“A little child shall lead them”
This book will be mere foolishness to those who repeat
the inhuman and animal cry that we have to take the
world as we find it—the motto of the impotent, the forgotten,
the cowardly and selfish, or the merely vegetable,
in all ages. The capital fact of man, as distinguished
from the lower animals and from plants, is that he does
not have to take the world as he finds it, that he does
not merely adapt himself to his environment, but that
he himself is a creator of his world. If our ancestors had
taken and left the world as they found it, we should be
little more than erected monkeys to-day. For none who
accept the hopeless dogma is this book written. They
are welcome to take and leave the world as they find it;
they are of no consequence to the world; and their existence
is of interest only in so far as it is another instance
of that amazing wastefulness of Nature in her generations,
with which this book will be so largely concerned.
Beginning, perhaps, some six million years ago, the
fact which we call human life has persisted hitherto,
and shows no signs of exhaustion, much less impending
extinction, being indeed more abundant numerically and
more dominant over other forms of life and over the
inanimate world to-day than ever before. It is a continuous
phenomenon. The life of every blood corpuscle
or skin cell of every human being now alive is absolutely
continuous with that of the living cells of the first human
beings—if not, indeed, as most biologists appear to
believe, of the first life upon the earth. Yet this continuous
life has been and apparently always must be lived in a
tissue of amazing discontinuity—amazing, at least, to
those who can see the wonderful in the commonplace.
For though the world-phenomenon which we call Man
has been so long continuous, and is at this moment
perhaps as much modified by the total past as if it were
really a single undying individual, yet only a few decades
ago, a mere second in the history of the earth, no human
being now alive was in existence. “As for man, his days
are as grass: as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth.
For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone; and the
place thereof shall know it no more.” Indeed, not merely
are we individually as grass, but in a few years the hand
that writes these words, and the tissues of eye and brain
whereby they are perceived, will actually be grass. Here,
then, is the colossal paradox: absolute and literal continuity
of life, every cell from a preceding cell throughout
the ages—omnis cellula e cellula; yet three times in every
century the living and only wealth of nations is reduced
to dust, and is raised up again from helpless infancy.
Where else is such catastrophic continuity?
Each individual enters the world in a fashion the
dramatic and sensational character of which can be
realised by none who have not witnessed it; and in a few
years the individual dies, scarcely less dramatically as
a rule, and sometimes more so. This continuous and
apparently invincible thing, human life, which began so
humbly and to the sound of no trumpets, in Southern
Asia or the neighbourhood of the Caspian Sea, but
which has never looked back since its birth, and is now
the dominant fact of what might well be an astonished
earth, depends in every age and from moment to
moment upon here a baby, there a baby and there yet
another; these curious little objects being of all living
things, animal or vegetable, young or old, large or small,
the most utterly helpless and incompetent, incapable even
of finding for themselves the breasts that were made for
them. If but one of all the “hungry generations” that
have preceded us had failed to secure the care and love
of its predecessor, the curtain would have come down
and a not unpromising though hitherto sufficiently
grotesque drama would have been ended for ever.
This discontinuity it is which persuades many of us
to conceive human life to be not so much a mighty maze
without a plan, as a mere stringing of beads on an endless
cord of which one end arose in Mother Earth, whilst the
other may come at any time—but goes nowhere. The
beads, which we call generations, vary in size and colour,
no doubt, but on no system; each one makes a fresh
start; the average difference between them is merely
one of position; and the result is merely to make the
string longer. Or the generations might be conceived
as the links of an indeterminate chain, necessarily held to
each other: but suggesting not at all the idea of a living
process such that its every step is fraught with eternal
consequence. In a word, we incline to think that History
merely goes on repeating itself, and we have to learn that
History never repeats itself. Every generation is epoch-making.
It is thus to the conception of parenthood as the vital
and organic link of life that we are forced: and the whole
of this book is really concerned with parenthood. We
shall see, in due course, that no generation, whether of
men or animals or plants, determines or provides, as a
whole, the future of the race. Only a percentage, as a
rule a very small percentage indeed, of any species reach
maturity, and fewer still become parents. Amongst
ourselves, one-tenth of any generation gives birth to
one-half the next. These it is who, in the long run,
make History: a Kant or a Spencer, dying childless,
may leave what we call immortal works; but unless
the parents of each new generation are rightly chosen
or “selected”—to use the technical word—a new
generation may at any time arise to whom the greatest
achievements of the past are nothing. The newcomers
will be as swine to these pearls, the immortality of which
is always conditional upon the capacity of those who
come after to appreciate them. There is here expressed
the distinction between two kinds of progress: the
traditional progress which is dependent upon transmitted
achievement, but in its turn is dependent upon racial
progress—this last being the kind of progress of which
the history of pre-human life upon the planet is so largely
the record and of which mankind is the finest fruit
hitherto.
It is possible that a concrete case, common enough,
and thus the more significant, may appeal to the reader,
and help us to realise afresh the conditions under which
human life actually persists.
Forced inside a motor-omnibus one evening, for lack of
room outside, I found myself opposite a woman, poorly-clothed,
with a wedding-ring upon her finger and a baby
in her arms. The child was covered with a black shawl
and its face could not be seen. It was evidently asleep.
It should have been in its cot at that hour. The mother's
face roused feelings which a sonnet of Wordsworth's
might have expressed, or a painting by some artist with
a soul, a Rembrandt or a Watts, such as we may look for
in vain amongst the be-lettered to-day. Here was the
spectacle of mother and child, which all the great historic
religions, from Buddhism to Christianity, have rightly
worshipped; the spectacle which more nearly symbolises
the sublime than any other upon which the eye of a
man, himself once such a child, can rest; the spectacle
which alone epitomises the life of mankind and the
unalterable conditions of all human life and all human
societies, reminding us at once of our individual mortality,
and the immortality of our race—
“While we, the brave, the mighty and the wise,
We Men, who in our morn of youth defied
The Elements, must vanish;—be it so!
Enough, if something from our hands have power
To live, and act, and serve the future hour:”
—the spectacle which alone, if any can, may reconcile us
to death; the spectacle of that which alone can sanctify
the love of the sexes; the spectacle of motherhood in
being, the supreme duty and supreme privilege of womanhood—“a
mother is a mother still, the holiest thing
alive.”
This woman, utterly unconscious of the dignity of her
attitude and of the contrast between herself and the
imitation of a woman, elegantly clothed, who sat next
her, giving her not a thought nor a glance, nor yet room
for the elbow bent in its divine office, was probably some
thirty-two or three years old, as time is measured by the
revolutions of the earth around the sun. Measured by
some more relevant gauge, she was evidently aged, her
face grey and drawn, desperately tired, yet placid—not
with due exultation but with the calm of one who has
no hope. She was too weary to draw the child to her
bosom, and her arms lay upon her knees; but instead
she bent her body downwards to her baby. She looked
straight out in front of her, not at me nor at the passing
phantasms beyond, but at nothing. The eyes were open
but they were too tired to see. The face had no beauty
of feature nor of colour nor of intelligence, but it was
wholly beautiful, made so by motherhood; and I think
she must have held some faith. The tint of her skin and
of her eyeballs spoke of the impoverishment of her blood,
her need of sleep and rest and ease of mind. She will
probably be killed by consumption within five years and
will certainly never hold a grand-child in her arms. The
pathologist may lay this crime at the door of the tubercle
bacillus; but a prophet would lay it at the reader's door
and mine.
While we read and write, play at politics or ping-pong,
this woman and myriads like her are doing the essential
work of the world. The worm waits for us as well as for
her and them: and in a few years her children and theirs
will be Mankind. We need a prophet to cry aloud and
spare not; to tell us that if this is the fate of mothers
in the ranks which supply the overwhelming proportion
of our children, our nation may number Shakespeare and
Newton amongst the glories of its past, and the lands of
ancient empires amongst its present possessions, but it
can have no future; that if, worshipping what it is
pleased to call success, it has no tears nor even eyes for
such failures as these, it may walk in the ways of its
insensible heart and in the sight of its blind eyes, yet it
is walking not in its sleep but in its death, is already
doomed and damned almost past recall; and that, if it
is to be saved, there will avail not “broadening the basis
of taxation,” nor teaching in churches the worship of the
Holy Mother and Holy Child, whilst Motherhood is
blasphemed at their very doors, but this and this only—the
establishment, not in statutes but in the consciences
of men and women, of a true religion based upon these
perdurable and evident dogmas—that all human life is
holy, all mothers and all children, that history is made
in the nursery, that the individual dies, that therefore
children determine the destinies of all civilisations, that
the race or society which succeeds with its mammoth
ships and its manufactures but fails to produce men and
women, is on the brink of irretrievable doom; that the
body of man is an animal, endowed with the inherited
animal instincts necessary for self-preservation and the
perpetuation of the race, but that, if the possession of
this body by a conscious spirit, “looking before and
after,” is anything more than a “sport” of the evolutionary
forces, it demands that, the blind animal instincts
notwithstanding, the desecration of motherhood, the
perennial slaughter and injury of children, the casual
unconsidered birth of children for whom there is no room
or light or air or food, and of children whose inheritance
condemns them to misery, insanity or crime, must cease;
and that the recurrent drama of human love and struggle
reaches its happy ending not when the protagonists are
married, but when they join hands over a little child that
promises to be a worthy heir of all the ages. This religion
must teach that the spectacle of a prematurely
aged and weary and hopeless mother, which he who runs
or rides may see, produced by our rude foreshadowings
of civilisation, is an affront to all honest and thoughtful
eyes: that where there are no mothers, such as mothers
should be, the people will assuredly perish, though
everything they touch should turn to gold, though
science and art and philosophy should flourish as never
before. I believe that history, rightly read, teaches these
tremendous lessons.
In our own day the bounds of imagination are undoubtedly
widening. Means of communication, the press,
the camera, the decadence of obsolete dogmas, making
room for the simple daily truths of morality which have
“the dignity of dateless age” and are too hard for the
teeth of time—these account in large measure for the
fact that the happier half of the world is at last beginning
to realise how the other half lives. There is perhaps more
divine discontent with things as they are than ever heretofore:
this being due, as has been suggested, perhaps
as much to the modern aids of imagination as to any
inherent increase of sympathy. Science, too, in the
form of sociology and economics, adds warrant to the
demand for some radical reform of the conditions of life.
It teaches that all forms of life are interdependent; that
society is thus an organism in more than merely loose
analogy; that the classes pay abundantly for the state
of the masses: whilst medicine teaches that the tuberculosis,
for instance, which slays so many members of
the middle and upper classes, is bred by and in the
overcrowding of the lower classes, this and many other
diseases promising to resist all measures less radical than
the abolition of half our current social practice.
Hence it is that we hear so much of social reform;
and the promises of representatives of many political
-isms jostle one another at the gates of our ears. The
Anarchist at one extreme, and the Collectivist at the
other, with the Individualist and the Socialist somewhere
between, offer their panaceas. To me, I confess, they
seem little better than the scholastic metaphysicians
of old days, like them mistaking words for things,
incapable of understanding each other, evading precise
definition and using terms which never mean the same
thing twice as missiles and weapons of abuse: and,
above all, mistaking means for ends.
But the leading error common to them all, as I seem to
see it, is their conception of society as a stable thing—a
piece of machinery which must be properly “assembled,”
as the engineers say; forgetful of the extraordinary
discontinuity which inheres in the swift-approaching
death of all its parts, and their replacement by helpless
immaturity. The first fact of society really is that all
its individuals are mortal. This we all know, but I
question whether even Herbert Spencer fully reckoned
with it; and certainly the common run of social speculators
have not begun to realise what it means. Human
life is made up of generations, and the key to all progress
lies in the nature of the relation between one generation
and another. Spencer records the case of an Oxford
graduate, desirous to be his secretary, who did not know
that the population of Great Britain is increasing. Here
is a capital present fact of the—merely quantitative—relation
between successive generations. So far as any
influence on their theory or practice is concerned, it is
still unknown to nearly all our advisers. Yet this fact
of the ceaseless multiplication of man, which has distinguished
him from the first, and is absolutely peculiar
to him of all living species, animal or vegetable, as
Sir E. Ray Lankester has lately pointed out, is the
source of the major facts of history and the besetting
condition of every social problem that can be named at
this hour.
