“It is in vain that historians enumerate the public calamities which preceded, and no doubt contributed to, the final catastrophe. Civil dissensions, military disasters, pestilences, famines, tyrants, tax-gatherers, growing burdens, and waning wealth—the gloomy catalogue is unrolled before our eyes, yet somehow it does not in all cases wholly satisfy us: we feel that some of these diseases are of a kind which a vigorous body politic should easily be able to survive, that others are secondary symptoms of some obscurer malady, and that in neither case do they supply us with the full explanation of which we are in search.”
“It is in vain that historians enumerate the public calamities which preceded, and no doubt contributed to, the final catastrophe. Civil dissensions, military disasters, pestilences, famines, tyrants, tax-gatherers, growing burdens, and waning wealth—the gloomy catalogue is unrolled before our eyes, yet somehow it does not in all cases wholly satisfy us: we feel that some of these diseases are of a kind which a vigorous body politic should easily be able to survive, that others are secondary symptoms of some obscurer malady, and that in neither case do they supply us with the full explanation of which we are in search.”
One must heartily thank the author for the abundant demonstration which follows, well warranting our feeling that these explanations do not suffice—nor yet, in the case of Rome, diminution of population, nor the “brutalities of the gladiatorial shows,” nor “the gratuitous distribution of bread to the urban mobs,” nor yet slavery, lately declared, by Mr. W. R. Paterson, in hisNemesis of Nations, to bethecause of the fall of empires. As Mr. Balfour says,“Who can believe that this immemorial custom could, in its decline, destroy the civilisation which, in its vigour, it had helped to create?” It would have been more important, perhaps, to consider, as Mr. Balfour does not, the latest view, advanced by Professor Ronald Ross, that the incursion of malaria may have had something to do with the fall of Rome.
Mr. Balfour's theory—decadence the cause of decadence.—Mr. Balfour then falls back upon “decadence "as the explanation, and to the critic of this elegant hypothesis that decadence is due to decadence, replies that it is something to recognise the possibility of "subtle changes in the social tissues of old communities.” One regrets all the more that he should not have considered anti-eugenic practices as possibly accounting for these subtle changes. One must, however, quote the excellent passage in which Mr. Balfour supports his use of the word decadence, though one utterly disagrees with the suggestion that the term “old age” might be its equivalent. He says: “The facile generalisations with which we so often season the study of dry historic fact; the habits of political discussion which induce us to catalogue for purposes of debate the outward signs that distinguish (as we are prone to think) the standing from the falling state, hide the obscurer, but more potent, forces which silently prepare the fate of empires.”
We may note with interest (and surely with surprise when we consider Japan and Spain and the China of to-morrow), Mr. Balfour's rejection of the doctrine that “arrested progress, and even decadence, may be but the prelude to a new period of vigorous growth. So that even those races or nations which seem frozen into eternal immobility may base upon experience their hopes of an awakening spring.” It is, I fancy, Mr. Balfour's fondness for the Platonic idea of senility in the race as in the individual, that leads him to question what can surely be no longer denied. Thus a little later we find himsaying, “If civilisations wear out, and races become effete, why should we expect to progress indefinitely, why for us alone is the doom of man to be reversed?”
Nowhere in this lecture is there any recognition of what, I confess, seems to me to be an obvious and necessary truth, the distinction between the two kinds of progress—racial progress due to the choice of the best for parenthood, and acquired or traditional progress. It may be suggested that no one can usefully discuss decadence or progress until he has seen and perceived this absolutely cardinal distinction, suggested in my Royal Institution lectures in February, 1907, as one of the great lessons taught by the study of biology to the student of progress.
Mr. Balfour does indeed avoid all those false solutions which depend upon a Lamarckian belief in the transmission of acquired characters. This, however, instead of leading him to insist upon the Darwinian contribution to the study of decadence—the idea ofselection—causes him to regard the racial question as unimportant. He notes one or two of the fashions in which the quality of a race may be modified, thus influencing national character, and then dismisses this question (wherein, as I cannot doubt, everything material lies) with the remark, “But such changes are not likely, I suppose, to be considerable, except perhaps those due to the mixture of races—and that only in new countries.”—Reaching page 45, the reader finds himself confident that now at length the writer has put his finger on the crux of the problem. Yet that is how he dismisses it; adding, indeed, to make it quite clear, the following words:“The flexible element in any society, that which is susceptible of progress or decadence, must therefore be looked for rather in the physical and psychical conditions affecting the life of its component units, than in their inherited constitution.”
Not a word as to cessation of selection! This omission, which is, indeed, the omission ofthefact of decadence, mainly depends, one fancies, upon that erroneous conception of natural selection as acting between species and societies rather than within them, which for so many decades the biologist has been at pains to correct. One would indeed have thought that, for a scholar and student like Mr. Balfour, Wordsworth's great sonnet would have sufficed to set up a train of thought which, fusing with ordinary biological principles, would have led him to what I believe to be the truth. Let us for a moment turn to its consideration:—
“When I have borne in memory what has tamedGreat Nations, how ennobling thoughts departWhen men change swords for ledgers....”
“When I have borne in memory what has tamedGreat Nations, how ennobling thoughts departWhen men change swords for ledgers....”
Should not this be enough to suggest to us the real meaning of the consequence which has followed when men changed swords for ledgers, and which even those who hate war as a vile blasphemy against life must recognise? It is that, as we have seen, when a nation is making its way there is selection of the fittest by the stern arbitrament of war, in which the battle is to the individually strong and fleet and brave and quick-witted. Later, “when men change swords for ledgers,” selection ceases; and that is why nothing fails like success. Yet later still, as France should know, selection by war must take the form of reversed selection, the flower of a nation's youth being immolated on the battle-field, whilst its future is determined by the weak and small and diseased, whom the recruiting sergeant rejects. “You are not good enough to be a soldier,” he says; “stay at home and be a father.” That was what Napoleon did for France.
