Race Improvement; or, Eugenics: A Little Book on a Great Subject
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Keywords: Eugenics

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Title: Race Improvement; or, Eugenics: A Little Book on a Great Subject

Author: La Reine Helen McKenzie Baker

Release date: January 15, 2015 [eBook #47976]
Most recently updated: October 24, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK RACE IMPROVEMENT; OR, EUGENICS: A LITTLE BOOK ON A GREAT SUBJECT ***

"Make no more giants, God
But elevate the race."

Browning.

RACE IMPROVEMENT
OR
EUGENICS

A Little Book on a Great Subject

BY

La Reine Helen Baker

NEW YORK
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
1912

Copyright, 1912

By DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY

Published, September, 1912

CONTENTS

CHAPTER | | PAGE
I | Introductory | 1
II | Heredity, Environment | 13
III | The Child, Its Heritage | 28
IV | Marriage | 40
V | Possibilities of Race Improvement | 55
VI | Education, Eugenics | 69
VII | Eugenics, The Modern Feminist Movement | 86
VIII | Positive, Negative Eugenics | 101
| Appendices |
| A. State Endowment of Motherhood | 120
| B. Sterilisation in U. S. A. | 128

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTORY

The aim of this little volume is to interest the American public in an important and neglected subject. The writer has her own views on art, politics, religion and other topics which divide mankind, she does not intrude those opinions here, although conscious that "to see life steadily and see it whole" much more is wanted than a single branch of study, however vital. It is not possible, however, to remain silent and, at least passively, acquiescent when the interests of the race are in danger of neglect. Need for apology is not considered when great and influential journals, magazines and volumes dissipate their powers on all the feeble foolings of the hour. There are many honourable exceptions. There are organs of opinion in nearly all directions of intellectual speculation, education and philosophy and there are of course necessary volumes of information on cooking, travel, dress and amusement. Every material interest except the basic material interest of our human existence is represented in our periodical press. An expedition to the pole, a prodigious attempt to attract the attention of Martian observers whose very existence is denied by more than half our scientists, or a commission to inquire into the relative merits of various manurial nitrates, for these time and money, private enterprise and state aid are readily forthcoming. Professorial chairs are easily financed for lectures on every necessary and unnecessary subject other than that of direct race improvement. Churches, universities and other institutions have been endowed for the sake of schisms which have no direct bearing on any human need.

I deny that people do not care what becomes of the race. There never has been a time in the history of the world when parents would not rather have a healthy progeny than an unhealthy. The nation would always prefer to be able to boast of improvement instead of blushing for its deteriorating citizenship. As long as Mothers love their own young and as long as the average man sympathises with undeserved suffering there will be perpetual possibilities for rousing interest in the most promising of all sciences, Eugenics.

Eugenics is a word invented by Francis Galton to cover the philosophy, collection of facts, the science, whatever we can call it, which regards race improvement as a desirable and practicable process. Stirpiculture is an older word for a similar idea. New descriptive or misleading phrases will be invented from time to time, sometimes by friends, sometimes by enemies of the movement. It may be well from the first to clear away some misinterpretations. Accusations against new ideas commonly take the form of attempting to show that the new and possibly good idea is irretrievably committed to some other idea, generally an older and discredited one. It is the universal rule, particularly in Anglo-Saxon countries, to regard sex-relationships as so sacrosanct that merely to mention them is to outrage modesty and shock morality. Fortunately or otherwise we have had to overcome this silly secretiveness. The horrible white-slave traffic, the loathsome increase of venereal diseases, the frequent revelations such as the Thaw case forced on the public, the necessity for protecting children from outrage—all these and other things have made not only possible but obviously desirable that decency, wisdom and humanity should make their voice heard. The time has come when we will not tolerate the daily scandal of having our newspapers polluted with details of sexual abnormalities while we are refused the opportunity of educating the people in the direction of purity, health, and efficiency in the sexual relation. Eugenics is concerned primarily and materially with the normal sex relationship, which in modern civilised lands means the ordinary legal monogamic marriage. It is perfectly true that there have been pioneer reformers, to whom the world owes much who have linked their ideals of race improvement to an advocacy of freer sex relationships. Modern eugenists have no such divided council. They aim at encouraging the best births and discouraging the worst, and all details of their propaganda must be subordinate to this great aspiration. Seeing then that through monogamic marriage the Anglo-Saxon race must overwhelmingly flow now and in all the sighted future, we resolutely direct our attention to this institution as we find it. On the lines of which the race has approved we shall proceed for our reforms. The United States great in a thousand ways, although often the despair of the reformer, offers the most promising field of the whole world in the direction of Eugenics. Comprising within her catholic embrace many varieties of monogamic marriage she possesses contrasts, comparisons, examples and warnings, which will be of infinite use in the Eugenist's laboratory. Well may we be content to show from these differences how on the present basis of marriage a nobler race may be reared. It is of course only one aspect of marriage that interests Eugenists, but as according to the teaching of most Churches and the theory of most governments the origin, basis and reason of marriage is procreation, it will be seen that race improvement does not look on the least important side of marriage. In other words it is in its public and universal relations that marriage will be regarded by Eugenists. In comparatively socialised States like ours where education and a hundred other concerns of every child are the constant care of representative institutions it would be retrogression if we did not now begin to consider the child as having from its birth a public interest. Seeing the advance being made in our understanding of some of the laws of heredity it must not be considered wonderful that this public interest in the future citizen should begin even before birth. For this purpose it is not at all necessary, I hold it to be eminently undesirable, that the State or any outside authority should attempt the ridiculous task of organising who shall marry and mate, or dictate by law or force the conditions of marriages which satisfy the contracting parties. But this laisser faire doctrine obviously has no applicability to the much more disputable proposition that the State has no right to deal with the source of its future responsibilities, the root by which may arrive human wrecks for which the State must provide in the days to come. This brings me to a further protest. It has been suggested that Eugenists are anarchists, tearing up the roots of government, blindly striking at civilised institutions, putting a bomb to the foundations of Church, State, and Family. Let it be said here and now in such clear phrase as may be that Eugenics is the antithesis of anarchy. It means order. Eugenics opposes chaos in the interests of the race. It is the most profoundly patriotic proposition ever laid before the people of these United States. Its conception is for the national good. American Eugenists will never rest until our race becomes the fittest on earth. Other nations shall teach us if they can, we will better their instruction. Monarchical old world peoples, restrained by traditions, tied down by red tape, drugged by the dread of progress, may justify their own inertia, we cannot sink with them. We are leaders and pioneers. In the United States respect is still accorded to those who have new truths to teach for the benefit of the race. If "national efficiency" has to some extent failed in its appeal, if the answer has been an admission of unaccomplished desires, the reason must be ascribed to the limited scope of the inquiry. The nation has to take itself seriously in hand. We need to get beyond the citizen of to-day, we have to consider the citizen of to-morrow.

As to religion, I appeal both to those who love God and to those who love their fellow-man. It is futile at this time of day to quote against the living race the dictates of a dead age. It is monstrous also to slander the noble men and women who are at present engaged in the secular activities of our Churches by pretending to believe that they are not most keenly anxious to aid in any uplifting work for the regeneration of the world. Every institution which is teaching, feeding or otherwise helping children is a nucleus for Eugenic enterprise. The neglect of Eugenics in the last generation has clogged the wheels of progress in this generation. We cannot and must not forget the victims of our national neglect, but we can do greatest honour to our philanthropists and workers for the general uplift by seriously endeavouring to eliminate from the coming generation the hopelessly unfit and by encouraging the multiplication of the efficient.

There is no immorality in our proposals, as a glance at these pages will abundantly prove. The Family of the future is going to be sweeter, purer and nobler. It may even be more numerous, for while Eugenists resolutely set themselves to discourage the national burdening by debt, danger and decay which inevitably follow in the footsteps of a deteriorating race, we have nevertheless no opinions whatever as to whether a numerically large or small family is best. Race suicide is no worse than race murder. We cannot imagine a nobler sight than an enormous and increasing race of the vitally fit. A temporary and deliberate discouragement of certain unwelcome elements may be momentarily embarrassing, but this is only half the story. Our ports of entry are firmly closed in the face of undesirable aliens, not for the purpose of reducing our population, far from it. Our stability, our greatness, our very existence depend on the success with which we have attracted to our shores those immigrants whose children to-day are our boast and pride. Eugenics, it cannot be too often said, is no mere phase of Malthusianism. It is not a population question it is the population question. It dismisses Malthus as a spent force, as a prophet whose message was only half delivered, as a Jeremiah who would have deprived the world of its saviours as well as of its betrayers. Of Malthus it may truly be said that in forbidding those who would "wade through slaughter to a throne" he "shut the gates of mercy on mankind." No philosophy to-day can meet the needs of to-day if it indiscriminately decreases both. Both methods are evil. We must weigh as well as count. The Sphinx of civilisation sits waiting our answer to her riddle. We have mingled the seeds of evil with the seeds of good. Mere mechanical multiplication only accentuates the evil because weeds are always of quicker growth than the flower plants which they deprive of their due share of light and air. Patient division of the seeds, careful sorting, subtracting as far as possible the contaminating elements, and giving all the needful attention to the sturdy but perverse, encouraging those seeds which in various ways will one day grow into perfect trees so as to show flower; to bear fruit, give shade, make timber or in any other way serve the multifarious needs of the nation.

CHAPTER II

HEREDITY AND ENVIRONMENT

Eugenics is not committed to the Darwinian doctrine of evolution, although it would probably never have reached the stage of practical politics but for the encouragement given to all systematic scientific studies by Darwin's magnificent generalisations. Eugenics takes its stand on the ascertained fact of heredity, and it owes an immense debt to the patience with which Lamarck, the Darwins, Weissman and others have piled instance upon instance to illustrate the fact that "the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children unto the third and fourth generation" and "the fathers have eaten sour grapes and the children's teeth are set on edge." The doctrine of heredity has never been more resonantly expressed than in these words although they show only one side and that not the better side of heredity. We are indeed "begotten not made." Nurture, or environment, has its place, and an important one, in race improvement, but the overwhelming fact remains that more than three-fourths of the elements which build up a human soul are in its nature, not its nurture. The formative factor of greatest importance in the making of human life and character is heredity.

Mankind has hitherto failed to grasp the full significance of this admission. Horticulturists have made it the starting point of their experiments until to-day the Luther Burbanks can almost create what they will in plant life. Cattle-breeders, dog-fanciers, and horse-farmers, are able to raise the value of their breeds to a wonderful degree. Ornithologists have been equally successful; from the original stock a hundred varieties come at the touch of the scientific magician's wand. In each case even where at first quantity was considered of no importance compared with quality, there has been a steady and unmistakable increase in the effective numbers side by side with a gigantic development of those elements of strength or beauty which have been arrived at. Race suicide is a metaphysical phrase not easily open to definition, but two things may be said about it at this stage. Race improvement is utterly inconsistent with any intelligent conception of race suicide. An increasing birthrate is not in itself a guarantee of progress and may indeed be the means of a nation's retrogression. Experience and logic lead to the confident conclusion that increased vitality means increased fecundity.

To acknowledge the law of heredity with its concomitant scientific implications, must inevitably change our mental outlook in many directions. Accordingly as we relatively place heredity or environment first, our views on social politics will be fundamentally sound or unsound. Taking a large view of society it must make an abysmal difference whether we think the race can or cannot be improved (not merely polished or even enlightened but really changed) by modifications of environment. We can no longer pursue the same and by the same means if we come to the conclusion that the individual is either born a potential asset to society or "damned into existence," a permanent drain on his fellows' comfort and wealth, even a possible miasma of infectious criminality.