The professional and dedicated teachers of morality
seem to be in little better case. They believe in babies,
perhaps, as the prime and only really valid source of the
weal and wealth and strength of nations, and as the
great moralisers and humanisers of the generation that
gives them birth. They are beginning to join in that
public outcry against infant mortality which will yet
abolish this abominable stain upon our time. But they
are lamentably uninformed. They do not know, for
instance, that a high infant mortality habitually goes
with a high birth-rate, not only in human society but in
all living species; and they have yet to appreciate the
proposition which I have so often advanced and which,
to me at any rate, seems absolutely self-evident, that
until we have learnt how to keep alive all the healthy
babies now born—that is to say, not less than ninety
per cent. of all, the babies in the slums included—it
is monstrous to cry for more, to be similarly slain.
These bewailings about our mercifully falling birth-rate,
uncoupled with any attention to the slaughter
of the children actually born, are pitiable in their blindness
and would be lamentable if they had any effect—of
which there is fortunately no sign whatever, but
indeed the contrary.
Humanitarian sentiment, also, is terribly misguided.
“Why always the benefit of the future, has the present
no claim upon us?” I have been asked. Assuredly all
sentient life, and therefore pre-eminently all human
life, in which sentiency is so incommensurably intensified
by self-consciousness, the power of “looking before and
after,” has a claim upon us: but the question could
have been asked by no one whose imagination had been
worthily employed. Our posterity will in due course
be as actual and present as we, their deeds and sufferings
and hopes as actual and present as ours. They outnumber
us as the ocean outweighs a raindrop; to avert
evil from one of them is as much as to relieve evil in one
of us,—how much more to prevent the misery of five
in the next generation, fifty in the next and unnumbered
hosts beyond? To serve the future of the race is not to
benefit a fiction: the men and women of a hundred and
a thousand years hence will be as real as we. And to
serve the future is to put out our talent at compound
interest a thousand-fold compounded. The weak imagination
would rather build a sanatorium for consumptives
and see it filled with grateful patients. This is a palpable,
sensible good, for which the meanest visual faculty
suffices: but the strong imagination would rather open
the closed windows of nurseries or work at the mechanical
problems of ventilation, aye, or even at the structure of
the bacteriological microscope—finding the spectacle, in
the mind's eye, of healthy men and women fifty years
hence as grateful and as real a reward as the sight of
a sanatorium in the present. The pace of progress will
be incalculably hastened when men, whether workers
or bequeathers or administrators, enlarge their imaginations
so as to perceive that the future will be, and therefore
indeed is, as real as the present.[1] I appeal to the reason of
the kind-hearted reader. Would you rather make one
man or child happy now, or two or a thousand a century
hence?
It is, in a word, the idea of continuous causation or
evolution that explains the remarkable contrast between
our outlook on the future and our fathers'. In older—that
is to say, younger—days, men's interest in posterity
was most naïvely and quaintly selfish. If they raised
a monument or did any piece of work which obviously
would endure beyond the span of their own lives, their
chief motive seems to have been that we should think
well of them, nor forget how well they thought of themselves.
They were not concerned with us, but with our
opinion of them. They were anxious about the verdict
of posterity; and the verdict is that they little realised
their responsibility for us, or betrayed it if they did.
There is also the frank attitude of Sir Boyle Roche's
famous bull, “What has posterity done for us?” This
is a quite familiar and conspicuous sentiment—as familiar
as any other form of selfishness: but it is as if a father
should say, “What have my children done for me?”
and is open to the same condemnation. We are assuredly
responsible for posterity as any parent for any child.
Before the nineteenth century this fact could be realised
by very few. To-day, when the truth of organic evolution
is a commonplace, and when the plasticity of the
forces of evolution is slowly becoming realised, we must
face our tremendous responsibility and privilege in a
spirit worthy of those to whom such mighty truths
have been revealed.
Parenthood and birth—in these the whole is summed.
At the mercy of these are all past discovery, all past
achievement in art or science, in action or in thought.
The human species, secure though it be, is only a race
after all; only a sequence of runners who quasi cursores,
vitaï lampada tradunt—like runners, hand on the lamp
of life, as Lucretius said. This it is which, to the thoughtful
observer, makes each birth such an overwhelming
event. It is a great event for the mother and the father,
but how much greater if its consequences be only half
realised. Education in its full sense, “the provision of
an environment,” as I would define it, is a mighty
and necessary force, for nothing but potentiality
is given at birth: but no education, no influence of
traditional progress, can avail, unless the potentialities
which these must unfold are worthy. The baby comes
tumbling headlong into the world. The fate of
all the to-morrows depends upon it. Hitherto
its happening has depended upon factors animal and
casual enough, utterly improvident, concerned but rarely
with this tremendous consequence. Fate may be
mistress, but she works only too often by Chance, as
Goethe remarked. Fate and Chance hitherto have
never failed to keep up the supply which the death of
the individual makes imperative: and forces have
been at work determining for progress, to some extent,
but most imperfectly, the parentage of these headlong
babies. Yet the human intelligence cannot remain
satisfied with their working—and much less so when
it realises how they can be controlled, how effectively,
and to what high ends. The physician may and must
concern himself, on these occasions, with the immediate
needs of the mother and the child, and when these are
satisfied he may feel that his duty has been done; but,
as he journeys homewards, he must surely reflect—that
this astonishing thing, then, has happened again, as
indeed it has happened many times this very day; that
whilst this baby is to become an individual man or
woman, an end in himself or herself, in its young loins
and in those of its like are the hosts of all the unborn
who are yet to be. If, then, these babies differ widely
from each other, as they do; if these differences are, on
the whole, capable of prediction in terms of heredity;
if the future state of mankind is involved in these
differences, which will in their turn be transmitted to
the children of such as themselves become parents; and
if this business of parenthood will be confined to only
a small proportion of these babies, of whom one-half
will never reach puberty; if these things be so, as
they are, cannot these babies be chosen in anticipation,
there being thus effected an enormous vital economy,
Nature being commanded to the highest ends by the
only method, which is to obey her, as Bacon said; and
the human intelligence thus making its supreme achievement—the
ethical direction and vast acceleration of
racial progress? What man can do for animals and
plants, can he not do for himself? Give imagination its
fleetest and strongest wing, it can never conceive a
task so worth the doing.
This, and this alone, is what requires to be brought
home to the general reader and the reformer alike. Says
Mr. H. G. Wells: “It seemed to me then that to prevent
the multiplication of people below a certain standard,
and to encourage the multiplication of exceptionally
superior people, was the only real and permanent way
of mending the ills of the world. I think that still.”
And then, in a few sketchy pages, Mr. Wells discredits,
as with one glance of great eyes, the very proposal which
he thinks to be the only real and permanent way of
mending the ills of the world. Not one man in thousands
has got so far as to hold this opinion; and it is the more
lamentable that Mr. Wells, having reached it, should
hold it in the loose, formal, and inoperative fashion in
which the man in the street or the woman in the pew
holds the dogmas of orthodox theology. We need to
educate public opinion—that “chaos of prejudices”—up
to Mr. Wells' standard, and then we need to accomplish
the much harder task of converting a mere intellectual
speculation into a living belief.
But so surely as this belief, the crowning and practical
conclusion to which all the teachings of modern biology
converge, comes to life in men's minds, so surely
the difficulties will be met, not only on paper but also
in practice. “Where there's a will there's a way.”
Meanwhile men are content to work at the impermanent,
if not indeed at measures which directly war against
the selection of the best for parenthood: they do not
realise the stern necessity of obeying Nature in this
respect—for it is Her selection of parents that alone
has raised us from the beast and the worm—and since
necessity alone, whether inner or outer, whether of
character or circumstance, is the mother of invention,
they fail to find the methods by which our ideal can be
carried out. There is nothing, either in the character
of the individual man and woman, or in the structure
of society, that makes the ideal of race-culture impossible
to-day: nor must action wait for further knowledge of
heredity. Little though we surely know so far, we have
abundance of assured knowledge for immediate action
in many directions—knowledge which is agreed upon by
Lamarckians and neo-Lamarckians, Darwinians and
Weismannians, Mendelians and biometricians alike. All
of these agree, for instance, as to the fact that the
insane tendency is transmissible and is transmitted by
heredity. We need only public opinion to say, “Then
most surely those who have such a tendency must forgo
parenthood.”
For it is public opinion that governs the world. If
it were, as it will be one day—which may these pages
hasten—an elementary and radical truth, as familiar
and as cogent to all, man in the House or man in the
public-house, as the fact of the earth's gravitation—that
racial maintenance, much more racial progress,
depends absolutely upon the selection of parents; if
the establishment of this selective process in the best
and widest manner were the admitted goal of all legislation
and all social and political speculation—who can
question that the thing would be practicable and indeed
easy? Without the formation of public opinion this is
as hopelessly Utopian and inaccessible an ideal as words
ever framed; public opinion once formed, nothing could
be more palpably feasible. Hence Mr. Galton's wisdom in
demanding that, before we dictate courses of procedure,
and even before we can expect profit from scientific
investigation, whether by the biometric method of which
he is the founder, or by any other, public opinion must
be formed; that the idea of eugenics or good-breeding
must be instilled into the conscience of civilisation like
a new religion—a religion of the most lofty and austere,
because the most unselfish, morality, a religion which
sets before it a sublime ideal, terrestrial indeed in its
chosen theatre, but celestial in its theme, human in its
means, but literally superhuman in its goal. If the
intrinsic ennoblement of mankind does not answer to this
eulogy, where is the ideal that does?
“This last lustrum has enabled us to make an astounding
discovery, of which neither Adam Smith nor Cobden nor Malthus
dreamed—that a nation is composed not of property nor of
provinces, but of men.”—Tille (1904), quoted by Forel.
The main thesis which the last chapter was intended
to introduce is, in the words of Ruskin, simply this:
“There is no wealth but life.” The assumption throughout
this book is that Ruskin is the real founder of political
economy, he first of moderns having seen this supreme
truth.
We speak of a nation's possessions, but possessions
imply a possessor or possessors. Wealth, as Ruskin
teaches us, is “the possession of the valuable by the
valiant.” If our national possessions were made over to
a race of monkeys, “they being inherently and eternally
incapable of wealth,” what would they be worth?
Furthermore, to possess and to be possessed by, are
totally diverse things. Says Ruskin, “Lately in a
wreck of a Californian ship, one of the passengers fastened
a belt about him with two hundred pounds of gold in
it, with which he was found afterwards at the bottom.
Now, as he was sinking—had he the gold or had the
gold him?”
Vital economics.—We have already alluded to the
unique property of mankind in virtue of which the radical
character of the essential wealth, which is life, has only
too commonly been forgotten. In the case of any animal
or vegetable species we should have no difficulty, if
asked regarding its “success” and “prospects,” in
directing our enquiry to essentials. We should examine
the individuals of that species, young and old, its death-rate
and its birth-rate, and these would supply us with
the answer. In the case of man there is the almost
incalculable complication involved in the fact that he
is capable of making external acquirements,—material
possessions and spiritual possessions which, so long as
he remains capable of possessing them, are of real value,
and, on account of what they mean for life, are a true
though secondary wealth. Amongst civilised mankind,
therefore, the essential question as to the breed of men
and women is obscured by the secondary question as
to their traditional or transmitted possessions or external
acquirements. But if we remember the case of the
drowning man and his gold we shall realise that, fundamentally,
the case is the same for the human as for
any other species. No one can openly question this,
but not one publicist or politician in a thousand believes
it in any living sense. The true function of government,
said Ruskin, is the production and recognition of human
worth. This has only to be said to be admitted; it
is one of the thoughts that shine, as Joubert says. No
one denies it and no one acts upon it.
