← catalogue

Mankind in the Making

by H. G. Wells · English · Gutenberg #7058 · 631,128 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Mankind in the Making
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: Mankind in the Making

Author: H. G. Wells


        
Release date: December 1, 2004 [eBook #7058]
                Most recently updated: September 17, 2016

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7058

Credits: Produced by Michelle Shephard, Tiffany Vergon, Juliet
        Sutherland, Charles Franks, David Widger
        and the Online Distributed Proofreaders


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MANKIND IN THE MAKING ***




Produced by Michelle Shephard, Tiffany Vergon, Juliet
Sutherland, Charles Franks and the Online Distributed
Proofreaders








MANKIND IN THE MAKING


By H. G. Wells




PREFACE


It may save misunderstanding if a word or so be said here of the aim
and scope of this book. It is written in relation to a previous work,
_Anticipations_, [Footnote: Published by Harper Bros.] and together with
that and a small pamphlet, “The Discovery of the Future,” [Footnote:
Nature, vol. lxv. (1901-2), p. 326, and reprinted in the Smithsonian
Report for 1902] presents a general theory of social development and of
social and political conduct. It is an attempt to deal with social and
political questions in a new way and from a new starting-point, viewing
the whole social and political world as aspects of one universal
evolving scheme, and placing all social and political activities in a
defined relation to that; and to this general method and trend it is
that the attention of the reader is especially directed. The two
books and the pamphlet together are to be regarded as an essay in
presentation. It is a work that the writer admits he has undertaken
primarily for his own mental comfort. He is remarkably not qualified to
assume an authoritative tone in these matters, and he is acutely aware
of the many defects in detailed knowledge, in temper, and in training
these papers collectively display. He is aware that at such points,
for example, as the reference to authorities in the chapter on the
biological problem, and to books in the educational chapter, the lacunar
quality of his reading and knowledge is only too evident; to fill in
and complete his design--notably in the fourth paper--he has had quite
frankly to jerry-build here and there. Nevertheless, he ventures to
publish this book. There are phases in the development of every science
when an incautious outsider may think himself almost necessary, when
sketchiness ceases to be a sin, when the mere facts of irresponsibility
and an untrained interest may permit a freshness, a freedom of mental
gesture that would be inconvenient and compromising for the specialist;
and such a phase, it is submitted, has been reached in this field of
speculation. Moreover, the work attempted is not so much special
and technical as a work of reconciliation, the suggestion of broad
generalizations upon which divergent specialists may meet, a business
for non-technical expression, and in which a man who knows a little of
biology, a little of physical science, and a little in a practical way
of social stratification, who has concerned himself with education and
aspired to creative art, may claim in his very amateurishness a special
qualification. And in addition, it is particularly a business for some
irresponsible writer, outside the complications of practical politics,
some man who, politically, “doesn’t matter,” to provide the first
tentatives of a political doctrine that shall be equally available for
application in the British Empire and in the United States. To that we
must come, unless our talk of co-operation, of reunion, is no more than
sentimental dreaming. We have to get into line, and that we cannot do
while over here and over there men hold themselves bound by old party
formulae, by loyalties and institutions, that are becoming, that
have become, provincial in proportion to our new and wider needs.
My instances are commonly British, but all the broad project of this
book--the discussion of the quality of the average birth and of
the average home, the educational scheme, the suggestions for the
organization of literature and a common language, the criticism of
polling and the jury system, and the ideal of a Republic with an
apparatus of honour--is, I submit, addressed to, and could be adopted
by, any English-reading and English-speaking man. No doubt the spirit
of the inquiry is more British than American, that the abandonment of
Rousseau and anarchic democracy is more complete than American thought
is yet prepared for, but that is a difference not of quality but of
degree. And even the appendix, which at a hasty glance may seem to be
no more than the discussion of British parochial boundaries, does indeed
develop principles of primary importance in the fundamental schism of
American politics between the local State government and the central
power. So much of apology and explanation I owe to the reader, to the
contemporary specialist, and to myself.

These papers were first published in the British _Fortnightly Review_
and in the American _Cosmopolitan_. In the latter periodical they were,
for the most part, printed from uncorrected proofs set up from an
early version. This periodical publication produced a considerable
correspondence, which has been of very great service in the final
revision. These papers have indeed been honoured by letters from men
and women of almost every profession, and by a really very considerable
amount of genuine criticism in the British press. Nothing, I think,
could witness more effectually to the demand for such discussions
of general principle, to the need felt for some nuclear matter to
crystallize upon at the present time, however poor its quality, than
this fact. Here I can only thank the writers collectively, and call
their attention to the more practical gratitude of my frequently
modified text.

I would, however, like to express my especial indebtedness to my
friend, Mr. Graham Wallas, who generously toiled through the whole of
my typewritten copy, and gave me much valuable advice, and to Mr. C. G.
Stuart Menteath for some valuable references.

H. G. WELLS.

SANDGATE, _July_, 1903.




CONTENTS


         PREFACE

      I. THE NEW REPUBLIC
     II. THE PROBLEM OF THE BIRTH SUPPLY
    III. CERTAIN WHOLESALE ASPECTS OF MAN-MAKING
     IV. THE BEGINNINGS OF THE MIND AND LANGUAGE
      V. THE MAN-MAKING FORCES OF THE MODERN STATE
     VI. SCHOOLING
    VII. POLITICAL AND SOCIAL INFLUENCES
   VIII. THE CULTIVATION OF THE IMAGINATION
     IX. THE ORGANIZATION OF THE HIGHER EDUCATION
      X. THOUGHT IN THE MODERN STATE
     XI. THE MAN’S OWN SHARE

   APPENDIX

   A PAPER ON ADMINISTRATIVE AREAS READ BEFORE THE FABIAN SOCIETY

   INDEX




MANKIND IN THE MAKING




I. THE NEW REPUBLIC


Toleration to-day is becoming a different thing from the toleration
of former times. The toleration of the past consisted very largely in
saying, “You are utterly wrong and totally accurst, there is no truth
but my truth and that you deny, but it is not my place to destroy you
and so I let you go.” Nowadays there is a real disposition to accept the
qualified nature of one’s private certainties. One may have arrived at
very definite views, one may have come to beliefs quite binding upon
one’s self, without supposing them to be imperative upon other people.
To write “I believe” is not only less presumptuous and aggressive in
such matters than to write “it is true,” but it is also nearer the
reality of the case. One knows what seems true to one’s self, but we are
coming to realize that the world is great and complex, beyond the utmost
power of such minds as ours. Every day of life drives that conviction
further home. And it is possible to maintain that in perhaps quite a
great number of ethical, social, and political questions there is no
absolute “truth” at all--at least for finite beings. To one intellectual
temperament things may have a moral tint and aspect, differing widely
from that they present to another; and yet each may be in its own way
right. The wide differences in character and quality between one human
being and another may quite conceivably involve not only differences in
moral obligation, but differences in fundamental moral aspect--we may
act and react upon each other towards a universal end, but without any
universally applicable rule of conduct whatever. In some greater vision
than mine, my right and wrong may be no more than hammer and anvil in
the accomplishment of a design larger than I can understand. So that
these papers are not written primarily for all, nor with the same
intention towards all who read them. They are designed first for those
who are predisposed for their reception. Then they are intended to
display in an orderly manner a point of view, and how things look from
that point of view, to those who are not so predisposed. These latter
will either develop into adherents as they read, or, what is more
likely, they will exchange a vague disorderly objection for a clearly
defined and understood difference. To arrive at such an understanding is
often for practical purposes as good as unanimity; for in narrowing down
the issue to some central point or principle, we develop just how far
those who are divergent may go together before separation or conflict
become inevitable, and save something of our time and of our lives from
those misunderstandings, and those secondary differences of no practical
importance whatever, which make such disastrous waste of human energy.

Now the point of view which will be displayed in relation to a number of
wide questions in these pages is primarily that of the writer’s. But he
hopes and believes that among those who read what he has to say, there
will be found not only many to understand, but some to agree with him.
In many ways he is inclined to believe the development of his views may
be typical of the sort of development that has gone on to a greater or
lesser extent in the minds of many of the younger men during the last
twenty years, and it is in that belief that he is now presenting them.

And the questions that will be dealt with in relation to this point of
view are all those questions outside a man’s purely private self--if he
have a purely private self--in which he interacts with his fellow-man.
Our attempt will be to put in order, to reduce to principle, what is at
present in countless instances a mass of inconsistent proceedings, to
frame a general theory in accordance with modern conditions of social
and political activity.

This is one man’s proposal, his attempt to supply a need that has
oppressed him for many years, a need that he has not only found in
his own schemes of conduct, but that he has observed in the thought
of numberless people about him, rendering their action fragmentary,
wasteful in the gross, and ineffective in the net result, the need for
some general principle, some leading idea, some standard, sufficiently
comprehensive to be of real guiding value in social and political
matters, in many doubtful issues of private conduct, and throughout the
business of dealing with one’s fellow-men. No doubt there are many
who do not feel such a need at all, and with these we may part company
forthwith; there are, for example, those who profess the artistic
temperament and follow the impulse of the moment, and those who consult
an inner light in some entirely mystical manner. But neither of these I
believe is the most abundant type in the English-speaking communities.
My impression is that with most of the minds I have been able to examine
with any thoroughness, the attempt to systematize one’s private and
public conduct alike, and to reduce it to spacious general rules, to
attempt, if not to succeed, in making it coherent, consistent, and
uniformly directed, is an almost instinctive proceeding.

There is an objection I may anticipate at this point. If I am to leave
this statement unqualified, it would certainly be objected that such
a need is no more nor less than the need of religion, that a properly
formulated religion does supply a trustworthy guide at every fork and
labyrinth in life. By my allusion to the failure of old formulae
and methods to satisfy now, I am afraid many people will choose to
understand that I refer to what is often spoken of as the conflict of
religion and science, and that I intend to propound some contribution
to the conflict. I will at any rate anticipate that objection here, in
order to mark out my boundaries with greater precision.

Taken in its completeness, I submit that it is a greater claim than
almost any religion can justifiably make, to satisfy the need I have
stated. No religion prescribes rules that can be immediately applied
to every eventuality. Between the general rules laid down and the
particular instance there is always a wide gap, into which doubts and
alternatives enter and the private judgment has play. No doubt upon
certain defined issues of every-day life some religions are absolutely
explicit; the Mahomedan religion, for example, is very uncompromising
upon the use of wine, and the law of the Ten Commandments completely
prohibits the making of graven images, and almost all the great variety
of creeds professed among us English-speaking peoples prescribe certain
general definitions of what is righteous and what constitutes sin. But
upon a thousand questions of great public importance, on the question
of forms of government, of social and educational necessities, of one’s
course and attitude towards such great facts as the press, trusts,
housing, and the like, religion, as it is generally understood, gives by
itself no conclusive light. It may, no doubt, give a directing light in
some cases, but not a conclusive light. It leaves us inconsistent and
uncertain amidst these unavoidable problems. Yet upon these questions
most people feel that something more is needed than the mood of the
moment or the spin of a coin. Religious conviction may help us, it
may stimulate us to press for clearer light upon these matters, but it
certainly does not give us any decisions.

It is possible to be either intensely religious or utterly indifferent
to religious matters and yet care nothing for these things. One may be a
Pietist to whom the world is a fleeting show of no importance whatever,
or one may say, “Let us eat, drink, and be merry, for to-morrow we die”:
the net result in regard to my need is the same. These questions appear
to be on a different plane from religion and religious discussion; they
look outward, while essentially religion looks inward to the soul, and,
given the necessary temperament, it is possible to approach them in an
unbiassed manner from almost any starting-point of religious profession.
One man may believe in the immortality of the soul and another may not;
one man may be a Swedenborgian, another a Roman Catholic, another a
Calvinistic Methodist, another an English High Churchman, another a
Positivist, or a Parsee, or a Jew; the fact remains that they must go
about doing all sorts of things in common every day. They may derive
their ultimate motives and sanctions from the most various sources, they
may worship in the most contrasted temples and yet meet unanimously in
the market-place with a desire to shape their general activities to the
form of a “public spirited” life, and when at last the life of every day
is summed up, “to leave the world better than they found it.” And it is
from that most excellent expression I would start, or rather from a sort
of amplified restatement of that expression--outside the province of
religious discussion altogether.

A man who will build on that expression _as his foundation_ in political
and social matters, has at least the possibility of agreement in the
scheme of action these papers will unfold. For though we theorize it is
at action that our speculations will aim. They will take the shape of an
organized political and social doctrine. It will be convenient to give
this doctrine a name, and for reasons that will be clear enough to those
who have read my book _Anticipations_ this doctrine will be spoken of
throughout as “New Republicanism,” the doctrine of the New Republic.

The central conception of this New Republicanism as it has shaped itself
in my mind, lies in attaching pre-eminent importance to certain aspects
of human life, and in subordinating systematically and always, all
other considerations to these cardinal aspects. It begins with a way
of looking at life. It insists upon that way, it will regard no human
concern at all except in that way. And the way, putting the thing as
compactly as possible, is to reject and set aside all abstract, refined,
and intellectualized ideas as starting propositions, such ideas as
Right, Liberty, Happiness, Duty or Beauty, and to hold fast to the
assertion of the fundamental nature of life as a tissue and succession
of births. These other things may be important, they may be profoundly
important, but they are not primary. We cannot build upon any one of
them and get a structure that will comprehend all the aspects of life.

For the great majority of mankind at least it can be held that life
resolves itself quite simply and obviously into three cardinal phases.
There is a period of youth and preparation, a great insurgence of
emotion and enterprise centering about the passion of Love, and a third
period in which, arising amidst the warmth and stir of the second,
interweaving indeed with the second, the care and love of offspring
becomes the central interest in life. In the babble of the
grandchildren, with all the sons and daughters grown and secure, the
typical life of humanity ebbs and ends. Looked at thus with a primary
regard to its broadest aspect, life is seen as essentially a matter of
reproduction; first a growth and training to that end, then commonly
mating and actual physical reproduction, and finally the consummation of
these things in parental nurture and education. Love, Home and Children,
these are the heart-words of life. Not only is the general outline of
the normal healthy human life reproductive, but a vast proportion of the
infinitely complex and interwoven interests that fill that outline with
incessant interest can be shown by a careful analysis to be more or less
directly reproductive also. The toil of a man’s daily work is rarely
for himself alone, it goes to feed, to clothe, to educate those cardinal
consequences of his being, his children; he builds for them, he plants
for them, he plans for them, his social intercourse, his political
interests, whatever his immediate motives, tend finally to secure their
welfare. Even more obviously is this the case with his wife. Even in
rest and recreation life still manifests its quality; the books the
ordinary man reads turn enormously on love-making, his theatre has
scarcely ever a play that has not primarily a strong love interest, his
art rises to its most consummate triumphs in Venus and Madonna, and his
music is saturated in love suggestions. Not only is this so with the
right and proper life, but the greater portion of those acts we call
vice draw their stimulus and pleasure from the impulses that subserve
this sustaining fact of our being, and they are vicious only because
they evade or spoil their proper end. This is really no new discovery at
all, only the stripping bare of it is new. In nearly every religious and
moral system in the world indeed, the predominant mass of the exposition
of sin and saving virtue positively or negatively centres upon birth.
Positively in the enormous stresses, the sacramental values which are
concentrated upon marriage and the initial circumstances of being, and
negatively in a thousand significant repudiations. Even when the devotee
most strenuously renounces this world and all its works, when St.
Anthony flees into the desert or the pious Durtal wrestles in his cell,
when the pale nun prays in vigil and the hermit mounts his pillar, it
is Celibacy, that great denial of life, that sings through all their
struggle, it is this business of births as the central fact of life they
still have most in mind.

This is not human life merely, it is all life. This living world, as
the New Republican will see it, is no more than a great birth-place,
an incessant renewal, an undying fresh beginning and unfolding of
life. Take away this fact of birth and what is there remaining? A world
without flowers, without the singing of birds, without the freshness of
youth, with a spring that brings no seedlings and a year that bears no
harvest, without beginnings and without defeats, a vast stagnation, a
universe of inconsequent matter--Death. Not only does the substance of
life vanish if we eliminate births and all that is related to births,
but whatever remains, if anything remains, of aesthetic and intellectual
and spiritual experience, collapses utterly and falls apart, when this
essential substratum of all experience is withdrawn. So at any rate the
world presents itself in the view the New Republican takes. And if it
should chance that the reader finds this ring untrue to him, then he may
take it that he stands outside us, that the New Republic is not for him.

It may be submitted that this statement that Life is a texture of
births may be accepted by minds of the most divergent religious and
philosophical profession. No fundamental or recondite admissions are
proposed here, but only that the every-day life for every-day purposes
has this shape and nature. The utter materialist may say that life
to him is a fortuitous concurrence of atoms, a chance kinking in the
universal fabric of matter. It is not our present business to confute
him. The fact remains this is the form the kinking has taken. The
believer, sedulous for his soul’s welfare, may say that Life is to
him an arena of spiritual conflict, but this is the character of the
conflict, this is the business from which all the tests and exercises of
his soul are drawn. It matters not in this present discussion if Life is
no more than a dream; the dream is this.

And now one comes to another step. The reader may give his assent
to this statement as obvious or he may guard his assent with a
qualification or so, but I doubt if he will deny it. No one, I expect,
will categorically deny it. But although no one will do that, a great
number of people who have not clearly seen things in this light, do in
thought and in many details of their practice follow a line that is,
in effect, a flat denial of what is here proposed. Life no doubt is
a fabric woven of births and the struggle to maintain and develop and
multiply lives. It does not follow that life is _consciously_ a fabric
woven of births and the struggle to maintain and develop and multiply
lives. I do not suppose a cat or a savage sees it in that light. A cat’s
standpoint is probably strictly individualistic. She sees the whole
universe as a scheme of more or less useful, pleasurable and interesting
things concentrated upon her sensitive and interesting personality. With
a sinuous determination she evades disagreeables and pursues delights;
life is to her quite clearly and simply a succession of pleasures,
sensations and interests, among which interests there happen to
be--kittens!

And this way of regarding life is by no means confined to animals and
savages. I would even go so far as to suggest that it is only within
the last hundred years that any considerable number of thoughtful people
have come to look at life steadily and consistently as being shaped to
this form, to the form of a series of births, growths and births. The
most general truths are those last apprehended. The universal fact
of gravitation, for example, which pervades all being, received its
complete recognition scarcely two hundred years ago. And again children
and savages live in air, breathe air, are saturated with air, die for
five minutes’ need of it, and never definitely realize there is such a
thing as air at all. The vast mass of human expression in act and art
and literature takes a narrower view than we have here formulated; it
presents each man not only as isolated from and antagonized with the
world about him, but as cut off sharply and definitely from the past
before he lived and the future after he is dead; it puts what is, in
relation to the view we have taken, a disproportionate amount of stress
upon his egotism, upon the pursuit of his self-interest and his personal
virtue and his personal fancies, and it ignores the fact, the familiar
rediscovery which the nineteenth century has achieved, that he is
after all only the transitory custodian of an undying gift of life, an
inheritor under conditions, the momentary voice and interpreter of a
being that springs from the dawn of time and lives in offspring and
thought and material consequence, for ever.

