings into the world for whose physical, intellectual, and moral
well-being no satisfactory provision is made.” Who, alas, will declare
that even after a century and a decade this great lesson is yet learnt?
It is to be added, first, that though improvement in agriculture is to
be commended on every conceivable ground, and though it may in some
degree relieve and postpone the difficulty, it is infinitely incapable
of abolishing it. Nothing but necessity can check the prolificness of
life. To this doctrine, however, there is, as we shall shortly see,
a great excepting principle, unrecognised by Malthus, discovered by
Herbert Spencer, and of vast and universal importance. Secondly, it is
to be noted that emigration--a real remedy for over-population--is so
only for a time. It cannot possibly abolish the problem--short of the
development of interplanetary communication, if then; and the observer
of contemporary politics must be well aware, as Germany, for instance,
is well aware already, that its effectiveness as a practical remedy for
over-population in some European countries is already being arrested by
the invaded states.
The references already made to the work of Sir William Crookes will
suffice to show that the teaching of Malthus is of practical importance
to us to-day, and not least to the population of Great Britain. I am
tempted to quote the actual case in this connection of a young student
of biology who applied for Malthus's book at one of the greatest
official libraries in this country. He was looked at as a shameless
young rascal, and the librarian curtly said, “We have no books of
that kind here.” I commend this exquisite instance of misapplied and
perfectly ignorant British prudery to Mr. Bernard Shaw: not even he
could imagine anything to surpass it. No more impeccably decent book
than this of “Parson Malthus” has ever been written, and I have no
adequate comment for the fact that its nature and contents were not
merely wholly unknown but grossly misimagined by this responsible
official, and that it could not be obtained in the great library of
science in question.
We pass in the following chapter to the momentous discovery of Herbert
Spencer that the great truth seen by Malthus was not a whole but a
half-truth, and that there is a compensating principle, which is at
once a source of inspiration and of difficulty to the eugenist. It is
in general the principle that as life ascends it becomes less prolific,
and its consequences are infinitely more vast than the phrase at first
suggests. Had this principle been discovered by a Continental thinker
or by a member of a British University instead of by a man who never
passed an examination, it would not now need the discussion which we
shall have to give it.
CHAPTER VI
THE GROWTH OF INDIVIDUALITY
=The laws of multiplication.=--Implicit or explicit approval of a
falling birth-rate involves opposition to the opinion of the man in
the street, the general opinion of the medical profession,[23] the
bench of bishops and the social prophet and publicist in general.
Nevertheless a fall in the birth-rate is a factor in organic progress,
and, in general, the level of any species is in inverse proportion to
its birth-rate, from bacteria to the most civilised classes of men in
the most civilised countries of to-day. But in truth the uninformed
opinion, totally contrary to the whole history of life and to the most
obvious comparative facts of the birth-rate amongst and within present
day human societies, was utterly disposed of forty years ago in the
closing chapter of the greatest contribution yet made to philosophic
biology--Herbert Spencer's _Principles of Biology_. The last chapter
of that masterpiece is entitled “The Laws of Multiplication.”
Unfortunately it has not been read by one in ten thousand of those who
think themselves entitled to hold, and even to express, opinions about
the birth-rate. Spencer's discovery is the complementary half-truth
to the discovery of Malthus, and just as the law of Malthus is
pessimistic, so the law of Spencer is optimistic. In a word, Malthus
assumed--indeed, formally declared--that there was no natural factor of
an internal kind tending to limit the rate of vital fertility. Spencer
discovered that there is such a factor, which can and does limit and
has been limiting vegetable, animal, and human fertility since the dawn
of life.
All reproduction involves an expenditure of energy in some degree on
the part of the parent. Now the energy available by any individual is
finite. If he expends it all upon reproduction, he himself, or she
herself, must cease to exist. This happens in all the lowest forms
of life, which multiply by fission or simple splitting. The young
bacteria are their sub-divided parent. At the other extreme is the
case of the individual who retains the whole of his energy for his own
development and life, and has no offspring at all. Such consummate
bachelor philosophers as Kant and Spencer may be quoted, and the list
of childless men of genius might be extended quite indefinitely. This
is not to declare this last state to be the ideal, but merely to point
out the logical extremes.