In this sense such a phrase as the National Exchequer
begins to take on a new meaning, and the Chancellor of
the Exchequer loses every whit of his importance, except
in so far as his proceedings tend towards, or away from,
the production and recognition of human worth. He
plays with money, whereas the Chancellor of the real
Exchequer would work for life.
The facts of childhood to-day.—But since human
life is discontinuous, since three times in a century the
essential wealth of nations is reduced to dust, and raised
again from helpless infancy, our urgent business is with
the children of the nation. What, then, in general, are
the facts of the National Exchequer thus conceived?
We find that, so far as ordinary physical health is
concerned, the majority of human babies—including, for
instance, so-called Anglo-Saxon babies—are physically
healthy at birth. On the other hand, a certain proportion
are as definitely and obviously unhealthy at the very start
as the more fortunate majority are healthy. If certain
influences, such as alcohol and some few diseases, have
been in operation, the babies may be already doomed—not
national wealth, but national illth. In the absence
of these pernicious factors, there is, on the whole, physical
fitness. The ratio is perhaps as ninety to ten per cent.
Here then, is, on the whole, a ceaseless supply of
essential wealth; physically, at any rate, of good enough
quality. As every one knows, or should know, the greater
part of it we immediately proceed to deface and destroy.
Our mouths are full of argument concerning the principles
of what we are pleased to conceive as political economy.
The principles of vital economy we do not enquire into
but outrage and defy at every turn. So horribly and
wastefully are we misguided that in point of fact we
actually destroy altogether the greater number, not of
all the children merely, but even of the fit and healthy
children; and it may forcibly be argued that, before
any one proceeds to attempt any choice amongst the
children, as to which shall in their turn become parents
and which shall not, it would be well, apart from any
question of discrimination, to revise radically the methods
which at present permit this wholesale destruction.
Whilst we kill outright by hundreds of thousands every
year, we damage for life far more, including a very large
proportion of those who, as things at present are, will in
their turn become the parents who alone are the makers
of the real wealth of nations. If this destructive process
had the effect which common notions of heredity would
lead us to expect, then most certainly not merely would
Britain, for instance, be doomed, but the very name
would long ago have become “one with Nineveh and
Tyre.” But though this destructive process (which it
is best to describe as resulting in deterioration rather
than degeneration) has been long continued, and though,
in consequence of the great economic changes of last
century and the rush into the cities with their over-crowding,
it is perhaps more disastrous now than ever
before: yet it remains true that most of the babies born
in the slums are splendid little specimens of humanity—so
far as physique is concerned—bearing no marks of
degeneration to correspond with the deterioration of their
parents. In a word, heredity works—the racial poisons
apart, as we shall see—so that each generation gets a
fresh start. If there be no process of selection, each
new generation begins where its predecessor began and
is as a whole neither worse nor better, whether physically
or psychically.
Eugenics and infant mortality.—In the face of the
foregoing, which merely outlines the appalling indictment
that ought to be framed against civilisation for its treatment
of its children, it is evidently incumbent upon us to
answer the objector who should say that the whole purpose
and argument of our present enquiry is premature,
and that surely our first business should be not to propose
any novel and revolutionary doctrine as to the choice of
parents and of children, but rather to stop this child
slaughter and child damage—in other words, that we
should devote ourselves rather, not to providing children
with a good heredity, but to providing them with a good
environment, it being only too demonstrable that the
environment we at present provide for the great majority
of them is deadly and abominable in the extreme. This
argument is all the stronger because most of the children
are admittedly fit physically at birth. It would seem as
if there were little to complain of in their heredity, whilst
there is certainly almost everything to complain of in
their environment.
If this objection is to be met at all, we must be most
careful and serious in our going. Whatever conclusions
we come to we must at any rate be sure that we do not
impugn or deny the instant, immediate and constant law
of love which declares that there can be no adequate ideal
short of doing our best for all children, once they are
born—nay, more, from the very moment, months before,
at which their individual history starts. Whoso suggests
that, as a present and immediate policy, it is not right to
care for all children, healthy or diseased, welcome or
unwelcome, nurseried in Park Lane or in the slums, may
have plausible and even so-called eugenic arguments on
his side, but his proposal is essentially immoral and therefore
essentially false. For all children actually in being—whether
they await or have passed the particular moment
of birth—it is our duty, ideal and real, to do our utmost.
The believer in the principle of race-culture or eugenics—whom
I shall hereafter, as for some years past, call the
eugenist—may believe that it would have been better had
some of these children never been born; he may believe
that, in the present unorganised state of society, in the
present dethroned state of motherhood, it were vastly better
had many even of the healthy majority never been born.
He may be convinced that, since so many of them will
certainly die, failing our feeble efforts to save childhood,
their birth is a misfortune: but on no terms and for no
objects whatever does, or can, the eugenist propose that
any of these children, even though from the moment of
birth they be riddled with disease, should be allowed to
die. Though some will say that the keeping alive of
diseased children, or even of many children at first
healthy, is a disaster, I maintain that no such question of
choice, selection or discrimination can find any warrant
in any form of morality—eugenic or other—from the
moment at which the child in question began its individual
existence. Those of us who advocate the
eugenic idea must be perpetually on our guard against
the insidious alliance of any who, agreeing with our
premises, declare that it is a mistake, for instance, to
prosecute a campaign against infant mortality. I myself
have had a share—by a continuous propaganda started
in 1902—in making this last a publicly recognised question,
whilst, on the other hand, I have done my best to popularise
the idea of eugenics. Let me repeat here what I
have already said elsewhere: that I strenuously repudiate
any suggestion that the eugenic end is legitimately or
effectively to be served by permitting the infant mortality
to continue. The distinguished Egyptologist, Professor
Flinders Petrie, in his recent book Janus in Modern Life,
describes as follows the results of the present crusade
against infant mortality, as he conceives them:—“We
must agree that it would be of the lower or lowest type of
careless, thriftless, dirty, and incapable families that the
increase [of surviving children] would be obtained. Is
it worth while to dilute our increase of population by ten
per cent. more of the most inferior kind? Will England
be stronger for having one-thirtieth more, and that of the
worst stock, added to the population every year? This
movement is doing away with one of the few remains of
natural weeding out of the unfit that our civilisation has
left to us. And it will certainly cause more misery than
happiness in the course of a century.”
Here, plainly, is a serious argument. We are bound
to sympathise with its underlying assumption, viz.,
that not all babies are such as we can desire to carry
on the race. Still more must we sympathise with any
author whatever who has imagination and foresight
enough to write anywhere, on any subject, wrongly or
rightly, such a sentence as “and it will certainly cause
more misery than happiness in the course of a century.”
We need more such authors. But without going into the
whole argument here—as, for instance, regarding the
singular use of the word “natural”—I do most entirely
deny the right of the eugenic idea to any voice or place as
to the fate of children once they have come into being.
Another writer, arguing on the same lines, says à propos
of the abolition of infant mortality: “This last change
which, as the Huddersfield experiment shows, is easy of
accomplishment, is likely to be completely effected in the
next few years, and we shall then have abolished the one
factor which in any important degree at present tends
to redress the balance between the rates of reproduction
of the superior and the inferior classes.” These are the
words of Dr. W. McDougall, the distinguished psychologist.
Dr. McDougall has subsequently shown that he repudiates
the apparent deduction from them, and entirely
approves of the present campaign of mercy to childhood.
Nevertheless, these arguments, plainly derived from the
principle of natural selection, do express a most important
truth—viz., that indiscriminate survival must lead to
racial decadence, whether in man, microbe or moss. I
submit that the difficulty can be solved only by the
eugenic principle.
The fittest must become parents, and the unfit[2] must
not; then kill the unfit, says Nature. And this indeed,
in all living species other than man, is what Nature does.
But “thou shalt not kill,” says the moral law—not even
the unfit. As the foregoing will have shown, some
thinkers to-day propose to avail themselves in this
dilemma of the “New Decalogue”:—
“Thou shalt not kill but need'st not strive
Officiously to keep alive.”
This is no solution of the problem. There is only one
solution, and that is the eugenic solution. Nature can
preserve a race only by destroying the unfit. We who
are intelligent must preserve and elevate the race by
preventing the unfit from ever coming into existence at
all. We must replace Nature's selective death-rate by a
selective birth-rate. This is merciful and supremely
moral; it means vast economy in life and money and
time and suffering; it is natural at bottom, but it is
Nature raised to her highest power in that almost
supra-natural fact—the moral intelligence of man.
The dilemma defined.—The moral law, and our natural
human sympathy, insist that we should seek to preserve
all the children that come into the world, to amplify the
health of the healthy, and to neutralise, as far as possible,
the unfitness of the unfit. A mother brings her malformed
baby to the surgeon, and he does his best to patch
up the gaps left by the imperfect processes of development.
Otherwise the baby will die. Who dares look that mother
in the face and say “Ah, but it is better for the race that
your child should die!” Such a doctrine, I submit, blasphemes
our humanity; it is intolerable to any decent
person who will pause to think what it means: and yet, in
so saying, we seem to defy Nature with her imperative
law of the survival of the fittest only. Pre-eugenic
writers on evolution state the case in all its hardness.
Dr. Archdall Reid says that “If we wish to improve
the individual, we must attend to his acquirements by
providing proper shelter, food, and training.” Well, we
do wish to improve the individual, and to preserve the
individual! We do not wish the super-man on the terms
of Nietzsche—the super-man obtained at the cost of love
would turn out to be inferior to any brute-beast, an
intellectual fiend. But, Dr. Reid goes on to say, “such
means will not effect an improvement of the race....
On the contrary, they will cause deterioration[3] by an
increased survival of the unfit.” The provision of
“proper shelter, food and training” will cause racial
decadence! Is it not evident, then, that such provisions
must rather be styled improper, and that we must refrain
from doing anything for the defects and needs of the
individual, lest a worse thing befall the race? This is
an outrageous proposition, yet it is offered us as a necessary
inference from the principle of natural selection or the
survival of the fittest—which no one now dares to dispute.
Herbert Spencer, to whom we owe the phrase “the
survival of the fittest,” expresses this critical difficulty
as follows: “The law that each creature shall take the
benefits and the evils of its own nature has been the law
under which life has evolved thus far. Any arrangements
which, in a considerable degree, prevent superiority from
profiting by the rewards of superiority, or shield inferiority
from the evils it entails—any arrangements
which tend to make it as well to be inferior as to be
superior, are arrangements diametrically opposed to the
progress of organisation, and the reaching of a higher
life.” This is permanently and necessarily true, and in
our care for childhood we have to reckon with it. Yet
even Spencer himself did not pursue this supremely
important enquiry to what I shall in a moment submit
to be its logical and almost incredibly hopeful conclusion.
Huxley, writing his well-known Romanes Lecture,
“Evolution and Ethics,” at a time when, unfortunately,
he had somewhat parted company with Spencer, and
was too ready to accept any argument that made against
Spencer's political views, cuts the Gordian knot in an
astonishingly unsatisfactory fashion. He declares that
“the ethical progress of society depends, not on imitating
the cosmic process [that is, the selection of the fittest],
still less in running away from it, but in combating it.”
This is shallow thinking and very poor philosophy. One
wonders how Huxley can have forgotten the great dictum
of Bacon that Nature can be commanded only by obeying
her. He declares that moral evolution is the direct
contradiction and antithesis of the process of organic
evolution hitherto. He says, “Social progress means a
checking of the cosmic process at every step and the
substitution for it of another, which may be called the
ethical process;” and he declares it to be a fallacy to
suppose “that because on the whole animals and plants
have advanced in perfection of organisation, by means of
the struggle for existence and the consequent survival
of the fittest; therefore men in society, men as ethical
beings, must look to the same process to help them
towards perfection.”