This over-accentuation in the past of man’s egoistic individuality, or,
if one puts it in another way, this unsuspicious ignorance of the
real nature of life, becomes glaringly conspicuous in such weighed
and deliberate utterances as _The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius_.
Throughout these frank and fundamental discourses one traces a
predominant desire for a perfected inconsequent egotism. Body is
repudiated as a garment, position is an accident, the past that made us
exists not since it is past, the future exists not for we shall never
see it; at last nothing but the abstracted ego remains,--a sort of
complimentary Nirvana. One citation will serve to show the colour of all
his thought. “A man,” he remarks, “is very devout to prevent the loss
of his son. But I would have you pray rather against the fear of
losing him. Let this be the rule for your devotions.” [Footnote: _The
Meditations of M. A. Antoninus_, ix. 40.] That indeed is the rule
for all the devotions of that departing generation of wisdom. Rather
serenity and dignity than good ensuing. Rather a virtuous man than any
resultant whatever from his lifetime, for the future of the world. It
points this disregard of the sequence of life and birth in favour of an
abstract and fruitless virtue, it points it indeed with a barbed point
that the son of Marcus Aurelius was the unspeakable Commodus, and that
the Roman Empire fell from the temporizing detachment of his rule into a
century of disorder and misery.

To the thoughtful reader to whom these papers appeal, to the reader
whose mind is of the modern cast, who has surveyed the vistas of the
geological record and grasped the secular unfolding of the scheme of
life, who has found with microscope and scalpel that the same rhythm of
birth and re-birth is woven into the minutest texture of things that has
covered the earth with verdure and shaped the massifs of the Alps, to
such a man the whole literature the world produced until the nineteenth
century had well progressed, must needs be lacking in any definite and
pervading sense of the cardinal importance in the world of this central
reproductive aspect, of births and of the training and preparation for
future births. All that literature, great and imposing as we are bound
to admit it is, has an outlook less ample than quite common men may
have to-day. It is a literature, as we see it in the newer view, of
abstracted personalities and of disconnected passions and impressions.

To one extraordinary and powerful mind in the earlier half of the
nineteenth century this realization of the true form of life came with
quite overwhelming force, and that was to Schopenhauer, surely at once
the most acute and the most biassed of mortal men. It came to him as
a most detestable fact, because it happened he was an intensely
egotistical man. But his intellect was of that noble and exceptional
sort that aversion may tint indeed but cannot blind, and we owe to him a
series of philosophical writings, written with an instinctive skill
and a clearness and a vigour uncommon in philosophers, in which a very
complete statement of the new view is presented to the reader in terms
of passionate protest. [Footnote: _Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung._]
“Why,” he asked, “must we be for ever tortured by this passion and
desire to reproduce our kind, why are all our pursuits tainted with this
application, all our needs deferred to the needs of the new generation
that tramples on our heels?” and he found the answer in the presence of
an overwhelming Will to Live manifesting itself throughout the universe
of Matter, thrusting us ruthlessly before it, as a strong swimmer
thrusts a wave before him as he swims. That the personal egotism should
be subordinated to and overwhelmed by a pervading Will to Live filled
his soul with passionate rebellion and coloured his exposition with the
hues of despair. But to minds temperamentally different from his, minds
whose egotism is qualified by a more unselfish humour, it is possible to
avail one’s self of Schopenhauer’s vision, without submitting one’s self
to his conclusions, to see our wills only as temporary manifestations
of an ampler will, our lives as passing phases of a greater Life, and
to accept these facts even joyfully, to take our places in that larger
scheme with a sense of relief and discovery, to go with that larger
being, to serve that larger being, as a soldier marches, a mere unit
in the larger being of his army, and serving his army, joyfully into
battle.

However, it is not to Schopenhauer and his writings, at least among the
English-speaking peoples, that this increasing realization of life as
essentially a succession of births, is chiefly ascribed. It is mainly,
as I have already suggested, the result of that great expansion of our
sense of time and causation that has ensued from the idea of organic
Evolution. In the course of one brief century, the human outlook upon
the order of the world has been profoundly changed. It is not simply
that it has become much more spacious, it is not only that it has opened
out from the little history of a few thousand years to a stupendous
vista of ages, but, in addition to its expanded dimensions, it has
experienced a change in character. That wonderful and continually more
elaborate and penetrating analysis of the evolutionary process by
Darwin and his followers and successors and antagonists, the entire
subordination of the individual lot to the specific destiny that these
criticisms and researches have emphasized, has warped and altered the
aspect of a thousand human affairs. It has made reasonable and in order
what Schopenhauer found so suggestively perplexing, it has dispelled
problems that have seemed insoluble mysteries to many generations of
men. I do not say it has solved them, but it has dispelled them and made
them irrelevant and uninteresting. So long as one believed that life
span unprogressively from generation to generation, that generation
followed generation unchangingly for ever, the enormous preponderance
of sexual needs and emotions in life was a distressing and inexplicable
fact--it was a mystery, it was sin, it was the work of the devil. One
asked, why does man build houses that others may live therein; plant
trees whose fruit he will never see? And all the toil and ambition,
the stress and hope of existence, seemed, so far as this life went,
and before these new lights came, a mere sacrifice to this pointless
reiteration of lives, this cosmic _crambe repetita_. To perceive this
aspect, and to profess an entire detachment from the whole vacuous
business was considered by a large proportion of the more thoughtful
people of the world the supreme achievement of philosophy. The acme
of old-world wisdom, the ultimate mystery of Oriental philosophy is to
contemn women and offspring, to abandon costume, cleanliness, and all
the decencies and dignities of life, and to crawl, as scornfully as
possible, but at any rate to crawl out of all these earthly shows and
snares (which so obviously lead to nothing), into the nearest tub.

And the amazing revelation of our days is that they do not lead to
nothing! Directly the discovery is made clear--and it is, I firmly
believe, the crowning glory of the nineteenth century to have
established this discovery for all time--that one generation does not
follow another in _fac simile_, directly we come within sight of
the reasonable persuasion that each generation is a step, a definite
measurable step, and each birth an unprecedented experiment, directly it
grows clear that instead of being in an eddy merely, we are for all our
eddying moving forward upon a wide voluminous current, then all these
things are changed.

That change alters the perspective of every human affair. Things that
seemed permanent and final, become unsettled and provisional. Social
and political effort are seen from a new view-point. Everywhere the old
direction posts, the old guiding marks, have got out of line and askew.
And it is out of the conflict of the new view with the old institutions
and formulae, that there arises the discontent and the need, and the
attempt at a wider answer, which this phrase and suggestion of the “New
Republic” is intended to express.

Every part contributes to the nature of the whole, and if the whole of
life is an evolving succession of births, then not only must a man in
his individual capacity (_physically_ as parent, doctor, food dealer,
food carrier, home builder, protector, or _mentally_ as teacher, news
dealer, author, preacher) contribute to births and growths and the
future of mankind, but the collective aspects of man, his social and
political organizations must also be, in the essence, organizations that
more or less profitably and more or less intentionally, set themselves
towards this end. They are finally concerned with the birth and with the
sound development towards still better births, of human lives, just as
every implement in the toolshed of a seedsman’s nursery, even the hoe
and the roller, is concerned finally with the seeding and with the sound
development towards still better seeding of plants. The private and
personal motive of the seedsman in procuring and using these tools
may be avarice, ambition, a religious belief in the saving efficacy of
nursery keeping or a simple passion for bettering flowers, that does not
affect the definite final purpose of his outfit of tools.

And just as we might judge completely and criticise and improve that
outfit from an attentive study of the welfare of plants and with an
entire disregard of his remoter motives, so we may judge all collective
human enterprises from the standpoint of an attentive study of human
births and development. _Any collective human enterprise, institution,
movement, party or state, is to be judged as a whole and completely, as
it conduces more or less to wholesome and hopeful births, and according
to the qualitative and quantitative advance due to its influence made
by each generation of citizens born under its influence towards a higher
and ampler standard of life_.

Or putting the thing in a slightly different phrasing, the New
Republican idea amounts to this: the serious aspect of our private
lives, the general aspect of all our social and co-operative
undertakings, is to prepare as well as we possibly can a succeeding
generation, which shall prepare still more capably for still better
generations to follow. We are passing as a race out of a state of
affairs when the unconscious building of the future was attained by
individualistic self-seeking (altogether unenlightened or enlightened
only by the indirect moralizing influence of the patriotic instinct and
religion) into a clear consciousness of our co-operative share in that
process. That is the essential idea my New Republic would personify and
embody. In the past man was made, generation after generation, by forces
beyond his knowledge and control. Now a certain number of men are coming
to a provisional understanding of some at least of these forces that go
to the Making of Man. To some of us there is being given the privilege
and responsibility of knowledge. We may plead lack of will or lack of
moral impetus, but we can no longer plead ignorance. Just as far as our
light upon the general purpose goes, just so far goes our responsibility
(whether we respect it or not) to shape and subdue our wills to the
Making of Mankind.

Directly the man, who has found akin to himself and who has accepted and
assimilated this new view, turns to the affairs of the political
world, to the general professions of our great social and business
undertakings, and to the broad conventions of human conduct, he will
find, I think, a very wide discrepancy from the implications of this
view. He will find--the New Republican finds--that the declared aims and
principles of the larger amount of our social and political effort are
astonishingly limited and unsatisfactory, astonishingly irrelevant to
the broad reality of Life. He will find great masses of men embarked
collectively upon enterprises that will seem to his eyes to have no
definable relation to this real business of the world, or only the
most accidental relationship, he will find others in partial lop-sided
cooperation or unintelligently half helpful and half obstructive, and he
will find still other movements and developments which set quite in
the opposite direction, which make neither for sound births nor sound
growth, but through the thinnest shams of excuse and purpose, through
the most hypnotic and unreal of suggestions and motives, directly and
even plainly towards waste, towards sterility, towards futility and
death and extinction.

But not deliberately towards Death. It is only in the theoretical
aspirations of Schopenhauer that he will find an expression of conscious
and resolved opposition to the pervading will and purpose in things.
In the common affairs of the world he will find neither deliberate
opposition nor deliberate co-operation, chance opposition indeed
and chance co-operation, but for the most part only a complete
unconsciousness, a blind irrelevance or a purely accidental accordance
to the essential aspect of Life.

Take, for example, the great enthusiasm that set all England waving
bunting in June, 1902. It was made clear to the most unwilling observer
that the great mass of English people consider themselves aggregated
together in one nation mainly to support, honour, and obey a King, and
that they rejoice in this conception of their national purpose. Great
sums of money were spent to emphasize this purpose, public work of all
sorts was dislocated, and the channels of public discussion clogged and
choked. A discussion of the education of the next generation, a matter
of supreme interest from the New Republican point of view, passed from
public sight amidst the happy tumults and splendours of the time. The
land was filled with poetry in the Monarch’s praise, bad beyond any
suspicion of insincerity. All that was certainly great in the land,
all that has any hold upon the motives and confidence of the English,
gathered itself into a respectful proximity, assumed attitudes of
reverent subordination to the Monarch. All that was eminent in science
and literature and art, the galaxy of the episcopate, the crowning
intellectualities of the army, came to these rites, clad in robes and
raiment that no sane person would ever voluntarily assume in public
except under circumstances of extreme necessity. The whole business was
conducted with a zest and gravity that absolutely forbids the theory
that it was a mere formality, a curious survival of mediævalism
cherished by a country that makes no breaks with its past. The spirit
and idea of the whole thing was intensely real and contemporary; one
could believe only that those who took part in it regarded it as a
matter of primary importance, as one of the cardinal things for which
they existed. The alternative is to imagine that they believe nothing
to be of primary importance in this world; a quite incredible levity of
soul to ascribe to all those great and distinguished people.

But it reflects not at all upon the high intelligence, the unobtrusive
but sterling moral qualities, the tact, dignity, and personal charm
of the central figure in their pageantries, a charm the pathetic
circumstances of his unseasonable illness very greatly enhanced, if
the New Republican fails to consider these ceremonials of primary
importance, if he declines to see them as of any necessary importance at
all, until it has been conclusively shown that they do minister to
the bettering of births and of the lives intervening between birth and
birth. On the surface they do not do that. Unless they can be shown to
do that they are dissipations of energy, they are irrelevant and wrong,
from the New Republican point of view. The New Republican can take no
part in these things, or only a very grudging and qualified part, on his
way to real service. He may or he may not, after deliberate examination,
leave these things on one side, unchallenged but ignored.

It may be urged that all the subserviences that distinguish our kingdom
and that become so amazingly conspicuous about a coronation, the kissing
of hands, the shambling upon knees, the crawling of body and mind, the
systematic encouragement of that undignified noisiness that nowadays
distinguishes the popular rejoicings of our imperial people, are simply
a proof of the earnest preoccupation of our judges, bishops, and leaders
and great officers of all sorts with remoter and nobler aims. The
kingdom happens to exist, and it would be complex and troublesome to get
rid of it. They stand these things, they get done with these things, and
so are able to get to their work. The paraphernalia of a Court, the sham
scale of honours, the submissions, the ceremonial subjection, are, it is
argued, entirely irrelevant to the purpose and honour of our race, but
then so would rebellion against these things be also irrelevant and
secondary. To submit or to rebel is a diversion of our energies from the
real purpose in things, and of the two it is infinitely less bother to
submit. In private conversation, I find, this is the line nine out of
ten of the King’s servants will take. They will tell you the public
understands; the thing is a mere excuse for festivity and colour; their
loyalty is of a piece with their Fifth of November anti-popery.
They will tell you the peers understand, the bishops understand,
the coronating archbishop has his tongue in his cheek. They all
understand--men of the world together. The King understands, a most
admirable gentleman, who submits to these traditional things, but who
admits his preference is for the simple, pure delight of the incognito,
for being “plain Mr. Jones.”

It may be so. Though the psychologist will tell you that a man who
behaves consistently as though he believed in a thing, will end in
believing it. Assuredly whatever these others do, the New Republican
must understand. In his inmost soul there must be no loyalty or
submission to any king or colour, save only if it conduces to the
service of the future of the race. In the New Republic all kings are
provisional, if, indeed--and this I shall discuss in a later paper--they
can be regarded as serviceable at all.

And just as kingship is a secondary and debatable thing to the New
Republican, to every man, that is, whom the spirit of the new knowledge
has taken for its work, so also are the loyalties of nationality, and
all our local and party adhesions.

Much that passes for patriotism is no more than a generalized jealousy
rather gorgeously clad. Amidst the collapse of the old Individualistic
Humanitarianism, the Rights of Man, Human Equality, and the rest of
those broad generalizations that served to keep together so many men of
good intention in the age that has come to its end, there has been much
hasty running to obvious shelters, and many men have been forced to take
refuge under this echoing patriotism--for want of a better gathering
place. It is like an incident during an earthquake, when men who have
abandoned a cleft fortress will shelter in a drinking bothy. But the
very upheavals that have shattered the old fastnesses of altruistic
men, will be found presently to be taking the shape of a new gathering
place--and of this the New Republic presents an early guess and
anticipation. I do not see how men, save in the most unexpected
emergency, can be content to accept such an artificial convention as
modern patriotism for one moment. On the one hand there are the patriots
of nationality who would have us believe that the miscellany of European
squatters in the Transvaal are one nation and those in Cape Colony
another, and on the other the patriots of Empire who would have me, for
example, hail as my fellow-subjects and collaborators in man-making a
host of Tamil-speaking, Tamil-thinking Dravadians, while separating me
from every English-speaking, English-thinking person who lives south of
the Great Lakes. So long as men are content to work in the grooves set
for them by dead men, to derive all their significances from the past,
to accept whatever is as right and to drive along before the compulsions
of these acquiescences, they may do so. But directly they take to
themselves the New Republican idea, directly they realize that life is
something more than passing the time, that it is constructive with its
direction in the future, then these things slip from them as Christian’s
burthen fell from him at the very outset of his journey. Until grave
cause has been shown to the contrary, there is every reason why all men
who speak the same language, think the same literature, and are akin
in blood and spirit, and who have arrived at the great constructive
conception that so many minds nowadays are reaching, should entirely
disregard these old separations. If the old traditions do no harm
there is no reason to touch them, any more than there is to abolish the
boundary between this ancient and invincible kingdom of Kent in which I
write and that extremely inferior country, England, which was conquered
by the Normans and brought under the feudal system. But so soon as these
old traditions obstruct sound action, so soon as it is necessary to
be rid of them, we must be prepared to sacrifice our archaeological
emotions ruthlessly and entirely.

And these repudiations extend also to the political parties that
struggle to realize themselves within the forms of our established
state. There is not in Great Britain, and I understand there is not in
America, any party, any section, any group, any single politician even,
based upon the manifest trend and purpose of life as it appears in the
modern view. The necessities of continuity in public activity and of a
glaring consistency in public profession, have so far prevented any such
fundamental reconstruction as the new generation requires. One hears of
Liberty, of Compromise, of Imperial Destinies and Imperial Unity,
one hears of undying loyalty to the Memory of Mr. Gladstone and the
inalienable right of Ireland to a separate national existence. One
hears, too, of the sacred principle of Free Trade, of Empires and
Zollvereins, and the Rights of the Parent to blockade the education of
his children, but one hears nothing of the greater end. At the best
all the objects of our political activity can be but means to that end,
their only claim to our recognition can be their adequacy to that
end, and none of these vociferated “cries,” these party labels, these
programme items, are ever propounded to us in that way. I cannot see
how, in England at any rate, a serious and perfectly honest man, holding
as true that ampler view of life I have suggested, can attach himself
loyally to any existing party or faction. At the utmost he may find
their faction-fighting may be turned for a time towards his remoter
ends. These parties derive from that past when the new view of life had
yet to establish itself, they carry faded and obliterated banners that
the glare and dust of conflict, the vote-storms of great campaigns, have
robbed long since of any colour of reality they once possessed. They
express no creative purpose now, whatever they did in their inception,
they point towards no constructive ideals. Essentially they are things
for the museum or the bonfire, whatever momentary expediency may
hold back the New Republican from an unqualified advocacy of such a
destination. The old party fabrics are no more than dead rotting things,
upon which a great tangle of personal jealousies, old grudges, thorny
nicknames, prickly memories, family curses, Judas betrayals and sacred
pledges, a horrible rubbish thicket, maintains a saprophytic vitality.

It is quite possible I misjudge the thing altogether. Sir Henry
Campbell-Bannerman, for example, may hide the profoundest and
most wide-reaching aims beneath his superficial effect of utter
superficiality. His impersonation of an amiable, spirited,
self-conscious, land-owning gentleman with a passion for justice in
remote places and a whimsical dislike of motor cars in his immediate
neighbourhood, may veil the operations of a stupendous intelligence bent
upon the regeneration of the world. It may do, but if it does, it is a
very amazing and purposeless impersonation. I at any rate do not believe
that it does. I do not believe that he or any other Liberal leader or
any Conservative minister has any comprehensive aim at all--as we of the
new generation measure comprehensiveness. These parties, and the phrases
of party exposition--in America just as in England--date from the
days of the limited outlook. They display no consciousness of the new
dissent. They are absorbed in the long standing game, the getting in,
the turning out, the contests and governments, that has just about the
same relation to the new perception of affairs, to the real drift of
life, as the game of cricket with the wheel as a wicket would have to
the destinies of a ship. They find their game highly interesting and
no doubt they play it with remarkable wit, skill and spirit, but
they entirely disregard the increasing number of passengers who are
concerning themselves with the course and destination of the ship.