Spencer's principle is that there is an “Antagonism,” or, as we
may rather say, an inverse ratio, between “Individuation” and
“Genesis”--between the proportion of energy expended upon the
individual and the proportion expended upon the continuance of the
race. Thus “Individuation,” meaning all those processes which maintain
and expand the life of the individual, and “Genesis,” meaning all
those processes which involve the formation of new individuals--are
necessarily antagonistic. Every higher degree of individual evolution
is followed by a lower degree of race multiplication, and _vice versâ_.
Increase in bulk (_cf._ the elephant), complexity or activity involves
diminution in fertility, and _vice versâ_. This is an obvious _à
priori_ principle.
Should the reader declare that there must be something the matter with
an asserted principle of progress which leads in theory or in practice
to the production of a childless generation, and therefore the end of
all progress, and that this principle suggests that the most completely
developed man and woman cannot be parents--then I would join in the
chorus of fathers and mothers generally, who would say that, in human
parenthood, if not, indeed, in sub-human parenthood, the antagonism
is reconciled in a higher unity; that the best and most complete
development of the individual is effected only through parenthood, in
due degree--as Spencer, himself childless, formally declared.
It is impossible here to show how complete is the evidence for
Spencer's law, both from the side of logical necessity and from the
side of observation. In order to indicate the overwhelming character
of the evidence, one would have to transcribe the whole of his
long chapter, and to add to it all our modern knowledge of human
birth-rates. This cannot be done, but even without it we may venture
to say that people who regard a falling birth-rate as in itself, and
obviously, a sign of racial degeneration or immorality, or approaching
weakness or failure of any kind, can have made no substantial additions
to their knowledge of the subject since they themselves formed items in
the birth-rate.
Spencer goes on to show, with profound insight, that, in general,
greater individuality, or, to put it in other words, the more highly
evolved organism, “_though less fertile absolutely, is the more fertile
relatively_.” The supreme instance of this truth is, of course, the
case of man, in whom individuation has reached its unprecedented
height, who is _absolutely_ the least fertile of creatures,[24] and
yet who is _relatively_ the most fertile--unique in his actual and
persistent multiplication.
=Their action in man.=--Within the human species the laws of
multiplication hold. It is still worth while, after half a century, to
quote Spencer's remark as to infertility in women due to mental labour
carried to excess--“most of the flat-chested girls who survive their
high-pressure education are incompetent to bear a well-developed infant
and to supply it with the natural food for the natural period.” On all
hands people with opened eyes are rightly urging this truth upon us
to-day. In the United States the so-called higher education of girls
has been proved in effect to sterilise them--and these the flower of
the nation's girlhood, and therefore, rightly, the very elect for
motherhood. Here is simply an instance of the Spencerian principle in
its most unfortunate misdirection by man.
Before leaving Spencer, we must refer briefly to the predictions,
based upon the foregoing principles, with which he concluded his great
work. The further evolution of man, he declares, must take mainly the
direction of a higher intellectual and emotional development. Hitherto,
and even to-day, pressure of population is the original cause of human
competition, application, discipline, expenditure of energy--and one
may add, the possibility of continued selection. Excess of fertility,
then, says Spencer, is the cause of man's evolution, but “man's further
evolution itself necessitates a decline in his fertility.” The future
progress of civilisation will be accompanied by increased development
of individuality, emotional and intellectual. As Spencer observes, this
does not necessarily mean a mentally laborious life, for as mental
activity “gradually becomes organic, it will become spontaneous and
pleasurable.”
Finally, the necessary antagonism between individuality and parenthood
ensures the ultimate attainment of the highest form of the maintenance
of the race--“... _a form in which the amount of life shall be the
greatest possible, and the births and deaths the fewest possible_.”
* * * * *
If now we look back at the law of Malthus we shall realise the
enormous significance of the law of Spencer. In this respect we have
the advantage over Malthus that we are aware, as he was not, of the
great fact of organic evolution. We discover, then, that an actual
consequence of the pressure of population, leading as it does to the
struggle for existence, and, in the main, the survival of higher types,
is that the rate of fertility falls. This conception of the fall in
the birth-rate--which, it is maintained, has been a great factor in
all organic progress--was entirely absent from the mind of Malthus.
In a word, the unlimited multiplication which Malthus observed leads
to its own correction. It provides abundance of material for natural
selection to work upon, and then the survival-value of individuation,
wherever it appears, asserts itself, with the consequence that the rate
of multiplication declines. This is actually to be observed to-day.