I am a Eugenist because I believe that the nature we have received from hereditary sources transcends in effectiveness all the nurture which follows birth. Eugenics means seeking for facts and applying them to solve the greatest of all problems—looking for light by which the race may control its destiny. Heredity in the animal and vegetable world may be considered dispassionately enough. Geology and astronomy are only hereditary studies affecting the birth of worlds. But from human birth and sex, the mysteries of creation in their divinest form, from these branches of the study of heredity the flaming sword of prudery warns us away. The subject of human sex has been the play-ground of neglect, ignorance, bigotry, superstition, persecution and every other foe to inquiry. It has been the object of worship but not of explanation, of romance but not of science, of abuse, mutilation, misunderstanding, but not of study, reason and generalization. Eugenics of course aims at expressing the scientific side of the process of which love is the artistic. The rare handful of brave men and women who against unique opposition have forced this question to the front are not to be blamed if up to now Eugenics can hardly be said to exist as a systematised science. It is in the nature of things that as a philosophy Eugenics is hardly more than a guess, a probability, an hypothesis. Doubt, uncertainty and half-heartedness inevitably accompany a movement so undeservedly discredited as this has been. Without the means to collect the enormous body of facts required to justify national action the Eugenists have been content to rely upon personal experiences, isolated family histories and the normal and abnormal facts which newspapers, biographies and daily life presented to them. Eugenists have wrestled against difficulties like Hercules in the Augean stable or Paul in the Ephesian arena. In fact the stable and the arena throw more light on Eugenics than any at present available from the human animal. The existent biology of Eugenics means a study of non-human life. There is a sufficiently extensive literature and digest of experiments relating to animal and plant life to serve as the stock in trade of a fairly complete system of Eugenics—if only fuschias were men or men were mules. External observations of animal and plant life cannot universally apply to man even passively, while the active interference of the human botanist in the affairs of the unprotesting plants separates these from men by an unpassable chasm.

The first need then for Eugenic study is some systematic collection of the ascertainable facts as far as they relate to human beings. This implies sufficient scientific interest in the phenomena of parentage to encourage widespread earnest patient desire to exchange information and to steadily accumulate enough knowledge to justify experiment in positive and negative Eugenics. No sane Eugenist advocates universal State action based on the existent records, but it would be against all good precedent if the absence of sufficient knowledge on a vital subject were allowed to stultify the efforts of those who seek for fuller information. Nothing but good will ensue if positive experiments are boldly labelled as such, instead of pretending that our twilight of investigation is the full light of perfect knowledge. Experiments in positive Eugenics will take various forms. They began with the most ordinary baby-shows; they proceeded through municipal prizes for the healthiest offsprings. An important stage arose when premiums in some cities began to be offered to all parents whose babies survived the critical first year of life. These were elementary experiments, based on the right motive but ignoring the element of heredity. The experiments of the future must be on a surer foundation. The current criteria of judgment are sound enough as far as they go, they encourage careful nurture, but the limitations of the experiments are those of an unscientific age. Obviously the next step in the same direction is to discriminate. The haphazard chance that of fifty children properly nourished one may be distinguished by its superior physique does not materially help us to solve our problem if we stop at this phase. Having found our healthiest child we might at least try to discover the hereditary history of its progenitors and take steps to encourage further offsprings from so promising a source. Imagine a scientific cattle-breeder possessing a perfect bull, contented that one of its offsprings should take a single prize! Not to unduly strain the analogy we might with all decorum and wisdom circulate what knowledge we can glean of those facts which have made perfection possible. Are we to be everlastingly contented with news of the romantic, sensational, abnormal and criminal phenomena of sex while our newspapers and official records are silent concerning ordinary and desirable experiences, their causes and their results? Heredity as the basis of legislation is never dreamt of, while our statute books are crowded with laws passed in a panic, laws which bear no ratio to essential facts, and laws which look at the elementary passions of mankind through the refractory media of prejudice, ignorance and well-meaning misconception. It rarely if ever occurs to legislators that a scientific system of society demands an acquaintance with the recently accepted conclusions of our greatest thinkers. We are suffering to-day from a pre-Darwinian government in almost all our States. "Authorities" of all kinds are quoted in support of and against any given proposal, but the "authorities" are seldom the fittest. In earlier days latin tags were considered a worthy conclusion to a speech in Senate or Legislature. Nowadays poetry or literature is called into requisition. Darwin, Spencer and Galton should at least have taught us to take trouble to learn all about the subject in hand and what bearing the scientific discoveries of our generation have upon particular problems. It is a disease of the age that we are conscious of our national short-comings in only the vaguest possible way. We are ignorant of the full extent of our misfortunes and we do not apply to them the time, trouble and money which are a preliminary necessity to discovering a remedy, and we forget the dynamic difference which must be made in our treatment of race problems as soon as we accept heredity as the controlling factor. But the preliminaries must be insisted on. Investigation, collation, classification, generalisation, and legislation, must be taken in their right order.

The difficulties in the way of investigating the laws which govern heredity have as usual led to shirking the issue altogether. Even when we look the difficulty straight in the face, we pass it by. We have made a god of environment. Our best social efforts hitherto in legislation, social conventions, conduct and educational ideals (and in modern times even our religions), have come to consider environment as of paramount importance. But take environment at its highest it can only be the best soil for the best seed. That is a Eugenic ideal also but it cannot convert a disease germ into a desirable citizen. Over-emphasis of reform dependent on improved environment implies that a deadly upas tree, if transplanted and properly watered and "given a better chance," will reward society with a plentiful harvest of edible nourishing fruit. The heartless school which on principles hates all reform derives its chief support from the fact that the reform which regards only environment too often descends to veneering vice with respectability or dissipates itself in futilities of a grandmotherly kind. The reformer of the future must study causes as well as phenomena. The skilled physician regards symptoms as of importance only to the extent that they assist the diagnosis of disease. Accurate analysis must consider hereditary causes as well as local symptoms.

Environment when properly subordinated to and illuminated by heredity does not cease to be important. Environment may provide wings to fly with and an atmosphere capable of sustaining weight, even when it cannot provide the will to fly. To return to our agricultural symbolism: environment cannot make or change the nature of the seed, it is the soil, the sunshine and the succulence, but it has to take the seed as it is. Heredity is inside the seed and goes behind the seed to the mother plant. Heredity is what our ancestors meant when they said predestination, necessity, destiny.

Philosophers of pre-Darwin days have lured mankind into the pleasant but dangerously untrue belief that human nature is essentially and universally good. This crude generalisation of Rousseau's gospel does some injustice to that great man's philosophy which represented a necessary revolt from the soul-destroying perversion of heredity which described man as uniformly "born in sin and shaped in iniquity." Experience has revolted against both extremes. The Heavenly father is no longer a Fiend who destines "one to heav'n and ten to hell," and the Earthly Parent emerges from his ancient unimportance. Man is in neither case fortuitous, his nature, potentiality and destiny are writ large in the study of his heredity. We are all, like poets, born not made; as we are: we remain: we develop on lines long ago laid down for us by other forces than those environment can control and it is still impossible to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. This consideration puts into proper perspective the things which matter, and warns us to cease vain expenditure on unscientific philanthropy. The efforts wasted on watering weeds might have made the garden smile with fragrant flowers. Environment means opportunity. We shall understand better how and why environments need reconstruction when we recognise the superior importance of heredity. We shall begin to realise the uselessness of forcing qualities into the human organism, and become all the more anxious to afford opportunity for developing whatever utilisable qualities are already there existent. We shall learn to educate, in the old sense of the word. We shall bring out the maximum of the good within. We will no longer tolerate the cruelties and crudities of abortive attempts to instil properties and qualities of character which not being inherent can never be successfully inoculated.

CHAPTER III

THE CHILD AND ITS HERITAGE

The previous chapter suggests that unless due regard is given to heredity an increased population will merely aggravate the existing social problems. It is necessary also to emphasise the importance of watching our death statistics as well as our birth returns. Obviously a nation with a low percentage of births compared with its population may be increasing the latter much more largely as well as more healthily than a nation with a much larger percentage of births. The pulse of each hand must be felt. Infant mortality is as easily ascertainable and is of at least equal importance. Infant efficiency is unfortunately less easily ascertainable statistically. Subject to these qualifications the Eugenics school welcomes Mr. Roosevelt's protests against Race Suicide, and gladly identifies itself with any religious, political or social effort to bring to our citizens a sense of what we owe to the commonwealth. It is not a matter to be dismissed with a speech or a magazine article when we see almost every career in the world glorified, and parentage alone sneered at. Believers in Eugenics regard with a horror based on a certainty of evil consequence when they contemplate a State in which the noble task of motherhood is left to the poor while the rich evade their duties. It is stupid as well as abominable to reproach heroic but uninstructed mothers of the less wealthy classes. Year after year they think they are fulfilling their destined purpose in life by adding to their families a burden difficult to bear. In the long run, after Nature has exercised a cruel elimination, this burden of the individual becomes the glory of the race, the very bloom and blossom of the future. Neither can reproach be given to the parents in the slums. Nature here seems to be prodigal indeed. The children come, only the doctors know the terrible tale of them. To the registrar they are but a name, to the statistician a number, but to the City and the State they mean cemeteries, hospitals, prisons, asylums, as well as barracks. But I am not dealing here with the whole problem of poverty. Eugenics aims at breeding the fittest from the fittest and it sees

"How many a gem of purest ray serene
The dark unfathom'd caves of ocean bear."

Even in the most unpromising surroundings one sees noble sparks of life not to be quenched by poverty or any other vital enemy. The Christ continues to be born in a stable.

It is when we reach the exclusive circles of the rich that we see how the race is decaying. Children are at a discount. Parentage is coming to be considered a waste of time. A man cannot spare his wife from social functions. Dressmakers agree that the coming of a child destroys symmetry and prevents fashionable tight-lacing. Besides there are other pastimes to consider. Neither the State nor the individual will make the public believe that the production of healthy children is as important as baseball, horse-racing or stamp collecting. Millions of dollars are spent on securing the best breeds of horses. Seven thousand dollars recently was the price of a single four-cent stamp. Dogs, in the highest circles, have luxuries of food, clothing and housing which the servants who feed them never possessed. Dog-cemeteries exist where more money is spent on the tombstone of a dead dog than would keep a live human family for a year. "Foxes have holes, the birds of the air have nests" but the children of the poor starve and the rich prefer the pastime of the moment to the permanent interests of the race.

Degeneracy is not a disease by specific intention, it is an attribute to our social neglect, it is the result of our inattention to vital issues, it is a sign that we are no longer keenly anxious to elevate the race. Race improvement requires, under modern conditions of life, eternal vigilance and deliberate aim. The prolific character of the degenerate type has often been remarked. It finds expression in the homely proverb "Ill weeds grow apace." But the "growth" is in the undesirable direction—they do not grow better. If it were not for the wasteful cruelty of it all one would see some gleam of satisfaction in the admitted fact that many of these breeds of degenerates are almost as short-lived as they are prolific. The handsome villain of contemporary romance, healthy in physique and mentally alert is a misleading picture entirely at variance with fact. The degenerate child is neither beautiful, robust nor mentally sound. While the number of children per family is four on the average, Dr. Tredgold tells us that the average of births in a degenerate family is over seven, in addition to the still-born who in the case of the degenerates amount to about fifteen per cent of the children born. Almost every prison in the civilised world bears record to the direct injury inflicted on the community by the degenerate class. The feeble-minded alone amount to an appreciable percentage of the ordinary population of our prisons, and, if to these are added other victims of hereditary degeneracy, there will be left only what may be described as the "Criminals by accident." I am not claiming too much for the science when I say that Eugenics is capable of revolutionising these terrible conditions. The hereditary nature of the taint of criminality is proved by the history and bodily characteristics of its unhappy victims. Eugenists as such have no special remedy for the present day criminality. Their work is to point to the breeding of the criminal and to urge the importance of stopping his multiplication. As soon as society begins to take steps towards cutting off the supply of the degenerate there will be no object in perpetuating cruel punishments whose only object was deterrence.