Those particular passengers in the figure, present the New Republic. It
is a dissension, an inquiry, it is the vague unconsolidated matter for a
new direction. “We who are young,” says the spirit of the New Republic,
“we who are in earnest can no more compass our lives under these
old kingships and loyalties, under these old leaders and these old
traditions, constitutions and pledges, with their party liabilities,
their national superstitions, their rotting banners and their
accumulating legacy of feuds and lies, than we can pretend we are indeed
impassioned and wholly devoted subjects of King Edward, spending our
lives in the service of his will. It is not that we have revolted
from these things, it is not that we have grown askew to them and that
patching and amendment will serve our need; it is that we have travelled
outside them altogether--almost inadvertently, but quite beyond any
chance of return to a simple acceptance again. We are no more disposed
to call ourselves Liberals or Conservatives and to be stirred to party
passion at the clash of these names, than we are to fight again the
battles of the Factio Albata or the Factio Prasina. These current
dramas, these current conflicts seem scarcely less factitious. Men
without faith may be content to spend their lives for things only half
believed in, and for causes that are contrived. But that is not our
quality. We want reality because we have faith, we seek the beginning of
realism in social and political life, we seek it and we are resolved to
find it.”

So we attempt to give a general expression to the forces that are new
at this time, to render something at least of the spirit of the New
Republic in a premature and experimental utterance. It is, at any rate,
a spirit that finds itself out of intimacy and co-ordination with all
the older movements of the world, that sees all pre-existing formulae
and political constitutions and political parties and organizations
rather as instruments or obstacles than as guiding lines and precedents
for its new developing will, its will which will carry it at last
irresistibly to the conscious and deliberate making of the future of
man. “We are here to get better births and a better result from the
births we get; each one of us is going to set himself immediately to
that, using whatever power he finds to his hand,” such is the form its
will must take. And such being its will and spirit these papers will
address themselves comprehensively to the problem, What will the New
Republic do? All the rest of this series will be a discussion of the
forces that go to the making of man, and how far and how such a New
Republic might seek to lay its hands upon them.

It is for the adversary to explain how presumptuous such an enterprise
must be. But presumption is ineradically interwoven with every beginning
that the world has ever seen. I venture to think that even to a reader
who does not accept or sympathize with the conception of this
New Republic, a general review of current movements and current
interpretations of morality from this new standpoint may be suggestive
and interesting. Assuredly it is only by some such general revision, if
not on these lines then on others, that a practicable way of escape is
to be found for any one, from that base and shifty opportunism in public
and social matters, that predominance of fluctuating aims and spiritless
conformities, in which so many of us, without any great positive
happiness at all to reward us for the sacrifice we are making, bury the
solitary talents of our lives.




II. THE PROBLEM OF THE BIRTH SUPPLY

Within the last minute seven new citizens were born into that great
English-speaking community which is scattered under various flags and
governments throughout the world. And according to the line of thought
developed in the previous paper we perceive that the real and ultimate
business, so far as this world goes, of every statesman, every social
organizer, every philanthropist, every business manager, every man
who lifts his head for a moment from the mean pursuit of his immediate
personal interests, from the gratification of his private desires, is,
as the first and immediate thing, to do his best for these new-comers,
to get the very best result, so far as his powers and activities can
contribute to it, from their undeveloped possibilities. And in the next
place, as a remoter, but perhaps finally more fundamental duty, he has
to inquire what may be done individually or collectively to raise the
standard and quality of the average birth. All the great concerns of
life work out with a very little analysis to that, even our wars, our
orgies of destruction, have, at the back of them, a claim, an intention,
however futile in its conception and disastrous in its consequences, to
establish a wider security, to destroy a standing menace, to open new
paths and possibilities, in the interest of the generations still
to come. One may present the whole matter in a simplified picture by
imagining all our statesmen, our philanthropists and public men, our
parties and institutions gathered into one great hall, and into this
hall a huge spout, that no man can stop, discharges a baby every eight
seconds. That is, I hold, a permissible picture of human life, and
whatever is not represented at all in that picture is a divergent and
secondary concern. Our success or failure with that unending stream of
babies is the measure of our civilization; every institution stands
or falls by its contribution to that result, by the improvement of the
children born, or by the improvement in the quality of births attained
under its influence.

To begin these speculations in logical order we must begin at the birth
point, we must begin by asking how much may we hope, now or at a later
time, to improve the supply of that raw material which is perpetually
dumped upon our hands? Can we raise, and if so, what can we do to raise
the quality of the average birth?

This speculation is as old at least as Plato, and as living as the seven
or eight babies born into the English-speaking world since the reader
began this Paper. The conclusion that if we could prevent or discourage
the inferior sorts of people from having children, and if we could
stimulate and encourage the superior sorts to increase and multiply, we
should raise the general standard of the race, is so simple, so obvious,
that in every age I suppose there have been voices asking in amazement,
why the thing is not done? It is so usual to answer that it is not done
on account of popular ignorance, public stupidity, religious prejudice
or superstition, that I shall not apologize for giving some little
space here to the suggestion that in reality it is not done for quite a
different reason.

We blame the popular mind overmuch. Earnest but imperfect men, with
honest and reasonable but imperfect proposals for bettering the world,
are all too apt to raise this bitter cry of popular stupidity, of the
sheep-like quality of common men. An unjustifiable persuasion of
moral and intellectual superiority is one of the last infirmities of
innovating minds. We may be right, but we must be provably, demonstrably
and overpoweringly right before we are justified in calling the
dissentient a fool. I am one of those who believe firmly in the
invincible nature of truth, but a truth that is badly put is not a
truth, but an infertile hybrid lie. Before we men of the study blame the
general body of people for remaining unaffected by reforming proposals
of an almost obvious advantage, it would be well if we were to change
our standpoint and examine our machinery at the point of application.
A rock-drilling machine may be excellently invented and in the most
perfect order except for a want of hardness in the drill, and yet there
will remain an unpierced rock as obdurate as the general public to so
many of our innovations.

I believe that if a canvass of the entire civilized world were put to
the vote in this matter, the proposition that it is desirable that the
better sort of people should intermarry and have plentiful children,
and that the inferior sort of people should abstain from multiplication,
would be carried by an overwhelming majority. They might disagree with
Plato’s methods, [Footnote: _The Republic_, Bk. V.] but they would
certainly agree to his principle. And that this is not a popular error
Mr. Francis Galton has shown. He has devoted a very large amount of
energy and capacity to the vivid and convincing presentation of this
idea, and to its courageous propagation. His Huxley Lecture to the
Anthropological Institute in 1901 [Footnote: _Nature_, vol. lxiv.
p. 659.] puts the whole matter as vividly as it ever can be put. He
classifies humanity about their average in classes which he indicates
by the letters R S T U V rising above the average and r s t u v falling
below, and he saturates the whole business in quantitative colour.
Indeed, Mr. Galton has drawn up certain definite proposals. He has
suggested that “noble families” should collect “fine specimens of
humanity” around them, employing these fine specimens in menial
occupations of a light and comfortable sort, that will leave a
sufficient portion of their energies free for the multiplication of
their superior type. “Promising young couples” might be given “healthy
and convenient houses at low rentals,” he suggests, and no doubt it
could be contrived that they should pay their rent partly or entirely
per stone of family annually produced. And he has also proposed that
“diplomas” should be granted to young men and women of high class--big
S and upward--and that they should be encouraged to intermarry young. A
scheme of “dowries” for diploma holders would obviously be the simplest
thing in the world. And only the rules for identifying your great S T U
and V in adolescence, are wanting from the symmetrical completeness of
his really very noble-spirited and high-class scheme.

At a more popular level Mrs. Victoria Woodhull Martin has battled
bravely in the cause of the same foregone conclusion. The work
of telling the world what it knows to be true will never want
self-sacrificing workers. The _Humanitarian_ was her monthly organ of
propaganda. Within its cover, which presented a luminiferous stark
ideal of exemplary muscularity, popular preachers, popular bishops, and
popular anthropologists vied with titled ladies of liberal outlook in
the service of this conception. There was much therein about the Rapid
Multiplication of the Unfit, a phrase never properly explained, and I
must confess that the transitory presence of this instructive little
magazine in my house, month after month (it is now, unhappily, dead),
did much to direct my attention to the gaps and difficulties that
intervene between the general proposition and its practical application
by sober and honest men. One took it up and asked time after time, “Why
should there be this queer flavour of absurdity and pretentiousness
about the thing?” Before the _Humanitarian_ period I was entirely in
agreement with the _Humanitarian’s_ cause. It seemed to me then that to
prevent the multiplication of people below a certain standard, and to
encourage the multiplication of exceptionally superior people, was the
only real and permanent way of mending the ills of the world. I think
that still. In that way man has risen from the beasts, and in that way
men will rise to be over-men. In those days I asked in amazement
why this thing was not done, and talked the usual nonsense about the
obduracy and stupidity of the world. It is only after a considerable
amount of thought and inquiry that I am beginning to understand why
for many generations, perhaps, nothing of the sort can possibly be done
except in the most marginal and tentative manner.

If to-morrow the whole world were to sign an unanimous round-robin
to Mr. Francis Galton and Mrs. Victoria Woodhull Martin, admitting
absolutely their leading argument that it _is_ absurd to breed our
horses and sheep and improve the stock of our pigs and fowls, while we
leave humanity to mate in the most heedless manner, and if, further,
the whole world, promising obedience, were to ask these two to gather
together a consultative committee, draw up a scheme of rules, and start
forthwith upon the great work of improving the human stock as fast as it
can be done, if it undertook that marriages should no longer be made in
heaven or earth, but only under licence from that committee, I venture
to think that, after a very brief epoch of fluctuating legislation, this
committee, except for an extremely short list of absolute prohibitions,
would decide to leave matters almost exactly as they are now; it would
restore love and private preference to their ancient authority and
freedom, at the utmost it would offer some greatly qualified advice, and
so released, it would turn its attention to those flaws and gaps in our
knowledge that at present render these regulations no more than a theory
and a dream.

The first difficulty these theorists ignore is this: we are, as a matter
of fact, not a bit clear what points to breed for and what points to
breed out.

The analogy with the breeder of cattle is a very misleading one. He
has a very simple ideal, to which he directs the entire pairing of his
stock. He breeds for beef, he breeds for calves and milk, he breeds
for a homogeneous docile herd. Towards that ideal he goes simply and
directly, slaughtering and sparing, regardless entirely of any divergent
variation that may arise beneath his control. A young calf with an
incipient sense of humour, with a bright and inquiring disposition, with
a gift for athleticism or a quaintly-marked hide, has no sort of chance
with him at all on that account. He can throw these proffered gifts
of nature aside without hesitation. Which is just what our theoretical
breeders of humanity cannot venture to do. They do not want a
homogeneous race in the future at all. They want a rich interplay of
free, strong, and varied personalities, and that alters the nature of
the problem absolutely.

This the reader may dispute. He may admit the need of variety, but he
may argue that this variety must arise from a basis of common endowment.
He may say that in spite of the complication introduced by the
consideration that a divergent variation from one ideal may be a
divergence towards another ideal, there remain certain definable points,
that could be bred for universally, for all that.

What are they?

There will be little doubt he will answer “Health.” After that probably
he may say “Beauty.” In addition the reader of Mr. Galton’s _Hereditary
Genius_ will probably say, “ability,” “capacity,” “genius,” and
“energy.” The reader of Doctor Nordau will add “sanity.” And the
reader of Mr. Archdall Reid will round up the list with “immunity” from
dipsomania and all contagious diseases. “Let us mark our human beings,”
 the reader of that way of thinking will suggest, “let us give marks for
‘health,’ for ‘ability,’ for various sorts of specific immunity and so
forth, and let us weed out those who are low in the scale and multiply
those who stand high. This will give us a straight way to practical
amelioration, and the difficulty you are trying to raise,” he urges,
“vanishes forthwith.”

It would, if these points were really points, if “beauty,” “capacity,”
 “health,” and “sanity” were simple and uniform things. Unfortunately
they are not simple, and with that fact a host of difficulties arise.
Let me take first the most simple and obvious case of “beauty.” If
beauty were a simple thing, it would be possible to arrange human beings
in a simple scale, according to whether they had more or less of this
simple quality--just as one can do in the case of what are perhaps
really simple and breedable qualities--height or weight. This person,
one might say, is at eight in the scale of beauty, and this at ten,
and this at twenty-seven. But it complicates the case beyond the
possibilities of such a scale altogether when one begins to consider
that there are varieties and types of beauty having very wide
divergences and made up of a varying number of elements in dissimilar
proportions. There is, for example, the flaxen, kindly beauty of the
Dutch type, the dusky Jewess, the tall, fair Scandinavian, the dark and
brilliant south Italian, the noble Roman, the dainty Japanese--to name
no others. Each of these types has its peculiar and incommensurable
points, and within the limits of each type you will find a hundred
divergent, almost unanalyzable, styles, a beauty of expression, a beauty
of carriage, a beauty of reflection, a beauty of repose, arising each
from a quite peculiar proportion of parts and qualities, and having no
definable relation at all to any of the others. If we were to imagine a
human appearance as made up of certain elements, a, b, c, d, e, f, etc.,
then we might suppose that beauty in one case was attained by a certain
high development of a and f, in another by a certain fineness of c and
d, in another by a delightfully subtle ratio of f and b.

                A, b, c, d, e, F, etc.
                a, b, _c_, _d_, e, f, etc.
                a, _b_, c, d, e, _F_, etc.,

might all, for example, represent different types of beauty. Beauty
is neither a simple nor a constant thing; it is attainable through a
variety of combinations, just as the number 500 can be got by adding or
multiplying together a great variety of numerical arrangements. Two long
numerical formulae might both simplify out to 500, but half the length
of one truncated and put end on to the truncated end of the other, might
give a very different result. It is quite conceivable that you might
select and wed together all the most beautiful people in the world and
find that in nine cases out of ten you had simply produced mediocre
offspring or offspring below mediocrity. Out of the remaining tenth a
great majority would be beautiful simply by “taking after” one or other
parent, simply through the predominance, the _prepotency,_ of one parent
over the other, a thing that might have happened equally well if the
other parent was plain. The first sort of beauty (in my three formulae)
wedding the third sort of beauty, might simply result in a rather ugly
excess of F, and again the first sort might result from a combination of

                a, b, c, d, e, _F_, etc.,
                             and
                _A_, b, c, d, e, f, etc.,

neither of which arrangements, very conceivably, may be beautiful at all
when it is taken alone. In this respect, at any rate, personal value and
reproductive value may be two entirely different things.

Now what the elements of personal aspect really are, what these
elements a, b, c, d, e, f, etc., may be, we do not know with any sort
of exactness. Possibly height, weight, presence of dark pigment in the
hair, whiteness of skin, presence of hair upon the body, are simple
elements in inheritance that will follow Galton’s arithmetical treatment
of heredity with some exactness. But we are not even sure of that. The
height of one particular person may be due to an exceptional length of
leg and neck, of another to an abnormal length of the vertebral bodies
of the backbone; the former may have a rather less than ordinary
backbone, the latter a stunted type of limb, and an intermarriage may
just as conceivably (so far as our present knowledge goes) give the
backbone of the first and the legs of the second as it may a very tall
person.

The fact is that in this matter of beauty and breeding for beauty we are
groping in a corner where science has not been established. No doubt
the corner is marked out as a part of the “sphere of influence” of
anthropology, but there is not the slightest indication of an effective
occupation among these raiding considerations and uncertain facts.
Until anthropology produces her Daltons and Davys we must fumble in this
corner, just as the old alchemists fumbled for centuries before the dawn
of chemistry. Our utmost practice here must be empirical. We do not know
the elements of what we have, the human characteristics we are working
upon to get that end. The sentimentalized affinities of young persons in
their spring are just as likely to result in the improvement of the
race in this respect as the whole science of anthropology in its present
state of evolution.

I have suggested that “beauty” is a term applied to a miscellany of
synthetic results compounded of diverse elements in diverse proportions;
and I have suggested that one can no more generalize about it in
relation to inheritance with any hope of effective application than one
can generalize about, say, “lumpy substances” in relation to chemical
combination. By reasoning upon quite parallel lines nearly every
characteristic with which Mr. Galton deals in his interesting and
suggestive but quite inconclusive works, can be demonstrated to consist
in a similar miscellany. He speaks of “eminence,” of “success,” of
“ability,” of “zeal,” and “energy,” for example, and except for the
last two items I would submit that these qualities, though of enormous
personal value, are of no practical value in inheritance whatever; that
to wed “ability” to “ability” may breed something less than mediocrity,
and that “ability” is just as likely or just as unlikely to be prepotent
and to assert itself in descent with the most casually selected
partner as it is with one picked with all the knowledge, or rather
pseudo-knowledge, anthropology in its present state can give us.

When, however, we turn to “zeal” or “energy” or “go,” we do seem to be
dealing with a simpler and more transmissible thing. Let us assume that
in this matter there is a wide range of difference that may be arranged
in a direct and simple scale in quantitative relation to the gross
output of action of different human beings. One passes from the
incessant employment of such a being as Gladstone at the one extreme,
a loquacious torrent of interests and achievements, to the extreme of
phlegmatic lethargy on the other. Call the former a high energetic and
the latter low. Quite possibly it might be found that we could breed
“high energetics.” But before we did so we should have to consider
very gravely that the “go” and “energy” of a man have no ascertainable
relation to many other extremely important considerations. Your
energetic person may be moral or immoral, an unqualified egotist or as
public spirited as an ant, sane, or a raving lunatic. Your phlegmatic
person may ripen resolves and bring out truths, with the incomparable
clearness of a long-exposed, slowly developed, slowly printed
photograph. A man who would exchange the slow gigantic toil of that
sluggish and deliberate person, Charles Darwin, for the tumultuous
inconsequence and (as some people think it) the net mischief of a
Gladstone, would no doubt be prepared to substitute a Catherine-wheel
in active eruption for the watch of less adventurous men. But before
we could induce the community as a whole to make a similar exchange, he
would have to carry on a prolonged and vigorous propaganda.

For my own part--and I write as an ignorant man in a realm where
ignorance prevails--I am inclined to doubt the simplicity and
homogeneity even of this quality of “energy” or “go.” A person without
restraint, without intellectual conscience, without critical faculty,
may write and jabber and go to and fro and be here and there, simply
because every impulse is obeyed so soon as it arises. Another person
may be built upon an altogether larger scale of energy, but may be
deliberate, concentrated, and fastidious, bent rather upon truth and
permanence than upon any immediate quantitative result, and may appear
to any one but an extremely penetrating critic, as inferior in energy to
the former. So far as our knowledge goes at present, what is popularly
known as “energy” or “go” is just as likely to be a certain net
preponderance of a varied miscellany of impulsive qualities over a
varied miscellany of restraints and inhibitions, as it is to prove a
simple indivisible quality transmissible intact. We are so profoundly
ignorant in these matters, so far from anything worthy of the name of
science, that one view is just as permissible and just as untrustworthy
as the other.