Malthus desired that we should postpone marriage to later ages so
as to lower the birth-rate. The increasing necessity and demand for
individuation is effecting that which Malthus desired. The average age
at marriage has been rising in our own country in both sexes during the
last thirty years: and the evidence shows that as civilisation advances
the age of marriage becomes later and later. Professor Metchnikoff has
discussed some aspects of this question in his book _The Nature of Man_.
=The intensive culture of life.=--For every student of progress, and
not least for the eugenist, Spencer's law is a warrant of hope and a
promise of better things to come. It teaches that in the development
of higher--that is to say, more specialised--that is to say, more
individualised--organic types, Nature is working already, and has
been working for ages, towards the elimination of the brutal elements
in the struggle for existence. This is, of course, what every worker
for progress, and every eugenist in especial, desires. Spencer's
discovery teaches also that individuality compensates a species for
loss of high fertility. The survival-value of individuation is greater
than the survival-value of rapid multiplication. _The very fact of
progress is the replacement of lower by higher life, the supersession
of the quantitative by the qualitative criterion of survival-value,
the increasing dominance of mind over matter, the substitution of the
intensive for the merely extensive cultivation of life._ These various
phrases express, I believe, various aspects of one and the same great
fact, and I only wish it were possible to include here an exhaustive
study of the conception which may be expressed by the phrase “the
intensity of life”--as distinguished from its mere extension. There is,
I believe, a real and significant analogy between the introduction of
what is called intensive cultivation in agriculture, and the eugenic
principle which seeks to replace the extensive by the intensive
cultivation of human life.
=The eugenic difficulty.=--But it will be already evident to the reader
that, though Spencer's law offers hope and warrant to the eugenist,
it also poses him with a permanent and ineradicable difficulty which
is inherent in natural necessity--viz., the difficulty that, in
consequence of the operation of this law, those very classes or members
of a society whose parenthood he most desires must be, in general, the
least fertile. Throughout the animal world the lesser fertility of
higher species is no real handicap to them, as we know; but where the
conditions of selection are so profoundly modified as in human society,
the case is very different. Furthermore, amongst mankind individuality
has often grown, and does grow, to such an extent that parenthood
disappears altogether. Indeed, Spencer's law expresses itself--and
the eugenist must qualify his hopes by the fact--in the practical
infertility of many[25] of the most highly individualised and even
unique personalities, that is to say, in the ranks of what we call
genius. To this subject we must return.
A notable section in Mr. Galton's great work, _Inquiries into Human
Faculty_, states very plainly the difficulty for the eugenist involved
in Spencer's law, under its more statistical aspect. What are the
relative effects of early and late marriages? Mr. Galton proves,
mathematically, that in a very few generations a group of persons who
marry late will be simply bred down and more than supplanted by those
who marry early. Now no one will dispute that the less individualised,
the lower types, the more nearly animal, do in general marry earlier,
and are more fertile. Here, then, is an anti-eugenic tendency in
human society, depending really upon Spencer's law and requiring us
to recognise and counteract it by throwing all the weight we can
upon the side of progress, which means _increasing to our utmost the
survival-value and the effective fertility of the higher types_.
Much more space might be spent upon this gravest of problems for the
eugenist--the fact that the very persons from whom he desires to
recruit the future on account of their greater individuality are also
on that very account the persons who, by natural necessity, tend to be
less fertile. The difficulty shows itself in the male sex, but it shows
itself still more conspicuously in the female sex, where the proportion
of the individual energy devoted to the race, as compared with that
devoted to individuation, is necessarily far higher, and must so remain
if the race is to persist. Primarily, the body of woman is the temple
of life to come--and _therefore_, as we shall some day teach our girls,
the holy of holies. Without going further into this matter now, it
may be suggested that a cardinal principle of practical importance
is involved. It is that the individual development of women, their
higher education, their self-expression in works of art and thought and
practice, cannot safely be carried to the point at which motherhood
is compromised; else the race in question will necessarily disappear
and be replaced by any race whatsoever, the women of which continue to
be mothers. There are women of the worker bee type whom this argument
annoys intensely. No one wants _them_ to be mothers.
The proposition that all progress in the psychical world depends upon
individuality, just as all organic progress, and indeed, all organic
evolution, depends upon the physical individuality which biologists
call variation, may suggest to the reader the importance which must
attach to our study of talent and genius, and the possibility of aiding
their production. Meanwhile, we must look a little further at the
general question of individuality or quality _versus_ quantity from the
international point of view.