With all this Huxley offers us no real solution whatever,
no hint that he has realised in any degree what must be
the consequences of indiscriminate survival. It is astonishing
how personal bias, so alien to the whole character
of the man as a rule, blinded him to a solution which, as
it seems to me, stared him in the face. Assuredly we can
transmute and elevate and raise to its highest power what
he calls the cosmic process, and can reconcile cosmic with
ethical evolution, by extending to the unfit all our sympathy
but forbidding them parenthood. I deny that the provision
of a proper environment for the individual entails racial
deterioration. Cosmic and moral evolution are compatible
if, whilst caring for each individual, whether maim,
halt, blind, or insane, and whilst admitting the categorical
imperative of the law of love which demands our care for
him, we continue to obey the indication of Nature, which
forbids such an individual to perpetuate his infirmity.
Nature has no choice; if she is to avert the coming of the
unfit race she must summarily extinguish its potential
ancestor, but we can prohibit the reproduction of his
infirmity whilst doing all we can for the success of his
individual life. This is the ideal course indicated and
approved by biology and morality alike.
The eugenic reconciliation.—I submit, then, that there
is no inconsistency in fighting simultaneously for the
preservation and care of all babies and all children without
discrimination of any kind—and, on the other hand,
in declaring that, if the degeneration of the race is to be
averted, still more if racial, which is the only sure, progress,
is to be attained, we must have the worthy and only the
worthy to be the parents of the future. I submit further
that only the eugenist can maintain his position in this
matter at the present day.
On his one hand is the improvident humanitarian with
his feeling heart, he who, seeing misery and disease and
death, whether in babyhood, childhood, or at any other
time of life, seeks to improve the environment and so
relieve these evils. Close beside this wholly indiscriminate
humanitarianism is that which declares that
with childhood is the future and therefore devotes its
energies especially to the young, is grateful for every baby
born, whatever its state, and when adult years are reached,
assumes that all will be well for the future, though the
principle of natural selection is thus made of none effect.
On the other side of the eugenists stand those whom
we may for short call the Nietzscheans. They see
one-half of the truth of natural selection; they see that
through struggle and internecine war, species have
hitherto maintained themselves or ascended. They declare
that all improvement of the environment, or at any
rate all humanitarian effort, tends to abrogate the struggle
for existence, and even, as is only too often true, to select
unworth and let worth go to the wall. This school then
declares that infant mortality is a blessing and charity
an unmitigated curse. In short, that we must go back
as quickly as possible to the order of the beast.
Between these two, surely, the eugenist stands, declaring
that each has a great truth, but that his teaching,
and his alone, involves their co-ordination and reconciliation.
He agrees with the humanitarian that no child
should cry or starve or work or die—or at any rate this
particular eugenist does—and he agrees with the Nietzschean
that to abrogate, and still more, to reverse, the
principle of natural selection, is to set our faces for the goal
of racial death. But further, the eugenist declares that the
indiscriminate humanitarian, blind to the truth which the
Nietzschean sees, would heap up, if permitted, disaster
upon disaster; whilst he repudiates as horrible and
ghastly the Nietzschean doctrine that morality must go
by the board if the race is to be raised:—that we must be
damned to be saved.
Our age is now awakening, at last, to the cry of the
children. The tendency of legislation and opinion in
every civilised country is one and the same. For this
humanitarianism let only him who thinks of any child
as a brat refuse to give thanks. But it is the business
of all who, whilst loving children and still in love with
love, are yet acquainted with the principles of organic
evolution—in short, the business of all humane men
of science, men of science who have not ceased to be
human—whilst aiding, abetting and directing this
humanitarian effort by every means in their power, to
teach and preach, in season and out of season, that
unless meanwhile we make terms with the principle of
selection, the choice of worth for parents, and the
rejection of the unworthy, not as individuals but as
parents, we shall assuredly breed for posterity, whose
lives and happiness and moral welfare are in our hands,
evils that can adequately neither be named nor numbered.
Already, together with much blessed good, this indiscriminate
humanitarianism has done much evil. Many
of our most instant and, for this generation, insoluble
problems are the lamentable fruit of this inherently
good thing. The eugenist declares that this fruit is not
necessary, that if it were necessary he could see no way
out of our morass and would echo the half-wish of Huxley
for some kindly comet that should put a term to human
history altogether; and, in short, that only by the
eugenic means can the humanitarian end be attained.
During the last year or two of the campaign against
infant mortality many things have become clear, and
none clearer than the fundamental compatibility between
this campaign and the principles of eugenics. As these
two efforts wall be predominant in the real politics of
all the years to come, a few more words must here be
devoted to the relation between them.
Granted that the highest of all objects is the making
of worthy human beings, it is quite evident that we
must attend equally to the two factors which determine
all human life—heredity and environment. Eugenics
stands for the principle of heredity—the principle that
the right children shall be born. The campaign against
infant mortality stands for a good environment[4]—so
that children, when born, may survive and thrive.
Obviously eugenics would be of no use if the children
could not survive, and no human infant can survive
unless it be born into a moral environment: no motherhood,
no man. The two campaigns, then, are strictly
complementary. We must endeavour to rid ourselves
of the popular notion that the whole result of the campaign
against infant mortality can be measured by the
number of babies whose death is prevented. The infant
mortality is merely an index of a widespread social
disease—an index and an extreme symptom. But for
every baby killed many are damaged; and to remove
the causes of infant mortality is to remove the causes
which at present effect the deterioration of millions of
human beings. The eugenic campaign, then, without
the other would be almost futile.
The time for eugenics.—On our principles the eugenic
question can be decently raised only before conception. The
unyoked germ-cells of any individual, though alive, are not
entitled to claim protection from the principle that life is
sacred. It is permitted to allow them to die; but from
the moment of conception a new individual has been formed—a
new living human individual, even though it only consists
of a single cell, product of the union of the parental
germ-cells: and we shall not be safe unless we regard
this being as sacred and its destruction—except in order
to save the life of the mother—as murder, even at
this as at any later stage. If the eugenist should raise
his voice, and say that this individual should not be born,
he must be regarded exactly as if he were to recommend
infanticide or the lethal chamber for unfit individuals.
In such a case he would have entirely mistaken the
whole principle of (negative) eugenics, which is not to
elevate the race by the destruction of the unfit, at
any stage, ante-natal or post-natal, but to do so by
prohibiting the conception of the unfit. Directly the new
human individual is formed the eugenic question is too
late in that case. It is now the eugenist's duty, because it
is every one's duty, to regard the new individual, whether
born or yet unborn, as an end in himself or herself. But
when the question arises whether that individual is to
become a parent, then the eugenic question can and
must be raised.
Circumstances might arise in which “case-law” might
be applicable. It might be thought better to destroy
the syphilitic child rather than allow it to come into
the world. But we cannot make these distinctions.
The question is simply one of expediency, and the
only expedient thing is that there shall be no paltering
with the principle that when a new human life is conceived
our duty is to preserve it, whether it were conceived
only twenty-four hours ago or whether it be a decrepit
and helpless centenarian. The instant we let this principle
go we are proposing to revert to Nature's method of keeping
up the level of a race by murder. It is improper, then, for
any one on eugenic grounds to protest against proposals
for the arrest of infant mortality. He should have
spoken sooner; at this stage he must hold his peace.
The two campaigns complementary.—Yet further:
not only is it evident that the campaign against
infant mortality (which is, in a word, the campaign
for the provision of a proper environment for the
young) is obviously necessary for the fulfilment of the
eugenic ideal—since what would be the good of choosing
the right parents if their children are then to be slain?—but
it can be shown conversely that the object of those
who are working against infant mortality can never be fully
attained except by means of eugenics. Eugenics apart,
we can and shall reduce the infant mortality to a mere fraction
of what it is at present, by preventing the destruction
of that great majority of babies who are born healthy.
Even, however, when we have provided an ideal environment
for every baby that comes into the world, we shall
not have abolished infant mortality, since there will
always remain a proportion, say ten per cent., whom
not even an ideal environment can save. They should
never have been conceived. At the Infantile Mortality
Conference held in London in 1908, this was clearly
recognised by more than one speaker. The maternalist
must have the eugenist to help him if his ideal is to be
attained.
Not only is the ideal of the two campaigns one and
the same; not only is each necessary for the other, but
their methods are the same. It is true that at first
this was not evident, since when we began to fight against
infant mortality many temporary expedients of no
eugenic relevance were adopted, such as the crèche and
the infant milk depot. But in the interval between the
Conferences of 1906 and 1908 many things became
clear: so that, whereas the papers at the first Conference
were only accidentally connected, the programme of the
second proceeded upon a principle—the principle of
the supremacy of motherhood. We see now that the
one fundamental method by which infantile mortality
may be checked is by the elevation of motherhood. In
the words of our President, Mr. John Burns, “you must
glorify, dignify, and purify motherhood by every means
in your power.” Thus the first two papers read at
the first morning's meeting of the Conference—a brief
paper by the present writer on “The Human Mother,”
and an admirable paper by Miss Alice Ravenhill on
“Education for Motherhood”—might equally well
have been read at a Eugenics Conference. The opponent
of infant mortality and the eugenist appeal to the same
principle and avow the same creed: that parenthood is
sacred, that it must not be casually undertaken, that it
demands the most assiduous preparation of body and
intellect and emotions. When, at last, these principles
are believed and acted upon, infant mortality will be
a thing of the past and national eugenics a thing of the
present.
It is essential in this first general study of the subject
to state the true nature of the relation between these
two campaigns, to which every succeeding year of the
present century will find more and more attention devoted.
Between them they succeed in beginning at the beginning,
and it would be a disaster, indeed, if they were incompatible.
On the contrary, they are complementary and
mutually indispensable. As the years go on they will
engage between them the sympathy and the assistance
of all serious people. In the year 1907 infant mortality
was first named in a speech by a Prime Minister, and in
that same year it was first mentioned in the Christmas-Day
sermon at St. Paul's Cathedral; in that year also
Parliament passed the Early Notification of Births Act,
the first substantial legislative provision which sets our
feet on the road towards the goal of a true national
estimate of the value of parenthood. We are about to
discover that the true politics is domestics, since there
is no wealth but life and life begins at home. We are
going to have the right kind of life born, and we are going
to take care of it when it is born. We shall raise a
generation which looks upon the ordinary money-changing
politician as an impudent public nuisance, and the brutal,
blood-stained Imperialist, shouting about the Empire
which his very existence almost suffices to condemn, whilst
he battens on the cannibal sale of alcoholic poison to babies
and the mothers of future babies, as the very type of those
traitors—they of its own household—who have helped to
destroy every Empire in history. We propose to rebuild
the living foundations of empire. To this end we shall
preach a New Imperialism, warning England to beware
lest her veins become choked with yellow dirt, and demanding
that over all her legislative chambers there be
carved the more than golden words, “There is no Wealth
but Life.”
“Truth justifies herself; and as she dwells
With hope, who would not follow where she leads?”
Wordsworth.
“La plus haute tâche de l'action morale est le travail pour le
bien des générations futures.”—Forel.
Before looking more closely than we are commonly
apt to do at the meaning of the phrases “natural selection”
and “survival of the fittest,” let us exercise the
right of man the moral being, as distinguished from
man the scientist or observer of Nature, to pass ethical
judgments upon the facts which it is the business of
all the sciences, except ethics itself, merely to record
and interpret in and for themselves. We are beginning
at last, half a century after the publication of the Origin
of Species in 1859, to realise the power of the law of
selection; what is the moral judgment which is to be
passed upon it? In a passage from the last page of
Herbert Spencer's Autobiography, we find words which
may be quoted on both sides: “When we think of the
myriads of years of the Earth's past, during which have
arisen and passed away low forms of creatures, small
and great, which, murdering and being murdered, have
gradually evolved,[5] how shall we answer the question—To
what end?”
“Murdering and being murdered” suggests the adverse,
and “have gradually evolved,” the favourable, ethical
judgment.
Many thinkers, finding Nature “so careless of the
single life,” finding the murderous struggle for existence
the dominant fact of the history of the living world,
return an adverse verdict. Amongst them are to be
found not merely those who are inclined, by temperament
or imperfect education, to rebellion against any conclusions
of science, but also, as we saw in the second
chapter, such a great biologist as Huxley. In another
part of the lecture already cited he says that the Stoics
failed to see
“... that cosmic nature is no school of virtue, but the headquarters
of the enemy of ethical nature. The logic of facts was
necessary to convince them that the cosmos works through the
lower nature of man, not for righteousness, but against it....