But to return—for the relations of war to eugenics would really demand a volume—it may be noted that,though rejecting the Lamarckian theory—the theory on which nothing should succeed like success—Mr. Balfour nowhere emphasises the amazing paradox of history that nothing fails like success. If we consider this fact with the idea of natural selection in our minds (not between societies but within them), we cannot fail to perceive that success involves failure because it involves failure of selection, and therefore indiscriminate survival; or indeed, survival of the worst.
Politics and domestics.—It is, perhaps, a noteworthy comment upon what may be called the political state of mind, that even when the idea of natural selection has entered it, the bias is towards associating it with international and not with intra-national or domestic politics. The time will come, however, when the politician—or shall we say the statesman?—realises that it is the domestic policy, it is the internal struggle for survival within a society, that conditions and fore-ordains all international politics. The history of nations is determined not on the battlefield but in the nursery, and the battalions which give lasting victory are battalions of babies.The politics of the future will be domestics.
Having rejected so many solutions of his problem, and having ignored the solution which is advanced in this volume, Mr. Balfour is reduced to such desperate resorts as phrases like this: “The point at which the energy of advance is exhausted”—a mere meaningless phrase; and even such an explanation as that through “mere weariness of spirit the community resigns itself to ... stagnation.” One is inclined to throw up one's hands and ask—Do you, then, who deny the Lamarckian theory, suppose that the fresh children come into the world with this “mere weariness of spirit”? Has this been observed in children? Is there anything conceivable that has been less observed in children, in alltimes and all places? And if that be so, what kind of explanation of decadence is this?
Science and industry.—Lastly, in a series of fine passages, Mr. Balfour offers us some hope in the help of science. Politics, says our ex-Premier, too often means “the barren exchange of one set of tyrants or jobbers, for another”: a Daniel come to judgment. We owe the modern spirit and modern progress, he tells us, neither to politicians nor to political institutions, nor to theologians nor to philosophers, but to science, which, he well says, “is the great instrument of social change, all the greater because its object is not change but knowledge; and its silent appropriation of this dominant function, amid the din of political and religious strife, is the most vital of all the revolutions which have marked the development of modern civilisation.”
And our cause of hope is “a social force, new in magnitude if not in kind ... the modern alliance between pure science and industry.” To this I answer a thousand times yes, but I must define the kind of industry. It is the culture of the racial life which is the vital industry of any nation, and which Mr. Balfour has not even distantly alluded to. I agree that our hope for the future is to be found in science: that, as has been said already, perchance our acquired or traditional progress in knowledge has now reached the point at which we have sufficient to reveal to us the necessity of racial progress and the means by which that may be effected.
“Science and industry,”—yes, indeed! But the industry is to be the making not of machines but men.The products of progress are not mechanisms but men, and one may now ask, What is the industry whose products can be named in the same breath with the men and women who shall yet be produced by the supreme industry of race-culture?
“The best is yet to be.”
In its form of what we have callednegativeeugenics, the practice of our principle would assuredly reduce to an incalculable extent the amount of human defect, mental and physical, which each generation now exhibits. This alone, as has been said, would be far more than sufficient to justify us. A world without hereditary disease of mind and body, and its grave social consequences, would alone warrant the hint of Ruskin that posterity may some day look back upon us with “incredulous disdain.” Yet, assuming that this could be accomplished, as it will be accomplished, what more is to be hoped for? Must race-culture cease merely when it has raised the average of the community by reducing to a minimum the proportion of those who are thus grossly defective in mind or body? Such disease apart, are we to be content, must we be content, with the present level of mediocrity in respect of intelligence and temper and moral sentiment? Can we anticipate a London in which the present ratio of musical comedy to great opera will be reversed, in which the works of Mr. George Meredith will sell in hundreds of thousands, whilst some of our popular novelists will have to find other means of earning a living? Can we make for a critical democracy which no political party can fool, and which will choose its best to govern it? Yet more, can we undertake, now or hereafter, to provide every generation with its own Shakespeareand Beethoven and Tintoretto and Newton? What, in a word, is the promise ofpositiveeugenics? It is to this aspect of the question that Mr. Galton has mainly directed himself. Indeed he was led to formulate the principles and ideals of the new science by his study of hereditary genius some four decades ago. Let us now attempt to answer some of these questions.
The production of genius.—And first as to the production of genius. It is this, perhaps, that has been the main butt of the jesters who pass for philosophers with some of us to-day. It may be said at once that neither Mr. Galton nor any other responsible person has ever asserted that we can produce genius at will. The difficulties in the way of such a project—at present—are almost innumerable. One or two may be cited.
In the first place, there is the cardinal—but by no means universal—difficulty that the genius is too commonly so occupied with the development and expansion of his own individuality that he has little time or energy for the purposes of the race. This, of course, is an example of Spencer's great generalisation as to the antagonism or inverse ratio between individuation and genesis.
Again, there is the generalisation of heredity formulated by Mr. Galton, and named by him thelaw of regression towards mediocrity. It asserts that the children of those who are above or below the mean of a race, tend to return towards that mean. The children of the born criminal will be probably somewhat less criminal in tendency than he, though more criminal than the average citizen. The children of the man of genius, if he has any, will probably be nearer mediocrity than he, though on the average possessing greater talent than the average citizen. It is thus not in the nature of sheer genius to reproduce on its own level. It is only the critics who are wholly ignorant of the elementary facts of heredity that attribute to theeugenist an expectation of which no one knows the absurdity so well as he does.
On the other hand, it is impossible to question that the hereditary transmission of genius or great talent does occur. One may cite at random such cases as that of the Bach family, Thomas and Matthew Arnold, James and John Stuart Mill: and the reader who is inclined to believe that there is no law or likelihood in this matter, must certainly make himself acquainted with Mr. Galton'sHereditary Genius, and with such a paper as that which he printed inSociological Papers, 1904, furnishing an “index to achievements of near kinsfolk of some of the Fellows of the Royal Society.” There is, of course, the obvious fallacy involved in the possibility that not heredity but environment was really responsible for many of these cases. It must have been a great thing to have such a father as James Mill. But it would be equally idle to imagine that the evidence can be dismissed with this criticism. A Matthew Arnold, a John Stuart Mill, could not be manufactured out of any chance material by an ideal education continued for a thousand years.