Alcoholism may be treated as a separate phase of this great question or it may be regarded as but a manifestation of feeble-mindedness. In either case it can be shown that the children of degenerates are those most often prone to the drink evil. It is not a fact that a drunkard's children necessarily grow up drunkards. This assertion which is sometimes met with in Temperance literature is based on a misconception of what heredity is and a misunderstanding of what alcoholism is. Alcoholism tends to eliminate the alcoholic. The children of the drunkard may not be drunkards but they may exhibit weaknesses, cravings for destructive media or absence of self-control which at length terminate their generation. There is only one final cure for national intemperance and that is a more humane imitation of Nature's own plan. Nature seems cruel in its work because its effectiveness is not hindered by moral or humane considerations. Man cannot and must not imitate Nature's ruthlessness even if the process of elimination becomes a slower one. We can imitate Nature's methodical incisiveness without following Nature's murderous indifference. In some directions we may even accelerate Nature's processes, not by increasing the pains and penalties which she inflicts on a gradually disappearing progeny, but by narrowing the circle of the victims; by declining to longer tolerate the procreation of a hopeless generation.

I do not deny that temperance and similar effort at moral suasion form a valuable buttress against the worst phenomena of alcoholism. It serves the same purpose of help that bread does to the starving destitute, it does not solve the problem but it is a necessary work all the same, a valuable adjunct to a radical cure, and only objectionable if it stands in the way of prevention which is better than cure.

There is a heritage for children worse, perhaps, than criminality, feeble-mindedness or a tendency to alcoholic excess. I refer to venereal diseases. Painful or otherwise the subject must be discussed in this connection sooner or later. Like alcoholism, this disease contributes to its own elimination, its victims do not survive many generations. It is impossible to obtain statistics reasonably complete of the depredations wrought by these diseases. Professor Fournier regards them as social danger (1) By the individual damage inflicted, (2) The damage inflicted on the family, (3) The hereditary consequences, especially the infant mortality which is terrible, (4) The race deterioration and depopulation entailed. Public opinion is ripe for Eugenic treatment of this subject for one good reason, namely that every other remedy has either failed after trial or is in the nature of things incapable of adequate enforcement. State regulation of vice, with its corollary, State examination of women, is nowadays opposed by medical authorities because of the illusory security from infection which it implies, and is bitterly resented by all reformers as an intolerable tyranny applicable only to a single sex.

If I have emphasised the evils which are the heritage of so large a number of our children, it must never be forgotten that great as is the proportion of the unfit, we have not yet reached the stage when there are more unfit than fit. The heritage of evil represents the need for Eugenics in its negative aspect. We are perfectly well aware of the characteristics which we desire to eliminate, and this is of very great importance, not only because of the active harm which a decadent type represents in our civilisation, but there is the further consideration that ninety-nine per cent of the reformative effort of our legislative and social crusades, and of the philanthropic side of our religious life, is concentrated on this appalling problem. The release of much of this effort would tend towards enlightening the nation in other directions. It is not at all wonderful that we should recognise our national agreement about the types we would gladly eliminate while we disagree very widely about the types we would most value. This arises largely from the fact that our attention for many years has been riveted on "the submerged tenth," on "degeneracy" on "the criminal classes" and on the various other descriptions of the undesirable. What a little share in our organised study of man has the best type had. We have fed the unfit and left the healthy unheeded. Actually while we have been discussing the problem of improvement we have seen the destruction and disappearance through war, disease and poverty of representatives of types which stood in no need of improvement but only of perpetuating. But in the main if we do not agree as to the most desirable heritage a child should have there is very much common ground between us all. We believe that every child has the right to a good constitution. We regard as a misfortune every obstacle which renders healthy parents unwilling or unable to add their contribution to the welfare of the State by increasing the number of happy children growing into efficient men and women. Why wonder at the anti-social elements to be found in every city? What claim has the State on its children when the State has neglected the duty of a parent. To be a citizen is too great an honor to bestow on the hopeless children of degenerate parents. These children's heritage is sorrow, the nation's remorse is unavailing, Nemesis overtakes the neglectful State.

CHAPTER IV

MARRIAGE

Forty years ago it would have been possible to say that all encouragements to marriage necessarily meant increasing the birth rate. Economic and other causes contribute to the decline of both marriage and birth-rates. In this chapter I am not concerned with the discouragements to race increase. I remark elsewhere on the absence of national inspiration to race improvement. I am at present concerned only with marriage as the medium for procreation, no other aspect of marriage is the concern of Eugenists. To encourage those marriages which will tend to produce a noble race might well befit the consideration of a great people. The views uttered here, while I think they would be largely shared by Eugenists as a whole, are more or less personal to the writer who alone is responsible for their statement. The legitimatisation in some way of the illegitimate seems to me a necessary, urgent duty of the State. The stigma, implying moral blame and sometimes meeting with actual ill-treatment on that account, is as unjust and undeserved as anything that can be imagined. To overcome the difficulty by making the marriage of the parents the sole method of removing the reproach seems to me as unjust as it is illogical. There is no sense in making a child suffer unnecessarily. The absence of a home with a pair of loving parents is often the natural sufferings inflicted on a "natural" child. We ought not to encourage any discrimination between the adopted and the unadopted illegitimate child. Public opinion must learn to regard all children from the moment of their birth as having an inherent right to the best possible welcome and the treatment best fitted to make them desirable citizens. Eugenics studies the parents and on occasion challenges their right to produce seed, and one of its basic reasons for doing so must inevitably be that there can be no post-natal challenge to the child's right to exist.

Illegitimacy however greatly deprecated morally has justified itself historically. It has produced some of earth's chosen heroes. It can be condemned ethically because it so often inflicts hardship, privation and misery on the unhappy mother and the innocent child. That subsequent marriage of the parents should bring into the family records the acknowledged previous offspring is obvious common sense, but the child whose father refuses to do its mother the sometimes doubtful "honour" of marriage should be regarded in this respect as a child whose father is dead. As our records demand a name for the father, "Anon" should serve where paternity is doubtful and the real father's name should be acknowledged in every official document in every case where paternity orders are obtained. In other words illegitimacy should be abolished and, marriage or no marriage, every child should be duly entitled to every right of inheritance, etc., which the laws at present confine to the fruit of wedlock. It is not the form of marriage or its absence but the racial result with which Eugenics is concerned. Morality, religion, or the law which holds society together may have its reproach, its deprecatory warnings, and even its punishments for parents who transgress its conventions, but humanity demands that no stone shall be thrown at the child.

Eugenics is so seriously concerned with the race that it cannot accept the pretentious puerilities which so often masquerade under the title of marriage-law reforms. The mere refusal of a marriage certificate to couples who cannot pass certain medical shibboleths, while their offspring is unconsidered (except in so far as it demands immediate public assistance) seems to be a mockery of a serious subject. The marriage of the unfit is the concern of the Eugenists primarily because deception on either side may lead to terrible evil. Physical examinations and medical certificates before marriage are an urgent necessity—not as a bar to marriage but as a hindrance to deceit. Wives must know the man they are marrying. Men must be informed what kind of wife is hidden beneath the attractive dress. A danger of marriage is that a perfectly capable healthy person may unsuspectingly marry an impotent, barren or deformed consort. Love capable of conquering a wholesome physical repulsion is one thing; love, blinded by custom, delivered bound into the hands of disease is a vile thing incapable of defence. Partners for life can even now demand a certificate on the portal of marriage, but public opinion and legislation must make such certificates an essential preliminary to the marriage contract. All legal barriers to breaking an engagement on grounds of physical and mental ill-health must be swept away, and the enlightened public must be led to learn that some promises are better broken than kept. If these ante-matrimonial conditions are observed Eugenists will look with a charitable if discouraging glance at marriages of the unfit. Marriage between two "unfit" persons can be defended on very many grounds so long as children are not born. It is, generally speaking, improbable that the unfit at their worst will either be drawn to each other or that they will wish to enter on any career which may tend to deprive them of what vitality they still possess. Most often such unions would be inevitably fruitless whatever vain attempts were made to make the dry bones live. Such unions would in nearly every instance simply mean that to prevent scandal a form of marriage is gone through and thereafter two weaklings give each other the comfort of communion; their common diet is suited to their needs, they live (as far as they can afford it) in an atmosphere adapted to their complaint. I do not envy the state of soul of their critics who would mar the placid satisfaction of mutual comfort which would solace their declining childless days.

The union of the fit and the unfit is a calamity or a catastrophe in cases of knowledge, it is a crime where the victim is deceived into ignorance. The union of two unfit persons entered into in complete knowledge will be an infinitely smaller evil.

To make marriage attractive we must very greatly increase the facilities for unmaking it, and we must lay down some general principles for its healthy continuance. The absolute right of a woman to her own person, and her prerogative to refuse to bear children, seem elementary conditions of civilised wedlock. Woman must be protected from outrage, be she wife or not. A married woman must have the same right over her own person and her own children that an unmarried woman has over hers. It is an unmistakable slight on marriage to compel a woman to relinquish any of the legal or social rights she would enjoy if unmarried. We cannot afford to throw these obstacles in the way of marriage, we want the best women to marry and not to abstain on account of the altogether unnecessary and unnatural disabilities which laws and men have made.

Eugenists are willing to concede that divorce should be cheap, easy and free from shameful scandal. This can only be done however without grave injustice to women and the race if, apart from religious and moral considerations, the family is made the first consideration. The problem is largely an economic one. It is not likely that the State willingly intends to take upon itself the burden of maintaining thousands of wives unable to maintain themselves discarded by husbands wealthy enough to incur new responsibilities and expense. Whether marriage should be regarded as giving a claim to equal shares in the property and income of either partner is worthy of discussion. It is likely enough that the thinking woman of the present day and her successors will insist on wages for wives, wages for motherhood, and wages for housekeeping, and that these stipulations will receive the sanction of State law wherever they are reasonably scheduled and definitely approved. The children of divorced parents occupy an onerous position. Mr. Henry James, in "What Maisie Knew," has touched convincingly on this point. It cannot be dismissed as unimportant for there is hardly a single good environment in children's lives so potent as that of a happy home in which the two parents' love for each other is only rivalled by their united love for the young lives their love has so miraculously created. But there is no worse condition for children than the home of hate. Divorce may be horrid, but the atmosphere of love turned to indifference and hate is hell for all who breathe there.

While marriage does not exhaust all the possibilities of increasing the race it may be said to be not only the best but the only socially desirable way. Preventing divorce, or railing marriage round with difficulties not only encourages illicit relations outside marriage, it inevitably tends to prevent marriages being as fecund as the interests of the race demands. There is no need to sigh for a uniform marriage-law. If the ideal rule could be discovered it would be a pity not to make it universal. States which have experimented under present conditions become valuable examples or warnings, and the only need is that the least enlightened (or the least speculative) State should come into line with the most advanced without undue delay. Fortunately already there has been a number of very interesting enterprises by individual States, and the time is ripe for the more general adoption of those marriage laws which have given general satisfaction where tried.