The practice of that which is ethically best—what we call goodness
or virtue—involves a course of conduct which, in all respects,
is opposed to that which leads to success in the cosmic struggle for
existence.”
In other words, honesty is the worst policy: and to
worship natural selection is to deify the devil.
The reader will realise that, if we are to succeed in
establishing the claim of natural selection to be the
natural model upon which those who desire the progress
of society are to base their policy, it is necessary to controvert
the doctrine that natural selection is an anti-moral
process. But let us hear the other side.
The directly contrary view, then, is taken that though,
truly enough, there has been and is much “murdering
and being murdered,” yet organisms “have gradually
evolved” towards fitness for their surroundings, or the
milieu environnant of Lamarck, which we translate environment;
and that since fitness or adaptation obviously
makes for happiness, and since the moral being man
has himself been thus evolved, the process of natural
selection, “murdering and being murdered” notwithstanding,
is essentially beneficent.
The controversy is embittered and complicated by the
fact that ultimate questions of religion and philosophy
are involved. Is the Universe moral, as Emerson asserted
it was, or is it immoral? A recent opponent of the
orthodox creed of a benevolent Deity teaches that “The
Lesson of Evolution” is to disprove the idea of benevolence
behind or in Nature: “The story of life has been a story
of pain and cruelty of the most ghastly description.”
The age-long fact of “murdering and being murdered”
is the weapon with which he attacks the theist: who,
per contra, points to the beneficent result, the exquisite
adaptation of all species to the circumstances of their
life, and the evolution of love itself.
We may remind ourselves of those great lines of
Mr. George Meredith,
“... sure reward
We have whom knowledge crowns;
Who see in mould the rose unfold,
The soul through blood and tears.”
The one camp points to the “blood and tears” and
asks for a verdict accordingly. The other points to
“the soul” as their product, and asks for a verdict
accordingly. But surely we need only to have the
case fairly stated, in order to realise that the “blood
and tears” are true but only half the truth, “the soul”
true but only half the truth. Natural Selection is a
colossal paradox—the doing evil that good may come.
The evil is undoubtedly done, and the good undoubtedly
comes. Is not this the only verdict that is in consonance
with all the facts? Is it not less than philosophic to
look at the process alone, or to look at the result alone?
Is any real end to be served by the incessant cry that
we should keep our eyes fixed on the “blood and tears”
alone, or on “the soul” alone? Is not the poet right
when he says that the sure reward of knowledge is not to
see either half of the truth as if it were the whole, but
to see unfold “the soul through blood and tears?”
Any attempt to cast up accounts between the evil of
the process and the good of the result—especially any
attempt based on the assumption that the process has
yet achieved its final result—would be not only premature
in the eyes of those who can look forwards, but
would be irrelevant to our present enquiry. I certainly am
with those who repudiate as misleading Mill's description
of Nature as a “vast slaughter-house,” and will declare
that, apart from self-conscious and supremely sensitive
man, it is easy to exaggerate the misery and to minimise
the joy of the sub-human world. But our business here
is with the process and its results in man himself, in
whom alone are possible the heights of ecstasy and the
depths of agony: and the thesis—the sublime thesis, we
may avouch—of the present discussion is that, whatever
the balance between the evil of the process of Natural
Selection and the good of its results in the natural state, yet
when it is transmuted, as it may be, by the moral intelligence
of man, according to the principles of race-culture
or eugenics, the good of the result can be attained, more
abundantly and incomparably more rapidly, than ever
heretofore, whilst the evil of the process can be abolished
altogether. True or false, is this not a sublime thesis?
Nature must be cruel to be kind.—If organic fitness
or adaptation to the circumstances of life is to be secured,
Nature must choose for future parents, out of every new
generation, only those whose inborn characters make for
this adaptation, and who, in virtue of the fact we call
heredity, will tend to transmit this fitness to their offspring.
Now it is often convenient to personify Nature,
but we must not be misled. The process is really an
automatic, not an intelligently directed one. In order
that it shall be possible, certain conditions must obtain.
The choice or selection depends not merely upon the
provision of a variety from which to choose—this being
afforded by what is called variation, which is the correlative
of heredity, both being obvious facts in any well-filled
nursery—but also upon the production of more
young creatures than there is or will be room for. (If
there be room for all, so that all survive, there can be
no selection, and instead of survival of the fittest there
will be indiscriminate survival.) The choice is effected
amongst this superfluity by an internecine “struggle for
existence”: hence the “murdering and being murdered,”
hence the “blood and tears.” The motor force of the
whole process may be symbolised as the “will to life,”
ever seeking to realise itself in more abundance and with
more success—with more and more approximation to
perfect adaptation. The will to death is no ingredient
of the will to life. Nature is, so to say, by no means
desirous of the process of “murdering and being murdered”:
very much on the contrary. It is life, more
life, and fitter life, that is her desire: the “murdering
and being murdered,” the “blood and tears” are no
part of her aim. But they are inevitable, though lamentable,
if her aim is to be realised. She must be cruel to
be kind—a little cruel to be very kind.[6]
It is imaginable, though no more, that natural selection,
in certain circumstances, might have worked otherwise:
the penalty for less as against greater fitness might
imaginably have been not death but merely sterility—the
denial of future parenthood. This is the ideal of race-culture.
Had this been possible, Nature could have
effected her end, which is fitter and fuller life, without
having incidentally to mete out premature death to such
an overwhelming majority of all her creatures. But,
actually, this was not possible: and, unless the end was
to be sacrificed, Nature was compelled—to keep up the
figure—summarily to kill right and left. Permitted to
reach maturity, the unfit as well as the fit would multiply;
and since, in general, the lower the form of life the greater
its fertility, the species could not possibly advance, or even
maintain itself at the level already gained.
To drop the figure, the process is a mechanical and
automatic one, and its appalling wastefulness and indisputable
cruelty are inevitably involved, whilst it so
remains.
Intelligence may be kind to be kinder.—But—and
here is the great event—this mechanical, automatic, non-intelligent
process has latterly given birth to intelligence,
the moral intelligence of man: and the question now
to be answered is, what modification can intelligence
effect in the moral-immoral process that has created
it? Must intelligence abrogate that process altogether,
as Huxley declares, on the grounds of its
murderous methods? Must intelligence simply look on,
recognise, but not reconstruct? Must intelligence reverse
the process—as indeed it is now doing in many
cases—so that in the new environment of which itself is
a factor, that which formerly was unfitness shall become
fitness, and vice versâ? Or is it conceivable that intelligence
can transmute the process, so that, whilst hitherto
mechanical, automatic, and therefore inevitably murderous,
it shall become intelligent, pressing towards the
sublime end, and reforming the murderous means?
Hear Mr. Galton himself (Sociological Papers, 1905,
p. 52):—
“Purely passive, or what may be styled mechanical evolution,
displays the awe-inspiring spectacle of a vast eddy of organic
turmoil ... it is moulded by blind and wasteful processes,
namely, by an extravagant production of raw material and the
ruthless rejection of all that is superfluous, through the blundering
steps of trial and error.... Evolution is in any case a grand
phantasmagoria, but it assumes an infinitely more interesting
aspect under the knowledge that the intelligent action of the
human will is, in some small measure, capable of directing its
course. Man has the power of doing this largely so far as the
evolution of humanity is concerned; he has already affected the
quality and distribution of organic life so widely that the changes
on the surface of the earth, merely through his disforestings and
agriculture, would be recognisable from a distance as great as that
of the moon.”
Hear also Sir E. Ray Lankester, in the Romanes
Lecture[7] for 1905: “Man is ... a product of the definite
and orderly evolution which is universal, a being
resulting from and driven by the one great nexus of
mechanism which we call Nature. He stands alone,
face to face with that relentless mechanism. It is his
destiny to understand and to control it.”
“Nature's insurgent son,” Professor Lankester calls man
in this lecture: and yet again there recurs that mighty
aphorism of Bacon, which might well be printed on every
page of these chapters, “Nature is to be commanded only
by obeying her.” The struggle for existence is the
terrible fact of Nature, but is only a means to an end.
It is our destiny to command the end whilst humanising
the means.
The struggle for existence.—The ideal of eugenics or
race-culture is to abolish the brutal elements of the
struggle for existence whilst gaining its great end. The
nature of this struggle is commonly misapprehended and,
as I cannot improve upon the words of Professor
Lankester, I shall freely use them in the attempt to
show what it really is. He says:—
“The world, the earth's surface, is practically full, that is to say,
fully occupied. Only one pair of young can grow up to take the
place of the pair—male and female—which have launched a
dozen, or it may be as many as a hundred thousand, young
individuals on the world.... The ‘struggle for existence’ of
Darwin is the struggle amongst all the superabundant young of a
given species, in a given area, to gain the necessary food, to escape
voracious enemies, and gain protection from excesses of heat, cold,
moisture, and dryness. One pair in the new generation—only one
pair—survive for every parental pair. Animal population does
not increase: ‘Increase and multiply’ has never been said by
Nature to her lower creatures. Locally, and from time to time,
owing to exceptional changes, a species may multiply here and
decrease there; but it is important to realise that the ‘struggle
for existence’ in Nature—that is to say, among the animals and
plants of this earth untouched by man—is a desperate one, however
tranquil and peaceful the battlefield may appear to us. The
struggle for existence takes place, not as a clever French writer
glibly informs his readers, between different species, but between
individuals of the same species, brothers and sisters and cousins....
In Nature's struggle for existence, death, immediate obliteration,
is the fate of the vanquished, whilst the only reward to the
victors—few, very few, but rare and beautiful in the fitness which
has carried them to victory—is the permission to reproduce their
kind—to carry on by heredity to another generation the specific
qualities by which they triumphed.
“It is not generally realised how severe is the pressure and
competition in Nature—not between different species, but between
the immature population of one and the same species, precisely
because they are of the same species and have exactly the same
needs.... A distinctive quality in the beauty of natural productions
(in which man delights) is due to the unobtrusive yet
tremendous slaughter of the unfit which is incessantly going on
and the absolute restriction of the privilege of parentage to the
happy few who attain to the standard described as ‘the fittest.’”
The survival of the fittest.—Now let us look closely at
this most famous of all Spencer's phrases, “the survival
of the fittest,” and try to understand its full and exact
meaning. There is no phrase in any language so frequently
misinterpreted. Even a writer who should know
better makes this mistake. Mr. H. G. Wells speaks[8]
of “that same lack of a fine appreciation of facts that
enabled Herbert Spencer to coin those two most unfortunate
terms Evolution and the Survival of the Fittest.
The implication is that the best reproduces and survives.
Now really it is the better that survives and not the best.”
What the correction is supposed to signify I do not know,
but the whole passage is nonsense. The implication is
neither that the best nor the better survive, but the fittest—or
if Mr. Wells prefers, for it matters not one whit—the
fitter. This lack of a fine appreciation of words is not,
unfortunately, peculiar to Mr. Wells. There is no word
in the language that more exactly expresses the fact than
the word fittest: as Darwin recognised when he promptly
incorporated Spencer's phrase in the second edition of the
Origin of Species as the best interpretation of his own
phrase “natural selection”![9] Fitness is the capacity
to fit: a thing that is fit is a thing that fits. A living
creature survives in proportion as it fits its environment—the
physical environment in the case of vegetables and
the lower animals, the physical, social, intellectual and
moral environment in the case of man. The kind of
glove that most perfectly fits the hand is the fittest glove
and will survive in the struggle for existence between
gloves. If, instead of a glove, we take a living creature,
say a microbe, the kind of microbe that best fits into the
environment provided by, say, human blood, is the fittest
and will survive and be the cause of our commonest
disease. Thus the tubercle bacillus is at once the fittest
microbe and, not the best, but the worst. Among
ourselves, the newspaper devoted to yesterday's murder
is the fittest and survives, ousting the newspaper which
reckons with the crucifixion, or the murder of Socrates or
Bruno. In a society of blackguardism, the biggest blackguard
is the fittest man and will survive: he is also the
worst. In another society the best man is the fittest and
survives. The capacity to fit into the environment is the
capacity that determines survival: it has no moral connotation
whatever. If Herbert Spencer had written the
survival of the better, as Mr. Wells desires, he would have
written palpable nonsense: as it was he used the fittest
word—in this case also the best, because the truest.