Even the qualification of “health” is not sufficient. A thoughtless
person may say with the most invincible air, “Parents should, at any
rate, be healthy,” but that alone is only a misleading vague formula for
good intentions. In the first place, there is every reason to believe
that transitory ill-health in the parent is of no consequence at all
to the offspring. Neither does acquired constitutional ill-health
necessarily transmit to a child; it may or it may not react upon the
child’s nutrition and training, but that is a question to consider
later. It is quite conceivable, it is highly probable, that there are
hereditary forms of ill-health, and that they may be eliminated from the
human lot by discreet and restrained pairing, but what they are and
what are the specific conditions of their control we do not know. And
furthermore, we are scarcely more certain that the condition of “perfect
health” in one human being is the same as the similarly named condition
in another, than we are that the beauty of one type is made up of the
same essential elements as the beauty of another. Health is a balance, a
balance of blood against nerve, of digestion against secretion, of heart
against brain. A heart of perfect health and vigour put into the body
of a perfectly healthy man who is built upon a slighter scale than that
heart, will swiftly disorganize the entire fabric, and burst its way
to a haemorrhage in lung perhaps, or brain, or wherever the slightest
relative weakening permits. The “perfect” health of a negro may be
a quite dissimilar system of reactions to the “perfect health” of a
vigorous white; you may blend them only to create an ailing mass of
physiological discords. “Health,” just as much as these other things,
is, for this purpose of marriage diplomas and the like, a vague,
unserviceable synthetic quality. It serves each one of us for our
private and conversational needs, but in this question it is not hard
enough and sharp--enough for the thing we want it to do. Brought to the
service of this fine and complicated issue it breaks down altogether. We
do not know enough. We have not analyzed enough nor penetrated enough.
There is no science yet, worthy of the name, in any of these
things. [Footnote: This idea of attempting to define the elements in
inheritance, although it is absent from much contemporary discussion,
was pretty evidently in mind in the very striking researches of the Abbé
Mendel to which Mr. Bateson--with a certain intemperance of manner--has
recently called attention. (Bateson, _Mendel’s Principles of Heredity_,
Cambridge University Press, 1902.)]

These considerations should at least suffice to demonstrate the entire
impracticability of Mr. Galton’s two suggestions. Moreover, this idea of
picking out high-scale individuals in any particular quality or group of
qualities and breeding them, is not the way of nature at all. Nature
is not a breeder; she is a reckless coupler and--she slays. It was a
popular misconception of the theory of the Survival of the Fittest,
a misconception Lord Salisbury was at great pains to display to the
British Association in 1894, that the average of a species in any
respect is raised by the selective inter-breeding of the individuals
above the average. Lord Salisbury was no doubt misled, as most people
who share his mistake have been misled, by the grammatical error of
employing the Survival of the Fittest for the Survival of the Fitter, in
order to escape a scarcely ambiguous ambiguity. But the use of the
word “Survival” should have sufficed to indicate that the real point of
application of the force by which Nature modifies species and raises
the average in any quality, lies not in selective breeding, but in the
disproportionately numerous deaths of the individuals below the average.
And even the methods of the breeder of cattle, if they are to produce a
permanent alteration in the species of cattle, must consist not only
in breeding the desirable but in either killing the undesirable, or
at least--what is the quintessence, the inner reality of death--in
preventing them from breeding.

The general trend of thought in Mrs. Martin’s _Humanitarian_ was
certainly more in accordance with this reading of biological science
than were Mr. Galton’s proposals. There was a much greater insistence
upon the need of “elimination,” upon the evil of the “Rapid
Multiplication of the Unfit,” a word that, however, was never defined
and, I believe, really did not mean anything in particular in this
connection. And directly one does attempt to define it, directly one
sits down in a businesslike way to apply the method of elimination
instead of the method of selection, one is immediately confronted by
almost as complex an entanglement of difficulties in defining points to
breed out as one is by defining points to breed for. Almost, I say, but
not quite. For here there does seem to be, if not certainties, at least
a few plausible probabilities that a vigorous and systematic criticism
may perhaps hammer into generalizations of sufficient certainty to go
upon.

I believe that long before humanity has hammered out the question of
what is pre-eminently desirable in inheritance, a certain number of
things will have been isolated and defined as pre-eminently undesirable.
But before these are considered, let us sweep out of our present
regard a number of cruel and mischievous ideas that are altogether too
ascendant at the present time.

Anthropology has been compared to a great region, marked out indeed as
within the sphere of influence of science, but unsettled and for the
most part unsubdued. Like all such hinterland sciences, it is a happy
hunting-ground for adventurers. Just as in the early days of British
Somaliland, rascals would descend from nowhere in particular upon
unfortunate villages, levy taxes and administer atrocity in the name of
the Empire, and even, I am told, outface for a time the modest heralds
of the government, so in this department of anthropology the public mind
suffers from the imposition of theories and assertions claiming to be
“scientific,” which have no more relation to that organized system of
criticism which is science, than a brigand at large on a mountain has
to the machinery of law and police, by which finally he will be hanged.
Among such raiding theorists none at present are in quite such urgent
need of polemical suppression as those who would persuade the heedless
general reader that every social failure is necessarily a “degenerate,”
 and who claim boldly that they can trace a distinctly evil and
mischievous strain in that unfortunate miscellany which constitutes “the
criminal class.” They invoke the name of “science” with just as much
confidence and just as much claim as the early Victorian phrenologists.
They speak and write with ineffable profundity about the “criminal” ear,
the “criminal” thumb, the “criminal” glance. They gain access to gaols
and pester unfortunate prisoners with callipers and cameras, and quite
unforgivable prying into personal and private matters, and they hold
out great hopes that by these expedients they will evolve at last a
“scientific” revival of the Kaffir’s witch-smelling. We shall catch our
criminals by anthropometry ere ever a criminal thought has entered their
brains. “Prevention is better than cure.” These mattoid scientists
make a direct and disastrous attack upon the latent self-respect of
criminals. And not only upon that tender plant, but also upon the
springs of human charity towards the criminal class. For the complex
and varied chapter of accidents that carries men into that net of
precautions, expedients, prohibitions, and vindictive reprisals, the
net of the law, they would have us believe there is a fatal necessity
inherent in their being. Criminals are born, not made, they allege. No
longer are we to say, “There, but for the grace of God, go I”--when the
convict tramps past us--but, “There goes another sort of animal that
is differentiating from my species and which I would gladly see
exterminated.”

Now every man who has searched his heart knows that this formulation of
“criminality” as a specific quality is a stupidity, he knows himself to
be a criminal, just as most men know themselves to be sexually rogues.
No man is born with an instinctive respect for the rights of any
property but his own, and few with a passion for monogamy. No man who
is not an outrageously vain and foolish creature but will confess
to himself that but for advantages and accidents, but for a chance
hesitation or a lucky timidity, he, too, had been there, under the
ridiculous callipers of witless anthropology. A criminal is no doubt of
less personal value to the community than a law-abiding citizen of the
same general calibre, but _it does not follow for one moment that he
is of less value as a parent._ His personal disaster may be due to the
possession of a bold and enterprising character, of a degree of pride
and energy above the needs of the position his social surroundings have
forced upon him. Another citizen may have all this man’s desires and
impulses, checked and sterilized by a lack of nervous energy, by an
abject fear of the policeman and of the consequences of the disapproval
of his more prosperous fellow-citizens. I will frankly confess that for
my own part I prefer the wicked to the mean, and that I would rather
trust the future to the former strain than to the latter. Whatever
preference the reader may entertain, there remains this unmistakable
objection to its application to breeding, that “criminality” is not a
specific simple quality, but a complex that may interfuse with other
complexes to give quite incalculable results in the offspring it
produces. So that here again, on the negative side, we find a general
expression unserviceable for our use. [Footnote: No doubt the home of
the criminal and social failure is generally disastrous to the children
born into it. That is a question that will be fully dealt; with in
a subsequent paper, and I note it here only to point out that it is
outside our present discussion, which is concerned not with the fate of
children born into the world, but with the prior question whether we
may hope to improve the quality of the average birth by encouraging some
sorts of people to have children and discouraging or forbidding others.
It is of vital importance to keep these two questions distinct, if we
are to get at last to a basis for effective action.]

But it will be alleged that although criminality as a whole means
nothing definite enough for our purpose, there can be picked out and
defined certain criminal (or at any rate disastrous) tendencies that
are simple, specific and transmissible. Those who have read Mr. Archdall
Reid’s _Alcoholism_, for example, will know that he deals constantly
with what is called the “drink craving” as if it were such a specific
simple inheritance. He makes a very strong case for this belief, but
strong as it is, I do not think it is going to stand the pressure of
a rigorously critical examination. He points out that races which
have been in possession of alcoholic drinks the longest are the least
drunken, and this he ascribes to the “elimination” of all those whose
“drink craving” is too strong for them. Nations unused to alcoholic
drink are most terribly ravaged at its first coming to them, may even be
destroyed by it, in precisely the same way that new diseases coming to
peoples unused to them are far more malignant than among peoples who
have suffered from them generation after generation. Such instances
as the terrible ravages of measles in Polynesia and the ruin worked by
fire-water among the Red Indians, he gives in great abundance. He infers
from this that interference with the sale of drink to a people may
in the long run do more harm than good, by preserving those who would
otherwise be eliminated, permitting them to multiply and so, generation
by generation, lowering the resisting power of the race. And he proposes
to divert temperance legislation from the persecution of drink makers
and sellers, to such remedies as the punishment of declared and
indisputable drunkards if they incur parentage, and the extension of the
grounds of divorce to include this ugly and disastrous habit.

I am not averse to Mr. Reid’s remedies because I think of the wife and
the home, but I would not go so far with him as to consider this “drink
craving” specific and simple, and I retain an open mind about the sale
of drink. He has not convinced me that there is an inherited “drink
craving” any more than there is an inherited tea craving or an inherited
morphia craving.

In the first place I would propound a certain view of the general
question of habits. My own private observations in psychology incline me
to believe that people vary very much in their power of acquiring habits
and in the strength and fixity of the habits they acquire. My most
immediate subject of psychological study, for example, is a man of
untrustworthy memory who is nearly incapable of a really deep-rooted
habit. Nothing is automatic with him. He crams and forgets languages
with an equal ease, gives up smoking after fifteen years of constant
practice; shaves with a conscious effort every morning and is capable
of forgetting to do so if intent upon anything else. He is generally
self-indulgent, capable of keen enjoyment and quite capable of
intemperance, but he has no invariable delights and no besetting sin.
Such a man will not become an habitual drunkard; he will not become
anything “habitual.” But with another type of man habit is indeed second
nature. Instead of the permanent fluidity of my particular case, such
people are continually tending to solidify and harden. Their memories
set, their opinions set, their methods of expression set, their delights
recur and recur, they convert initiative into mechanical habit day by
day. Let them taste any pleasure and each time they taste it they
deepen a need. At last their habits become imperative needs. With such
a disposition, external circumstances and suggestions, I venture to
believe, may make a man either into an habitual church-goer or
an habitual drunkard, an habitual toiler or an habitual rake. A
self-indulgent rather unsocial habit-forming man may very easily become
what is called a dipsomaniac, no doubt, but that is not the same thing
as an inherited specific craving. With drink inaccessible and other
vices offering his lapse may take another line. An aggressive, proud and
greatly mortified man may fall upon the same courses. An unwary youth of
the plastic type may be taken unawares and pass from free indulgence to
excess before he perceives that a habit is taking hold of him.

I believe that many causes and many temperaments go to the making of
drunkards. I have read a story by the late Sir Walter Besant, in which
he presents the specific craving as if it were a specific magic curse.
The story was supposed to be morally edifying, but I can imagine this
ugly superstition of the “hereditary craving”--it is really nothing
more--acting with absolutely paralyzing effect upon some credulous
youngster struggling in the grip of a developing habit. “It’s no good
trying,”--that quite infernal phrase!

It may be urged that this attempt to whittle down the “inherited
craving” to a habit does not meet Mr. Reid’s argument from the gradual
increase of resisting power in races subjected to alcoholic temptation,
an increase due to the elimination of all the more susceptible
individuals. There can be no denying that those nations that have had
fermented drinks longest are the soberest, but that, after all, may be
only one aspect of much more extensive operations. The nations that have
had fermented drinks the longest are also those that have been civilized
the longest. The passage of a people from a condition of agricultural
dispersal to a more organized civilization means a very extreme change
in the conditions of survival, of which the increasing intensity
of temptation to alcoholic excess is only one aspect. Gluttony, for
example, becomes a much more possible habit, and many other vices tender
death for the first time to the men who are gathering in and about
towns. The city demands more persistent, more intellectualized and less
intense physical desires than the countryside. Moral qualities that were
a disadvantage in the dispersed stage become advantageous in the
city, and conversely. Rugged independence ceases to be helpful, and an
intelligent turn for give and take, for collaboration and bargaining,
makes increasingly for survival. Moreover, there grows very slowly an
indefinable fabric of traditional home training in restraint that is
very hard to separate in analysis from mental heredity. People who have
dwelt for many generations in towns are not only more temperate and less
explosive in the grosser indulgences, but more _urbane_ altogether. The
drunken people are also the “uncivil” peoples and the individualistic
peoples. The great prevalence of drunkenness among the upper classes two
centuries ago can hardly have been bred out in the intervening six or
seven generations, and it is also a difficult fact for Mr. Reid that
drunkenness has increased in France. In most of the cases cited by
Mr. Reid a complex of operating forces could be stated in which the
appearance of fermented liquors is only one factor, and a tangle of
consequent changes in which a gradually increasing insensibility to the
charms of intoxication was only one thread. Drunkenness has no doubt
played a large part in eliminating certain types of people from the
world, but that it specifically eliminates one specific definable type
is an altogether different matter.

Even if we admit Mr. Reid’s conception, this by no means solves the
problem. It is quite conceivable that the world could purchase certain
sorts of immunity too dearly. If it was a common thing to adorn the
parapets of houses in towns with piles of loose bricks, it is certain
that a large number of persons not immune to fracture of the skull by
falling bricks would be eliminated. A time would no doubt come
when those with a specific liability to skull fracture would all be
eliminated, and the human cranium would have developed a practical
immunity to damage from all sorts of falling substances. But there
would have been far more extensive suppressions than would appear in the
letter of the agreement.

This no doubt is a caricature of the case, but it will serve to
illustrate my contention that until we possess a far more subtle and
thorough analysis of the drunkard’s physique and mind--if it really is a
distinctive type of mind and physique--than we have at present, we
have no justification whatever in artificial intervention to increase
whatever eliminatory process may at present be going on in this respect.
Even if there is such a specific weakness, it is possible it has a
period of maximum intensity, and if that should be only a brief phase
in development--let us say at adolescence--it might turn out to be much
more to the advantage of humanity to contrive protective legislation
over the dangerous years. I argue to establish no view in these matters
beyond a view that at present we know very little.

Not only do ignorance and doubt bar our way to anything more than a
pious wish to eliminate criminality and drunkenness in a systematic
manner, but even the popular belief in ruthless suppression whenever
there is “madness in the family” will not stand an intelligent scrutiny.
The man in the street thinks madness is a fixed and definite thing, as
distinct from sanity as black is from white. He is always exasperated
at the hesitation of doctors when in a judicial capacity he demands: “Is
this man mad or isn’t he?” But a very little reading of alienists will
dissolve this clear assurance. Here again it seems possible that we have
a number of states that we are led to believe are simple because they
are gathered together under the generic word “madness,” but which
may represent a considerable variety of induced and curable and
non-inheritable states on the one hand and of innate and incurable and
heritable mental disproportions on the other.

The less gifted portion of the educated public was greatly delighted
some years ago by a work by Dr. Nordau called _Degeneration_, in which
a great number of abnormal people were studied in a pseudo-scientific
manner and shown to be abnormal beyond any possibility of dispute.
Mostly the samples selected were men of exceptional artistic and
literary power. The book was pretentious and inconsistent--the late Lord
Tennyson was quoted, I remember, as a typically “sane” poet in spite
of the scope afforded by his melodramatic personal appearance and his
morbid passion for seclusion--but it did at least serve to show that if
we cannot call a man stupid we may almost invariably call him mad with
some show of reason. The public read the book for the sake of its abuse,
applied the intended conclusion to every success that awakened its envy,
and failed altogether to see how absolutely the definition of madness
was destroyed. But if madness is indeed simply genius out of hand and
genius only madness under adequate control; if imagination is a snare
only to the unreasonable and a disordered mind only an excess of
intellectual enterprise--and really none of these things can be
positively disproved--then just as reasonable as the idea of suppressing
the reproduction of madness, is the idea of breeding it! Let us take all
these dull, stagnant, respectable people, one might say, who do nothing
but conform to whatever rule is established about them and obstruct
whatever change is proposed to them, whose chief quality is a sheer
incapacity to imagine anything beyond their petty experiences, and let
us tell them plainly, “It is time a lunatic married into your family.”
 Let no one run away from this with the statement that I propose such a
thing should be done, but it is, at any rate in the present state of
our knowledge, as reasonable a proposal, to make as its quite frequently
reiterated converse.

If in any case we are in a position to intervene and definitely forbid
increase, it is in the case of certain specific diseases, which I
am told are painful and disastrous and inevitably transmitted to the
offspring of the person suffering from these diseases. If there are such
diseases--and that is a question the medical profession should be able
to decide--it is evident that to incur parentage while one suffers
from one of them or to transmit them in any avoidable way, is a cruel,
disastrous and abominable act. If such a thing is possible it seems to
me that in view of the guiding principle laid down in these papers it
might well be put at the nadir of crime, and I doubt if any step the
State might take to deter and punish the offender, short of torture,
would meet with opposition from sane and reasonable men. For my own part
I am inclined at times almost to doubt if there are such diseases. If
there are, the remedy is so simple and obvious, that I cannot but blame
the medical profession for very discreditable silences. I am no believer
in the final wisdom of the mass of mankind, but I do believe enough in
the sanity of the English-speaking peoples to be certain that any clear
statement and instruction they received from the medical profession, as
a whole, in these matters, would be faithfully observed. In the face
of the collective silence of this great body of specialists, there is
nothing for it but to doubt such diseases exist.