The transmission of genius.—One single instance of the transmission of genius or great talent in a family may be cited. We shall take the family which produced Charles Darwin, the discoverer of the fundamental principle of eugenics, and his first cousin, Francis Galton. Darwin's grandfather was Erasmus Darwin, physician, poet and philosopher, and independent expounder of the doctrine of organic evolution. Darwin's father was a distinguished physician, described by his son as “the wisest man I ever knew.” Darwin's maternal grandfather was Josiah Wedgwood, the famous founder of the pottery works. Amongst his first cousins is Mr. Francis Galton. He has five living sons, each a man ofgreat distinction, including Mr. Francis Darwin and Sir George Darwin, both of them original thinkers, honoured by the presidency of the British Association. No one will put such a case as this down to pure chance or to the influence of environment alone. This is evidently, like many others, a greatly distinguished stock. The worth of such families to a nation is wholly beyond any one's powers of estimation. What if Erasmus Darwin had never married!
No student of human heredity can doubt that, however limited our immediate hopes, facts such as those alluded to furnish promise of great things for the future. But let us turn now from genius to what we usually call talent.
The production of talent.—There can be no question that amongst the promises of race-culture is the possibility of breeding such things as talent and the mental energy upon which talent so largely depends. In hisInquiries into Human Faculty, Mr. Galton shows the remarkable extent to which energy or the capacity for labour underlies intellectual achievement. He says, of energy—
“It is consistent with all the robust virtues, and makes a large practice of them possible. It is the measure of fulness of life; the more energy the more abundance of it; no energy at all is death; idiots are feeble and listless. In the enquiries I made on the antecedents of men of science no points came out more strongly than that the leaders of scientific thought were generally gifted with remarkable energy, and that they had inherited the gift of it from their parents and grandparents. I have since found the same to be the case in other careers.... It may be objected that if the race were too healthy and energetic there would be insufficient call for the exercise of the pitying and self-denying virtues, and the character of men would grow harder in consequence. But it does not seem reasonable to preserve sickly breeds for the sole purpose of tending them, as the breed of foxes is preserved solely for sport and its attendant advantages. There is little fear that misery will ever cease from the land, or that thecompassionate will fail to find objects for their compassion; but at present the supply vastly exceeds the demand: the land is over-stocked and over-burdened with the listless and the incapable. In any scheme of eugenics, energy is the most important quality to favour; it is, as we have seen, the basis of living action, and it is eminently transmissible by descent.”
“It is consistent with all the robust virtues, and makes a large practice of them possible. It is the measure of fulness of life; the more energy the more abundance of it; no energy at all is death; idiots are feeble and listless. In the enquiries I made on the antecedents of men of science no points came out more strongly than that the leaders of scientific thought were generally gifted with remarkable energy, and that they had inherited the gift of it from their parents and grandparents. I have since found the same to be the case in other careers.... It may be objected that if the race were too healthy and energetic there would be insufficient call for the exercise of the pitying and self-denying virtues, and the character of men would grow harder in consequence. But it does not seem reasonable to preserve sickly breeds for the sole purpose of tending them, as the breed of foxes is preserved solely for sport and its attendant advantages. There is little fear that misery will ever cease from the land, or that thecompassionate will fail to find objects for their compassion; but at present the supply vastly exceeds the demand: the land is over-stocked and over-burdened with the listless and the incapable. In any scheme of eugenics, energy is the most important quality to favour; it is, as we have seen, the basis of living action, and it is eminently transmissible by descent.”
Need it be pointed out that any political system which ceases to favour or actively disfavours energy, making it as profitable to be lazy as to be active, is anti-eugenic, and must inevitably lead to disaster? That, however, by the way. Our present point is that eugenics can reasonably promise, when its principles are recognised, to multiply the human[84]and diminish the vegetable type in the community. In so doing, it will greatly further the production of talent, and therefore of that traditional or acquired progress which men of talent and genius create. Such a result will also further, though indirectly, the production of genius itself. For, as Mr. Galton points out, “men of an order of ability which is now very rare, would become more frequent, because the level out of which they rose would itself have risen.”
This is by no means the only fashion in which an effective and practicable race-culture would serve genius, and I shall not be blamed for considering this matter further by any reader who realises, however faintly, what the man of genius is worth to the world. If it were shown possible to establish such social conditions that genius could never flower in them, we should realise that their establishment would mean the putting of an end to progress and the blasting of all the highest hopes of the highest of all ages.
The immediate need of this age, as of all ages, is perhaps not so much the birth of babies capable of developing into men and women of genius, as the full exploitationof the possibilities of genius with which, as I fancy, every generation on the average is about as well endowed as any other. There is, of course, the popular doctrine that there are no mute inglorious Miltons, that “genius will out,” and that therefore if it does not appear, it is not there to appear. In expressing the compelling power of genius in many cases, this doctrine is not without truth. Yet history abounds in instances where genius has been destroyed by environment—and we can only guess how many more instances there are of which history has no record. To take the single case of musical genius, it is a lamentable thought that there may be those now living whose natural endowments, in a favourable environment, would have enabled them to write symphonies fit to place beside Beethoven's, but whom some environmental factors—conventional, economic, educational, or what not—have silenced; or worse, have persuaded to write such sterile nullities as need not here be instanced. There is surely no waste in all this wasteful world so lamentable as this waste of genius.
If, then, anyone could devise for us a means by which the genius, potentially existing at any time, were realised, he would have performed in effect a service equivalent to that of which eugenics repudiates the present possibility—the actual creation of genius. But if we consider what the conditions are which cause the waste of genius, we realise at once that they mainly inhere in the level of the human environment of the priceless potentiality in question. As we noted elsewhere, in an age like that of Pericles genius springs up on all hands. It is encouraged and welcomed because the average level of the human environment in which it finds itself is so high. But if eugenics can raise the average level of intelligence, in so doing not merely does it render more likely, as Mr. Galton points out, the production of men of the highestability, but it provides those conditions in which men of genius, now swamped, can swim. We could not undertake to produce a Shakespeare, but we might reasonably hope to produce a generation which would not damage or destroy its Shakespeares. And even if men of genius still found it necessary, as men of genius have found it necessary, to “play to the gallery,” they would play, as Mr. Galton says of the demagogue in a eugenic age, “to a more sensible gallery than at present.”