Referring to the queen-bee, who destroys her own
daughters, Darwin says, “undoubtedly this is for the good
of the community; maternal love or maternal hatred,
though the latter fortunately is most rare, is all the
same to the inexorable principle of natural selection.”
If natural selection were the survival of the better, as
Mr. Wells would have us believe, there would be nothing
for eugenics or race-culture to do: and heaven would
long ago have come to earth. If in all ages the better men
and women had survived and become parents, earth would
long ago have become a demi-paradise indeed, there would
have been no arrests, no reversals in the history of human
progress, and life would be already what, some day, it
will be, when there is achieved the eugenic ideal—which
is precisely that the best or better members of our
race shall be the selected for the supreme profession of
parenthood. In other words, the eugenic ideal, the ideal
of race-culture, is to ensure that the fittest shall be the best.
Always, everywhere, without a solitary exception, human,
animal or vegetable, the fittest have ultimately survived
and must survive. Once realise what is the meaning of
the word fit—best seen in the verb “to fit”—and we
shall see that, as Herbert Spencer pointed out in his
overwhelming reply to the late Lord Salisbury's attack
on evolution, the idea of the survival of the fittest is a
necessity of thought.[10]
But, alas, the idea of the survival of the best or the
better is not a necessity of thought! The fittest microbes
are the worst from our point of view, because they are
most inimical to the highest forms of life; the fittest
newspaper may be the worst, because it panders to the
worst but most widespread and irresponsible elements
in human nature; everything and every one that succeeds,
succeeds because it or he fits the conditions: but
to succeed is not necessarily to be good. Indeed everything
that exists at all, living or lifeless, an atom or an
animal, a molecule or a moon, exists because it can exist,
because it fits the conditions of existence: there is no
moral question involved, but only a mechanical one.
The business of eugenics or race-culture is to make an
environment, conditions of law and public opinion, such
that the fittest shall be the best and the best the fittest therein.
If memory may be trusted, the primary meaning of the
word fit has not hitherto been called in by any one to
elucidate the meaning of Spencer's phrase: perhaps it
may be hoped that we shall at last begin to understand it,
if we remember that a thing is fit because it fits. It is
best not to be too sanguine, however, and therefore we
may attempt to illustrate the case from another aspect.
Survival-value.—Every living thing and nearly every
character or feature of a living thing that survives, survives
because it has value or capacity for life—which may be
called, in Professor Lloyd Morgan's phrase, survival-value.
The character that gives an organism survival-value, or
value for life, the character that enables it to fit its environment,
may be of any order. The atom, as I have said
elsewhere, is an organism writ small. The kinds of atoms
that have survived in the age-long struggle for existence
between atoms are those that have survival-value on
account of their internal stability: as Empedocles argued
ages ago. In the case of living things, which individually
die, it is evident that the capacity to reproduce themselves
is one of supreme survival-value. If mankind
lost this capacity, all its other characters of survival-value,
such as intelligence, would obviously avail it
nought. Certain valuable members of society may fall
short in this cardinal respect, and therefore become
extinct. Indeed, other forms of survival-value, as we
shall see, seem to be in large measure inimical to fertility:
and this is perhaps the chief obstacle to eugenics.[11]
Fertility apart, the character having survival-value may
take a thousand forms. In the case of the parasitic
microbe it is an evil character, the power to produce
toxins or poisons. In the case of the tiger it is the possession
of large and powerful bones and claws and muscles
and teeth. In the case of the ox it is a complicated and
efficient digestive apparatus, enabling it to fit into a
food-environment which is too innutritious to sustain
the life of creatures not so endowed. Nature seeks only
the fittest; not the best but the best-adapted; she asks
no moral questions. A Keats, a Spinoza, or a Schubert
must go under if his factors of survival-value do not enable
him to resist those of the tubercle bacillus, its toxins or
poisons. She welcomes the parasitic tapeworm, all hooks
and mouth or stomach, because these give it survival-value;
and so on.
The business of eugenics or race-culture, then, is to
create an environment such that those characters which
we desire as moral and intelligent beings shall be endowed
with the highest possible survival-value, as against those
which ally so many men with the microbe and the tapeworm.
There are those who live in society to-day, and
reproduce their like, in virtue of the poisons they produce,
in virtue of their tenacious hooks and voracious stomachs.
If society be organised so that these are factors of more
survival-value than the disinterested search for truth, or
mother-love, or the power to create great poetry or
music—then, according to the inevitable and universal
law of the survival of the fittest, our parasites will oust
our poets and our poisoners our philosophers. These
things have happened and may happen again at any time.
It does not matter that the good thing, in virtue of
survival-value then superior, has been evolved. Nature
never gives a final verdict in favour of good or bad but
only and always in favour of the fit. Let the conditions
change, so that rapacity fits them better than righteousness,
or—as in a completely “collectivist” state—vegetableness
rather than virility, and the thing we call
high will go under before the thing we call low. Nature
recognises neither high nor low but only fitness or value for
life in the conditions that actually obtain. These laws enthroned
and dethroned the civilisations of the past: they
have enthroned and may dethrone us. But this end is
not inevitable, since man—and this is his great character—not
merely reacts to his environment, as all creatures
must, but can create and recreate it. The business of
eugenics or race-culture is to create an environment such
that the human characters of which the human spirit
approves shall in it outweigh those of which we disapprove.
Make it fittest to be best and the best will
win—not because it is the best, but because it is the
fittest: had the worst been the fittest it would have won.
In society to-day both forms of the process may be
observed. The balance between them determines its
destiny. It is the business of eugenics to throw the
whole weight of human purpose into the scale of the
good.
Evolution not necessarily progress.—No excessive space
has been devoted to this distinction between the fittest
and the best and to the real meaning of Spencer's famous
phrase, if perchance it should avail in any degree to dispel
one of the commonest of the many common delusions
regarding the nature of organic evolution and its outcome.
This delusion is that progress is an inevitable law
of nature.[12] The great process of history, as revealed
by biology, displays as its supreme fact the occurrence
of progress. The principles of evolution teach that this
progress—as, for instance, in the evolution of man—is a
product of the survival of the fittest; whilst we are also
reminded that the survival of the fittest is a necessary
truth: but it does not follow that progress is inevitable.
In the first place, natural selection involves selection.
Where all the young members of a new generation of any
species survive, and parenthood becomes not a privilege
but a common and universal function, plainly the process
is in abeyance: and, in the second place, since the survival
of the fittest is not the survival of the best, but only
the survival of the best adapted, the process may at any
time take the form of retrogression rather than that of
progress. The assumption that, because progress has
been effected through natural selection, we need do no
more than fold our hands, or unfold them merely to applaud,
involves the denial of one of the most familiar
facts of natural history—the fact of racial degeneration.
The parasitic microbes, the parasitic worms, the barnacles,
innumerable living creatures both animal and vegetable,
individuals and races of mankind, to-day as in all ages—these
prove only too clearly that the process of the
survival of the fittest may make as definitely for retrogression
in one case as for progress in another.
By all means let us infer from the facts of organic
evolution the conclusion that further progress must surely
be possible, so much progress having already been achieved
as is represented by the difference between inorganic
matter or the amœba or microbe on the one hand, and
man on the other hand. But let us most earnestly beware
of the false and disastrous optimism which should suppose
that because the survival of the fittest has often, and
indeed most often, meant the survival of the best, it
means always that and nothing else. On the contrary,
we must learn that, even in natural circumstances, apart
from any interference by man, the survival of the fittest
often means racial degeneration—a tapeworm kept in
spirits should stand upon the study mantelpiece of all
who think with Mr. Wells that the survival of the fittest
means the survival of the better; and still more notably
we must learn that the interference of man in the case
of his own species, sometimes of evil intent, sometimes
for the highest ends, with the process of natural selection,
has repeatedly led, and is now in large part leading, to
nothing other than that process of racial degeneration of
which the tapeworm and the barnacle should be our perpetual
reminders. The case becomes serious enough when
man interferes with the process of selection merely with the
effect of suspending it, wholly or in part: but it becomes
far more serious when his interference constitutes a
reversal of the process. This most supremely disastrous
of all conceivable consequences of man's intelligence and
moral sense is known as reversed selection, and must be
carefully studied hereafter. Meanwhile, we must devote
some space to a most important consideration—namely,
that though Nature is impartial in her choice, and will,
for instance, allow the poisons of a microbe such as the
tubercle bacillus to destroy the life of a Spinoza or a
Keats or a Schubert, yet, on the whole, the survival-value
of the mental, spiritual, or psychical in all its forms
does persistently tend to outweigh that of the physical
or material—of this great truth the evolution and dominance
of man himself being the supreme example.
The very fact of progress, which I would define as the
emergence and increasing dominance of mind, demonstrates—it
being remembered that natural selection has no
moral prejudices—that even in a world of claws and
toxins the psychical must have possessed sufficient
survival-value to survive. It is quite evident that
even the lowliest psychical characters, such as sharpness
of sensation, discrimination, and memory, must be of
value in the struggle for life. More and more we might
expect to find, and do actually find in the course of
evolution, that creatures live by their wits, rather than by
force of bone or muscle. The psychical was certainly
given no unfair start—on the contrary. It has had to
struggle for its emergence; it has emerged only where
there has been struggle and has done so because it could—because
of its superior survival-value. It has the right
which belongs to might—in the world of life there is no
other.[13]
By no means less evident is the inherently superior
survival-value of the psychical, if we turn from its aspects
of sensation and intelligence to those which are all summed
up under the word love. Notwithstanding Nietzsche's
mad misconception of the Darwinian theory, no one who
has studied the facts of reproduction and its conditions
in the world of life can question the incalculable survival-value
of love in animal history. The success of those
most ancient of all societies, of which the ant-heap and
the bee-hive are the types, depends absolutely upon the
self-sacrifice of the individual. If we pass upwards
from the insects to the lowest vertebrates, we find the
survival-value of love proved by the comparison between
various species of fish, and its increasing importance may
be traced upwards through amphibia, reptiles, birds and
mammals in succession, up to man. Natural selection
thus actually selects morality. Without love no baby
could live for twenty-four hours. Every human being
that exists or ever has existed or ever will exist is a
product of mother-love or foster-mother-love, and I
am well entitled to say, as I have so often said, no morals,
no man. The creature in whom organic morality is at
its height has become the lord of the earth in virtue of
that morality which natural selection has selected, not
from any moral bias, but because of its superior survival-value.
“Many are the mighty things, but none is mightier than
man.... He conquers by his devices the tenant of the
fields.”—Sophocles.
“L'homme n'est qu'un roseau, le plus faible de la Nature;
mais c'est un roseau pensant.”—Pascal.
“The soul of all improvement is the improvement of the
soul.”—Burchell.
Whereas, in its beginning, mind, or the psychical in all
its aspects, was merely a useful property of body, all
organic progress may be conceived in terms of a change
in this original relation between them. In man, the
mental or psychical has become the essential thing, and
the body its servant. We are well prepared, then, to
accept the proposition that in our own day and for our
own species, the plane upon which natural selection
works has largely been transferred, and, indeed, if any
further progress is to be effected, must be transferred,
from the bodily or physical to the mental or psychical. A
certain most remarkable fact in the anatomy of man
may be cited, as we shall see, in support of this proposition.
We need not venture upon the controversial ground
of the relation or ultimate unity of mind and body;
nor need we set up any suggestion of antagonism between
them. All, however, are absolutely agreed that the
psychical in all its forms, whatever it really be, has a
consistent relation of the most intimate kind with that
part of the body which we call the nervous system.