Such a systematic suppression of a specific disease or so is really the
utmost that could be done with any confidence at present, so far as the
State and collective action go. [Footnote: Since the above was written,
a correspondent in Honolulu has called my attention to a short but most
suggestive essay by Doctor Harry Campbell in the _Lancet_, 1898, ii.,
p. 678. He uses, of course, the common medical euphemism of “should not
marry” for “should not procreate,” and he gives the following as a list
of “bars to marriage”: pulmonary consumption, organic heart disease,
epilepsy, insanity, diabetes, chronic Bright’s disease, and rheumatic
fever. I wish I had sufficient medical knowledge to analyze that
proposal. He mentions inherited defective eyesight and hearing also, and
the “neurotic” quality, with which I have dealt in my text. He adds two
other suggestions that appeal to me very strongly. He proposes to bar
all “cases of non-accidental disease in which life is saved by the
surgeon’s knife,” and he instances particularly, strangulated hernia and
ovarian cyst. And he also calls attention to apoplectic breakdown
and premature senility. All these are suggestions of great value for
individual conduct, but none of them have that quality of certainty
that justifies collective action.] Until great advances are made in
anthropology--and at present there are neither men nor endowments to
justify the hope that any such advances will soon be made--that is as
much as can be done hopefully for many years in the selective breeding
of individuals by the community as a whole. [Footnote: If at any time
certainties should replace speculations in the field of inheritance,
then I fancy the common-sense of humanity will be found to be in favour
of the immediate application of that knowledge to life.] At present
almost every citizen in the civilized State respects the rules of the
laws of consanguinity, so far as they affect brothers and sisters, with
an absolute respect--an enormous triumph of training over instinct, as
Dr. Beattie Crozier has pointed out--and if in the future it should be
found possible to divide up humanity into groups, some of which could
pair with one another only to the disadvantage of the offspring, and
some of which had better have no offspring, I believe there would
be remarkably little difficulty in enforcing a system of taboos in
accordance with such knowledge. Only it would have to be absolutely
certain knowledge proved and proved again up to the hilt. If a truth is
worth application it is worth hammering home, and we have no right to
expect common men to obey conclusions upon which specialists are as
yet not lucidly agreed. [Footnote: It has been pointed out to me by my
friend, Mr. Graham Wallas, that although the State may not undertake
any positive schemes for selective breeding in the present state of our
knowledge, it can no more evade a certain reaction upon these things
than the individual can evade a practical solution. Although we
cannot say of any specific individual that he or she is, or is not, of
exceptional reproductive value to the State, we may still be able, he
thinks, to point out classes which are very probably, as a whole, _good_
reproductive classes, and we may be able to promote, or at least to
avoid hindering, their increase. He instances the female elementary
teacher as being probably, as a type, a more intelligent and more
energetic and capable girl than the average of the stratum from which
she arises, and he concludes she has a higher reproductive value--a view
contrary to my argument in the text that reproductive and personal value
are perhaps independent. He tells me that it is the practice of many
large school boards in this country to dismiss women teachers on
marriage, or to refuse promotion to these when they become mothers,
which is, of course, bad for the race if personal and reproductive value
are identical. He would have them retain their positions regardless of
the check to their efficiency maternity entails. This is a curiously
indirect way towards what one might call Galtonism. Practically he
proposes to endow mothers in the name of education. For my own part I do
not agree with him that this class, any more than any other class, can
be shown to have a high reproductive value--which is the matter under
analysis in this paper--though I will admit that an ex-teacher will
probably do infinitely more for her children than if she were an
illiterate or untrained woman. I can only reiterate my conviction that
nothing really effective can be organized in these matters until we are
much clearer than we are at present in our ideas about them, and that
a public body devoted to education has no business either to impose
celibacy, or subsidize families, or experiment at all in these affairs.
Not only in the case of elementary teachers, but in the case of
soldiers, sailors, and so on, the State may do much to promote or
discourage marriage and offspring, and no doubt it is also true, as Mr.
Wallas insists, that the problems of the foreign immigrant and of racial
intermarriage, loom upon us. But since we have no applicable science
whatever here, since there is no certainty in any direction that any
collective course may not be collectively evil rather than good, there
is nothing for it, I hold, but to leave these things to individual
experiment, and to concentrate our efforts where there is a clearer hope
of effective consequence. Leave things to individual initiative and some
of us will, by luck or inspiration, go right; take public action on
an insufficient basis of knowledge and there is a clear prospect of
collective error. The imminence of these questions argues for nothing
except prompt and vigorous research.]

That, however, is only one aspect of this question. There are others
from which the New Republican may also approach this problem of the
quality of the birth supply.

In relation to personal conduct all these things assume another colour
altogether. Let us be clear upon that point. The state, the community,
may only act upon certainties, but the essential fact in individual life
is experiment. Individuality is experiment. While in matters of public
regulation and control it is wiser not to act at all than to act upon
theories and uncertainties; while the State may very well wait for
a generation or half a dozen generations until knowledge comes up to
these--at present--insoluble problems, the private life _must_ go on
now, and go upon probabilities where certainties fail. When we do not
know what is indisputably right, then we have to use our judgments
to the utmost to do each what seems to him probably right. The New
Republican in his private life and in the exercise of his private
influence, must do what seems to him best for the race; [Footnote: He
would certainly try to discourage this sort of thing. The paragraph is
from the _Morning Post_ (Sept., 1902):--

“_Wedded in Silence_.--A deaf and dumb wedding was celebrated at Saffron
Walden yesterday, when Frederick James Baish and Emily Lettige King,
both deaf and dumb, were married. The bride was attended by deaf and
dumb bridesmaids, and upwards of thirty deaf and dumb friends were
present. The ceremony was performed by the Rev. A. Payne, of the Deaf
and Dumb Church, London.”] he must not beget children heedlessly and
unwittingly because of his incomplete assurance. It is pretty obviously
his duty to examine himself patiently and thoroughly, and if he feels
that he is, on the whole, an average or rather more than an average man,
then upon the cardinal principle laid down in our first paper, it is
his most immediate duty to have children and to equip them fully for
the affairs of life. Moreover he will, I think, lose no opportunity of
speaking and acting in such a manner as to restore to marriage something
of the solemnity and gravity the Victorian era--that age of nasty
sentiment, sham delicacy and giggles--has to so large an extent refused
to give it.

And though the New Republicans, in the existing lack of real guiding
knowledge, will not dare to intervene in specific cases, there is
another method of influencing parentage that men of good intent may
well bear in mind. To attack a specific type is one thing, to attack a
specific quality is another. It may be impossible to set aside selected
persons from the population and say to them, “You are cowardly, weak,
silly, mischievous people, and if we tolerate you in this world it is on
condition that you do not found families.” But it may be quite possible
to bear in mind that the law and social arrangements may foster and
protect the cowardly and the mean, may guard stupidity against the
competition of enterprise, and may secure honour, power and authority
in the hands of the silly and the base; and, by the guiding principle we
have set before ourselves, to seek every conceivable alteration of such
laws and such social arrangements is no more than the New Republican’s
duty. It may be impossible to select and intermarry the selected best
of our race, but at any rate we can do a thousand things to equalize the
chances and make good and desirable qualities lead swiftly and clearly
to ease and honourable increase.

At present it is a shameful and embittering fact that a gifted man from
the poorer strata of society must too often buy his personal development
at the cost of his posterity; he must either die childless and
successful for the children of the stupid to reap what he has sown, or
sacrifice his gift--a wretched choice and an evil thing for the world at
large. [Footnote: This aspect of New Republican possibilities comes in
again at another stage, and at that stage its treatment will be resumed.
The method and possibility of binding up discredit and failure with
mean and undesirable qualities, and of setting a premium upon the
nobler attributes, is a matter that touches not only upon the quality of
births, but upon the general educational quality of the State in which
a young citizen develops. It is convenient to hold over any detailed
expansions of this, therefore, until we come to the general question,
how the laws, institutions and customs of to-day go to make or unmake
the men of to-morrow.]

So far at least we may go, towards improving the quality of the average
birth now, but it is manifestly only a very slow and fractional advance
that we shall get by these expedients. The obstacle to any ampler
enterprise is ignorance and ignorance alone--not the ignorance of a
majority in relation to a minority, but an absolute want of knowledge.
If we knew more we could do more.

Our main attack in this enterprise of improving the birth supply must
lie, therefore, through research. If we cannot act ourselves, we may
yet hold a light for our children to see. At present, if there is a man
specially gifted and specially disposed for such intricate and laborious
inquiry, such criticism and experiment as this question demands, the
world offers him neither food nor shelter, neither attention nor help;
he cannot hope for a tithe of such honours as are thrust in profusion
upon pork-butchers and brewers, he will be heartily despised by
ninety-nine per cent. of the people he encounters, and unless he has
some irrelevant income, he will die childless and his line will perish
with him, for all the service he may give to the future of mankind.
And as great mental endowments do not, unhappily, necessarily involve
a passion for obscurity, contempt and extinction, it is probable that
under existing conditions such a man will give his mind to some pursuit
less bitterly unremunerative and shameful. It is a stupid superstition
that “genius will out” in spite of all discouragement. The fact that
great men have risen against crushing disadvantages in the past proves
nothing of the sort; this roll-call of survivors does no more than give
the measure of the enormous waste of human possibility human stupidity
has achieved. Men of exceptional gifts have the same broad needs as
common men, food, clothing, honour, attention, and the help of their
fellows in self-respect; they may not need them as ends, but they need
them by the way, and at present the earnest study of heredity produces
none of these bye-products. It lies before the New Republican to tilt
the balance in this direction.

There are, no doubt, already a number of unselfish and fortunately
placed men who are able to do a certain amount of work in this
direction; Professor Cossar Ewart, for example, one of those fine,
subtle, unhonoured workers who are the glory of British science and
the condemnation of our social order, has done much to clarify the
discussion of telegony and prepotency, and there are many such medical
men as Mr. Reid who broaden their daily practice by attention to
these great issues. One thinks of certain other names. Professors Karl
Pearson, Weldon, Lloyd Morgan, J. A. Thomson and Meldola, Dr. Benthall
and Messrs. Bateson, Cunningham, Pocock, Havelock Ellis, E. A. Fay
and Stuart Menteath occur to me, only to remind me how divided their
attention has had to be. As many others, perhaps, have slipped my
memory now. Not half a hundred altogether in all this wide world of
English-speaking men! For one such worker we need fifty if this science
of heredity is to grow to practicable proportions. We need a literature,
we need a special public and an atmosphere of attention and discussion.
Every man who grasps the New Republican idea brings these needs nearer
satisfaction, but if only some day the New Republic could catch the
ear of a prince, a little weary of being the costumed doll of grown-up
children, the decoy dummy of fashionable tradesmen, or if it could
invade and capture the mind of a multi-millionaire, these things might
come almost at a stride. This missing science of heredity, this unworked
mine of knowledge on the borderland of biology and anthropology, which
for all practical purposes is as unworked now as it was in the days of
Plato, is, in simple truth, ten times more important to humanity than
all the chemistry and physics, all the technical and industrial science
that ever has been or ever will be discovered.

So much for the existing possibilities of making the race better by
breeding. For the rest of these papers we shall take the births into the
world, for the most part, as we find them.

[Mr. Stuart Menteath remarks _apropos_ of this question of the
reproduction of exceptional people that it is undesirable to suggest
voluntary extinction in any case. If a man, thinking that his family
is “tainted,” displays so much foresighted patriotism, humility, and
lifelong self-denial as to have no children, the presumption is that the
loss to humanity by the discontinuance of such a type is greater than
the gain. “Conceit in smallest bodies strongest works,” and it does
not follow that a sense of one’s own excellence justifies one’s utmost
fecundity or the reverse. Mr. Vrooman, who, with Mrs. Vrooman, founded
Ruskin Hall at Oxford, writes to much the same effect. He argues that
people intelligent enough and moral enough to form such resolutions are
just the sort of people who ought not to form them. Mr. Stuart Menteath
also makes a most admirable suggestion with regard to male and female
geniuses who are absorbed in their careers. Although the genius may not
have or rear a large family, something might be done to preserve the
stock by assisting his or her brothers and sisters to support and
educate their children.]




III. CERTAIN WHOLESALE ASPECTS OF MAN-MAKING


§ 1


With a skin of infinite delicacy that life will harden very speedily,
with a discomforted writhing little body, with a weak and wailing outcry
that stirs the heart, the creature comes protesting into the world, and
unless death win a victory, we and chance and the forces of life in
it, make out of that soft helplessness a man. Certain things there are
inevitable in that man and unalterable, stamped upon his being long
before the moment of his birth, the inherited things, the inherent
things, his final and fundamental self. This is his “heredity,” his
incurable reality, the thing that out of all his being, stands the test
of survival and passes on to his children. Certain things he must be,
certain things he may be, and certain things are for ever beyond his
scope. That much his parentage defines for him, that is the natural man.

But, in addition, there is much else to make up the whole adult man as
we know him. There is all that he has learnt since his birth, all that
he has been taught to do and trained to do, his language, the circle of
ideas he has taken to himself, the disproportions that come from unequal
exercise and the bias due to circumambient suggestion. There are a
thousand habits and a thousand prejudices, powers undeveloped and skill
laboriously acquired. There are scars upon his body, and scars upon his
mind. All these are secondary things, things capable of modification and
avoidance; they constitute the manufactured man, the artificial man.
And it is chiefly with all this superposed and adherent and artificial
portion of a man that this and the following paper will deal. The
question of improving the breed, of raising the average human heredity
we have discussed and set aside. We are going to draw together now as
many things as possible that bear upon the artificial constituent, the
made and controllable constituent in the mature and fully-developed man.
We are going to consider how it is built up and how it may be built up,
we are going to attempt a rough analysis of the whole complex process by
which the civilized citizen is evolved from that raw and wailing little
creature.

Before his birth, at the very moment when his being becomes possible,
the inherent qualities and limitations of a man are settled for good and
all, whether he will be a negro or a white man, whether he will be free
or not of inherited disease, whether he will be passionate or phlegmatic
or imaginative or six-fingered or with a snub or aquiline nose. And not
only that, but even before his birth the qualities that are not strictly
and inevitably inherited are also beginning to be made. The artificial,
the avoidable handicap also, may have commenced in the worrying, the
overworking or the starving of his mother. In the first few months
of his life very slight differences in treatment may have life-long
consequences. No doubt there is an extraordinary recuperative power in
very young children; if they do not die under neglect or ill-treatment
they recover to an extent incomparably greater than any adult could do,
but there remains still a wide marginal difference between what they
become and what they might have been. With every year of life the
recuperative quality diminishes, the initial handicap becomes more
irrevocable, the effects of ill-feeding, of unwholesome surroundings,
of mental and moral infections, become more inextricably a part of the
growing individuality. And so we may well begin our study by considering
the circumstances under which the opening phase, the first five years of
life, are most safely and securely passed.

Food, warmth, cleanliness and abundant fresh air there must be from
the first, and unremitting attention, such attention as only love can
sustain. And in addition there must be knowledge. It is a pleasant
superstition that Nature (who in such connections becomes feminine and
assumes a capital N) is to be trusted in these matters. It is a pleasant
superstition to which, some of us, under the agreeable counsels of
sentimental novelists, of thoughtless mercenary preachers, and ignorant
and indolent doctors, have offered up a child or so. We are persuaded
to believe that a mother has an instinctive knowledge of whatever is
necessary for a child’s welfare, and the child, until it reaches the
knuckle-rapping age at least, an instinctive knowledge of its own
requirements. Whatever proceedings are most suggestive of an ideal
naked savage leading a “natural” life, are supposed to be not only
more advantageous to the child but in some mystical way more moral. The
spectacle of an undersized porter-fed mother, for example, nursing a
spotted and distressful baby, is exalted at the expense of the clean
and simple artificial feeding that is often advisable to-day. Yet the
mortality of first-born children should indicate that a modern woman
carries no instinctive system of baby management about with her in her
brain, even if her savage ancestress had anything of the sort, and both
the birth rate and the infantile death rate of such noble savages as
our civilization has any chance of observing, suggest a certain generous
carelessness, a certain spacious indifference to individual misery,
rather than a trustworthy precision of individual guidance about
Nature’s way.

This cant of Nature’s trustworthiness is partly a survival of the day of
Rousseau and Sturm (of the Reflections), when untravelled men, orthodox
and unorthodox alike, in artificial wigs, spouted in unison in this
regard; partly it is the half instinctive tactics of the lax and
lazy-minded to evade trouble and austerities. The incompetent medical
practitioner, incapable of regimen, repeats this cant even to-day,
though he knows full well that, left to Nature, men over-eat themselves
almost as readily as dogs, contract a thousand diseases and exhaust
their last vitality at fifty, and that half the white women in the world
would die with their first children still unborn. He knows, too, that to
the details of such precautionary measures as vaccination, for example,
instinct is strongly opposed, and that drainage and filterage and the
use of soap in washing are manifestly unnatural things. That large,
naked, virtuous, pink, Natural Man, drinking pure spring water, eating
the fruits of the earth, and living to ninety in the open air is
a fantasy; he never was nor will be. The real savage is a nest of
parasites within and without, he smells, he rots, he starves. Forty is
a great age for him. He is as full of artifice as his civilized brother,
only not so wise. As for his moral integrity, let the curious inquirer
seek an account of the Tasmanian, or the Australian, or the Polynesian
before “sophistication” came.

The very existence and nature of man is an interference with Nature
and Nature’s ways, using Nature in this sense of the repudiation of
expedients. Man is the tool-using animal, the word-using animal, the
animal of artifice and reason, and the only possible “return to
Nature” for him--if we scrutinize the phrase--would be a return to the
scratching, promiscuous, arboreal simian. To rebel against instinct,
to rebel against limitation, to evade, to trip up, and at last to
close with and grapple and conquer the forces that dominate him, is the
fundamental being of man. And from the very outset of his existence,
from the instant of his birth, if the best possible thing is to be made
of him, wise contrivance must surround him. The soft, new, living thing
must be watched for every sign of discomfort, it must be weighed and
measured, it must be thought about, it must be talked to and sung to,
skilfully and properly, and presently it must be given things to see and
handle that the stirring germ of its mind may not go unsatisfied. From
the very beginning, if we are to do our best for a child, there must
be forethought and knowledge quite beyond the limit of instinct’s poor
equipment.

Now, for a child to have all these needs supplied implies certain other
conditions. The constant loving attention is to be got only from a
mother or from some well-affected girl or woman. It is not a thing to be
hired for money, nor contrivable on any wholesale plan. Possibly there
may be ways of cherishing and nursing infants by wholesale that will
keep them alive, but at best these are second best ways, and we are
seeking the best possible. A very noble, exceptionally loving and quite
indefatigable woman might conceivably direct the development of three
or four little children from their birth onward, or, with very good
assistance, even of six or seven at a time, as well as a good mother
could do for one, but it would be a very rare and wonderful thing. We
must put that aside as an exceptional thing, quite impossible to provide
when it is most needed, and we must fall back upon the fact that the
child must have a mother or nurse--and it must have that attendant
exclusively to itself for the first year or so of life. The mother or
nurse must be in health, physically and morally, well fed and contented,
and able to give her attention mainly, if not entirely, to the little
child. The child must lie warmly in a well-ventilated room, with some
one availably in hearing day and night, there must be plentiful warm
water to wash it, plenty of wrappings and towellings and so forth for
it; it is best to take it often into the open air, and for this, under
urban or suburban conditions at any rate, a perambulator is almost
necessary. The room must be clean and brightly lit, and prettily and
interestingly coloured if we are to get the best results. These things
imply a certain standard of prosperity in the circumstances of the
child’s birth. Either the child must be fed in the best way from a
mother in health and abundance, or if it is to be bottle fed, there must
be the most elaborate provision for sterilizing and warming the milk,
and adjusting its composition to the changing powers of the child’s
assimilation. These conditions imply a house of a certain standard of
comfort and equipment, and it is manifest the mother cannot be earning
her own living before and about the time of the child’s birth, nor,
unless she is going to employ a highly skilled, trustworthy, and
probably expensive person as nurse, for some year or so after it. She or
the nurse must be of a certain standard of intelligence and education,
trained to be observant and keep her temper, and she must speak her
language with a good, clear accent. Moreover, behind the mother and
readily available, must be a highly-skilled medical man.