The "age of consent" and the age of marriage must be brought to a common minimum. If a girl is mature enough for one she is mature enough for the other. The condition of parental consent seems at first glance an anachronism, but may have some Eugenic value if modified to mean that the age of consent can be pre-dated in exceptional cases.

No husband or wife should be tied for life to a person who develops symptoms of such diseases as tuberculosis, syphilis, chronic alcoholism and the like. Felony and even incurable laziness or incapacity should be good grounds for divorce. There is no necessary connection between Socialism and Eugenics but neither is there any essential antagonism. Eugenics recognises the responsibilities of parenthood and to that extent is individualistic; it claims also that the children born to all men, rich or poor, are bound to be born as healthy as advancing science can make them. That is why Eugenics is sometimes regarded as socialistic, but we have long ago decided that health is a national concern and therefore the State builds hospitals, passes sanitary laws and insists on the notification of certain diseases. In a Republic it ought not to be necessary to say that classes should not exist. At the risk of accentuating the socialistic accusation it has to be made plain that matrimonial selection must ignore distinctions of wealth and class and creed. The fit must wed the fittest, that is the keynote of Eugenics. Eugenics speaks with no uncertain voice on the "Colour question"—every race must work out its own salvation, and in the interests of each race there must be no intermarrying. It is a healthy and natural objection which causes a white woman to shudder at the idea of a mixed marriage. The mating of a black woman with a white man is seldom a wedding, it generally means degradation to both and excessive suffering to the victims—the woman and the child.

After we have done all we can to make marriage a more perfect institution we are only beginning the ideal of Eugenic life. We have to know more than we know at present of what characteristics are best combined with what others, and to know which unions are fraught with dangers both to the partners and still more to the offspring. The old Stirpiculturists have very much to say on the subject of "likes and contrasts" from the days of Byrd Powell up till the time when scientific Eugenics under Sir Francis Galton gave new light to the study: Phrenology, freed from its showman and charlatan element, may yet help us in our quest. For there is no divorce law which can ever cure the ills of ill-assorted marriage. Our ignorance may not be criminal, it is nevertheless deplorable. Science gathers increasing information about all other things and we spend our millions on investigating the prevention of utilisation of waste, shall we not hope that this great institution of marriage may too in its turn be the subject of our scientists', philosophers' and statisticians' concern. Marriage has its origin in the profoundest needs of social man. The raison d'etre of marriage is human happiness now and in the generations to follow. Throwing legislative obstacles in the way of marriage has never had any effect except the increase of illegitimacy. The scientific remedy here as elsewhere is enlightenment. We have to safeguard the race and educate the present generation. We cannot tell those who would marry more than we know ourselves, but every ascertained fact and every reasonable probability about marriage should be at the disposal of every candidate for the "holy order." The mere necessity of systematising our knowledge ready for distribution will be a gain, the sum of actual fact about the mating of various temperaments and characteristics may be larger than we think. Anyhow it offers a promising field of research. Eugenics will encourage the endowment of such knowledge, it will seek subsidies from the State towards its acquisition, it will strive to popularise it in every way until it will be much rarer than it is to-day unhappily to hear the complaints "If youth but knew," and "It might have been."

CHAPTER V

POSSIBILITIES OF RACE IMPROVEMENT

It is unnecessary to argue the desirability of race improvement. It is the avowed ultimate object of every religious, moral, social and individual reform. In the light of history we know that race improvement is possible. Degeneration is the scientists' formula for the theologian's "fall from grace," evolution is the Darwinian phrase for

"That far-off divine event
To which the whole creation moves."

The Eugenist does not say that religion, morality, and education are ineffective, he only claims that these great forces should apply to the foundations of society instead of being spent and dissipated in a thousand less important directions.

Eugenics is not a step in the dark. The theory is based on observation and its practice on a selection of the innumerable experiences of mankind. Since the first man married the first bride mankind has been unconsciously offering an accumulation of experiments in improvement, deterioration and stagnation of the race. It is only inexplicable reticence which has diverted man's study from these phenomena. Failure to appreciate relative values, the prejudice arising from a debased or immature morality, the bigotry of misunderstood religion and the dread of wounding prudish susceptibilities have led competent writers to devote to pigs and sheep volumes which should have had man for their subject. "The noblest study of mankind is man," but our naturalists have not advertised it sufficiently. Charles Darwin, whose powers of minute observation are admitted to have been supreme even by those who dispute his conclusions, recognised the racial bias against "the noblest study." Writing to A. R. Wallace in 1857 he said: "You ask whether I shall discuss 'man.' I think I shall avoid the subject, as so surrounded with prejudice; though I admit it is the highest and most interesting problem for the naturalist."

The old attempts to divide mankind into good and bad have failed beyond recall. The first lesson we can learn from a study of the past is to recognise the probably infinite variety of type which exists, not only in the attainments, but in the potentialities of various types of man and woman. We no longer wonder at differences of mentality when we know the variations in bodily form and structure. We see that some are capable of endurance, some are physically weak, some are almost leonine in strength. Each variation in strength may be united with differing degrees of other qualities, of sight, of motion, of temperament—there is no end to the combinations. We are well on the road to the elements of Eugenics when we have grasped two facts, the analysable distinctions between individuals, and the fact that broadly speaking a child is endowed with its essential characteristics from birth. The qualifications of the hereditary principle need not be set forth here. Darwin's theory is being modified in our day on important but not vital details. Eugenics is only interested in so far as we admit this broad generalisation to which no scholar of to-day would substantially demur.

We cannot in every case disentangle human characteristics with sufficient precision to warrant us in saying which combinations are desirable and which are undesirable. We can, however, get into our minds the idea that one good quality may be happily supplemented by another, or that certain characteristics might prove irreconcilable in combination. For instance strong sexuality allied to moral responsibility would prove an admirable combination, but the former quality in conjunction with weak mentality would work for certain ill. The marriage of near relations has been demonstrated to stereotype existent combinations, the evil is not as was once feared that the act was in itself categorically immoral and therefore followed by Nature's punishment. It amounted to the same thing in many cases because Nature's law is progress or retrogression; to stand still is to stultify the law of the universe. The highest and noblest physically, morally and mentally are the most complicated, and there is little danger that they will find their match amongst those with whom they are likely to marry. The risk of like marrying like is more inherently probable amongst the commonplace and mediocre. The danger becomes a terrible one when the lowest rung of the ladder is reached and it is here that intermarriage is most common if not invariable. The lowest degenerates, the most vulgar criminals the absolute failures, the "creatures who once were men" rarely have sexual unions of any sort or kind outside their own degraded circle. The unfit breed more of their kind and do not improve. The commonplace may by happy chance or on wise information mingle just those characteristics which raise the race to a higher level. The highest like those in the last category, may in the next generation lead to still higher heights or they may maintain their standard of efficiency, or their caste may sink to lower circles. In any of these cases of course there is the alternative that their race may be extinguished. All this is merely to state the case as it stands. There are few who dispute the facts, the Eugenic remedy is either not appreciated or it is ignored. It cannot be a subject of indifference whether the best types increase or the worst. It must matter to the race, it must seriously affect the present generation, it must be of increasing importance to each generation. Cruel, harsh, severe, repressive laws have been discarded as ineffective and inhuman. We cannot go back to an abortive policy which failed even a Torquemada. On the contrary we have repressed natural checks to population and must increasingly continue to do so wherever we discover new methods of foiling Nature's indiscriminate destructiveness. The stream of tendency cannot be dammed, we must adapt our social mill-wheels to the new channels which the river of time has cut in the fields of experience.

We must discard the old unscientific view of existence as an inexplicable riddle, of marriage as a lucky bag, of crime as a mere chance occurrence, of genius as a "sport," of events as casualties or accidents and of goodness as accessible to all and badness the deliberate choice of the wilful. A few years ago a well-known publisher exposed a huge poster advertising his encyclopædia. It was called "The Child; What will he become?" Two series of pictures were given, the top line indicating the gradual ascent of the child fortunate enough to read the encyclopædia. By easy stages he passed through the Sabbath school, emerged into the business office where he accumulated wealth and a cheerful countenance, he ascended into the paradise of benevolent baldness and appeared in the final picture a happy patriarch breathing out blessings and probably platitudes at every pore. Contrasted with these series, the bottom line pictorially followed the awful fate of the child who did not read this wonderful work. He deteriorated rapidly, first a pickpocket, then a forger, finally a murderer, and a drunkard all the time. This is the classic exaggeration of the unscientific view actually held by some well-meaning reformers. And if we ridicule this discredited theory of life why do we not frankly disavow the hopeless "reforms" which are the natural product of this haphazard view? We accept the doctrine on which Eugenics is based because all the facts conform it, but we continue to spend our time and money on methods of reform which have lost their root and now only cumber the ground.

The "points" of an animal have for ages been the subject of the breeders' successful efforts, but they are not more certainly inherited than are the form of a man's head, his stature, the colour of his eyes, and the length of his life, all of which are hereditary like the colour of a horse, the scent of a flower and the shape of an apple. Naturalists no more than farmers can with exactness predict that 173 live lambs will be born on one farm, that every flower of the same class will give equally abundant perfume, or that every fruit on the same tree will weigh just the same to an ounce. We are still more ignorant or at least equally ignorant about the exact results in a particular instance of the character of the individual offspring even when we are reasonably well acquainted with all its antecedents. We can say with certainty, however, as Dr. Karl Pearson says that "of all the children of a definite class of parents like A and B we can assert that a definite proportion will have a definite amount of any character of A and B, with a certainty as great as that of any scientific prediction whatever. I am not speaking from belief or from theory but simply from facts, from thousands of instances recorded by my fellow-workers or myself. Here is a great principle of life, something apparently controlling all life from its simplest to its most complex forms, and yet, though we too often see its relentless effects we go on hoping that at any rate we and our offspring shall be the exceptions to its rules. For one of us as an individual this may be true, but for the average of us all, for the nation as a whole, it is an idle hope. You cannot change the leopard's spots, and you cannot change bad stock to good; you may dilute it, but until it ceases to multiply, it will not cease to be." (National Life from the Standpoint of Science.) The reformer sees in these facts the basis of his highest hopes as certainly as he sees therein the condemnation of all attempts at reform which ignore these bed-rock truths. Permanent maintenance of good standards, gradual elimination of the hopelessly bad stock, and experimentation designed to utilise all the good elements on the border line between the desirable and the undesired—this is the Eugenist's programme in the immediate present. His ideal goes beyond this practicable programme, for the Eugenist aims at some final justification of Nature. Without worshipping Nature he desires to understand her processes and walk in harmony with her tendencies.

The most potent of all the beneficent influences in the organic world has been the law of Natural Selection. By "Law" of course we merely mean the observed invariable sequence of events, and whether or not this universe has a guiding Intelligence behind it, the "survival of the fittest" has taken its course by means of this particular law or process. It is impossible to deny that this selection has more often been instinctive than conscious. It is easy to predict that conscious intelligent selection may produce as real an improvement in the human race as has been obtained in the animal and vegetable kingdoms where man has so long directed the survival of the desired or elimination of undesired "points."

Patience, study, discrimination and courage are the principal weapons in the Eugenic armoury. With these qualities assured Eugenics may be trusted in the long run to outdistance all other competitors in the field of race improvement. Study is a sine qua non, because Eugenics means Probability based on Experience, and the more extensive our researches the safer our generalisations will be. Patience is needed because unlike other cures Eugenics will help the individual less than it will assist society, and it will always place the interests of the race first and foremost. Accordingly its cures will not be apparent in the current generation. This may discourage the unthinking, it will tire the hand-to-mouth reformer, the superficial will dismiss the whole thing as useless. Wisdom in discrimination will be essential because sometimes "the stone which the builders reject" has a way of becoming "the headstone of the corner." But when we have ascertained beyond reasonable doubt the qualities we want to preserve and the characteristics we desire to eliminate we must be courageous in the application of our remedy.