For our present purposes the nature of this relation
matters nothing at all, and in place of the phrase, the
“selection of mind,” I should be quite content, if the
reader so prefers, to speak of the selection of nerve or
nervous selection. And if I may for a moment anticipate
the conclusion, we may say that, in and for the future,
the process of selection for life and parenthood, as it occurs
in mankind, must be based, if the highest results are to
be obtained, upon the principle that the selection of
bodily qualities other than those of the nervous system
is of value only in so far as these serve the nervous or
psychical qualities. For practical and for theoretical
purposes we must accept the dictum of Professor Forel
that “the brain is the man”—or, to be more accurate
and less epigrammatic, the nervous system is the man.
If, then, we counsel or approve of any selection of bone
or muscle or digestion, or any other bodily organ or
function; if we select for physical health, physical
energy, longevity, or immunity from disease—our estimate
of these things, one and all, must be wholly determined
by the services which they can perform for the nervous
system, whether as its instruments, its guarantors of
health and persistence, or otherwise. But we are not
to regard any of these things as ends in themselves—notwithstanding
the fact that this temptation will constantly
beset us. So to do is implicitly to deny and
renounce the supreme character of man—which is that,
in him, mind or nervous system is the master, and the
rest of the body, with all its attributes, the servant.
The body still necessary.—Should anyone suppose that
the principles here laid down would speedily involve us, if
executed, in a host of disasters, let him reconsider that
conclusion. Utterly ignorant or jocose persons have
hinted, more or less definitely, that if a race of mankind
were to be bred for brains, the product would be a most
misbegotten creature approaching as near as possible—and
that imperfectly enough—to the ideal of disembodied
thought, a creature monstrous as to head, impotent and
puny as to limbs, and, in effect, the least effective of living
creatures. This supposition may be commended as the last
word in the way of nonsense. It depends upon an abysmal
ignorance of the necessary and permanent relations
which subsist between mind and body. It assumes that
the healthy mind can be obtained without the healthy
body; it is totally unaware that the nervous system
cannot work properly unless the blood be well aerated
by active lungs and distributed by a healthy heart;
that unless certain glands, of which these people have
never heard, are acting properly, the nervous system
falls into decadence, and the man becomes an imbecile.
To breed for brains is most assuredly to breed for body
too: only that the end in view will guide us as to what
points of body to breed for. For instance, it would
prevent us from having any foolish ambitions as to
increasing the stature of the race, or the average weight
of its muscular apparatus. Stature may be a point
to breed for in the race-culture of giraffes and muscle
in the race-culture of the hippopotamus: but such
bodily characters are of no moment for man, who is above
all things a mind. Whilst we shall pay little attention
to these, we or our descendants will be abundantly
concerned with the preservation and culture of those
many bodily characters upon which the health and
vigour and sanity and durability of the nervous system
depend.
Further, notwithstanding all the nonsense that has
been written concerning the man of the future, with bald
and swollen head, be-goggled eyes, toothless gums, and
wicker-work skeleton, those who know the alphabet
of physiology and psychology are warranted in believing
that wisely to breed for brains will be to breed for beauty
too—not of the skin-deep but of the mind-deep variety—and
also for grace and energy and versatility of physique.
Those who worship brawn as brawn may be commended
to the ox; those who respect brawn as the instrument
of brain, and value it not by its horse-power but by
its capacity as the agent of purpose, will find nothing
to complain of in the kinds of men and women whom a
wise eugenics has for its ideal.
The erect attitude.—And now we must briefly consider
that “most remarkable fact in the anatomy of man” to
which allusion was made in the first paragraph. It is that,
as the most philosophic anatomists are now coming to
believe, the body of man actually represents the goal of
physical evolution. Of course the common opinion is, quite
apart from science, that man is the highest of creatures,
and that there is no more to be expected. But the
doctrine of evolution regards man as the latest, not
necessarily the last, term in an age-long process
which is by no means completed, and from the
evolutionary point of view it is thus a daring
and, at first hearing, a preposterous thing to say that,
so far as the physical aspects of organic evolution are
concerned, the body of man apparently represents the
logical and final conclusion of the age-long process which
has produced it. Let us attempt very briefly to outline
the argument.
We may say that a great step was taken when from
the chaos of the invertebrate or backbone-less animals
there emerged the first vertebrates. This unquestionably
occurred in the sea, the first backbone being evolved
in a fish-like creature which, in the course of time, developed
two lateral fins. These became modified into
two pairs of limbs, the sole function of which was locomotion.
In the next group of vertebrates, the amphibia—such
as the frog—we see these limbs terminating
each in five digits. (The frog, so to say, decided that we
should count in tens.) Now some creatures have
specialised their limbs at the cost of certain fingers.
The horse, for instance, walks on the nails (the hoofs)
of its middle fingers and its middle toes. In the
main line of ascent, however, none of these precious
fingers (and toes)—how precious let the typist or the
pianist say—have been sacrificed. There has been,
however, in later ages a tendency towards the specialisation
of the front limbs. Used for locomotion at times,
they are also used for grasping and tearing and holding,
as in the case of the tiger, a member of the carnivora,
a relatively late and high group of mammals. But the
carnivore does not carry its food to its mouth, and the
cat carries her kittens in her mouth and not with her
paws. In the apes and monkeys, however, this specialisation
goes further, and things are actually carried by the
hands to the mouth—a very great advance on the tiger,
who fixes his food with his “hands,” and then carries
his mouth to it. Food to mouth instead of mouth to
food is a much later stage in evolution, a fact which may
be recalled when we watch the table manners of certain
people. Finally, in man the specialisation reaches its
natural limit by the complete liberation of the fore-limbs
from the purposes of locomotion—though the crawling
gait of a child recalls the base degrees by which we did
ascend.
This great change depends upon an alteration
in the axis of the body. The first fishes, like present
fishes, were horizontal animals, but gradually the axis
has become altered, in the main line of progress, until
the semi-erect apes yield to man the erect, or “man the
erected,” as Stevenson called him. The son of horizontal
animals, he is himself vertical: the “pronograde”
has become “orthograde.” Thus the phrase, “the
ascent of man,” may be read in two senses. This capital
fact has depended upon a shifting of the centre of
gravity of the body, which in adult man lies behind
the hip-joints, whereas in his ancestors and in the small
baby (still in the four-footed stage) it lies in front of the
hip-joints. Thus, whilst other creatures tend naturally
to fall forwards, so that they must use their fore-limbs
for support and locomotion, the whole body of man above
the hip-joints tends naturally to fall backwards, being
prevented from doing so by two great ligaments which
lie in front of the hip-joints and have a unique development
in man. The complete erection of the spine means
that the skull, instead of being suspended in front, is
now poised upon the top of the spinal column. The field
of vision is enormously enlarged, and it is possible to
sweep a great extent of horizon at a moment's notice.
But the complete discharge of the fore-limbs from the
function of locomotion has far vaster consequences,
especially as they now assume the function of educating
their master, the brain, and enabling him to employ them
for higher and higher purposes.
Thus, when we ask ourselves whether there is any
further goal for physical evolution, the answer is that
none can be seen. So far as physical evolution is concerned
the goal has been attained with the erect attitude.
Future changes in the anatomy of man will not be positive
but negative. There doubtless will be a certain lightening
of the ship, the casting overboard of inherited superfluities,
but that is all: except that we may hope for
certain modifications in the way of increasing the adaptation
of the body to the erect attitude, which at present
bears very hardly in many ways upon the body of man,
and much more so upon the body of woman.
Thus race-culture will certainly not aim at the breeding
of physical freaks of any kind, nor yet at such things
as stature. It must begin by clearly recognising what
are the factors which in man possess supreme survival-value,
and it must aim at their reinforcement rather
than at the maintenance of those factors which, of
dominant value in lower forms of life, have been superseded
in him. A few words will suffice to show in what
fashion man has already shed vital characters which,
superfluous and burdensome for him, have in former
times been of the utmost survival-value.
The denudation of man.—As contrasted with the
whole mass of his predecessors, man comes into the
world denuded of defensive armour, destitute of offensive
weapons, possessed alone of the potentialities
of the psychical. So far as defence is concerned,
he has neither fur nor feathers nor scales, but is the
most naked and thinnest skinned of animals. In his
Autobiography, Spencer tells us how he and Huxley,
sitting on the cliff at St. Andrews and watching some
boys bathing, “marvelled over the fact, seeming especially
strange when they are no longer disguised by clothes,
that human beings should dominate over all other creatures
and play the wonderful part they do on the earth.”[14]
But man is not only without armour against either
living enemies or cold; he is also without weapons of
attack. His teeth are practically worthless in this
respect, not only on account of their small size but also
because his chin, a unique possession, and the shape
of his jaws, make them singularly unfit for catching
or grasping. For claws he has merely nails, capable
only of the feeblest scratching; he can discharge no
poisons from his mouth; he cannot envelop himself in
darkness in order to hide himself; his speediest and
most enduring runner is a breathless laggard. And,
lastly, he is at first almost bereft of instinct, has to be
burnt in order to dread the fire, and cannot find his
own way to the breast. His sole instrument of dominance
is his mind in all its attributes.
On the grounds thus indicated, we must be wholly
opposed to all proposals for race education and race-culture,
and to all social practices, which assume more
or less consciously that, for all his boasting, man is after
all only an animal: whilst we must applaud the selection
and culture of the physical exactly in so far as, but no
further than, it makes for health and strength of the
psychical—or, if the reader dislikes these expressions,
the health and strength of that particular part of the
physical which we call the nervous system.
It used to be generally asserted that whilst, in a civilised
community, we do not expect to find the biggest or most
muscular man King or Prime Minister, yet amongst savage
tribes it is the physical, muscle and bone and brutality,
that determines leadership. This, however, we now
know to be untrue even for the earliest stages of society
that anthropologists can recognise. The leader of the
savage tribe is not the biggest man but the cleverest.
The suggestion is therefore that, even in the earliest stages
of human society, the plane of selection has already been
largely transferred from brawn to brain or from physique
to psyche. It has always been so, we may be well sure.
The Drift men of Taubach, living in the inter-glacial
period, could kill the full-grown elephant and rhinoceros.
Says Professor Ranke: “It is the mind of man that shows
itself superior to the most powerful brute force, even where
we meet him for the first time.” This remains true whether
the brute force be displayed in brutes or in other men.
The great fact of intelligence, as against material
apparatus of any kind and even as against rigid instinct,
is its limitless applicability. With this one instrument
man achieves what without it could be achieved only by
a creature who combined in his own person every kind
of material apparatus, offensive and defensive, locomotor
or what not, which animal life, and vegetable life too,
have invented in the past—and not even by such a
creature. Man is a poor pedestrian, but his mind makes
locomotives which rival or surpass the fish of the sea,
the antelope on land, if not yet the bird of the air; his
teeth are of poor quality, but his mind supplies him with
artificial ones and enables him to cook and otherwise to
prepare his food. All the physical methods are self-limited,
but the method of mind has no limits; it is even
more than cumulative, and multiplies its capacities by
geometrical progression.
The cult of muscle.—A word must really be said
here, in accordance with all the foregoing argument,
against the recent revival of what may be called the
Cult of Muscle. This cult of muscle, or belief in
physical culture, so called, as the true means of
race-culture, undoubtedly requires to have its absurd
pretensions censured. We now have many flourishing
schools of physical culture which desire to
persuade us to a belief in the monstrous anachronism
that, even in man, muscle and bone are still pre-eminent.
They want as many people as possible to believe that the
only thing really worth aiming at is what they understand
by physical culture. They pride themselves upon knowing
the names and positions of all the muscles in the
body, and on being able to provide us with instruments
to develop all these muscles: they are there and they
ought to be developed, and you are a mere parody of
what a man ought to be unless they are developed—none
of them must be neglected. Many people have been
persuaded of these doctrines, and there is no doubt that
the physical culture schools do thus develop a large
number of muscles which have no present service for
man and would otherwise have been allowed to rest in a
decent obscurity.