Not to have these things means a handicap. Not to have that very
watchful feeding and attention at first means a loss of nutrition, a
retarding of growth, that will either never be recovered or will
be recovered later at the expense of mental development or physical
strength. The early handicap may also involve a derangement of the
digestion, a liability to stomachic and other troubles, that may last
throughout life. Not to have the singing and talking, and the varied
interest of coloured objects and toys, means a falling away from the
best mental development, and a taciturn nurse, or a nurse with a base
accent, means backwardness and needless difficulty with the beginning of
speech. Not to be born within reach of abundant changes of clothing and
abundant water, means--however industrious and cleanly the instincts of
nurse and mother--a lack of the highest possible cleanliness and a
lack of health and vitality. And the absence of highly-skilled
medical advice, or the attentions of over-worked and under-qualified
practitioners, may convert a transitory crisis or a passing ailment into
permanent injury or fatal disorder.

It is very doubtful if these most favourable conditions fall to the
lot of more than a quarter of the children born to-day even in England,
where infant mortality is at its lowest. The rest start handicapped.
They start handicapped, and fail to reach their highest possible
development. They are born of mothers preoccupied by the necessity
of earning a living or by vain occupations, or already battered and
exhausted by immoderate child-bearing; they are born into insanity and
ugly or inconvenient homes, their mothers or nurses are ignorant and
incapable, there is insufficient food or incompetent advice, there is,
if they are town children, nothing for their lungs but vitiated air, and
there is not enough sunlight for them. And accordingly they fall away
at the very outset from what they might be, and for the most part they
never recover their lost start.

Just what this handicap amounts to, so far as it works out in physical
consequences, is to be gauged by certain almost classical figures, which
I have here ventured to present again in graphic form. These figures
do not present our total failure, they merely show how far the less
fortunate section of the community falls short of the more fortunate.
They are taken from Clifford Allbutt’s _System of Medicine_ (art.
“Hygiene of Youth,” Dr. Clement Dukes). 15,564 boys and young men were
measured and weighed to get these figures. The black columns indicate
the weight (+9 lbs. of clothes) and height respectively of youths of the
town artisan population, for the various ages from ten to twenty-five
indicated at the heads of the columns. The white additions to these
columns indicate the additional weight and height of the more favoured
classes at the same ages. Public school-boys, naval and military cadets,
medical and university students, were taken to represent the more
favoured classes. It will be noted that while the growth in height of
the lower class boy falls short from the very earliest years, the strain
of the adolescent period tells upon his weight, and no doubt upon his
general stamina, most conspicuously. These figures, it must be borne in
mind, deal with the living members of each class at the ages given. The
mortality, however, in the black or lower class is probably far higher
than in the upper class year by year, and if this could be allowed for
it would greatly increase the apparent failure of the lower class.
And these matters of height and weight are only coarse material
deficiencies. They serve to suggest, but they do not serve to gauge, the
far graver and sadder loss, the invisible and immeasurable loss through
mental and moral qualities undeveloped, through activities warped and
crippled and vitality and courage lowered.

Moreover, defective as are these urban artisans, they are, after
all, much more “picked” than the youth of the upper classes. They are
survivors of a much more stringent process of selection than goes on
amidst the more hygienic upper and middle-class conditions. The
opposite three columns represent the mortality of children under five
in Rutlandshire, where it is lowest, in the year 1900, in Dorsetshire, a
reasonably good county, and in Lancashire, the worst in England, for the
same year. Each entire column represents 1,000 births, and the blackened
portion represents the proportion of that 1,000 dead before the fifth
birthday. Now, unless we are going to assume that the children born in
Lancashire are inherently weaker than the children born in Rutland or
Dorset--and there is not the shadow of a reason why we should believe
that--we must suppose that at least 161 children out of every 1,000 in
Lancashire were killed by the conditions into which they were born.
That excess of blackness in the third column over that in the first
represents a holocaust of children, that goes on year by year, a
perennial massacre of the innocents, out of which no political capital
can be made, and which is accordingly outside the sphere of practical
politics altogether as things are at present. The same men who spouted
infinite mischief because a totally unforeseen and unavoidable epidemic
of measles killed some thousands of children in South Africa, who, for
some idiotic or wicked vote-catching purpose, attempted to turn that
epidemic to the permanent embitterment of Dutch and English, these
same men allow thousands and thousands of avoidable deaths of English
children close at hand to pass absolutely unnoticed. The fact that more
than 21,000 little children died needlessly in Lancashire in that very
same year means nothing to them at all. It cannot be used to embitter
race against race, and to hamper that process of world unification which
it is their pious purpose to delay.

It does not at all follow that even the Rutland 103 represents
the possible minimum of infant mortality. One learns from the
Register-General’s returns for 1891 that among the causes of death
specified in the three counties of Dorset, Wiltshire, and Hereford,
where infant mortality is scarcely half what it is in the three vilest
towns in England in this respect, Preston, Leicester, and Blackburn, the
number of children killed by injury at birth is three times as great
as it is in these same towns. Unclassified “violence” also accounts for
more infant deaths in the country than in towns. This suggests pretty
clearly a delayed and uncertain medical attendance and rough conditions,
and it points us to still better possibilities. These diagrams and these
facts justify together a reasonable hope that the mortality of infants
under five throughout England might be brought to less than one-third
what it is in child-destroying Lancashire at the present time, to a
figure that is well under ninety in the thousand.

A portion of infant and child mortality represents no doubt the
lingering and wasteful removal from this world of beings with inherent
defects, beings who, for the most part, ought never to have been born,
and need not have been born under conditions of greater foresight.
These, however, are the merest small fraction of our infant mortality.
It leaves untouched the fact that a vast multitude of children of
untainted blood and good mental and moral possibilities, as many,
perhaps, as 100 in each 1,000 born, die yearly through insufficient
food, insufficient good air, and insufficient attention. The plain and
simple truth is that they are born needlessly. There are still too many
births for our civilisation to look after, we are still unfit to be
trusted with a rising birth-rate. [Footnote: It is a digression from
the argument of this Paper, but I would like to point out here a very
popular misconception about the birth-rate which needs exposure. It is
known that the birth-rate is falling in all European countries--a fall
which has a very direct relation to a rise in the mean standard of
comfort and the average age at marriage--and alarmists foretell a time
when nations will be extinguished through this decline. They ascribe
it to a certain decay in religious faith, to the advance of science
and scepticism, and so forth; it is a part, they say, of a general
demoralization. The thing is a popular cant and quite unsupported by
facts. The decline in the birth-rate is--so far as England and Wales
goes--partly a real decline due to a decline in gross immorality, partly
to a real decline due to the later age at which women marry, and partly
a statistical decline due to an increased proportion of people too old
or too young for child-bearing. Wherever the infant mortality is falling
there is an apparent misleading fall in the birth-rate due to the
“loading” of the population with children. Here are the sort of figures
that are generally given. They are the figures for England and Wales for
two typical periods.

           Period 1846-1850     33 8 births per 1000
           Period 1896-1900     28 0 births per 1000
                               ----------------------------
                                 5.8 fall in the birth-rate.

This as it stands is very striking. But if we take the death-rates of
these two periods we find that they have fallen also.

           Period 1846-1850     23 3 deaths per 1000
           Period 1896-1900     17 7 deaths per 1000
                               ----------------------------
                                 5.6 fall in the death-rate.

Let us subtract death-rate from birth-rate and that will give the
effective rate of increase of the population.

           Period 1846-1850    10 5 effective rate of increase
           Period 1896-1900    10 3 effective rate of increase
                              ---------------------------------
                                 .2 fall in the rate of increase.

But now comes a curious thing that those who praise the good old
pre-Board School days--the golden age of virtuous innocence--ignore. The
_Illegitimate births_ in 1846-1850 numbered 2.2 per 1000, in 1896-1900
they numbered 1.2 per 1000. So that if it were not for this fall in
illegitimate births the period 1896-1900 would show a positive rise in
the effective rate of increase of .8 per thousand. The eminent persons
therefore who ascribe our falling birth-rate to irreligion and so forth,
either speak without knowledge or with some sort of knowledge beyond my
ken. England is, as a matter of fact, becoming not only more hygienic
and rational, but more moral and more temperate. The highly moral,
healthy, prolific, pious England of the past is just another poetical
delusion of the healthy savage type.]

These poor little souls are born, amidst tears and suffering they gain
such love as they may, they learn to feel and suffer, they struggle and
cry for food, for air, for the right to develop; and our civilisation at
present has neither the courage to kill them outright quickly, cleanly,
and painlessly, nor the heart and courage and ability to give them what
they need. They are overlooked and misused, they go short of food
and air, they fight their pitiful little battle for life against the
cruellest odds; and they are beaten. Battered, emaciated, pitiful, they
are thrust out of life, borne out of our regardless world, stiff little
life-soiled sacrifices to the spirit of disorder against which it is
man’s preeminent duty to battle. There has been all the pain in their
lives, there has been the radiated pain of their misery, there has been
the waste of their grudged and insufficient food, and all the pain
and labour of their mothers, and all the world is the sadder for them
because they have lived in vain.


§ 2


Now, since our imaginary New Republic, which is to set itself to the
making of a better generation of men, will find the possibility of
improving the race by selective breeding too remote for anything but
further organised inquiry, it is evident that its first point of attack
will have to be the wastage of such births as the world gets to-day.
Throughout the world the New Republic will address itself to this
problem, and when a working solution has been obtained, then the New
Republican on press and platform, the New Republican in pulpit and
theatre, the New Republican upon electoral committee and in the ballot
box, will press weightily to see that solution realised. Upon the theory
of New Republicanism as it was discussed in our first paper an effective
solution (effective enough, let us say, to abolish seventy or eighty per
cent.) of this scandal of infantile suffering would have precedence over
almost every existing political consideration.

The problem of securing the maximum chance of life and health for every
baby born into the world is an extremely complicated one, and the reader
must not too hastily assume that a pithy, complete recipe is attempted
here. Yet, complicated though the problem is, there does not occur any
demonstrable impossibility such as there is in the question of selective
breeding. I believe that a solution is possible, that its broad lines
may be already stated, and that it could very easily be worked out to an
immediate practical application.

Let us glance first at a solution that is now widely understood to be
incorrect. Philanthropic people in the past have attempted, and many are
still striving, to meet the birth waste by the very obvious expedients
of lying-in hospitals, orphanages and foundling institutions, waifs’
homes, Barnardo institutions and the like, and within certain narrow
limits these things no doubt serve a useful purpose in individual cases.
But nowadays there is an increasing indisposition to meet the general
problem by such methods, because nowadays people are alive to certain
ulterior consequences that were at first overlooked. Any extensive
relief of parental responsibility we now know pretty certainly will
serve to encourage and stimulate births in just those strata of society
where it would seem to be highly reasonable to believe they are least
desirable. It is just where the chances for a child are least that
passions are grossest, basest, and most heedless, and stand in the
greatest need of a sense of the gravity of possible consequences to
control their play, and to render it socially innocuous. If we were
to take over or assist all the children born below a certain level of
comfort, or, rather, if we were to take over their mothers before the
birth occurred, and bring up that great mass of children under the best
conditions for them--supposing this to be possible--it would only leave
our successors in the next generation a heavier task of the same sort.
The assisted population would grow generation by generation relatively
to the assisting until the Sinbad of Charity broke down. And quite early
in the history of Charities it was found that a very grave impediment to
their beneficial action lay in one of the most commendable qualities to
be found in poor and poorish people, and that is pride. While Charities,
perhaps, catch the quite hopeless cases, they leave untouched the
far more extensive mass of births in non-pauper, not very prosperous
homes--the lower middle-class homes in towns, for example, which supply
a large proportion of poorly developed adults to our community. Mr.
Seebohm Rowntree, in his “Poverty” (that noble, able, valuable book),
has shown that nearly thirty per cent. at least of a typical English
town population goes short of the physical necessities of life. These
people are fiercely defensive in such matters as this, and one may no
more usurp and share their parental responsibility, badly though they
discharge it, than one may handle the litter of a she-wolf.

These considerations alone would suffice to make us very suspicious of
the philanthropic method of direct assistance, so far as the remedial
aspect goes. But there is another more sweeping and comprehensive
objection to this method. Philanthropic institutions, as a matter of
fact, rarely succeed in doing what they profess and intend to do.

I do not allude here to the countless swindlers and sham institutions
that levy a tremendous tribute upon the heedless good. Quite apart
from that wastage altogether, and speaking only of such _bonâ fide_
institutions as would satisfy Mr. Labouchere, they do not work. It
is one thing for the influential and opulent inactive person of good
intentions to provide a magnificent building and a lavish endowment
for some specific purpose, and quite another to attain in reality the
ostensible end of the display. It is easy to create a general effect of
providing comfort and tender care for helpless women who are becoming
mothers, and of tending and training and educating their children, but,
in cold fact, it is impossible to get enough capable and devoted people
to do the work. In cold fact, lying-in hospitals have a tendency
to become austere, hard, unsympathetic, wholesale concerns, with a
disposition to confuse and substitute moral for physical well-being. In
cold fact, orphanages do not present any perplexing resemblance to an
earthly paradise. However warm the heart behind the cheque, the human
being at the other end of the chain is apt to find the charity no more
than a rather inhuman machine. Shining devotees there are, but able,
courageous, and vigorous people are rare, and the world urges a thousand
better employments upon them than the care of inferior mothers and
inferior children. Exceptionally good people owe the world the duty of
parentage themselves, and it follows that the rank and file of those in
the service of Charity falls far below the standard necessary to
give these poor children that chance in the world the cheque-writing
philanthropist believes he is giving them. The great proportion of the
servants and administrators of Charities are doing that work because
they can get nothing better to do--and it is not considered remarkably
high-class work. These things have to be reckoned with by every
philanthropic person with sufficient faith to believe that an enterprise
may not only look well, but do well. One gets a Waugh or a Barnardo
now and then, a gleam of efficiency in the waste, and for the rest this
spectacle of stinted thought and unstinted giving, this modern Charity,
is often no more than a pretentious wholesale substitute for retail
misery and disaster. Fourteen million pounds a year, I am told, go to
British Charities, and I doubt if anything like a fair million’s worth
of palliative amelioration is attained for this expenditure. As for any
permanent improvement, I doubt if all these Charities together achieve
a net advance that could not be got by the discreet and able expenditure
of ten or twelve thousand pounds.

It is one of the grimmest ironies in life, that athwart the memory of
sainted founders should be written the most tragic consequences. The
Foundling Hospital of London, established by Coram--to save infant
lives!--buried, between 1756 and 1760, 10,534 children out of 14,934
received, and the Dublin Foundling Hospital (suppressed in 1835) had a
mortality of eighty per cent. The two great Russian institutions are,
I gather, about equally deadly with seventy-five per cent., and the
Italian institutes run to about ninety per cent. The Florentine boasts a
very beautiful and touching series of _putti_ by Delia Robbia, that does
little or nothing to diminish its death-rate. So far from preventing
infant murder these places, with the noblest intentions in the world,
have, for all practical purposes, organized it. The London Foundling, be
it noted, in the reorganized form it assumed after its first massacres,
is not a Foundling Hospital at all. An extremely limited number of
children, the illegitimate children of recommended respectable but
unfortunate mothers, are converted into admirable bandsmen for the
defence of the Empire or trained to be servants for people who feel the
need of well-trained servants, at a gross cost that might well fill the
mind of many a poor clergyman’s son with amazement and envy. And this is
probably a particularly well-managed charity. It is doing all that can
be expected of it, and stands far above the general Charitable average.

Every Poor Law Authority comes into the tangles of these perplexities.
Upon the hands of every one of them come deserted children, the children
of convicted criminals, the children of pauper families, a miscellaneous
pitiful succession of responsibilities. The enterprises they are forced
to undertake to meet these charges rest on taxation, a financial basis
far stabler than the fitful good intentions of the rich, but apart from
this advantage there is little about them to differentiate them from
Charities. The method of treatment varies from a barrack system, in
which the children are herded in huge asylums like those places between
Sutton and Banstead, to what is perhaps preferable, the system of
boarding-out little groups of children with suitable poor people.
Provided such boarded-out children are systematically weighed, measured
and examined, and at once withdrawn when they drop below average
mental and bodily progress, it would seem more likely that a reasonable
percentage should grow into ordinary useful citizens under these latter
conditions than under the former.

It is well, however, to anticipate a very probable side result if we
make the boarding out of pauper children a regular rural industry. There
will arise in many rural homes a very strong pecuniary inducement to
limit the family. Side by side will be a couple with eight children--of
their own, struggling hard to keep them, and another family with, let
us say, two children of their own blood and six “boarded-out,” living in
relative opulence. That side consequence must be anticipated. For my own
part and for the reasons given in the second of these papers, I do not
see that it is a very serious one so far as the future goes, because I
do not think there is much to choose between the “heredity” of the rural
and the urban strain. It is nonsense to pretend that we shall get the
fine flower of the cottage population to board pauper children; we shall
induce respectable inferior people living in healthy conditions to take
care of an inferior sort of children rescued from unhealthy disreputable
conditions--that is all. The average inherent quality of the resultant
adults will be about the same whichever element predominates.

Possibly this indifference may seem undesirable. But we must bear in
mind that the whole problem is hard to cope with, it is an aspect
of failure, and no sentimental juggling with facts will convert the
business into a beautiful or desirable thing. Somehow or other we have
to pay. All expedients must be palliatives, all will involve sacrifices;
we must, no doubt, adopt some of them for our present necessities, but
they are like famine relief works, to adopt them in permanence is a
counsel of despair.

Clearly it is not along these lines that the capable men-makers we
suppose to be attacking the problem will spend much of their energies.
All the experiences of Charities and Poor-Law Authorities simply confirm
our postulate of the necessity of a standard of comfort if a child is
to have a really good initial chance in the world. The only conceivable
solution of this problem is one that will ensure that no child, or only
a few accidental and exceptional children, will be born outside these
advantages. It is no good trying to sentimentalize the issue away. This
is the end we must attain, to attain any effectual permanent improvement
in the conditions of childhood. A certain number of people have to be
discouraged and prevented from parentage, and a great number of homes
have to be improved. How can we ensure these ends, or how far can we go
towards ensuring them?