Darwin somewhere points out that it is not the scientific, but the unscientific man who denies future possibilities. Thus though an advocate of eugenics may be applauded for his judgment if he declares that the creation of genius will for ever be impossible, yet I should not care to assert that the ultimate limitations of eugenics can thus be defined. We have yet to hear the last of Mendelism.
Eugenics and unemployment.—Let us look now at another aspect of the promise of race-culture. When the time comes that quality rather than quantity is the ideal of those who concern themselves with the population question, it is quite evident that not a few of the social problems which we now find utterly insoluble will disappear. In this brief outline, we can only allude to one or two points. Take, for instance, the question of unemployment. We know that some by no means small proportion of the unemployed were really destined to be unemployable from the first, as for instance by reason of hereditary disease. It were better for them and for us had they never been born. Many more of the unemployed have been made unemployable by the influence of over-crowding, to which they were subjected in their years of development. Is there, can there be, any real and permanent remedy for over-crowding, but the erection of parenthood into an act of personal and provident responsibility?
Eugenics and woman.—Take, again, the woman question. No one will deny that in many of its gravest forms, especially in its economic form, and the question of the employment of women, wisely or horribly, this depends (to a degree which few, I think, realise) upon the fact that there are now, for instance, 1,300,000 women in excess in this country. Is it then proposed, the reader will say, by means of race-culture to exterminate the superfluous woman? Indeed, no. But is the reader aware that Nature is not responsible for the existence of the superfluous woman? There are more boys than girls born in the ratio of about 103 or 104 to 100: and Nature means them all to live, boys and girls alike. If they did so live, we should have merely the problem of the superfluous man, which would not be an economic problem at all. But we destroy hosts of all the children that are born, and since male organisms are in general less resistant than female organisms, we destroy a disproportionate number of boys, so that the natural balance of the sexes is inverted. Unlike ancient societies, we largely practisemaleinfanticide. Can the reader believe that there is any permanent and final means of arresting this wastage of child-life, with its singular and far-reaching consequences,—other than the elevation of parenthood, on the principles which race-culture enjoins, even wholly apart from the question of the selection of parents? We shall not succeed in keeping all the children alive (with a trivial number of exceptions), thereby abolishing the superfluous woman by keeping alive the boy who should have grown up to be her partner, until we greatly reduce the birth-rate; as it must and will be reduced when the ideal of race-culture is realised, and no child comes into the world that is not already loved and desired in anticipation.
Eugenics and cruelty to children.—This ideal, also, offers us in its realisation the only complete remedy for the present ghastly cruelty under which so many children suffer even in Great Britain, even in the twentieth century. Is the reader aware that the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children enquired into the ill-treatment or cruel neglect of 115,000 children in the year beginning April 1st, 1906? It has been reasonably and carefully estimated that “over half a million children are involved in the total of the wastage of child-life and the torture and neglect of child-life in a single year.” Surely Mr. G. R. Sims, to whom I would offer a hearty tribute for his recent services to childhood, is justified in saying, “Against the guilt of race-suicide our men of science are everywhere preaching their sermons to-day. It is against the guilt of race-murder that the cry of the children should ring through the land.” As regards race suicide and the men of science, I am not so sure as to the assertion. But the truth of the second sentence quoted is as indisputable as it is horrible.
Now no legislation conceivable will wholly cure this evil nor avert its consequences. At bottom it depends upon human nature, and you can cure it only by curing the defect of human nature. This, in general, is of course beyond the immediate powers of man, but evidently we should gain the same end if only we could confine the advent of children to those parents who desired them—that is to say, those in whom human nature displayed the first, if not indeed almost the only, requisite for the happiness of childhood. To this most beneficent and wholly moral end we shall come, notwithstanding the blind and pitiable guidance of most of our accredited moral teachers to-day. By no other means than the realisation of the ideal defined, that every new babyshall be loved and desired in anticipation—an ideal which is perfectly practicable—can the black stain of child murder and child torture and child neglect be removed from our civilisation.
Ruskin and race-culture.—The name of Ruskin, perhaps, would not occur to the reader as likely to afford support to the fair hopes of the eugenist. Consider then, these words fromTime and Tide:—
“You leave your marriages to be settled by supply and demand, instead of wholesome law. And thus, among your youths and maidens, the improvident, incontinent, selfish, and foolish ones marry, whether you will or not; and beget families of children necessarily inheritors in a great degree of these parental dispositions; and for whom, supposing they had the best dispositions in the world, you have thus provided, by way of educators, the foolishest fathers and mothers you could find; (the only rational sentence in their letters, usually, is the invariable one, in which they declare themselves ‘incapable of providing for their children's education’). On the other hand, whosoever is wise, patient, unselfish, and pure among your youth, you keep maid or bachelor; wasting their best days of natural life in painful sacrifice, forbidding them their best help and best reward, and carefully excluding their prudence and tenderness from any offices of parental duty. Is not this a beatific and beautifully sagacious system for a Celestial Empire, such as that of these British Isles?”
“You leave your marriages to be settled by supply and demand, instead of wholesome law. And thus, among your youths and maidens, the improvident, incontinent, selfish, and foolish ones marry, whether you will or not; and beget families of children necessarily inheritors in a great degree of these parental dispositions; and for whom, supposing they had the best dispositions in the world, you have thus provided, by way of educators, the foolishest fathers and mothers you could find; (the only rational sentence in their letters, usually, is the invariable one, in which they declare themselves ‘incapable of providing for their children's education’). On the other hand, whosoever is wise, patient, unselfish, and pure among your youth, you keep maid or bachelor; wasting their best days of natural life in painful sacrifice, forbidding them their best help and best reward, and carefully excluding their prudence and tenderness from any offices of parental duty. Is not this a beatific and beautifully sagacious system for a Celestial Empire, such as that of these British Isles?”