=Quantity versus quality.=--The reader will understand how it is
that anyone writing from the biological standpoint must view with
something like contempt the common assumption that, in international
competition, mere statistics of population furnish, as such, final
and adequate data for prophecy. Let us remind ourselves once more
that, according to these crude criteria, which were really superseded
untold æons ago, the dominance of the world must belong in the near
future not to Russia, with its balance of more than two million births
per annum, rather than to France, with its approximately stationary
population, but to the bacteria, the growth of population amongst
which, if it be not controlled by the less fertile creature we call
man, may be of simply inexpressible magnitude. But the world is not,
and will not be, ruled by bacteria, their fertility notwithstanding.
Indeed, the disease-producing bacteria have already had sentence of
death pronounced upon them by the higher intelligence of man, and
that sentence will be carried out within a century. Similarly within
the bounds of humanity we must recognise the limitations of mere
statistics. The population of France, some forty years ago, consisted
of so many millions of units. The figure does not matter,--let us put
it at 30,000,001. Now that 1, so to say, was called Louis Pasteur,
and from the point of view of statistics or those who think they can
predict history by counting heads, he was only an almost infinitesimal
fraction, about one-thirty-millionth part, of the French people. Yet,
as Huxley pointed out long ago, his mind sufficed to pay the entire
indemnity exacted from France after the Franco-Prussian war. This
single unit was worth more than a host of soldiers of the merely
mechanical kind. Or take Athens, with its population of 30,000 people,
mostly slaves, and consider its influence upon the world. Or, indeed,
go where you please, whether to the history of nations or the history
of religion or science or art, and ask whether the counting of heads,
the ordinary census taking which indeed amounts merely to weighing
nations by the ton, is an adequate one. In estimating national
capital by the methods of vital statistics alone, we are in a far
worse case than he would be who estimated monetary wealth by numbers
of coins, without considering whether they were pounds, shillings or
pence, whether they were genuine or counterfeit. The illustration is
ludicrously inadequate, as every illustration must be, simply because
the human case is unique. In the units of a population, which many
prophets treat as if they were all of equal value, there are not merely
differences to which the difference between a sovereign and a penny
offers no parallel; there is not merely an enormous quantity of bogus
or counterfeit units, but there is a very large number of units in
every population which, so far from adding to the value of the rest,
subtract from it, are parasitic upon it. Students of money will find
no parallel to this. Yet in the face of facts which ought to be common
intellectual property amongst school-children, we find many writers,
bishops, socialist economists, moralists, schoolboy Imperialists, and
the rest, pointing merely to the quantitative question of population
as if it were everything, though they must surely know that, if
international competition were the highest state of mankind, and if
the work of Kelvin and Lister had been sold at its real worth by us to
the rest of the world, those two men alone, in their services to life,
and in the power which they give us over life, would be equal in value
to, shall we say, the lower four-fifths of the whole birth-rate during
the last generation. All human history teaches, as all animal history
teaches in lesser degree, that quality and individuality is everything,
that quantity is nothing or far worse than nothing _except in so far
as it is quantity of quality_: yet though this lesson is written upon
every page of the past, the greater number of our publicists and our
public advisers still implicitly deny it. As Mr. Crackanthorpe put it,
speaking of the figures for 1907, it is not the defective numbers, but
the numbers of defectives, that should give us concern.
=Mass versus mind.=--John Ruskin called Darwin “a dim comet, wagging
its tail of phosphorescent nothing against the steadfast stars”--a
description as delightful as it is foolish. Yet the conception of
eugenics, which is indeed a necessary deduction from Darwin's great
discovery, finds abundant warrant and support in Ruskin's own wonderful
writings, and here I quote, from _Time and Tide_, some sentences which
still require to be read and remembered by the majority of our present
advisers. He says:--
“And the question of numbers is wholly immaterial, compared with
that of character; or rather, its own materialness depends on the
prior determination of character. Make your nation consist of
knaves, and, as Emerson said long ago, it is but the case of any
other vermin--the more, the worse. Or, to put the matter in narrower
limits, it is a matter of no final concern to any parent whether he
shall have two children, or four; but matter of quite final concern
whether those he has shall, or shall not, deserve to be hanged....