The first step to ensuring them is certainly to do all we can to
discourage reckless parentage, and to render it improbable and
difficult. We must make sure that whatever we do for the children,
the burden of parental responsibility must not be lightened a
feather-weight. All the experience of two hundred years of charity
and poor law legislation sustains that. But to accept that as a first
principle is one thing, and to apply it by using a wretched little child
as our instrument in the exemplary punishment of its parent is another.
At present that is our hideous practice. So long as the parents are not
convicted criminals, so long as they do not practise indictable cruelty
upon their offspring, so long as the children themselves fall short of
criminality, we insist upon the parent “keeping” the child. It may be
manifest the child is ill-fed, harshly treated, insufficiently clothed,
dirty and living among surroundings harmful to body and soul alike, but
we merely take the quivering damaged victim and point the moral to the
parent. “This is what comes of your recklessness,” we say. “Aren’t
you ashamed of it?” And after inscrutable meditations the fond parent
usually answers us by sending out the child to beg or sell matches or
by some equally effective retort. Now a great number of excellent people
pretend that this is a dilemma. “Take the child away,” it is argued,
“and you remove one of the chief obstacles to the reckless reproduction
of the unfit. Leave it in the parents’ hands and you must have the
cruelty.” But really this is not a dilemma at all. There is a quite
excellent middle way. It may not be within the sphere of practical
politics at present--if not, it is work for the New Republic to get it
there--but it would practically settle all this problem of neglected
children. This way is simply to make the parent the debtor to society on
account of the child for adequate food, clothing, and care for at least
the first twelve or thirteen years of life, and in the event of parental
default to invest the local authority with exceptional powers of
recovery in this matter. It would be quite easy to set up a minimum
standard of clothing, cleanliness, growth, nutrition and education, and
provide, that if that standard was not maintained by a child, or if the
child was found to be bruised or maimed without the parents being able
to account for these injuries, the child should be at once removed from
the parental care, and the parents charged with the cost of a suitable
maintenance--which need not be excessively cheap. If the parents failed
in the payments they could be put into celibate labour establishments
to work off as much of the debt as they could, and they would not be
released until their debt was fully discharged. Legislation of this type
would not only secure all and more of the advantages children of the
least desirable sort now get from charities and public institutions, but
it would certainly invest parentage with a quite unprecedented gravity
for the reckless, and it would enormously reduce the number of births
of the least desirable sort. Into this net, for example, every habitual
drunkard who was a parent would, for his own good and the world’s, be
almost certain to fall. [Footnote: Mr. C. G. Stuart Menteath has favored
me with some valuable comments upon this point. He writes: “I agree
that calling such persons as have shown themselves incapable of parental
duties debtors to the State, would help to reconcile popular ideas of
the ‘liberty of the subject’ with the enforcement as well as the passing
of such laws. But the notions of drastically enforcing parental duties,
and of discouraging and even prohibiting the marriages of those unable
to show their ability to perform these duties, has long prevailed. See
Nicholl’s _History of the Poor Law_ (1898, New Edition), i. 229, and ii.
140, 278, where you will find chargeable bastardy has been punishable
in the first offence by one year’s imprisonment, and in the second,
by imprisonment until sureties are given, which thus might amount to
imprisonment for life. See also, J. S. Mill, _Political Economy_, Bk.
II., ch. ii., for extreme legislation on the Continent against the
marriage of people unable to support a family. In Denmark there seem
to be very severe laws impeding the marriage of those who have
been paupers. The English law was sufficiently effective to produce
infanticide, so that a law was passed making concealment of birth almost
infanticide.”]

So much for the worst fringe of this question, the maltreated children,
the children of the slum, the children of drunkards and criminals, and
the illegitimate. But the bulk of the children of deficient growth,
the bulk of the excessive mortality, lies above the level of such
intervention, and the method of attack of the New Republican must
be less direct. Happily there already exists a complicated mass of
legislation that without any essential change of principle could be
applied to this object.

The first of the expedients which would lead to a permanent improvement
in these matters is the establishment of a minimum of soundness and
sanitary convenience in houses, below which standard it shall be illegal
to inhabit a house at all. There should be a certain relation between
the size of rooms and their ventilating appliances, a certain minimum
of lighting, certain conditions of open space about the house and sane
rules about foundations and materials. These regulations would vary with
the local density of population--many things are permissible in Romney
marsh, for example, which the south-west wind sweeps everlastingly, that
would be deadly in Rotherhithe. At present in England there are local
building regulations, for the most part vexatious and stupid to an
almost incredible degree, and compiled without either imagination or
understanding, but it should be possible to substitute for these a
national minimum of habitability without any violent revolution. A house
that failed to come up to this minimum--which might begin very low and
be raised at intervals of years--would, after due notice, be pulled
down. It might be pulled down and the site taken over and managed by
the local authority--allowing its owner a portion of its value in
compensation--if it was evident his failure to keep up to the standard
had an adequate excuse. In time it might be possible to level up the
minimum standard of all tenements in towns and urban districts at any
rate to the possession of a properly equipped bathroom for example,
without which, for hardworking people, regular cleanliness is a
practical impossibility. This process of levelling-up the minimum
tenement would be enormously aided by a philanthropic society which
would devote itself to the study of building methods and materials,
to the evolution of conveniences, and the direction of invention to
lessening the cost and complication of building wholesome dwellings.

The state of repair of inhabited buildings is also already a matter of
public concern. All that is needed is a slow, persistent tightening-up
of the standard. This would ensure, at any rate, that the outer shell
of the child’s surroundings gave it a fair chance in life. In the next
place comes legislation against overcrowding. There must be a maximum
number of inhabitants to any tenement, and a really sane law will be
far more stringent to secure space and air for young children than
for adults. There is little reason, except the possible harbouring of
parasites and infectious disease, why five or six adults should not
share a cask on a dust heap as a domicile--if it pleases them. But
directly children come in we touch the future. The minimum permissible
tenement for a maximum of two adults and a very young child is one
properly ventilated room capable of being heated, with close and easy
access to sanitary conveniences, a constant supply of water and easy
means of getting warm water. More than one child should mean another
room, and it seems only reasonable if we go so far as this, to go
further and require a minimum of furniture and equipment, a fire-guard,
for instance, and a separate bed or cot for the child. In a civilized
community little children should not sleep with adults, and the killing
of children by “accidental” overlaying should be a punishable offence.
[Footnote: In the returns I have quoted from Blackburn, Leicester, and
Preston the number of deaths from suffocation per 100,000 infants born
was 232 in the first year of life. ]

If a woman does not wish to be dealt with as a half-hearted murderess
she should not behave like one. It should also be punishable on the part
of a mother to leave children below a certain age alone for longer than
a certain interval. It is absurd to punish people as we do, for the
injuries inflicted by them upon their children during uncontrollable
anger, and not to punish them for the injuries inflicted by uncontrolled
carelessness. Such legislation should ensure children space, air and
attention. [Footnote: It is less within the range of commonly grasped
ideas, it is therefore less within the range of practical expedients,
to point out that a graduated scale of building regulation might be
contrived for use in different localities. Districts could be classed
in grades determined by the position of each district in the scale
of infant mortality, and in those in which the rate was highest the
hygienic standard could be made most stringent and onerous upon the
house owner. This would force up the price of house-room, and that would
force up the price of labour, and this would give the proprietors of
unwholesome industries a personal interest in hygienic conditions
about them. It would also tend to force population out of districts
intrinsically unhealthy into districts intrinsically healthy. The
statistics of low-grade districts could be examined to discover the
distinctive diseases which determine their lowness of grade, and if
these were preventable diseases they could be controlled by special
regulations. A further extension of these principles might be made.
Direct inducements to attract the high birth-rates towards exceptionally
healthy districts could be contrived by a differential rating of sound
families with children in such districts, the burthen of heavy rates
could be thrown upon silly and selfish landowners who attempted to
stifle sound populations by using highly habitable areas as golf links,
private parks, game preserves, and the like, and public-spirited people
could combine to facilitate communications that would render life in
such districts compatible with industrial occupation. Such deliberate
redistribution of population as this differential treatment of districts
involves, is, however, quite beyond the available power and intelligence
of our public control at present, and I suggest it here as something
that our grandchildren perhaps may begin to consider. But if in the
obscurity of this footnote I may let myself go, I would point out that,
in the future, a time may come when locomotion will be so swift and
convenient and cheap that it will be unnecessary to spread out the homes
of our great communities where the industrial and trading centres are
gathered together; it will be unnecessary for each district to sustain
the renewal and increase of its own population. Certain wide regions
will become specifically administrative and central--the home lands, the
mother lands, the centres of education and population, and others will
become specifically fields of action. Something of this kind is to a
slight degree already the case with Scotland, which sends out its
hardy and capable sons wherever the world has need of them; the Swiss
mountains, too, send their sons far and wide in the world; and on the
other hand, with regard to certain elements of population, at any rate,
London and the Gold Coast and, I suspect, some regions in the United
States of America, receive to consume.]

But it will be urged that these things are likely to bear rather
severely on the very poor parent. To which a growing number of people
will reply that the parent should not be a parent under circumstances
that do not offer a fair prospect of sound child-birth and nurture. It
is no good trying to eat our cake and have it; if the parent does not
suffer the child will, and of the two, we, of the New Republic, have no
doubt that the child is the more important thing.

It may be objected, however, that existing economic conditions make life
very uncertain for many very sound and wholesome kinds of people, and
that it is oppressive and likely to rob the State of good citizens to
render parentage burthensome, and to surround it with penalties. But
that directs our attention to a second scheme of expedients which have
crystallized about the expression, the Minimum Wage. The cardinal idea
of this group of expedients is this, that it is unjust and cruel in the
present and detrimental to the future of the world to let any one be
fully employed at a rate of payment at which a wholesome, healthy, and,
by the standards of comfort at the time, a reasonable happy life is
impossible. _It is better in the long run that people whose character
and capacity will not render it worth while to employ them at the
Minimum Wage should not be employed at all._ The sweated employment of
such people, as Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Webb show most conclusively in
their great work, “Industrial Democracy,” arrests the development of
labour-saving machinery, replaces and throws out of employment superior
and socially more valuable labour, enables these half capables to
establish base families of inadequately fed and tended children (which
presently collapse upon public and private charity), and so lowers and
keeps down the national standard of life. As these writers show very
clearly, an industry that cannot adequately sustain sound workers is
not in reality a source of public wealth at all, but a disease and a
parasite upon the public body. It is eating up citizens the State
has had the expense of educating, and very often the indirect cost of
rearing. Obviously the minimum wage for a civilized adult male should
be sufficient to cover the rent of the minimum tenement permissible
with three or four children, the maintenance of himself and his wife and
children above the minimum standard of comfort, his insurance against
premature or accidental death or temporary economic or physical
disablement, some minimum provision for old age and a certain margin for
the exercise of his individual freedom. [Footnote: An excellent account
of experiments already tried in the establishment of a Minimum Wage
will be found in W.P. Reeves’ _State Experiments in Australia and New
Zealand_, vol. ii., p. 47 _et seq_.]

So that while those who are bent on this conception of making economy
in life and suffering the guiding principle of their public and social
activity, are seeking to brace up the quality of the home on the one
hand, they must also do all they can to bring about the realization of
this ideal of a minimum wage on the other. In the case of government and
public employment and of large, well-organized industries, the way is
straight and open, and the outlook very hopeful. Wherever licenses,
tariffs, and any sort of registration occurs there are practicable means
of bringing in this expedient. But where the employment is shifting and
sporadic, or free from regulation, there we have a rent in our social
sieve, and the submissive, eager inferior will still come in, the
failures of our own race, the immigrant from baser lands, desperately
and disastrously underselling our sound citizens. Obviously we must
use every contrivance we can to mend these rents, by promoting the
organization of employments in any way that will not hamper progress in
economic production. And if we can persuade the Trade Unions--and there
is every sign that the old mediaeval guild conception of water-tight
trade limitations is losing its hold upon those organizations--to
facilitate the movement of workers from trade to trade under the
shifting stress of changing employment and of changing economy of
production, we shall have gone far to bring the possibilities of the
rising operative up to the standard of the minimum home permissible for
children.

These things--if we could bring them about--would leave us with a sort
of clarified Problem of the Unemployed on our hands. Our Minimum Wage
would have strained these people out, and, provided there existed what
is already growing up, an intelligent system of employment bureaus, we
should have much more reason to conclude than we have at present, that
they were mainly unemployed because of a real incapacity in character,
strength, or intelligence for efficient citizenship. Our raised
standards of housing, our persecution of overcrowding, and our
obstruction of employment below the minimum wage, would have swept out
the rookeries and hiding-places of these people of the Abyss. They would
exist, but they would not multiply--and that is our supreme end. They
would be tramping on roads where mendicity laws would prevail, there
would be no house-room for them, no squatting-places. The casual wards
would catch them and register them, and telephone one to the other about
them. It is rare that children come into this world without a parent or
so being traceable. Everything would converge to convince these people
that to bear children into such an unfavourable atmosphere is an
extremely inconvenient and undesirable thing. They would not have many
children, and such children as they had would fall easily into our
organized net and get the protection of the criticised and improved
development of the existing charitable institutions. [Footnote: “I
wonder whether there is any legal flaw in the second section of the
Prevention of Cruelty to Children Act of 1894, which may have been
_specially_ aimed at beggars with offspring. It is specially punishable
to beg having an infant in their arms, quite apart from teaching the
infant in question to beg. Or is this law insufficiently enforced
through popular apathy?”--C. G. STUART MENTEATH.] This is the best we
can do for those poor little creatures. As for that increasing section
of the Abyss that will contrive to live childless, these papers have no
quarrel with them. A childless wastrel is a terminating evil, and it may
be, a picturesque evil. I must confess that a lazy rogue is very much
to my taste, provided there is no tragedy of children to smear the joke
with misery. And if he or she neither taints nor tempts the children,
who are our care, a childless weakling we may freely let our pity and
mercy go out to. To go childless is in them a virtue for which they
merit our thanks.

These are the first necessities, then, in the Making of Men and the
bettering of the world, this courageous interference with what so many
people call “Nature’s methods” and “Nature’s laws,” though, indeed, they
are no more than the methods and laws of the beasts. By such expedients
we may hope to see, first, a certain fall in the birth-rate, a fall
chiefly in the birth-rate of improvident, vicious, and feeble types, a
continuation, in fact, of that fall that is already so conspicuous
in illegitimate births in Great Britain; secondly, a certain, almost
certainly more considerable fall in the death-rate of infants and
young children, and that fall in the infantile death-rate will serve to
indicate, thirdly, a fall no statistics will fully demonstrate in what
I may call the partial death-rate, the dwarfing and limiting of that
innumerable host of children who do, in an underfed, meagre sort of a
way, survive. This raising of the standard of homes will do a work that
will not end with the children; the death-line will sag downward for
all the first twenty or thirty years of life. Dull-minded, indolent,
prosperous people will say that all this is no more than a proposal to
make man better by machinery, that you cannot reform the world by Board
of Trade Regulations and all the rest of it. They will say that such
work as this is a scheme of grim materialism, and that the Soul of
Man gains no benefit by this “so-called Progress,” that it is not
birth-rates that want raising but Ideals. We shall deal later with
Ideals in general. Here I will mention only one, and that is, unhappily,
only an Ideal Argument. I wish I could get together all these people
who are so scornful of materialistic things, out of the excessively
comfortable houses they inhabit, and I wish I could concentrate them in
a good typical East London slum--five or six together in each room, one
lodging with another, and I wish I could leave them there to demonstrate
the superiority of high ideals to purely material considerations for
the rest of their earthly career while we others went on with our sordid
work unencumbered by their ideality.

Think what these dry-looking projects of building and trade regulation,
and inspection and sanitation, mean in reality! think of the promise
they hold out to us of tears and suffering abolished, of lives
invigorated and enlarged!


[Endnote 1

I am greatly obliged to Mr. J. Leaver for a copy of the following
notice:


“DEATHS OF CHILDREN FROM BURNING.

“TO PARENTS AND GUARDIANS.

“Attention is drawn to the frequency with which the death of young
children is caused owing to their clothing taking fire at unprotected
firegrates. During the years 1899 and 1900 inquests were held on the
bodies of 1684 YOUNG CHILDREN whose death had resulted from burning,
and in 1425 of these cases the fire by which the burning was caused was
unprotected by a guard.

“With a view to prevent such deplorable loss of life it is suggested to
Parents and Guardians, who have the care of young children, that it is
very desirable that efficient fire-guards should be provided, in
order to render it impossible for children to obtain access to the
fire-grates.

“E. R. C. BRADFORD,

“The Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis.

“Metropolitan Police Office,

“New Scotland Yard,

“January 28th, 1902.”]




IV. THE BEGINNINGS OF THE MIND AND LANGUAGE


§ 1


The newborn child is at first no more than an animal. Indeed, it is
among the lowest and most helpless of all animals, a mere vegetative
lump; assimilation incarnate--wailing. It is for the first day in its
life deaf, it squints blindly at the world, its limbs are beyond its
control, its hands clutch drowningly at anything whatever that drifts
upon this vast sea of being into which it has plunged so amazingly. And
imperceptibly, subtly, so subtly that never at any time can we mark with
certainty the increment of its coming, there creeps into this soft and
claimant little creature a mind, a will, a personality, the beginning of
all that is real and spiritual in man. In a little while there are eyes
full of interest and clutching hands full of purpose, smiles and frowns,
the babbling beginning of expression and affections and aversions.
Before the first year is out there is obedience and rebellion, choice
and self-control, speech has commenced, and the struggle of the newcomer
to stand on his feet in this world of men. The process is unanalyzable;
given a certain measure of care and protection, these things come
spontaneously; with the merest rough encouragement of things and voices
about the child, they are evoked.

But every day the inherent impulse makes a larger demand upon the
surroundings of the child, if it is to do its best and fullest.
Obviously, quite apart from physical consequences, the environment of
a little child may be good or bad, better or worse for it in a thousand
different ways. It may be distracting or over-stimulating, it may evoke
and increase fear, it may be drab and dull and depressing, it may be
stupefying, it may be misleading and productive of vicious habits
of mind. And our business is to find just what is the best possible
environment, the one that will give the soundest and fullest growth, not
only of body but of intelligence.

Now from the very earliest phase the infant stands in need of a
succession of interesting things. At first these are mere vague sense
impressions, but in a month or so there is a distinct looking at
objects; presently follows reaching and clutching, and soon the
little creature is urgent for fresh things to see, handle, hear, fresh
experiences of all sorts, fresh combinations of things already known.
The newborn mind is soon as hungry as the body. And if a healthy wellfed
child cries, it is probably by reason of this unsatisfied hunger,
it lacks an interest, it is bored, that dismal vacant suffering that
punishes the failure of living things to live fully and completely.
As Mr. Charles Booth has pointed out in his _Life and Labour of the
People_, it is probable that in this respect the children of the
relatively poor are least at a disadvantage. The very poor infant
passes its life in the family room, there is a going and coming, and
interesting activity of domestic work on the part of its mother, the
preparation of meals, the intermittent presence of the father, the whole
gamut of its mother’s unsophisticated temper. It is carried into crowded
and eventful streets at all hours. It participates in pothouse soirées
and assists at the business of shopping. It may not lead a very hygienic
life, but it does not lead a dull one. Contrast with its lot that of
the lonely child of some woman of fashion, leading its beautifully
non-bacterial life in a carefully secluded nursery under the control of
a virtuous, punctual, invariable, conscientious rather than emotional
nurse. The poor little soul wails as often for events as the slum baby
does for nourishment. Into its grey nursery there rushes every day,
or every other day, a breathless, preoccupied, excessively dressed,
cleverish, many-sided, fundamentally silly, and universally incapable
woman, vociferates a little conventional affection, slaps a kiss or so
upon her offspring, and goes off again to collect that daily meed of
admiration and cheap envy which is the gusto of her world. After that
gushing, rustling, incomprehensible passage, the child relapses into the
boring care of its bored hireling for another day. The nurse writes her
letters, mends her clothes, reads and thinks of the natural interests of
her own life, and the child is “good” just in proportion to the extent
to which it doesn’t “worry.”