We look not only at the worst but also at the best when we ask ourselves can the Race be improved? The highest type of man known to men must be our model. We must constantly and actively believe that what man has been man may be. If mankind be truly one we are linked to the Grants as well as to the Guiteaus, to the saviours as well as to the assassins of society. Our kinship with the lowest must make us more merciful, our kinship with the highest may make us more ambitious to be contented with nothing short of the best.

CHAPTER VI

EDUCATION AND EUGENICS

A healthy wave of reaction seems setting in against the old ideal of "cramming" which once masqueraded as education. Already signs are apparent that in order to have a healthy mind a healthy body is necessary. A sentiment in favour of physical education is slowly arising and may some day be translated into statutes and administrative rule. At present the sentiment is a vague one and is not wholly free from the suspicion of ulterior motives connected with national defence. It cannot be gainsaid that the army and navy will gain in strength and efficiency by the improvement of the racial physique but the same forces might be equally increased by some new discovery in aviation, some new invention in machinery or some new combination in explosives peculiar to America. Methods of education must justify themselves first and last by their conformity to the physical, and moral and intellectual needs of the human basis of society. They must not be devoted to the development of a healthy manhood only, the interests of the race demand that healthy womanhood shall be the care of any truly national system of education. Until we have built up the body we are little likely to succeed in creating a race of pure-thinking, pure-living men and women. This is the universal need. Higher education, the highest intellectual culture is for the few, not for the wealthy few—but for the proved fit, for those whose antecedents and character show that their brain is capable of receiving and their powers are capable of using a fully developed education which would otherwise be a ridiculously wasted acquisition.

The intellectual education of the future will probably average a higher standard than at present but we must revise our criterion of judgment. We must realise that our current ideals tend rather towards making a nation of priggish inefficients than of happy, healthy home builders.

If our teachers have aimed in the past at cramming comparatively useless knowledge into every brain independent of individual capacity, it is not strange that our educational faults have been to neglect the physical side and to ignore the vital teaching which might have led our scholars in the direction of their own physical development. These two things must inevitably stand or fall together. If you neglect physical training it will be because you do not realise its importance. If you realise its importance you will not only devote your principal educational efforts towards its universal practice in the schools but you will see that nothing is left undone to induce the young to adopt in the privacy of their own lives the principles which make for physical perfection.

Heredity and environment alike teach this lesson. The child is father to the man, the parents of to-morrow are now being made. The weak should learn early their limitations, the strong should be taught how best to economise their strength. No Eugenist believes in over-emphasis of sexual knowledge, but every Eugenist believes in the absolute importance of early familiarity with the essential information of sex-life. To emphasise this knowledge would mean being guilty of the same kind of error as is at present prevalent. A knowledge of the laws of sex should never be separated from other physiological and moral education, its acquisition should be gradual, its full meaning should be so well prepared for that its physical manifestations in the youth of both sexes would be understood, without the necessity of a sudden jump from abysmal ignorance to overwhelming experience.

Co-education, the schooling together of boys and girls until puberty, is a step in the right direction. It familiarises children with each other in quite the best and most innocent manner; it is no more likely to create evil results than the daily life at home of the perfect family of boys and girls meeting under the protection of their own parents.

Co-education renders unnecessary that departing into separate schools which is so mysterious in early life. It aims at giving girls the benefit of boys' play, encouraging them in the boys' code of honour, and tending to prepare them for a citizenship they have to share with the boys whom they may even now regard as "chums." For boys the familiarity with girls' ways and girls' characteristics will help them to be courteous without being weak and to lose that shamefaced sex-consciousness which is the opposite to a healthy knowledge of the existence of another sex.

In the early years of infancy only the parents can impart information about sex to their own offspring, and generally speaking only the mother will be the desirable source of information. This in itself justifies the necessity of the Eugenist demand for educationally preparing girls for motherhood. In the nursery the time for teaching intimate things may be left to date itself. The earliest questions of a child fix the time when the earliest information must be given. When a child asks questions you either tell him the truth or a lie. The truth can be told so delicately that no one need blush to repeat it. A lie may be directly more indelicate and in its future results may be a source of deadly demoralisation. Children ask about the "secret" of birth when a baby brother or sister is born. Their questions and our answers are a frequent subject for jest, when the only reasonable excuse for our failure to impart accurate knowledge is either our own unfitness to teach, or our child's incapacity to understand. If the first is not incurable it should be the object of immediate study with a view to reform. The incapacity of youthful intelligence to grasp elementary facts is greatly exaggerated, but anyhow it is no excuse for deliberate deception. The immature mind can wait for knowledge, its development need not be prejudiced before it begins to know anything. If we cannot feed it on facts at least do not fill it with falsehood.

On entering school the children are introduced to a person whose profession is to teach. How easy now it would be to obtain a child's confidence, how easy to lead a child to believe that there is no hidden knowledge, no subject which is taboo, no function of a healthy body which is unhealthy, and no process of Nature which cannot be made an interesting and helpful study. To impart an unnecessary sense of shame to a child is a shocking outrage from which a sensitive soul never recovers. Exceptional children will require exceptional care but the average child need never know from experience the meaning of sexual shame. Healthy boys and girls will learn that as their parents made them they will one day themselves qualify for all those joys, pains, excitements and interests which are so intimately wrapt round the functions of parenthood. To prepare boys and girls to become parents may seem a big proposition. I am convinced it is practicable, desirable and in the best interests of the race. The human relationship, the human parentage, the human processes should be the foundation of natural history lessons. Botany and biology should be interesting because of their relation to humanity. Information about the human processes of life and sex should not be made contingent on the possibility of divulging it in scattered fragments incidental to remarks on the habits of polar bears or the functions of the stamen and pollen of the flower.

On this subject at least there is no possibility of permanent secrecy. The plan for Eugenic school-teaching is only a plea for the wise, discreet well-timed truth from a capable and trusted source, against indiscreet and often indecently ill-timed half-truth from the worst sources. Children need to be informed, warned and helped.

Why should it be regarded as indecent to give kindly warning against disease? Children are often over sensitive about fancied or discovered differences between themselves and other children, and about natural developments or even small defects which the uninformed mind magnifies into first-class abnormalities. They would often be reassured by learning of the enormous varieties which can exist within the average and the normal. Children should neither be frightened by the well-meant exaggerations which sometimes are used to warn children and growing youth from the very real evil results of self-abuse, nor should such evils be encouraged by a prudish ignoring of the possible danger. Masturbation can be shown to stand in the way of all that youth rightly values in its present happy school life and play, it can be proved to prevent the accomplishment of what every healthy school ideal demands as the future functions of maturity. Restraint is impossible because onanism is essentially a secret vice, and therefore when these appeals to reason, idealism, self-respect, and self-interest fail everything fails. Fear is opposed to the very basis of school honour. If the nobler motives are inadequate the physician is required rather than the teacher, for there is a pathological reason for such abnormal minds. The danger of contracting sexual diseases must be very carefully taught. The body must be saved but the soul must not be simultaneously lost. Sexual disease problems must not be mixed up with sexual morality, or we shall pervert the noblest part of youth. Sexual disease should be referred to, like all other sexual questions, as incidental to the whole subject of the body and its functions, abuses and diseases. The idea that any disease may justly be regarded as a fitting "punishment" for any particular crime, is as evil in its effect as it is vicious in its principle. To encourage the notification of every disease, especially the worst, is a public duty we can only evade at enormous cost in innocent lives. Grappling with the sexual scourge called syphilis is horribly hindered by the reticence, concealment and shame, directly or indirectly to be traced to a mistaken ethic about Nemesis.

To prepare children for parenthood involves finding a reasonable regard for fatherhood as well as for motherhood. No system of economics that relegates fatherhood to unimportance is good for the State. The boy must learn that the father has responsibilities, different from the mother's but worthy of his own very best. Fortunately the pages of history teem with illustrations of this theme for those who desire examples and warnings from the past, it may even be necessary to point out that the father's function has been over valued in our annals as compared with that of the still more important but less praised mother. Inasmuch, however, as the mother's function is so much more continuous than the father's, the perpetuation of such degree of perfection as a boy is endowed with must be secured by constant vigilance, lest he fail in the one great act which earns the right of giving his name to his offspring.

The Eugenic education of girls is generally easier than that of boys for many reasons. Girls see more than boys of the management of a home, they are used to children younger than themselves, they are fond of babies and will nurse dolls for an amusement, deriving much pleasure from a pastime fraught with Eugenic suggestiveness. Later on certain signs of adolescence precipitate explanations and stimulate inquiry. There is no need for any restrictions of the facilities women enjoy educationally. As with boys the best education should be given to those girls who show capacity for using it. It has never been claimed that culture should be withheld from a man, as inconsistent with fatherhood; motherhood must not be made an excuse for denying education. The safest policy is to make preparations for Life independent of preparations for a Career. The don and the bluestocking have to live, so have the cowboy and the cook. All must have the universal knowledge whereby they may serve their race as healthy parents of healthy children, even though the college, the study, the ranch and the kitchen have their own particular technicalities to be mastered by the interested individuals.

Of study in general Eugenics will find much to say. It is impossible to neglect any branch of knowledge. The human will no less than human necessity presses forward in every direction. We may be like King Solomon surrounded by material wealth and possessions, but, like him, if we are forced to choose between them and knowledge, the noblest thing within us will cry for knowledge. We must learn to discriminate between knowledge-values, and endeavour to frame our study-time so that even the least of us may be encouraged to learn all that we can. For those who can rapidly digest huge continents of study the prizes of scholarship are assured. It is not in the interests of Eugenics that knowledge should be acquired with this rapidity by those constitutionally unfitted for the strain. An educational system devised for men may not necessarily be suited to women equally anxious to know and willing to give as long a period to study. It may be found practicable on Eugenic grounds to give more facilities than we do for broken studies, for studies which go slower and last longer, and for studies where the honours are not given to those who can cram most in the least time.

It is impossible for any view of Eugenics in relation to education to ignore the terrible danger of child-labour. Economic consideration of this subject is common enough; it is time that Eugenics made its voice heard in denunciation of a system which cannot fail to demoralise the race if persisted in. The energy of a growing youth is required for building up his own constitution, and if his early labours are spent in occupations inconsistent with physical development he becomes a stunted weakling from whose loins we cannot expect the issue of a noble race. In the case of girl-labour the trouble is intensified, partly because the occupations of young girls are mostly of a description requiring a bodily posture which works untold evil in their future health and fitness. Needlework, laundry-work and typewriting are cases in point. Housework, with which every young girl should be familiar at a reasonably early age, becomes an intolerable check to womanly growth when overdone. Factory life and "home" labour are equally objectionable where children are forced by parental pressure, or the exigences of economic circumstance to earn bread for themselves or to contribute to the family sustenance.

I close this chapter abruptly, fully realising that Eugenic zeal has carried me beyond any narrow view of elementary education, and will inevitably lead the nation into economic controversy. The history of all reform encourages us to persevere. Neither fears of expense, nor metaphysical considerations of parental duty, nor sentimental objections to State intrusion have prevented a nation (when faced with a foreign foe) pledging all its resources, taking sons from mothers and husbands from wives, and using land, railways and stores to prosecute a war deemed necessary for national defence. I am convinced that we have only to realise the national danger and we shall heartily follow the Eugenic lead, even if it costs us the price of a fifth-rate war.