Apart from the point as to wholesome law rather than the education of opinion as the eugenic means, the foregoing passage must win the assent and respect of every eugenist. It indicates the promise of race-culture as it appeared to John Ruskin. The passage has been quoted in full not for the benefit of the ordinary thoughtful reader but for that of the professional literary man who, in this remarkable age, so far as I can judge, reads nothing but what he writes, and thus qualifies himself for dismissing Spencer or Darwin or Galton in any casual phrase—meanwhilecondemning Ruskin, whom he probably professes to adore.
Race-culture and human variety.—Now let us turn to another question. Let it be asserted most emphatically that, if there is anything in the world which eugenics or race-culture doesnotpromise or desire, it is the production of a uniform type of man. This delusion, for which there has never been any warrant at all, possesses many of the critics of eugenics, and they have made pretty play with it, just as they do with their other delusions. Let us note one or two facts which bear upon this most undesirable ideal.
In the first place, it is unattainable because of the existence of what we call variation. No apparatus conceivable would suffice to eliminate from every generation those who varied from the accepted type.
In the second place, this uniformity is supremely undesirable from the purely evolutionary point of view, because its attainment would mean the arrest of all progress. All organic evolution, as we know, depends upon the struggle between creatures possessing variations and the consequent selection of those variations which constitute their possessors best adapted or fitted to the particular environment. If there is no variation there can be no evolution. To aim at the suppression of variation, therefore, on supposed eugenic grounds (which would be involved in aiming at any uniform type of mankind) would be to aim at destroying the necessary condition of all racial progress. The mere fact that the critics of race-culture attribute to evolutionists, of all people, the desire to suppress variation, is a pathognomic symptom of their critical quality.
And, of course, quite independently of the evolutionary function of variation—though this is cardinal and must never be forgotten by the politician of any school, since what we call individuality is variation on the humanplane—the value of variation in ordinary life is wholly incalculable. It is not merely that, as Mr. Galton says, “There are a vast number of conflicting ideals, of alternative characters, of incompatible civilisations; but they are wanted to give fulness and interest to life. Society would be very dull if every man resembled the highly estimable Marcus Aurelius or Adam Bede.” The question is not merely as to the interest of life. Much more important is the fact that it takes all sorts to make a world. What is the development of society but the result of the psychological division of labour in the social organism? And how could such division of labour be carried out if we had not various types of labourers? What would be the good of science if there were no poetry or music to live for? How would poetry and music help us if we had not men of science to protect our shores from plague?
Obviously the existence of men of most various types is a necessity for any highly organised society. Even if eugenics were capable—as it is not—of producing a complete and balanced type, fit up to a point to turn out a satisfactory poem, a satisfactory symphony or a satisfactory sofa, the utmost could not be expected of such a man in any of these directions. In a word, as long as their activities are not anti-social, men cannot be of too various types. We require mystic and mathematician, poet and pathologist. Only, we want good specimens of each. “The aim of eugenics,” says Mr. Galton, “is to represent each class or sect by its best specimens; that done, to leave them to work out their common civilisation in their own way.... Special aptitudes would be assessed highly by those who possessed them, as the artistic faculties by artists, fearlessness of enquiry and veracity by scientists, religious absorption by mystics, and so on. There would be self-sacrificers, self-tormentors, and other exceptional idealists.” But atleast it is better to have good rather than bad specimens of any kind, whatever that kind may be. Mr. Galton thinks that all except cranks would agree as to including health, energy, ability, manliness and courteous disposition amongst qualities uniformly desirable—alike in poet and pathologist. We should desire also uniformity as to the absence of the anti-social proclivities of the born criminal. So much uniformity being granted, let us have with it the utmost conceivable variety,—more, indeed, than most of us can conceive.
This point, of course, is cardinal from the point of view of practice. No progress could be made with eugenics, it would be impossible even to form a Eugenics Education Society, if each of us were to regard the particular type he belongs to as the ideal, and were to seek merely to obtain the best specimens of that type. The doctrine that it takes all sorts to make a world—a doctrine very hard for youth to learn, yet unconsciously learnt by all who are capable of learning at all—must be regarded as a cardinal truth for the eugenist. But he wisely seeks good specimens rather than bad. Poets certainly, but not poetasters; jesters certainly, but not clever fools, who stand Truth on her head and then make street-boy gestures at her.
Time and its treasure.—Taking the modern estimates of the physicists, we are assured that the total period of past human existence is very brief compared with what may reasonably be predicted. Granted, then, practically unlimited time, what inherent limits are there to the upward development of man as a moral and intellectual being? Shall we answer this question by a study of the nature of matter? Plainly not. Shall we answer it by a study of the nature of mind? Surely not, for the study of existing mind cannot inform us as to what mind might be. One source of guidance alone we have, and this is the amazing contrastwhich exists between the mind of man at its highest, and mind in its humblest animal forms: or shall we say even between the highest and lowest manifestations of mind within the human species? The measureless height of the ascent thus indicated offers us no warrant for the conclusion that, as we stand on the heights of our life, our “glimpse of a height that is higher” is only an hallucination. On the contrary.
There is no warrant whatever for supposing that the forces which have brought us thus far are yet exhausted: they have their origin in the inexhaustible. Who, gazing on the earth of a hundred million years ago, could have predicted life—could have recognised, in the forces then at work and the matter in which they were displayed, the promise and potency of all terrestrial life? Who, contemplating life at a much later stage, even later mammalian, could have seen in the simian the prophecy of man? Who, examining the earliest nervous ganglia, could have foreseen the human cerebrum? The fact that we can imagine nothing higher than ourselves, that we make even our gods in our own image, offers no warrant for supposing that nothing higher will ever be, What ape could have predicted man, what reptile the bird, what amœba the bee? “There are many events in the womb of time which will be delivered,” and the fairest of her sons and daughters are yet to be.