You have to consider first, by what methods of land distribution you
can maintain the greatest number of healthy persons; and secondly
whether, if, by any other mode of distribution and relative ethical
laws, you can raise their character, while you diminish their
numbers, such sacrifices should be made, and to what extent?... The
French and British public may and will, with many other publics, be
at last brought ... to see farther that a nation's real strength
and happiness do not depend upon properties and territories, nor on
machinery for their defence, but on their getting such territory as
they _have_, well filled with none but respectable persons, which is
a way of _infinitely_ enlarging one's territory, feasible to every
potentate.”
Surely it is not necessary, one feels, and yet one knows it is
necessary, again to lay down propositions of such shining truth, and
one wonders whether they shine so brightly as to blind those who should
see them: or what can conceivably be the explanation of such arguments
as those of the Bishop of London and others who, in the face of our
monstrous infant and child mortality, the awful pressure of population
and over-crowding in our great cities, where every year a larger and
larger proportion of the population lives, and is born and dies--plead
for a higher birth-rate on moral grounds, of all amazing grounds
conceivable; and those also who, from the military or so-called
Imperial point of view, regarding men primarily as “food for powder,”
in Shakespeare's phrase, read and quote statistics of population in
order to promulgate the same advice?
To the moralist we need make no reply except simply to name the infant
mortality which is at last coming to be recognised everywhere as,
perhaps, the most abominable of all our scandals. To the militarist I
would quote the case of our ally, Japan. He recalls the war between
China and Japan, and its issue, and has some idea, perhaps, of the
population ratio of those two Empires. How was it that Providence was
on the side of the small battalions? He recalls also the Russo-Japanese
war and its issue; and the population ratio of the two Empires in that
case. How many other instances does not military history afford of
the truth that in the human species mind is the master of matter? One
would suppose that a critical historical enquiry had been made, proving
that the results of all past wars could have been predicted by the
simple method of estimating the total aggregate weight of the combatant
nations in flesh and blood and bone! More than this, if the development
of the art of warfare means anything, if there has been any such
development since the days of fists and stones, it means, as all human
development in every sphere means, the increasing dominance of mind
over matter, character and initiative over machinery, _dead or alive_.
Meanwhile, the estimate of warriors in terms of the scale and the foot
rule are still accepted just as if they had not been rendered obsolete
for ever with the passing of the “dragons of the prime.”
As regards the psychical worth of the soldier, is it not recognised,
though too commonly forgotten, when we applaud the value of the veteran
or of seasoned troops? Physically the veteran is, on the average,
inferior to the younger man. It is the psychical that gives him
his worth, just as it was patriotism and sobriety that enabled the
few sober Japanese to beat the many drunken Russians. It is safe to
prophesy that, in all future war, the numerical criterion, which in
effect weighs armies by the ton, as if war were merely a tug-of-war,
will become less and less important--if, indeed, it is not already
negligible; whilst the purely psychical qualities, from generalship and
strategy and hygiene to initiative, judgment, accuracy, memory, and
down finally to mere brutal red-blooded courage, will determine the
issue.
Platitude, of course, but if true, why ignored? Why cannot our military
advisers learn, in this respect, from the Navy? Owing to the very
nature of the sea as compared with the land, in relation to the merely
physical capacities of man, a Navy must be more intelligent than an
Army, just as it requires more intelligence to make a boat than to
walk; and it is in the Navy that the mechanical factor has been most
completely transferred, so that the human machinery is at a discount
and the steel machinery made by the human mind is much, whilst the
value of the psychical in all its aspects dominates and controls
the whole. Great Britain, as the foremost naval power in the world,
should long ago have left to its ultimate fate amongst other nations
the idea that quantity--so many tons of soldiers and so many tons of
sailors--affords an estimate of the warring force of a nation: even if
the whole history of this little isle and the possession of our present
Empire did not teach, as the history of Rome taught and as the history
of Athens teaches in another sphere, that not mass but mind makes a
nation great.
CHAPTER VII
HEREDITY AND RACE-CULTURE
“We cannot but feel that the application of biological results
is _only beginning_, and beginning with a tardiness which is a
reproach to human foresight. There can be no doubt that it would
pay the British nation to put aside a million a year for research
on eugenics, or the improvement of the human breed.” (Prof. J. A.
Thomson, _Heredity_, 1908.)