CHAPTER VII

EUGENICS AND THE MODERN FEMINIST MOVEMENT

Eugenics is not essentially concerned with the right to vote nor is Eugenics specially interested in such abstract questions as the relative voting qualifications of the sexes. If these things really weighed at all Eugenics would naturally favour fitness instead of sex as the qualification for electoral enfranchisement. At present Eugenics views the feminist movement from the point of view of political power as a means to national efficiency. This standpoint is the more natural because there is every reason to believe that while the objective of the feminist is nominally Votes for Women it is actually an assertion of woman's all-round equality with men. I believe it will be a perilous enterprise, fraught with grave danger to the State if women successfully organise as a sex-party, prepared to study every question from the special interests or supposed interests of women. However much this definite policy may be repudiated it is a genuine danger, to which a prolonged suffrage agitation is bound, ostensibly or unintentionally, to contribute. It is to the interest of all who do not take a sex-party view of citizenship to abbreviate this struggle. It seems illogical, unnatural and undesirable that there should be a sex-basis of citizenship rights. All deprecation of anything even remotely approaching a sex-war is an argument for the acknowledgment of Women's claim to electoral equality with men. It is incredible that the mere extension of the franchise can create a revolution; a revolution is historically rather to be expected from refusing the suffrage to a class containing intelligent, capable law-abiding adults.

Let us not deceive ourselves, however, as to the real meaning of the claim for women's electoral emancipation. Whether that demand is granted or not the moral and intellectual driving-force of the agitation comes from a genuine reforming spirit, which will succeed with or without the vote in elevating woman to a position more worthy of civilisation than she has hitherto occupied. So much is certain to those who recognise in Mrs. Chapman Catt, Dr. Anna Shaw and the English Suffragettes the inspiration of Mary Woolstonecraft, the radical pioneer who first said "Woman must be free." A conspiracy of men to hinder women's emancipation might provoke a sex-war, the granting of such freedom as women claim can only end in mutual honour. Women will learn to realise and respect the differences between men and women when those differences do not wear the unmistakable taint of inequalities. The Eugenists' hope is for a peaceful solution, for the peace of the home is the hope of the child. The child is apt to be forgotten when men and women quarrel.

There are undoubtedly many property questions mixed up with the electoral claim, and the former have a genuine Eugenic side to them. It is not in the interests of the race that mothers should be in any doubt as to their immunity from financial worry during child-birth pains, or that they should have to consider any merely sordid question in deciding whether or not a perfectly healthy mother should increase the nation's stock of perfectly fit citizens. The position of a wealthy man's wife in the present day is often an anomalous one. Where the husband was rich at the time of his wedding, marriage-contracts usually protect the wife's interests to some extent. In the much commoner cases of gradually increasing wealth, of wealth coming unexpectedly or as the result of years of protected operations, the wife depends absolutely on her husband's good will. Often enough her exertions have helped to find this fortune. Her influence on his life is frequently an indispensable asset. Her care of the children she has borne give her a sentimental claim which justice cannot ignore. It is intolerable that husbands becoming rich men should be entitled to speculate and gamble with the whole of what should be considered the joint capital of the family, without obtaining the consent of the actual working partner. He should be at liberty neither to "deal" unauthorisedly with what might be considered the family's share of his fortune, nor to alienate by testamentary legacy anything beyond a fair proportion away from those who have the first claim upon his goods. In order to defraud his creditors or for less criminal reasons a man has often used his wife as a convenient banker. It will be easier to check this species of cheating when the wife herself becomes a creditor.

In the poorest circles where man and woman are equally destitute of worldly wealth this woman's property question is too inseparably mixed with the whole economic problem to be stated solely in terms of Eugenics. Eugenics does not profess to point out the lines on which the problem of poverty is to be solved. Eugenics only says that certain conditions (inconsistent with destitution) have to be observed if we want the race to improve and to save the nation from absolute decay. It is up to our politicians to find the means by which these conditions can be observed. A nation converted to the gospel of Eugenics will not boggle at providing the means for saving itself.

Middle-class women have a genuine grievance which is becoming articulate. The women-workers claim equal wages for equal work, and married women claim wages for the work they perform as housekeepers, nurses or cooks, or all three. If there is anything at all in the idea of attracting the best workers by high wages the women will win. It will be a misfortune to Eugenics if for any monetary reason the best women are attracted to commercial careers rather than to domestic duties, but women-workers will succeed by combination while wives will win only if legislation favours them. Legislation must and will be forthcoming to prevent the comparative attractiveness of motherhood from sinking still lower in the scale than at present.

The most important question which many suffragists are preparing to face is to whom shall women look for their support. There is of course for the daughters of the rich an inheritance which places them above the vulgar struggle which ninety per cent. of our women have to face. For this great majority the alternatives to State-maintenance are generally speaking marriage or the labour-market. There is much to be said for the State-provision of maintenance for motherhood, which is elsewhere referred to. The principle is neither new nor revolutionary. Most States make some provision of the kind, and this State-provision is often excellent in efficiency but frequently quite demoralising in the restrictions with which it is hedged. Obviously with no Eugenic inspiration State-helps of the kind can never be anything but a stop-gap which self-respecting women will not seek voluntarily and which will always be given grudgingly. Its conditions will no longer degrade but will tend towards race improvement by encouraging the fit and warning the weak and diseased. For this double purpose the State will employ ladies to visit poor mothers so as to make sure that at least no mother shall want for food, shelter and the best medical attention, while she is assisting in what will be universally regarded as the highest and best interests of the nation. If State-subventions of this kind are beset with restrictions, what are we to say to "charitable" enterprises. Some few are ideal institutions, the vast majority are only justifying their existence by doing badly what would be otherwise left undone. Some exist merely because medical students must have some experience of maternity cases, sometimes the accommodation for mothers is so scanty compared with the number of students that many score of students attend a single mother, whose experience in such a case is not an enviable one.

Neither charity nor the present limited State-aid touch the larger question. It would almost seem as if the State and the charities had a grudge against motherhood. It is as if some monstrous misunderstanding of Malthusianism had led these authorities to believe that the interests of the race demanded the accentuation of the primal course. "In sorrow," indeed, do the poor "bring forth children." There is a prejudice too against the noblest emotions of motherhood. Cases are common where the relieving authorities, public or voluntary, faced with the absolute inability of a parent to contribute towards a child's keep, undertake the child's care under conditions which exclude the parents' continued interest in the child's welfare. A mother unexpectedly widowed is "relieved" of her four young children who are sent sometimes to different orphanages, often at a distance from the mother who loves them and who would be their very best guardian. She has to find work amongst strangers to support herself, while losing money every "visiting day" if she can anyway get to see her children, whose aggregate keep costs actually more than would comfortably maintain them and their mother under ideal conditions. It is this almost fiendish masculine administration of the maternal functions of the public authorities which women most vehemently protest against. There seems no remedy for it except a recognition that a man cannot be a mother, not even a step-mother.

Apart from the maternal side of woman's life there is her individual life to consider, and while this is of enormous importance to herself its chief interest to Eugenists (as such) is that only out of healthy and happy conditions of womanhood can a noble motherhood be expected to grow. Slave-mothers are apt to breed slave-children, and still worse for the race slave-women are disinclined to become mothers. It is of course unfair to see no distinction between slavery which professes no fine sentiment towards its chattel objects, and the refined system which places woman on a pedestal and worships her but denies her the elementary rights of citizenship. The Eugenist ideal of marriage is the union of equality, two citizens joining together in love and wisdom and with such sanction of the State and the Church as may be, with resultant harmony of life and its fruit in an increase of the truest wealth any State can possess, namely well-conceived, well-formed, and well-matured men and women.

In the Eugenist State there will be a determined enmity to the increased generations of the criminal, the weak-minded and the diseased. But if reform is forced on women by men, instead of being the spontaneous decision of a genuine democracy, the grossest tyranny will be perpetuated (however wise its object, humane its methods and Eugenic its result). A benevolent despotism might be endured in its disposition of the issues of war, the production of wealth, or the distribution of honours, nothing but the sovereign will of the people can be tolerated in the Eugenic field, and here if nowhere else woman being essentially concerned must have an equal voice with man. Where women cannot be convinced that Eugenic reform is in the interests of the race we must trust to personal persuasion, individual example and such public opinion as we are capable of influencing. The powers of the State must not be invoked in the face of popular protest, it will be to the interests of Eugenists that such protest shall be able to express itself in the ballot-box instead of by surreptitious evasion or mob-law.

The double standard in morals must go. Whatever our standard may be it must be colour-blind as regards sex. The modern feminist movement is in harmony with Eugenic science, in insisting on this point being made clear. For ages past masculine hypocrisy has been able to exact from the opposite sex a crushing worship of Mrs. Grundy, by the simple expedient of ruling men out of the conventions they dictated to women.

The time has come for a candid reconsideration of moral problems on the basis of sex-equality. It may be that some fine sentiments will vanish, perhaps women will descend from the dizzy height where they are supposed to dwell. Truth at least will gain, pretence will give place to reality and we shall be capable of postulating a new and better morality based on the essential facts of life. To the consideration of the best possible life for men and women must be added the Eugenic claims of the race. We live and die but the race continues, heirs of our perfection, inheritors of our defects. We pass, but we must think of those to whom this heritage passes. The strong woman mated to the strong man is proud of a posterity which will do them honour. The woman-movement aims at removing the obstacles to this endeavour. The tragedy of the woman's life is when either her own or her husband's unfitness to bear anything but a tainted stock is disregarded by law, custom and the brutality of lustful bestiality. She who might be, as she desires to be, the guardian of the nation's truest interests, is overpowered and compelled to be the medium of national pollution. This knowledge strengthens the women's agitation; the determination to end such a shameful degradation makes the women's movement irresistible.

CHAPTER VIII

POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE EUGENICS

This little volume would sadly fail to convey its author's meaning if dogmatism stood in the way of persuasion, or authority seemed to be claimed for the tentative suggestions herein outlined. There is no immediate danger that Eugenic principles will suddenly rush society into extreme action. The probabilities are quite in the opposite direction. We shall continue to see what has always been observed by thinkers, namely, "Decency and custom starving truth, and blind authority beating with his staff the child which might have led him." Valuable experiments are delayed by prejudice, and Eugenists have only too good ground for complaint that the scientific spirit is thwarted by prejudiced opposition to new ideas. The very absence of dogmatism which characterises the genuine thinker serves as the basis of opposition in his experiments. Because he does not glibly guarantee universal success like a patent-pill advertiser nothing whatever is done to obtain a criterion of judging how far his reasonable proposals can succeed. The failure of all other attempts to improve the race may force upon the public the necessity of Eugenic experiments. As has been said more than once, philanthropy has failed, politics has failed, rescue work has failed, perhaps Eugenics may not fail, for it is based on the impregnable rock of science, it proceeds on the sound lines of prevention, it aims to start at the beginning of things, to build up a new race if not of supermen at least of sound healthy human beings.

The lethal chamber is not a Eugenic remedy. It is the last heart-broken despairing cry of the old unscientific system. It is the only final alternative to Eugenics. It means that man has failed. It has neither sense, sentiment, nor science for its justification. It substitutes murder for moral method. Eugenics on the other hand starts out with the principle that there is nothing so sacred as life. That the lethal chamber for the aged, diseased, infirm, and unfit is barbarous and immoral, that it is utterly indefensible, and would be absolutely ineffective if not ridiculously impracticable. There is not much need to waste further consideration on a project from which every healthy citizen naturally revolts. It has to be categorically repudiated lest it should be mistakenly regarded as a Eugenic proposal.