But even grant, for the sake of the argument, that the intelligence of a Newton, the musical faculty of a Bach, the moral nature of any good mother anywhere, represent the utmost limits of which the evolution of the psychical is capable. There is every reason to deny this, but let us for the moment assume it true. There still remains the thought of Wordsworth, “What one is, why may not millions be?”—a thought to which Spencer has also given utterance. What is shown possible for humannature here and there, he says, is conceivable for human nature at large. It is possible for a human being, whilst still remaining human, to be a Shakespeare or a St. Francis: these things are thus demonstrably within the possibilities of human nature. It is therefore at the least conceivable that, in the course of almost infinite time (even assuming, say, that intelligence must ever be limited, as even Newton's intelligence was limited), some such capacities as his may be common property amongst men of the scientific type; and so with other types. We may answer Wordsworth that there is no bar thrown by Nature in the way of such a hope.
What is possible?—This, of course, is speculation and of no immediate value. I would merely remind the reader that the doctrine of optimism, as regards the future of mankind, which the principles of race-culture assume and which they desire to justify, was definitely shared by the great pioneers to whom we owe our understanding of those principles. Notwithstanding grave nervous disorder, such as makes pessimists of most men, both Darwin and Spencer were compelled by their study of Nature to this rational optimism as regards man's future. The doctrine of organic evolution, and of the age-long ascent of man through the selection of the fittest (who have,on the whole, been thebest) for parenthood, is one not of despair but of hope. Exactly half a century ago it struck horror into the minds of our predecessors. Man, then, is only an erected ape, they thought—as if any historical doctrine, however true, could shorten the dizzy distance to which man has climbed since he was simian: and man being an ape, they thought his high dreams palpably vain. But the measure of the accomplished hints at the measure of the possible, and the value of the historical facts lies not in themselves, all facts as such being as dead as are the individual atoms of the living body, but in theprinciples which grow out of them. It is of no importance as such that man has simian ancestors; it is of immeasurable importance that he should learn by what processes he has become human, and by what, indeed, they became simian—which would have been a proud adjective for its own day. The principles of organic progress matter for us because they are the principles of race-culture, the only sure means of human progress. Our looking backwards does not turn us into pillars of salt, but teaches us that the best is yet to be, and how alone it is to be attained.
Elsewhere the optimistic argument of Wordsworth is quoted. Hear also John Ruskin:—
“There is as yet no ascertained limit to the nobleness of person and mind which the human creature may attain, by persevering observance of the laws of God respecting its birth and training.”[85]
“There is as yet no ascertained limit to the nobleness of person and mind which the human creature may attain, by persevering observance of the laws of God respecting its birth and training.”[85]
and Herbert Spencer:—
“What now characterises the exceptionally high may be expected eventually to characterise all. For that which the best human nature is capable of, is within the reach of human nature at large.”[86]
“What now characterises the exceptionally high may be expected eventually to characterise all. For that which the best human nature is capable of, is within the reach of human nature at large.”[86]
and Francis Galton:—
“There is nothing either in the history of domestic animals or in that of evolution to make us doubt that a race of sane men may be formed, who shall be as much superior, mentally and morally, to the modern European, as the modern European is to the lowest of the Negro races.“It is earnestly to be hoped that enquiries will be increasingly directed into historical facts, with the view of estimating the possible effects of reasonable political action in the future, in gradually raising the present miserably low standard of the human race to one in which the Utopias in the dreamland of philanthropists may become practical possibilities.”[87]
“There is nothing either in the history of domestic animals or in that of evolution to make us doubt that a race of sane men may be formed, who shall be as much superior, mentally and morally, to the modern European, as the modern European is to the lowest of the Negro races.
“It is earnestly to be hoped that enquiries will be increasingly directed into historical facts, with the view of estimating the possible effects of reasonable political action in the future, in gradually raising the present miserably low standard of the human race to one in which the Utopias in the dreamland of philanthropists may become practical possibilities.”[87]
Conclusion—Eugenics and Religion.—In an early chapter it was attempted to show that eugenics is not merely moral, but is of the very heart of morality. We saw that it involves taking no life, that, rather, it desires to make philanthropy more philanthropic, that, at any rate so far as this eugenist is concerned, it recognises and bows to the supreme law of love: and claims to serve that law, and the ideal of social morality, which is the making of human worth. Eugenics may or may not be practicable, it may or may not be based upon natural truth, but it is assuredly moral: though I, for one, would proclaim eternal war between this real morality and the damnable sham which approves the unbridled transmission of the most hideous diseases, rotting body and soul, in the interests of good.
And if religion, whatever its origin and the more questionable chapters in its past, be now “morality touched with emotion,” I claim that eugenics is religious, is and will ever be a religion. Elsewhere[88]I have attempted to show that religion has survived and will survive because of its survival-value—its services to the life of the societies wherein it flourishes. The religion of the future, it was sought to argue, will be that which “best serves Nature's unswerving desire—fulness of life.” The Founder of the Christian religion said, “I am come that ye might have life, and that ye might have it more abundantly.” It is higher and more abundant life that is the eugenic ideal. Progress I define as the emergence and increasing dominance of mind. Of progress, thus conceived, man is the highest fruit hitherto. He is also its appointed agent, and eugenics is his instrument.
To this end he must use all the powers which have blossomed in him from the dust. He must claim Art: and indeed in Wagner's great music-drama, at themoment when the prophetic Brünnhilde tells Sieglinde who has just lost her mate that she, the expectant mother, may look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come in the child Siegfried; and when the heroic theme is pronounced for the first time and followed by that which signifies redemption by love—then, I think, the eugenist may thrill not merely to the music, or to the humanity of the story, but to the spiritual and scientific truth which it symbolises.
If the struggle towards individual perfection be religious, so, assuredly, is the struggle, less egoistic, indeed, towards racial perfection. If the historic meaning and purport of religion are as I conceive them, and if its future evolution may thence be inferred, there can be no doubt in the prophecy that in ages to come those high aspirations and spiritual visions which astronomy has dishoused from amongst the stars, and which, at their best, were ever selfish, will find a place on this human earth of ours. If we have transferred our hopes from heaven to earth and from ourselves to our children, they are not less religious. And they that shall be of us shall build the old waste places; for we shall raise up the foundations of many generations:
“We feed the high tradition of the world,And leave our spirits in our children's breasts.”