It is evident that the facts and principles of heredity lie at the
very basis of eugenics or race-culture in any of its forms, practical
or impractical, scientific or unscientific. Our continual assumption
throughout is that _like tends to beget like_, and it is on this ground
that we desire to make parenthood the privilege of those whom we regard
as _inherently_ the best. If there were no such thing as heredity there
could be no possibility of race-culture--nor indeed should we be here
to discuss it. If a man's children were equally likely to be acorns or
babies or tadpoles, the living world would not be the living world we
know.
The potency of heredity is obscured to uncritical examination by the
fact that that which is inheritable is that which was innate, inherent
or germinal in the parent, as we shall shortly see. We, however, are
apt to compare the child with the parent, who has perhaps been much
modified by circumstances, so that the resemblance between father
and child may seem to be slight. Yet if we could bring back before
us that father, as he was, say at the age of two, and compare him
with his two-year-old child, we should perhaps be astonished by the
resemblance. But we see the acquirements or acquired characters of the
parent; make no distinction between them and his inherent characters;
fail to discover these acquired characters in his child;--and discount
the importance of heredity. Then, again, the eugenist may be utterly
confounded if he estimates the parental value of an individual without
reference to this limitation of heredity. Here is a man of culture and
accomplishment; his children, then, will presumably tend to be cultured
and accomplished. But every kind of advantage that forethought and
love and money can afford may have been showered upon that man. So far
as native endowment was concerned, he may have indeed been far below
mediocrity. Now it is native endowment alone that he can transmit, and
our eugenic estimate of him is therefore erroneous and will lead to
disappointment. It is impossible to lay too great stress upon the truth
that in all eugenic plans or demands or practices we are assuming the
fact of inheritance, and that therefore it is our first business to
distinguish absolutely between that which tends to be inherited and
that which, on the other hand, is never inherited.
Yet again, this distinction is of almost incalculable social moment in
so far as it affects the process of selection actually occurring in
society. This, perhaps, has not been adequately recognised. One may
repeat a former statement of this point, which is cardinal for the
eugenist:--
“Even supposing that we were all identical at birth, yet, since
we would come to differ from one another in virtue of different
acquirements, due to our adaptation to differing environments,
natural selection would ultimately have different individuals
from which to select. Those who had made the most advantageous
acquirements, such as industry or great knowledge, would tend to
survive and prosper, whilst those who had made disadvantageous
acquirements, such as laziness or the loss of sight or limbs, would
be pushed to the wall. That process, of course, occurs in society
at the present day to a greater or less degree, but it has only
immediate and temporary or contemporary consequences. For if we
recall the assertion that acquirements cannot be transmitted, we
shall see that the selection of those who have made advantageous
acquirements cannot benefit the next generation, since these
acquirements die with their makers. The only process of natural
selection which can result in progress is one which consists in
the selection of favourable ... inborn and therefore transmissible
characters, such as good digestion, the musical sense, exceptional
intelligence, the sympathetic temperament or what not (in so far as
these are inborn)--the reason being that such are transmissible and
that the children of persons so selected will tend to inherit their
parents' good fortune. There is a fictitious way in which we speak
of a child inheriting his father's acquirements, as when his father
has acquired a fortune; but the child does much better to inherit
his father's good sense or good health, which were characters inborn
in him. Acquirements, then, are all very well for the day, but it is
inborn characters that alone count for the morrow.”[26]
It may be added that the time is coming when there will be a radical
“transvaluation,” as Nietzsche would say, of the two fashions in which
a father “leaves” something to his children. When a question is asked
on this head now-a-days, we mean, foolishly enough, to enquire how
much money the father left his child, and we say of a man that he has
“inherited” a fortune. We can see plainly enough, as Theognis did
two thousand five hundred years ago, that such an “inheritance” may
and often does work in an anti-eugenic fashion. The gilded fool is
swallowed by the maiden whose native sense would have rejected such a
pill without its coat, and so the most pitiable degenerate becomes the
father of his like. This point will be alluded to later. The present
argument is that when we ask what a father “left” his children, we
should really desire to learn what he _gave_ them when he was still
alive and begot them. These vital, or mortal, characters which they
inherit--shall we say good health or insanity--are of incalculably
more moment to them as individuals than any monetary fortune, and of
incalculably more moment for the future. Yet again is it true that
there is no wealth but life, and the best “fortune” or wealth that you
can leave your children is sane and vigorous life.
=The case of slum childhood.=--We have already seen that even in the
slums the children make a fresh start in a wonderful way, that their
stunted growth, their proneness to disease, are mainly due to their
environment, which it is therefore our duty to improve. This is _in
genera
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