Abortion and infanticide are equally condemned by Eugenists, although on different grounds. Infanticide is murder. It destroys the life of an actual human being. Infanticide, though doubtless less reprehensible in degree than the lethal chamber idea, is in principle indistinguishable therefrom. It is the antithesis to the idea of Eugenics. The state which can contemplate child-murder without horror is far indeed from being a humane State. Sensitiveness to suffering is a sign of civilisation. Wherever we find a live human being, however hopeless its condition may appear, universal experience has shown us that man's advance from savagedom depends on his using all his resources to save the final spark of life which remains. "While there's life there's hope" is a maxim which is based on the greatest need of mankind. Eugenics deplores waste of effort that this entails, but there can be no doubt about its rightness or its justification by the universal consensus of progressive races. Abortion may be condemned on religious and moral grounds, but the overwhelming weight of medical opinion against it is based on physiological reasons. No woman can be guilty of this practice without the greatest risks of physical damage. She jeopardises her life immediately and she generally deteriorates her capacity for future usefulness. Eugenics will find a sphere of usefulness in the spread of this piece of saving knowledge. Unmarried mothers and mothers in all spheres of society are terribly ignorant of the dangers of this common death-trap. The mere fact that the sale and procuration of drugs and use of means for purposes of abortion are criminal acts is not sufficient. The idea is prevalent that it is only the police who have to be evaded. Our laws are not empiric, but their reason is seldom apparent to those who are expected to obey them. A few drugs, or a few pills—how easy it all seems—and how fatal. Eugenists do not want the law altered, but they want the added deterrent of reason. There may be a chance of evading the law, there is none of evading the bodily injury which inevitably accompanies abortion.

I have already shown that Malthusian arguments do not appeal to Eugenists. This is not to say that Malthusian methods are also condemned. Malthusian prognostications have not been fulfilled, its statistics have been superseded, and its conclusions modified by the process of the suns. The world does not contain too many people, it only contains too many of the wrong sort of people. Production has not only kept pace with population, it has raced it. Intensive cultivation, new treatments of the soil, scientific rotation of crops and scientific agriculture rendering rotation unnecessary, new economic inducements to cultivate hitherto waste lands, discoveries and inventions of all kinds have taken away from Malthusianism the unduly pessimistic philosophy with which it once tried to frighten the race. Malthusianism will always be remembered with gratitude, however, for its practical methods and for its refusing to confuse marriage with procreation. That distinction still needs to be borne in mind because otherwise half our Eugenic efforts will be wasted by directing ourselves to a problem which does not exist. It is impossible to assail the proposition that a moral married life is consistent with a prudential check on increased population. This prudential check need not necessarily be a material one. Even a Tolstoyan may be a married man. Abstinence in due season in the case of normal adults is or may be Nature's plan for increasing virility at other seasons. The most prolific parents may be pardoned for resting occasionally from their protracted persistency of race-production. Eugenists object to weakening virility by sacrificing fitness for mere numbers, but it is in the essence of their demand that the race shall, "increase and multiply and replenish the earth." The objection (which Eugenists share with the majority of the American public) to anything remotely resembling infanticide must have some definite proof of its sincerity. Eugenists denounce the New Decalogue of current morality which says:

"Thou shalt not kill,—but needs not strive
Officiously to keep alive."

The Eugenist does not desire to detract from the responsibility of parenthood, but rather to increase it. On the other hand whatever steps may be taken against neglectful, vicious or unnatural parents, the race interests demand that the child shall not suffer. A new responsibility must be added to parentage—the parent of the race is the State, which must be vigilant to protect the child from the faults and follies of fathers who fail in their most essential duties. A child should be guaranteed loving parents or failing these a never failing foster-parent, in a paternal State.

In the recognition of its duties as Step-mother, the State will in self-defence protect its maternal arms from the influx of undesirables. The universal endowment of Motherhood may be a socialist dream rather than a Eugenic practical proposal, but even the Eugenists' demand for the State to act as step-mother involves an expenditure which will probably amount to the cost of a national war. It is part of our case that the money spent is an investment certain to pay big dividends in the shape of increased national efficiency. It is in any case inevitable. Public sentiment cannot tolerate this idiotic waste of the noblest of all raw material. It will be not the least of its advantages that the State will at length be directly interested, financially and therefore most deeply, in stopping the supply of the unfit—a bad investment at the best, requiring a maximum of trouble, and a continuous source of damage. The sterilisation of the unfit has become a regular experience in a number of States. It has outlived its detractors wherever it has been practised. It remains necessary now only to convert its objectors in other States, and to gradually extend its beneficent operation and the sphere of its activities. Naturally it begins with the habitual criminal. Of absolute success in the States where it has been tried it will be far more effective when it is applied in the more populous centres and when it becomes impossible for the permanently criminal to escape its attention. Sterilisation as now recommended and performed by our highest scientific authorities is in no sense cruel, it is not even painful. It must not be confounded with the mutilations of earlier centuries, it leaves the person operated on possessed of every faculty for use and capacity for happiness, it only takes away the power of reproduction. The first extension of the plan has been to the certified hopeless idiot. These two classes and the inmates of homes for incurable drunkards represent a very easy definition of those who should be treated to this operation. In the case of the criminal it will enable very great mercy to be extended. Sterilisation will not be a mere added infliction of a degrading punishment, it will substitute an awful warning for a long imprisonment. Only those criminals will be sterilised whose chronic criminality is proved after repeated convictions and form a study of what facts are ascertainable as to their hereditary history. They will leave the jail knowing that society regards them as unworthy to be parents, or if they themselves are also too dangerous to be let at large their close confinement will be rarely necessary.

The Eugenist does not propose to extend the operation of sterilisation beyond the classes above mentioned. It does not, however, regard these as exhausting the categories of undesirable procreators. Already there are numerous suffering and semi-cured adults whose children would inherit the diseases, weaknesses, and evil tendencies of their ancestors. Tuberculosis, syphilis and St. Vitus's Dance sufferers are specimens of this class. As Eugenics advances we may learn more of the racial poisons, and a scientific black-list may be drawn up of those hereditary taints which inflict most harm on the community. Doctors should have to notify the authorities of these diseases and the patient should be encouraged to frankness and helped to a cure. In all such cases kind but firm warning must be given against procreation. The failure to heed such warning should inevitably result in imprisonment—a very short term will suffice, for with Eugenics established as a rule of society, the State could afford to be patient. The elimination of the unfit would make rapid strides, and the offspring of tainted parents evading the law in one generation would be less and less likely to escape in the next generation.

It may be that the State will be contented with the negative side of Eugenics. It may be that it is the more important because we are daily increasing the elements which if not checked will destroy our civilisation. Negative Eugenics is as imperative a necessity as the protection of our coasts from invasion or the destruction of potato blight.

Positive Eugenics represents the attempt to encourage breeding from every healthy stock. Its methods will vary with the views of society from time to time. Its machinery will be by State-interference or by private experimental enterprise according as socialist or individualist ideals are current. I do not wish to commit Eugenists who are by no means agreed on this point, but my personal view is that individual experiments cannot possibly go far beyond public opinion, whereas, "the State can do no wrong" if it endows, undertakes and is responsible for experiments limited in extent but far reaching in principle, so long as such experiments are based on scientific probabilities and are supported by enlightened competent judges and do not outrage the humane sentiment of the race. Drastic individual experiments, involving however few people, will always be subject to interference at critical moments by mobs, governments, vigilance societies, etc. It is not wise to ignore this factor; it is not necessary even to deprecate it; nay, it has its advantages. The omnipotence of the State rests not merely in its power of arms; a State experiment, even though not initiated by the people, can be stopped by the people. The electors' power ultimately to interfere makes for tolerance.

While drastic experiments must be left to democracy acting through its elected governors, there is ample scope for other features of positive Eugenics. One of these is the endowment of worthy young couples too poor otherwise to marry. The ideal of celibacy stands self-condemned. Where successful it means race-suicide, where unsuccessful it means hypocrisy and a thousand other horrors. What then can we think of the fact that millions of dollars have been spent in endowing monasteries, nunneries, brotherhoods and all the other ancient and modern forms of celibate stultification of probably perfectly potential parents. Add to these millions the other millions spent in endowing the worst and least capable in prisons, asylums and in often demoralising charities. Then bear in mind that the endowment of the healthy for Eugenic purposes, for the regeneration of mankind, is absolutely unknown. A millionaire who loves his kind could scarcely do better with his money than the establishment, under proper supervision, of a fund which would encourage human efficiency. There is no fame so lasting as the glory which would attach to such a fund. It would be greater than a Nobel name, its prizes would be more keenly competed for than for "Marathon" or "America" cups. Its winners would become a new aristocracy, and for the first time in the history of the world noble families would be founded on a blending of ancestral and personal merit, aristocratic, indeed, because the best become personally powerful, but absolutely democratic in that neither class, caste nor creed are allowed to count in the selection. From this aristocracy a new knighthood might be formed. Degeneration would mean exclusion. Improvement would mean increased honours. New standards of efficiency, mental, moral and physical, would be evolved for the guidance of the race. An American model of this kind would speedily find imitators abroad. The real struggle for race supremacy would be concentrated on the Eugenic groups. Competitions, challenges and contests between national groups might eclipse in interest all the other exhibits in future International Expositions.

The daily work of Eugenic education is independent of these short cuts to the Eugenics millennium. The dissemination of ascertained facts about heredity is urgently necessary. It may be news to many that there are hundreds of institutions throughout our land where accurate information has been carefully collected for many years. The antecedents of inmates of prisons, asylums and "homes" have been patiently scheduled, classified and studied. Only money and public interest are wanted to make this vital information known. Investigations of this kind need also to be made universal. It is not enough that institutions should relieve the present sufferers. They can only justify their existence by contributing to our desire for the eradication of suffering. It should be made a condition of public support that the most useful kind of inquiries should be made, and be placed at the disposal of all who are interested. It is useless throwing pages of undigested statistics at the public, this is mere waste of effort. With the facts and figures in existence and accessible, centres of scientific study such as a Eugenics laboratory should be, will be able to present to the public the living issues which those dead figures mean. It would, however, be contrary to the spirit of Eugenics to confine attention to the sadder side of statistics. It is of infinite importance that we should understand and cultivate fitness, and therefore we want the systematic collection of family histories relating to our noblest, best and worthiest. Here State-interference is out of place. Voluntary work on the part of enthusiastic Eugenists would soon succeed in obtaining information of great value. Few families would refuse to impart through private channels ancestral facts, particularly as the mere inquiry would imply a compliment. The Chinese worship of ancestors would have a modern scientific interpretation, in the honour which would be won by the founders of fine families, a study of whose history would be an inspiration and a help to the race.

The advocates of Eugenics are prepared for small beginnings but they have enormous faith in its future. There is no desire and no need to exaggerate the present tentative claims. To the many it is still necessary to ask for the intellectual hospitality of impartial consideration. Even to the convinced we only appeal for judicious experiment. To the religious our work comes as a harmonious exercise of the best with which the Eternal Will of the Universe has endowed us.

To the evolutionist Eugenics represents the study and expression of Nature's plan. To the humane our work appeals as it assures mankind of a curtailment of human suffering. We lay new laurels on graves of the honoured dead and write new epitaphs glorifying the ancestors of the worthy living. We reverence the cradle containing the hope of the race, we think of past and present as the womb of the future.