That, of course, is an extreme case. It assumes a particularly bad
mother and a particularly ill-chosen nurse, and what is probably only
a transitory phase of sexual debasement. The average nurse of the
upper-class child is often a woman of highly developed motherly
instincts, and it is probable that our upper class and our upper
middle-class is passing or has already passed through that phase of
thought which has made solitary children so common in the last decade
or so. The effective contrast must not take us too far. We must remember
that all women do not possess the passion for nursing, and that some of
those who are defective in this direction may be, for all that, women
of exceptional gifts and capacity, and fully capable of offspring.
Civilization is based on the organized subdivision of labour, and, as
the able lady who writes as “L’amie Inconnue” in the _County Gentleman_
has pointed out in a very helpful criticism of the original version
of this paper, it is as absurd to require every woman to be a nursery
mother as it is, to require every man to till the soil. We move from
homogeneous to heterogeneous conditions, and we must beware of every
generalization we make.

For all that, one is inclined to think the ideal average environment
should contain the almost constant presence of the mother, for no one
is so likely to be continuously various and interesting and untiring as
she, and only as an exception, for exceptional mothers and nurses, can
we admit the mother-substitute. When we admit her we admit other
things. It is entirely on account of such an ideal environment, we
must remember, that monogamy finds its practical sanction; it claims to
ensure the presiding mother the maximum of security and self-respect. A
woman who enjoys the full rights of a wife to maintenance and exclusive
attention, without a complete discharge of the duties of motherhood,
profits by the imputation of things she has failed to perform. She may
be justified by other things, by an effectual co-operation with her
husband in joint labours for example, but she has altered her footing
none the less. To secure an ideal environment for children in as many
cases as possible is the second of the two great practical ends--the
first being sound births, for which the restrictions of sexual morality
exist. In addition there is the third almost equally important matter
of adult efficiency; we have to adjust affairs, if we can, to secure
the maximum of health, sane happiness and vigorous mental and physical
activity, and to abolish, as far as possible, passionate broodings,
over-stimulated appetites, disease, and destructive indulgence. Apart
from these aspects, sexual morality is outside the scope of the New
Republican altogether. . . . Do not let this passage be misunderstood.
I do not mean that a New Republican ignores sexual morality except on
these grounds, but so far as his New Republicanism goes he does, just
as a member of the Aeronautical Society, so far as his aeronautical
interests go, or as an ecclesiastical architect, so far as his
architecture goes.

The ideal environment should, without any doubt at all, centre about
a nursery--a clean, airy, brightly lit, brilliantly adorned room, into
which there should be a frequent coming and going of things and people;
but from the time the child begins to recognize objects and individuals
it should be taken for little spells into other rooms and different
surroundings. In the homely, convenient, servantless abode over which
the able-bodied, capable, skilful, civilized women of the ordinary sort
will preside in the future, the child will naturally follow its mother’s
morning activities from room to room. Its mother will talk to it, chance
visitors will sign to it. There should be a public or private garden
available where its perambulator could stand in fine weather; and its
promenades should not be too much a matter of routine. To go along a
road with some traffic is better for a child than to go along a secluded
path between hedges; a street corner is better than a laurel plantation
as a pitch for perambulators.

When a child is five or six months old it will have got a certain use
and grip with its hands, and it will want to handle and examine and test
the properties of as many objects as it can. Gifts begin. There seems
scope for a wiser selection in these early gifts. At present it is
chiefly woolly animals with bells inside them, woolly balls, and so
forth, that reach the baby’s hands. There is no reason at all why a
child’s attention should be so predominantly fixed on wool. These toys
are coloured very tastefully, but as Preyer has advanced strong reasons
for supposing that the child’s discrimination of colours is extremely
rudimentary until the second year has begun, these tasteful arrangements
are simply an appeal to the parent. Light, dark, yellow, perhaps red
and “other colours” seem to constitute the colour system of a very
young infant. It is to the parent, too, that the humorous and realistic
quality of the animal forms appeal. The parent does the shopping and has
to be amused. The parent who ought to have a doll instead of a child is
sufficiently abundant in our world to dominate the shops, and there is a
vast traffic in facetious baby toys, facetious nursery furniture, “art”
 cushions and “quaint” baby clothing, all amazingly delightful things for
grown-up people. These things are bought and grouped about the child,
the child is taught tricks to complete the picture, and parentage
becomes a very amusing afternoon employment. So long as convenience
is not sacrificed to the æsthetic needs of the nursery, and so long as
common may compete with “art” toys, there is no great harm done, but it
is well to understand how irrelevant these things are to the real needs
of a child’s development.

A child of a year or less has neither knowledge nor imagination to see
the point of these animal resemblances--much less to appreciate either
quaintness or prettiness. That comes only in the second year. He is much
more interested in the crumpling and tearing of paper, in the crumpling
of chintz, and in the taking off and replacing of the lid of a little
box. I think it would be possible to devise a much more entertaining
set of toys for an infant than is at present procurable, but, unhappily,
they would not appeal to the intelligence of the average parent. There
would be, for example, one or two little boxes of different shapes and
substances, with lids to take off and on, one or two rubber things that
would bend and twist about and admit of chewing, a ball and a box
made of china, a fluffy, flexible thing like a rabbit’s tail, with the
vertebræ replaced by cane, a velvet-covered ball, a powder puff, and so
on. They could all be plainly and vividly coloured with some non-soluble
inodorous colour. They would be about on the cot and on the rug where
the child was put to kick and crawl. They would have to be too large to
swallow, and they would all get pulled and mauled about until they were
more or less destroyed. Some would probably survive for many years as
precious treasures, as beloved objects, as powers and symbols in the
mysterious secret fetichism of childhood--confidants and sympathetic
friends.


§ 2


While the child is engaged with its first toys, and with the collection
of rudimentary sense impressions, it is also developing a remarkable
variety of noises and babblements from which it will presently
disentangle speech. Day by day it will show a stronger and stronger bias
to associate definite sounds with definite objects and ideas, a bias so
comparatively powerful in the mind of man as to distinguish him from
all other living creatures. Other creatures may think, may, in a sort
of concrete way, come almost indefinably near reason (as Professor Lloyd
Morgan in his very delightful _Animal Life and Intelligence_ has shown);
but man alone has in speech the apparatus, the possibility, at any rate,
of being a reasoning and reasonable creature. It is, of course, not
his only apparatus. Men may think out things with drawings, with little
models, with signs and symbols upon paper, but speech is the common way,
the high road, the current coin of thought.

With speech humanity begins. With the dawn of speech the child ceases to
be an animal we cherish, and crosses the boundary into distinctly
human intercourse. There begins in its mind the development of the most
wonderful of all conceivable apparatus, a subtle and intricate keyboard,
that will end at last with thirty or forty or fifty thousand keys. This
queer, staring, soft little being in its mother’s arms is organizing
something within itself, beside which the most wonderful orchestra one
can imagine is a lump of rude clumsiness. There will come a time when,
at the merest touch upon those keys, image will follow image and emotion
develop into emotion, when the whole creation, the deeps of space,
the minutest beauties of the microscope, cities, armies, passions,
splendours, sorrows, will leap out of darkness into the conscious being
of thought, when this interwoven net of brief, small sounds will form
the centre of a web that will hold together in its threads the universe,
the All, visible and invisible, material and immaterial, real and
imagined, of a human mind. And if we are to make the best of a child, it
is in no way secondary to its physical health and growth that it should
acquire a great and thorough command over speech, not merely that it
should speak, but, what is far more vital, that it should understand
swiftly and subtly things written and said. Indeed, this is more than
any physical need. The body is the substance and the implement; the
mind, built and compact of language, is the man. All that has gone
before, all that we have discussed of sound birth and physical growth
and care, is no more than the making ready of the soil for the mind that
is to grow therein. As we come to this matter of language, we come a
step nearer to the intimate realities of our subject--we come to the
mental plant that is to bear the flower and the ripe fruit of the
individual life. The next phase of our inquiry, therefore, is to examine
how we can get this mental plant, this foundation substance, this
abundant mastered language best developed in the individual, and how far
we may go to ensure this best development for all children born into the
world.

From the ninth month onward the child begins serious attempts to talk.
In order that it may learn to do this as easily as possible, it requires
to be surrounded by people speaking one language, and speaking it with
a uniform accent. Those who are most in the child’s hearing
should endeavour to speak--even when they are not addressing the
child--deliberately and clearly. All authorities are agreed upon
the mischievous effect of what is called “baby talk,” the use of an
extensive sham vocabulary, a sort of deciduous milk vocabulary that will
presently have to be shed again. Froebel and Preyer join hands on
this. The child’s funny little perversions of speech are really genuine
attempts to say the right word, and we simply cause trouble and hamper
development if we give back to the seeking mind its own blunders again.
When a child wants to indicate milk, it wants to say milk, and not
“mooka” or “mik,” and when it wants to indicate bed, the needed word is
not “bedder” or “bye-bye,” but “bed.” But we give the little thing no
chance to get on in this way until suddenly one day we discover it
is “time the child spoke plainly.” Preyer has pointed out very
instructively the way in which the quite sufficiently difficult matter
of the use of I, mine, me, my, you, yours, and your is made still more
difficult by those about the child adopting irregularly the experimental
idioms it produces. When a child says to its mother, “Me go mome,” it
is doing its best to speak English, and its remark should be received
without worrying comment; but when a mother says to her child, “Me go
mome,” she is simply wasting an opportunity of teaching her child its
mother-tongue. One sympathizes with her all too readily, one understands
the sweetness to her of these soft, infantile mispronunciations; but,
indeed, she ought to understand; it is her primary business to know
better than her feelings in this affair.

In learning to speak, the children of the more prosperous classes are
probably at a considerable advantage when compared with their poorer
fellow children. They hear a clearer and more uniform intonation than
the blurred, uncertain speech of our commonalty, that has resulted from
the reaction of the great synthetic process, of the past century upon
dialects. But this natural advantage of the richer child is discounted
in one of two ways: in the first place by the mother, in the second by
the nurse. The mother in the more prosperous classes is often much more
vain and trivial than the lower-class woman; she looks to her children
for amusement, and makes them contributors to her “effect,” and, by
taking up their quaint and pretty mispronunciations, and devising
humorous additions to their natural baby talk, she teaches them to be
much greater babies than they could ever possibly be themselves. They
specialise as charming babies until their mother tires of the pose, and
then they are thrust back into the nursery to recover leeway, if they
can, under the care of governess or nurse.

The second disadvantage of the upper-class child is the foreign nurse
or nursery governess. There is a widely diffused idea that a child is
particularly apt to master and retain languages, and people try and
inoculate with French and German as Lord Herbert of Cherbury would have
inoculated children with antidotes, for all the ills their flesh was
heir to--even, poor little wretches, to an anticipatory _regimen_ for
gout. The root error of these attempts to form infantile polyglots
is embodied in an unverified quotation from Byron’s _Beppo,_ dear to
pedagogic writers--

“Wax to receive and marble to retain”

runs the line--which the curious may discover to be a description of
the faithful lover, though it has become as firmly associated with the
child-mind as has Sterne’s “tempering the wind to the shorn lamb” with
Holy Writ. And this idea of infantile receptivity and retentiveness is
held by an unthinking world, in spite of the universally accessible fact
that hardly one of us can remember anything that happened before the age
of five, and very little that happened before seven or eight, and that
children of five or six, removed into foreign surroundings, will in a
year or so--if special measures are not taken--reconstruct their idiom,
and absolutely forget every word of their mother-tongue. This foreign
nurse comes into the child’s world, bringing with her quite weird
errors in the quantities, the accent and idiom of the mother-tongue, and
greatly increasing the difficulty and delay on the road to thought and
speech. And this attempt to acquire a foreign language prematurely at
the expense of the mother-tongue, to pick it up cheaply by making the
nurse an informal teacher of languages, entirely ignores a fact upon
which I would lay the utmost stress in this paper--which, indeed, is
the gist of this paper--that only a very small minority of English or
American people have more than half mastered the splendid heritage of
their native speech. To this neglected and most significant limitation
the amount of public attention given at present is quite surprisingly
small. [Footnote: My friend, Mr. L. Cope Cornford, writes _apropos_
of this, and I think I cannot do better than print what he says as
a corrective to my own assertions: “All you say on the importance of
letting a child hear good English cleanly accented is admirable; but
we think you have perhaps overlooked the importance of ear-training
as such, which should begin by the time the child can utter its first
attempts at speech. By ear-training I mean the differentiation of
sounds--articulate, inarticulate, and musical--fixing the child’s
attention and causing it to _imitate_. As every sound requires a
particular movement of the vocal apparatus, the child will soon be able
to adapt its apparatus unconsciously and to distinguish accurately. And
if it does not so learn before the age of five or six, it probably will
never do so. By the age of two--or less--the child should be able to
_imitate_ exactly any speech-sound. Our youngsters can do so; and,
consequently, the fact that they had a nurse with a Sussex accent ceased
to matter, because they learned to distinguish her talk from correct
English. So in the case of a foreign nurse; the result of a foreigner’s
influence would be good in this way, that it would train a child to a
_new series of speech-sounds_, thus enlarging its ear capacity. Nor need
it necessarily adopt these speech-sounds as those which it should use;
it merely knows them; and if the foreigner have a good accent, and
speaks her own tongue well, the child’s ear is trained for life,
_irrespective of expression_. Experience shows that a child can keep
separate in its mind two or three languages--at first the speech-sounds,
later the expression. _Modes of expression_ need not begin till after
five, or later. With regard to music, every child should begin to
undergo a simple course of ear-training on the sol-fa system as
elaborated and taught by McNaught, because the faculty of so learning
is lost--atrophied--by the age of twelve or fourteen. But, beginning
early--as early as possible--every child, ‘musical’ or not, can be
trained, just as every child, ‘artistic’ or not, may be taught to draw
accurately up to a certain point.”]

There can be little or no dispute that the English language in its
completeness presents a range too ample and appliances too subtle for
the needs of the great majority of those who profess to speak it. I do
not refer to the half-civilized and altogether barbaric races who are
coming under its sway, but to the people we are breeding of our own
race--the barbarians of our streets, our suburban “white niggers,” with
a thousand a year and the conceit of Imperial destinies. They live
in our mother-tongue as some half-civilized invaders might live in a
gigantic and splendidly equipped palace. They misuse this, they waste
that, they leave whole corridors and wings unexplored, to fall into
disuse and decay. I doubt if the ordinary member of the prosperous
classes in England has much more than a third of the English language
in use, and more than a half in knowledge, and as we go down the social
scale we may come at last to strata having but a tenth part of our full
vocabulary, and much of that blurred and vaguely understood. The speech
of the Colonist is even poorer than the speech of the home-staying
English. In America, just as in Great Britain and her Colonies, there is
the same limitation and the same disuse. Partly, of course, this is due
to the pettiness of our thought and experience, and so far it can only
be remedied by a general intellectual amplification; but partly it is
due to the general ignorance of English prevailing throughout the world.
It is atrociously taught, and taught by ignorant men. It is atrociously
and meanly written. So far as this second cause of sheer ignorance
goes, the gaps in knowledge are continually resulting in slang and the
addition of needless neologisms to the language. People come upon ideas
that they know no English to express, and strike out the new phrase in a
fine burst of ignorant discovery. There are Americans in particular who
are amazingly apt at this sort of thing. They take an enormous pride in
the jargon they are perpetually increasing--they boast of it, they give
exhibition performances in it, they seem to regard it as the culminating
flower of their continental Republic--as though the Old World had never
heard of shoddy. But, indeed, they are in no better case than that
unfortunate lady at Earlswood who esteems newspapers stitched with
unravelled carpet and trimmed with orange peel, the extreme of human
splendour. In truth, their pride is baseless, and this slang of theirs
no sort of distinction whatever. Let me assure them that in our heavier
way we in this island are just as busy defiling our common inheritance.
We can send a team of linguists to America who will murder and
misunderstand the language against any eleven the Americans may select.

Of course there is a natural and necessary growth and development in
a living language, a growth that no one may arrest. In appliances,
in politics, in science, in philosophical interpretation, there is a
perpetual necessity for new words, words to express new ideas and new
relationships, words free from ambiguity and encumbering associations.
But the neologisms of the street and the saloon rarely supply any
occasion of this kind. For the most part they are just the stupid
efforts of ignorant men to supply the unnecessary. And side by side
with the invention of inferior cheap substitutes for existing words
and phrases, and infinitely more serious than that invention, goes on a
perpetual misuse and distortion of those that are insufficiently known.
These are processes not of growth but of decay--they distort, they
render obsolete, and they destroy. The obsolescence and destruction of
words and phrases cuts us off from the nobility of our past, from the
severed masses of our race overseas, far more effectually than any
growth of neologisms. A language may grow--our language must grow--it
may be clarified and refined and strengthened, but it need not suffer
the fate of an algal filament, and pass constantly into rottenness and
decay whenever growth is no longer in progress. That has been the
fate of languages in the past because of the feebler organization, the
slenderer, slower intercommunication, and, above all, the insufficient
records of human communities; but the time has come now--or, at the
worst, is rapidly coming--when this will cease to be a fated thing.
We may have a far more copious and varied tongue than had Addison or
Spenser--that is no disaster--but there is no reason why we should not
keep fast hold of all they had. There is no reason why the whole fine
tongue of Elizabethan England should not be at our disposal still.
Conceivably Addison would find the rich, allusive English of George
Meredith obscure; conceivably we might find a thousand words and phrases
of the year 2000 strange and perplexing; but there is no reason why a
time should ever come when what has been written well in English since
Elizabethan days should no longer be understandable and fine.

The prevailing ignorance of English in the English-speaking communities,
enormously hampers the development of the racial consciousness. Except
for those who wish to bawl the crudest thoughts, there is no means of
reaching the whole mass of these communities to-day. So far as material
requirements go it would be possible to fling a thought broadcast like
seed over the whole world to-day, it would be possible to get a book
into the hands of half the adults of our race. But at the hands and
eyes one stops--there is a gap in the brains. Only thoughts that can be
expressed in the meanest commonplaces will ever reach the minds of the
majority of the English-speaking peoples under present conditions.

A writer who aims to be widely read to-day must perpetually halt, must
perpetually hesitate at the words that arise in his mind; he must ask
himself how many people will stick at this word altogether or miss the
meaning it should carry; he must ransack his memory for a commonplace
periphrase, an ingenious rearrangement of the familiar; he must omit
or overaccentuate at every turn. Such simple and necessary words as
“obsolescent,” “deliquescent,” “segregation,” for example, must be
abandoned by the man who would write down to the general reader; he must
use “impertinent” as if it were a synonym for “impudent” and “indecent”
 as the equivalent of “obscene.” And in the face of this wide ignorance
of English, seeing how few people can either read or write English
with any subtlety, and how disastrously this reacts upon the general
development of thought and understanding amidst the English-speaking
peoples, it would be preposterous even if the attempt were successful,
to complicate the first linguistic struggles of the infant with the
beginnings of a second language. But people deal thus lightly with the
mother-tongue because they know so little of it that they do not even
suspect their own ignorance of its burthen and its powers. They speak a
little set of ready-made phrases, they write it scarcely at all, and all
they read is the weak and shallow prose of popular fiction and the daily
press. That is knowing a language within the meaning of their minds, and
such a knowledge a child may very well be left to “pick up” as it may.
Side by side with this they will presently set themselves to erect a
similar “knowledge” of two or three other languages. One is constantly
meeting no

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/7058