“We feed the high tradition of the world,And leave our spirits in our children's breasts.”
The preceding pages are of course only tentative, preliminary and introductory. I have merely tried to make a beginning. No better purpose can be achieved than that the reader should proceed to study the subject for himself. A few pages may therefore be devoted to the names of some of the books which will be found useful. This is in no sense a complete bibliography, nor even a tithe of such a bibliography. But the reader who makes a beginning with the books here named, or even with a well-chosen half dozen of them, will thereafter need no one to tell him that the culture of the human race on scientific principles will be the supreme science of all the future, the supreme goal of all statesmen, the object and the final judge of all legislation.
Where it is thought that useful remarks can be made they will be made, but neither their presence nor absence nor their length is to be taken as any index to the writer's opinion of the relative value of the works in question.
Heredity.(The Progressive Science Series, 1908.) ByProfessor J. A. Thomson, M.A.
This is the most recent and most valuable for general purposes of all books on the subject of heredity. No layman should express opinions on heredity or eugenics until he has read it, for it is extremely improbable that they will be valuable. Professor Thomson covers the whole ground with extreme lucidity and care and impartiality. The book is readable, nay more, fascinating from end to end, and it is liberally and usefully illustrated. It is the first general treatise on heredity which leads consciously, yet as of necessity, towards eugenics as the crown and goal of the whole study, and in this respect it undoubtedly marks an epoch.
The Methods and Scope of Genetics.(1908.) ByW. Bateson, M.A., F.R.S.
This is the inaugural lecture, destined, I have little doubt, to become historic, which was delivered by Professor Bateson on his appointment to the new Darwin Chair of Biology at Cambridge. It is purposely included here for very good reasons. The reader who begins his serious study of heredity with Professor Thomson's work must be informed that though the author gives an interesting account of Mendelism, he is not a Mendelian, and neither his account of Mendelism nor his estimate of it is at all adequate for the present day. In truth there is the study of heredity before Mendelism and after, and though eugenics owes its modern origin to the founder of the school of biometrics, and though among his followers there are to be found many who decry and oppose the Mendelians, it is for the eugenist of single purpose to take the truth wherever it is to be found. It is now idle to deny either the general truth or the stupendous promise of Mendelism. Many vital phenomena besides heredity are studied by the statistical method, and are put down by it to heredity. The Mendelians take seeds of known origin, and plant them and note the result. They carry out experimental breeding not only amongst plants but amongst the higher animals, including mammals who, in all essentials of structure and function, are one with ourselves. It is not possible, I believe, to over-estimate the supreme importance of Mendelian enquiry for eugenics. Eugenics is founded upon heredity, and genetics, which is Professor Bateson's name for the physiology of heredity and variation, is now working atthe very heart of those natural phenomena upon which eugenics depends. This lecture of Professor Bateson's is by the far the best introduction to Mendelism that exists, besides being the most recent and the most authoritative possible. With the lucidity of the born teacher (whose faculty, I have no doubt, is a Mendelian unit, not always inherited by the born observer) the author explains the essence of Mendelism. The usual expositor has not proceeded far upon his way before he is encumbering himself and the learner with the phenomena of dominance and recessiveness, which are not cardinal and are highly involved. Professor Bateson makes no allusion to them. But he gives an account of Mendelism which it is impossible to put down without finishing, and which is elementary in the highest sense of the word. In the later pages the author preaches eugenics with a vigour and conviction not unworthy of notice as coming from the leader of a school which is utterly opposed in principle and in methods, if not in results, to the school of biometrics founded by the founder of eugenics. I insist upon this because there is a half-instructed ignorance abroad which has heard the name of Mendel, and seeks thereby to discredit Darwin and natural selection, Mr. Galton and eugenics. Hear Professor Bateson:—
“If there are societies which refuse to apply the new knowledge, the fault will not lie with Genetics. I think it needs but little observation of the newer civilisations to foresee thattheywill apply every scrap of scientific knowledge which can help them, or seems to help them in the struggle, and I am good enough selectionist to know that in that day the fate of the recalcitrant communities is sealed.”
Hereditary Genius, An Inquiry into its Laws and Consequences.ByFrancis Galton.
This is the classical and pioneer enquiry, far beyondmy praise or appraisement. The main text is not long, is easily read and is extremely interesting. The reader should acquaint himself also with Mr. Constable's recent criticism,Poverty and Hereditary Genius.
A Study of British Genius.(1904.) ByHavelock Ellis.
This is an extremely interesting book, which should be read in association with the foregoing, to which it is a criticism and supplement. The greater part of the volume is concerned with the study of genius from the point of view of heredity—in terms of nationality and race, and of individual parentage. Very great labour and scholarship have been expended to very high purpose in this work.
Inquiries into Human Faculty.(1883.) ByFrancis Galton.
This is the next in order of Mr. Galton's works,Hereditary Geniusdating from 1869. It has recently been reprinted in Dent's “Everyman's Library,” and can thus be purchased for one shilling.
Natural Inheritance.(1889.) ByFrancis Galton.
Memories of my Life.(1908.) ByFrancis Galton.
This is Mr. Galton's latest book, and apart from its personal fascination must be read by the serious eugenist if only on account of its last five chapters, and especially the last two, which deal with Heredity and Race Improvement. What could be more interesting and significant, for instance, than to find Mr. Galton in 1908 saying of himself in 1865, “I was too much disposed to think of marriage under some regulation, and not enough of the effects of self-interest and of social and religious sentiment.” Mr. Galton comments on the wrongheadedness of objectors to eugenics. I fancy, however, that the familiar misrepresentations will soon cease to be possible. The whole of this brief last chapter must be carefullyread and studied. At least I must quote the following paragraph:—
“What I desire is that the importance of eugenic marriages should be reckoned at its just value, neither too high nor too low, and that eugenics should form one of the many considerations by which marriages are promoted or hindered, as they are by social position, adequate fortune, and similarity of creed. I can believe hereafter that it will be felt as derogatory to a person of exceptionally good stock to marry into an inferior one as it is for a person of high Austrian rank to marry one who has not sixteen heraldic quarterings. I also hope that social recognition of an appropriate kind will be given to healthy, capable, and large families, and that social influence will be exerted towards the encouragement of eugenic marriages.”