APPENDIX A

Maternity Maintenance, or State Subventions to Mothers

MEDICAL ATTENDANCE

First and foremost comes the need for qualified medical and nursing attendance on the mother and the newly born infant. At present many mothers go almost unattended in their hour of need; many tens of thousands more have attendance that comes too late, or is quite inadequately qualified; hundreds of thousands of others fail to get the nursing and home assistance that is required to prevent long-continued suffering and ill-health to mothers and children alike. The local health authorities ought to be required to provide within its area qualified medical attendance, including all necessary nursing, for all cases of child-birth of which it has received due notice. There is no reason why this should not be done as a measure of public health, free of charge to the patient, in the same way as vaccination is provided for all who do not object to that operation; and on the same principle that led to the gratuitous opening of the hospitals, to any person suffering from particular diseases quite irrespective of his means. What is, however, important is that the necessary medical attendance and nursing shall always be provided. If the community prefers to recover the cost from such patients as can clearly afford to pay—say, for instance, those having incomes above a prescribed amount—instead of from everybody in the form of rates and taxes, this (as with the payment for admission to an isolation hospital) may be an intermediate stage. In one way or another, there must be no child-birth without adequate attendance and help to the mother.

Pure Milk

At present many tens of thousands of infants perish simply from inanition in the first few days or weeks after birth. In town and country alike many hundreds of thousands of families find the greatest difficulty, even when they can pay for it, in buying milk of reasonable purity and freshness, or in getting it just when they require it, or often indeed in getting it at all. The arguments in favour of the municipalisation of the milk supply are overwhelming in strength. But an even stronger case can be made out for the systematic provision by the Local Health Authority, to every household in which a birth has taken place, of the necessary quantity of pure, fresh milk, in sealed bottles, delivered every day. Whatever else is left undone, the necessary modicum of pure milk, whether taken by the mother or prepared for the child, might at any rate be supplied as the birth-right of every new-born citizen.

Maternity Pensions.

The next step must be the establishment of a system of maternity pensions free, universal, and non-contributory. If they be not universal, they will come as of favour, and be open to the objections rightly urged against all doles, public or private. A contributory scheme could only exist as part of a universal sick fund. If the contributions were optional the poorest mothers would get no pension at all. If they were compulsory on a fixed scale, the scheme would still further impoverish those it is intended to benefit. If the contributions were on a sliding scale, the pension would be smallest just where it is most necessary. To work out a pension scheme on the basis of compensation for loss of the mother's earnings would at once involve a sliding scale such as is in force in Germany and Austria, which would be unfair in the working, and benefit the poorest least. Moreover, the theory is fallacious, inasmuch as it views the woman as a worker and not as a mother. Let the pension be regarded rather as the recompense due to the woman for a social service, second to none that can be rendered. The time will come when the community will set a far higher value on that service than it does at present. But at present the main point is to tide the mother over a time of crisis as best we may.

How long should the pension last? The average duration of a maternity case inside a hospital appears to be a fortnight. The normal period during which upper class mothers keep their beds is three weeks, but for some time after leaving bed, the mother is incapable of any active work without harm to herself. Many internal diseases and nervous complaints as well as a good deal of the drinking among women, have their origin in getting about too soon. For some weeks at least, whether the mother nurses her baby or not, she requires much more than ordinary rest and nourishment. These considerations apply also, though in a less degree, to the period preceding confinement.

Under the law of Great Britain, the period of enforced cessation from factory work is four weeks. The same period is prescribed in Holland and Belgium. In Switzerland the period is eight weeks.

These laws, though of great value, are often cruel in the working, as they deprive the woman of wages without compensation just at the time she needs money most. The result is they are often evaded. Germany and Austria have recognised this. In Germany women are forbidden to work for six weeks after confinement. But the insurance law of Germany provides women with free medical attendance, midwife and medicine, and in addition with an allowance not exceeding seventy-five per cent of her customary wage for the six weeks. There is further a provision that pregnant women unable to work should be allowed the same amount for not more than six weeks previous to confinement. A similar insurance system exists in Austria and Hungary. In some parts of Germany, the municipality still goes further. In Cologne, the working mother is given a daily grant to stay at home and suckle her child, and visitors see that this condition is fulfilled. The Cologne system has been adopted by some municipalities in France. In Leipsic, every illegitimate child becomes a ward of the municipality, which puts it out to nurse with certified persons who must produce it for inspection on demand.

These provisions enable the government of Germany to enforce the law against the employment of women in the last period of pregnancy without hardship to them. The compensation given to German mothers is already felt to be insufficient, but there is a difficulty in making it more generous arising from the fact that the system is a scheme of insurance; the benefits cannot be increased without a rise in the contribution. In a free pension scheme, this difficulty will not occur. A small beginning might be made by way of experiment to familiarise the public with the advantage of caring for maternity, with a knowledge that its scope could be extended indefinitely without dislocation of the scheme. But the period like the amount must be substantial even at first. If the pension is to have any permanent value it should extend over a period of at least eight weeks: about two weeks before and six weeks after the date on which the birth is expected to take place.

The above is a brief resumé of the essential features of the British Fabian Society's scheme for the Endowment of Motherhood. In "Fabian Tract No. 149" (from which these extracts are made) $2.50 per week is suggested as a reasonable maternity allowance.

APPENDIX B.

Sterilisation of the Unfit.

The State Legislatures of California, Pennsylvania, Oregon, Indiana and Connecticut have already passed measures to secure this object. On February 10th, 1907, Indiana passed the following act:—

"An Act entitled an Act to prevent procreation of confirmed criminals, idiots, imbeciles, and rapists—providing, that superintendents or boards of managers of institutions where such persons are confined shall have the authority, and are empowered to appoint a committee of experts, consisting of two physicians, to examine into the mental condition of such inmates.

"Whereas heredity plays an important part in the transmission of crime, idiocy, and imbecility, therefore, be it enacted by the General Assembly of the State of Indiana, that on and after the passage of this act, it shall be compulsory for each and every institution in the State entrusted with the care of confirmed criminals, idiots, rapists, and imbeciles, to appoint upon its staff, in addition to the regular institution physician, two skilled surgeons of recognised ability, whose duty it shall be, in conjunction with the chief physician of the institution, to examine the mental and physical condition of such inmates as are recommended by the institutional physician and board of managers.

"If in the judgment of this committee procreation is inadvisable and there is no probability of improvement of the mental condition of the inmate, it shall be lawful for the surgeons to perform such operation for the prevention of procreation as shall be decided safest and most effective. But this operation shall not be performed except in cases that have been pronounced unimprovable."

In August, 1909, the Connecticut State Legislature enacted the following:—

"An Act concerning operations for the prevention of Procreation.—Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives in General Assembly convened:

"Section 1.—The directors of the State prisons and the superintendents of State Hospitals for the insane at Middletown and Norwich are hereby authorised and directed to appoint for each of said institutions, respectively, two skilled surgeons, who, in conjunction with the physician or surgeon in charge at each of said institutions, shall examine such persons as are reported to them by the warden, superintendent, or the physician or surgeon in charge, to be persons by whom procreation would be inadvisable.

"Such board shall examine the physical and mental condition of such persons, and their record and family history so far as the same can be ascertained, and if in the judgment of the majority of said board, procreation by any such person would produce children with an inherited tendency to crime, insanity, feeble-mindedness, idiocy, or imbecility, and there is no probability that the condition of any such person so examined will improve to such an extent as to render procreation by such person advisable, or, if the physical or mental condition of any such person will be substantially improved thereby then the said board shall appoint one of its members to perform the operation of vasectomy or oöphorectomy, as the case may be, upon such person. Such operation shall be performed in a safe and humane manner, and the board making such examination, and the surgeon performing such operation, shall receive from the State such compensation, for services rendered, as the warden of the State prison or the superintendent of either of such hospitals shall deem reasonable.

"Section 2.—Except as authorised by this act, every person who shall perform, encourage, assist in or otherwise promote the performance of either of the operations described in Section 1 of this Act, for the purpose of destroying the power to procreate the human species: or any person who shall knowingly permit either of such operations to be performed upon such person—unless the same be a medical necessity—shall be fined not more than one thousand dollars, or imprisoned in the State prison not more than five years, or both."

In California, in 1909, the legislature passed a statute which provides that whenever in the opinion of the medical superintendent of any State hospital, or the superintendent of the California Home for the Care and Training of Feeble-minded Children, or of the resident physician in any State prison, it would be conducive to the benefit of the physical, mental or moral condition of any inmate of such home, hospital or state prison, to be asexualised, then such superintendent or resident physician shall call into consultation the General Superintendent of State Hospitals and the Secretary of the State Board of Health, and they shall jointly examine into all the particulars of the case, and if, in their opinion, or in the opinion of any two of them, asexualisation will be beneficial to such inmate, patient, or convict, they may perform the same.

The British Commissioners in Lunacy in their 63rd Report to the Lord Chancellor, 1909, briefly reviewing the Report of the Royal Commission on the care and Control of the Feeble-minded, say:

"The Royal Commission devoted much attention to the causation of mental defect, and arrived at the conclusion that feeble-mindedness is largely inherited; that prevention of mentally defective persons from becoming parents would tend to diminish the numbers of such persons in the population; and that, consequently, there are the strongest grounds for placing mental defectives of each sex in institutions where they will be detained and kept under effectual supervision as long as may be necessary. Public opinion would not, the Royal Commission think, sanction legislation directed to the prevention of hereditary transmission of mental defect by surgical or other artificial measures, and they regard restrictions on the marriage of persons of unsound mind as inadvisable, in view of the fact that this form of mental disability is often of a limited or temporary character. As respects, however, congenital and incurable forms of mental defect, no such considerations apply, and the only remedy is to place persons so suffering under such restrictions as to make procreation impossible. The Royal Commission were evidently much impressed by the evidence they received, which we can from our own experience amply corroborate, of the large number of weak-minded women and girls to be found in the work-houses throughout the country, who go there to be delivered of illegitimate children, and they invite your Lordship and the Secretary of State for the Home Department to consider whether the existing law provides adequate protection for mentally defective persons against sexual crime and immorality....

Sterilisation of men can be effectively achieved by simple vasectomy or section of the vas deferens, and of women by the almost equally simple and harmless method of ligature of the Fallopian tubes (Kehrer's method as advocated by Kisch). It would appear that both these operations may be effected by skilled hands in a few minutes with a minimum of pain and inconvenience, and they possess the immense advantage that the sexual glands are preserved, and no organ removed from the body.[1]

(1) It is probable, also, that the method of sterilisation by X-rays may some day acquire practical importance. In this case there is no operation at all, though the effects do not last for more than a few years. This might be an advantage in some cases. See British Medical Journal, August 13th, 1904; ib. March 11th, 1905; ib. July 6th, 1907; ib. August 21st, 1909."

[1] (Havelock Ellis in the "Eugenics Review," London, Eng.)

According to Dr. Havelock Ellis Swiss alienists are unanimously in favour of the sterilisation of the mentally degenerate classes and hold that this matter should be regulated by law. Switzerland is the first European State which has adopted sterilisation as an alternative to the "indeterminate sentence" in the case of confirmed abnormalities and prisoners convicted of serious sexual offences against children. At Wil in Berne, two women and two men were incarcerated in the cantonal asylum. All were defectives but not strictly speaking insane. Children had already been born in each case. To prevent further procreative degeneracy sterilisation was suggested and agreed to by the four persons who welcomed the operation as an alternative to detention. The result has justified the experiment. According to the Eugenics Review there has actually been a marked change in the characters of the individuals and there is certainly no danger of their weaknesses being reproduced at the expense of the coming generation.

THE END

Transcriber Notes

There is a quotation which begins on page 133 but there is no endquote in the text. It is assumed that the quotation ends on page 136 after the date August 21, 1909.

Cover image produced from an image made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries and is placed in the Public Domain.

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