This volume, a model for all future autobiographers, ends with the following splendid statement of the eugenic creed:—
“A true philanthropist concerns himself not only with society as a whole, but also with as many of the individuals who compose it as the range of his affections can include. If a man devotes himself solely to the good of a nation as a whole, his tastes must be impersonal and his conclusions so far heartless, deserving the ill title of ‘dismal’ with which Carlyle labelled statistics. If, on the other hand, he attends only to certain individuals in whom he happens to take an interest, he becomes guided by favouritism and is oblivious of the rights of others and of the futurity of the race. Charity refers to the individual; Statesmanship to the nation; Eugenics cares for both.
“It is known that a considerable part of the huge stream of British charity furthers by indirect and unsuspected ways the production of the Unfit; it is most desirable that money and other attention bestowed on harmful forms of charity should be diverted to the production and well-being of the Fit. For clearness of explanation we may divide newly married couples into three classes, with respect to the probable civic worth of their offspring. There would be a small class of ‘desirables,’ a large class of ‘passables,’ of whom nothing more will be said here, and a small class of ‘undesirables.’ It would clearly be advantageous to the country if social and moral support as well as timely material help were extended to the desirables, and not monopolised as it is now apt to be by the undesirables.
“I take eugenics very seriously, feeling that its principles ought to become one of the dominant motives in a civilised nation, much as if they were one of its religious tenets. I have often expressed myself in this sense, and will conclude this book by briefly reiterating my views.
“Individuals appear to me as partial detachments from the infinite ocean of Being, and this world as a stage on which Evolution takes place, principally hitherto by means of Natural Selection, which achieves the good of the whole with scant regard to that of the individual.
“Man is gifted with pity and other kindly feelings; he has also the power of preventing many kinds of suffering. I conceive it to fall well within his province to replace Natural Selection by other processes that are more merciful and not less effective.
“This is precisely the aim of eugenics. Its first object is to check the birth-rate of the Unfit, instead of allowing them to come into being, though doomed in large numbers to perish prematurely. The second object is the improvement of the race by furthering the productivity of the Fit by early marriages and healthful rearing of their children. Natural Selection rests upon excessive production and wholesale destruction; Eugenics on bringing no more individuals into the world than can be properly cared for, and those only of the best stock.”
Heredity and Selection in Sociology.(1907.) ByGeorge Chatterton-Hill.
This is a useful and interesting work, the nature of which is well indicated by its title. It contains many purely eugenic chapters, and cannot be ignored by the student.
The Germ-plasm, A Theory of Heredity.(The Contemporary Science Series. 1893.) ByAugust Weismann.
This is Weismann's great work. It should be studied by politicians and others who still interpret all social phenomena in terms of Lamarckian theory, and also by modern writers who are so much more Weismannian than Weismann.
The Evolution Theory.(1904.) Translated by J. Arthur Thomson and M. R. Thomson. ByAugust Weismann.
The Principles of Heredity.(1905.) ByG. Archdall Reid.
This is a very interesting and extremely Weismannian book which contains the most recent statement of the author's remarkable enquiries into the influence of disease as a factor of human selection.
Variation in Animals and Plants.(The International Scientific Series. 1903.) ByH. M. Vernon.
Variation, Heredity and Evolution.(1906.) ByR. H. Lock.
The Origin of Species.(1869. Last (sixth) edition. Reprinted 1901.) ByCharles Darwin.
The Descent of Man.(1871. Second edition, 1874. Reprinted 1906.) ByCharles Darwin.
These classics now cost only half-a-crown apiece.
The beginner should readThe Descent of Manfirst,I think. Some of the earlier chapters are of the utmost eugenic value, and would be found immensely interesting by modern lecturers on decadence, and the like.
Darwinism To-day.(1907.) ByVernon L. Kellogg.
An interesting and scholarly recent criticism, containing much matter strictly relevant to eugenics.
The Evolution of Sex.(The Contemporary Science Series. Revised edition, 1901. Originally published in 1899.) ByPatrick GeddesandJ. Arthur Thomson.
A famous book, yet to be discovered by most “authorities” on the Woman Question.
A History of Matrimonial Institutions.(1904.) ByG. E. Howard.
This is a three-volume treatise, extremely comprehensive, and especially valuable as a guide to the literature of the subject. Only the professional student can be expected to read it from cover to cover, but it is invaluable for purposes of reference.
The History of Human Marriage.ByE. Westermarck.
This rightly celebrated and epoch-making work demonstrates in especial the survival-value of monogamy, and its historical dominance as a marriage form.
The Evolution of Marriage.(The Contemporary Science Series.) ByProfessor Letourneau.
The Principles of Population.ByT. R. Malthus.
The substance of this may be conveniently read in the extracts published in theEconomic Classicsby Macmillan (1905).
The Principles of Biology.ByHerbert Spencer.
The last section, “The Laws of Multiplication,”mustbe read as the expression of the missing half of the truth discovered by Malthus. It is tiresome, nearly half a century after Spencer's enunciation of his law, to have to read the remarks of some modern writers who continueto assume that Malthus expressed not merely the truth but the whole truth.
The Republic of Plato.
Apart from the lines of Theognis quoted by Darwin inThe Descent of Man, which are some two centuries older than Plato, the fifth book of theRepublicis the earliest discussion in literature of the idea of eugenics, and utterly wild though we may consider most of the proposals of Plato—or Socrates—to be, these early thinkers are yet more modern and more scientific and more fundamental than all their successors, even including our modern Utopia makers who have come after Darwin, in recognising that it is the quality of the citizen which will make a Utopia possible. The following will suffice to show that after more than two thousand years we can still learn from the fundamental idea of Plato's fifth chapter:—