In order to prove this point, let us instance a few
muscles which it is utterly absurd to regard as still possessing
any survival-value for man. In the sole of the
foot there are four distinct layers of muscles, by means
of which it is theoretically possible to turn each individual
toe to the left or the right, independently of its neighbours,
and to move the various parts of each toe upon
themselves, just as in the case of the fingers. All this
muscular apparatus is a mere survival, worth nothing at
all for the special purposes of the human foot. In point of
fact the human foot is now decadent, and probably not
more than two or three specimens of feet in a hundred
contain the complete normal equipment of muscles, bones
and joints—as Sir William Turner showed many
years ago. Thus many feet are possessed of muscles
designed to act upon joints which have not been developed
at all in the feet in question and which, if they
were there, would not be of the smallest use. To take
another instance, we do not now use our external ears
for the purpose of catching sound, though we still possess
muscles which, if thrown into action, would move the
external ear in various directions. Again, there is a flat,
thin stratum of muscle on the front of the neck, corresponding
to a muscle which in the dog and the horse is
quite important, but which is of no use to us. All would
be agreed as to the absurdity of devoting continued
conscious effort to the development of these particular
muscles; but in point of fact we have a whole host of
muscles which are in a similar case, and which are nevertheless
objects of the most tender solicitude on the part
of the physical culturist. In general, this modern craze,
whilst highly profitable to those who foster it, is
most misguided and reactionary. Modern knowledge of
heredity teaches us that our descendants will not profit
muscularly in the slightest degree because of our devotion
to these relics: the blacksmith's baby has promise
of no bigger biceps than any one else's. Further, the
over-doing of muscular culture is responsible for the
consumption of a large amount of energy. A muscle is
a highly vital and active organ, requiring a large amount
of nourishment, which its possessor has to obtain, consume,
digest and distribute. The more time and energy spent
in sustaining useless muscles, the less is available for
immeasurably more important concerns. Man does not
live by brawn alone: he does live by brain alone.
Strength versus skill.—So far as true race-culture
is concerned, we should regard our muscles merely
as servants or instruments of the will. Since we
have learnt to employ external forces for our purposes,
the mere bulk of a muscle is now a matter of
little importance. Of the utmost importance, on the
other hand, is the power to co-ordinate and graduate the
activity of our muscles, so that they may become highly
trained servants. This is a matter, however, not of
muscle at all but of nervous education. Its foundation
cannot be laid by mechanical things like dumb-bells and
exercises, but by games, in which will and purpose and
co-ordination are incessantly employed. In other words,
the only physical culture worth talking about is nervous
culture.
The principles here laid down are daily defied in very
large measure in our nurseries, our schools, and our
barrack yards. The play of a child, spontaneous and
purposeful, is supremely human and characteristic.
Although, when considered from the outside, it is simply a
means of muscular development, properly considered it is
really the means of nervous development. Here we see
muscles used as human muscles should alone be used—as
instruments of mind. In schools the same principles
should be recognised. From the biological and psychological
point of view the playing-field is immeasurably
superior to the gymnasium. But it is in the barrack
yard that the pitiable confusion between the survival-value
of mind and muscle respectively in man is most
ludicrously and disastrously exemplified.
The glorious truth upon which we appear to act is that
man is an animated machine; that the business of the
soldier is not to think, not to be an individual, but to be
an assemblage of muscles. We see the marks of this idea
even in a fine poem: “Their's not to reason why, their's
but to do or die”—which, of course, might just as well
be said of a stud of horses or motor-cars. Further, our
worship of the machine is, consistently enough, an unintelligent
worship. We do not even recognise the best
conditions for its action. Every year hundreds of young
soldiers, originally healthy, have their hearts and lungs
and other vital organs permanently injured by the
imbecile attitude of chest—that of abnormal expansion—which
they are required to adopt during hard work.
Army doctors are now protesting against this, but it is
in accordance with the fitness of things that the cult of
muscle as against intelligence should be unintelligent.
I repeat that whilst in the study of race-culture the
physical cannot be ignored, since the psychical is so
largely dependent upon it, yet the physical is of worth
to us only in so far as it serves the psychical. The race
the culture of which we propose to undertake has long
ago determined to abandon the physical in itself as an
instrument of success. We are not attempting the
culture of the cretaceous reptiles, which staked their all
upon muscle, and finally, having become as large as
houses—and as agile—suffered extinction. We are attempting
the culture of a species which, so far as the
physical is concerned, has long ago crossed the Rubicon
or burnt its boats. Even if Mr. Sandow and the drill-sergeant
had their way to the utmost, and, having finally
eliminated all traces of mind, succeeded in producing the
strongest and most perfect physical machine that could
be made from the human body, the species so produced
would go down in a generation before the elements or
before any living species that may be named. Man
has staked his all upon mind. The only physical
development that is really worth anything to such a race
is that which educates intelligence and morality, on the
one hand, and serves for their expression, on the other.
If there is any salient and irresistible tendency in our
civilisation to-day, it is the persistent decadence of
muscle and of all of which muscle is the type, as an
instrument of survival-value. The development of
machinery, much deplored by the short-sighted, is in the
direct line of progress, because it reduces the importance
of muscle and throws all its weight into the scale of mind.
Hewers of wood and drawers of water are becoming less
and less necessary, not because mechanical force is not
needed but because the human intelligence is learning
how to supersede the human machine as its source. Every
development of machinery makes the man who can merely
offer his muscles of less value to the community. Long
ago—not so very long ago in some cases—it was quite
sufficient for a man to be able to say “I am a good
machine:” he was worth his keep and had his chance of
becoming a parent; but the man whom society wants
now-a-days is not the man who is a good machine but
the man who can make one. These elementary truths
are hidden, however, from the political quacks who discourse
to us upon unemployment.
Herbert Spencer's remark that it is necessary to be a
good animal has an element of truth in it which was
utterly ignored and needed proclamation at that time;
but it is necessary to be a good animal only in so far as
that state makes for being a good man—and not an iota
further.
The present interest in many most important aspects
of physical education, such as may be summed up under
the phrase “school hygiene,” must not blind us to the
great principle that physical education is a means and not
an end. Our present educational system, which permits
schooling to end just when it should begin, or rather
sooner, and which, even through our Government Departments,
permits boys to be used as little more than animated
machines, such as telegraph boys—is very largely
responsible for the great national evil of unemployment,
which we treat with soup-kitchens. We shall revise a
large proportion of our educational, political and social
methods just so soon as—but not before—we get into
our heads the idea that in human society, and pre-eminently
in society to-day, the survival-value of mind
and consequently the selection of mind must predominate
over the survival-value and consequent selection of
muscle. Further, whatever factors tend to enhance the
survival-value of the physical are ipso facto making for
retrogression and a return to the order of the beast.
Whatever tend to enhance the survival-value of the
psychical—by which I most assuredly include not only
intelligence but, for instance, motherhood—are ipso
facto forces of progress. The products of progress are not
machinery but men, and the well-drilled-machine idea of
a man ought to be as obsolete as more than one recent
war has proved it disastrous.
There is here to be read no pessimistic suggestion that
the psychical is in any permanent danger. No one can
think so who knows its strength and the relative impotence
of the physical, but it is certainly possible that the
course of progress may be greatly delayed in any given
nation or race by worship of the physical, or even, as
Sparta shows, by worship of what may be called the
physical virtues as against the moral and intellectual
virtues. But those who are interested in the survival of
any particular race or nation have to remember that
arrest or retardation of progress therein, relatively to its
wiser neighbours, must, before long, result in its utter
downfall.
What are we to choose?—The argument that the
selection of mind has been dominant throughout
human history is reinforced by such knowledge of
that history as we possess. There is no record of any
race that established itself in virtue of great stature
or exceptional muscular strength. Even in cases of
the most purely military dominance, it was not force
as such, but discipline and method, that determined
success; whilst some of the greatest soldiers in history
have been physically the smallest. The statement of the
anthropologists, already alluded to, regarding the selection
of the leading men in primitive tribes, may safely
be taken as always true: selection in human society has
always been, in the main, selection of that which, for
survival-value, is the dominant character of man, mind
in its widest sense. We shall see, later, that physical
eugenics can by no means be ignored: but our guiding
principle must be that the physical is of worth only in so
far as it serves the psychical, and is worse than worthless
in so far as it does not. It would surely be well, for
instance, that we should breed for “energy,” to use
Mr. Galton's term: but the energy we desire, and the energy
he commends, is nervous, not muscular. The confusion
between two radically different things, vitality and muscularity,
is, however, almost universal, though it will not
stand a moment's examination. In a volume devoted to
personal hygiene I have discussed this point, which is of
real moment both for the individual and for the theory
of eugenics.[15]
It is of interest to note, in passing from this question,
that inherent facts of the human constitution would
interdict us if we thought it a fit ideal to breed for stature
or bulk. Giants are essentially morbid—not favourable
but unfavourable variations. They are very frequently
childless and almost constantly slow-witted. Their
condition is really a mild form of a well-marked and highly
characteristic disease known as acromegaly, and distinguished
by great enlargement of the face and
extremities. The malady depends upon peculiarities in
the glandular activities of the body: and the state of these
which makes for great stature and bulk makes against intelligence.
It is suggested, then, that any considerable
increase of human bulk and stature could only be
obtained at the cost of intelligence. It would be very
dear at the price.
When we come to the subject of selection for parenthood
in man through the preferences exhibited by individuals
for members of the opposite sex, we shall see that what
Darwin called “sexual selection” is certainly a reality
in the case of man, whether or not it be so in the case of
the lower animals. We shall see that this most potent
factor in human evolution acts even now very favourably,
and is capable of having its value enormously enhanced.
In the selection of husbands, nervous or psychical factors
are notably of high survival-value in civilised communities.
In the selection of wives the survival-value of the
physical is still very high: but it may be hoped and
believed that the present tendency is to attach relatively
less importance to them and more to the psychical elements
of the chosen. This tendency must be furthered to
the utmost point beyond which the physical requisites
for motherhood would suffer weakening—but no further.
How are we to estimate civic worth?—We have
already observed that it is incorrect to use the word
“fit” as if it were synonymous with “worthy.” If we
insist on using this term, which means only “adapted to
conditions,” we must define those conditions. We must
say that we desire to further the production of those who
are fit for citizenship, and to disfavour the production of
those who are unfit for citizenship. We shall thereby
dispose at least of those vexatious objectors who tell us
that many eminent criminals are individually superior to
many eminent judges. The statement is doubtless
untrue, but if it were true it would still be irrelevant.
A criminal may be individually a remarkable personality,
but in so far as he is a criminal he is unfit for citizenship.
It is far better to use consistently Mr. Galton's phrase,
“civic worth,” or, for short, “worth.” We may here note
Mr. Galton's most recent remarks on what he means by
worth:—
“By this I mean the civic worthiness, or the Value to the State
of a person, as it would probably be assessed by experts or, say, by
such of his fellow-workers as have earned the respect of the community
in the midst of which they live. Thus the worth of
soldiers would be such as it would be rated by respected soldiers,
students by students, business men by business men, artists by
artists, and so on. The State is a vastly complex organism, and
the hope of obtaining a Proportional Representation of its best
parts should be an avowed object of issuing invitations to these
gatherings.
“Speaking only for myself, if I had to classify persons according
to Worth, I should consider each of them under the three heads of
Physique, Ability, and Character, subject to the provision that
inferiority in any one of the three should outweigh superiority in
the other two. I rank Physique first, because it is not only very
valuable in itself and allied to many other good qualities, but has
the additional merit of being easily rated. Ability I should place
second on similar grounds, and Character third, though in real
importance it stands first of all.”[16]
We shall certainly misunderstand this quotation unless
we clearly realise that Mr. Galton is speaking of eugenic
worth—that is to say, of worth in relation to parenthood
and heredity. No one, of course, would assert for a
moment that inferiority in the matter of physique outweighed
superiority in ability and character, so far as
our estimate of an individual as an individual is concerned,
nor yet so far as our estimate of him as a citizen
is concerned. But from the eugenic standpoint, as a
parent of citizens to come, such a person, though he may
have himself saved the State, is on the average rightly
to be regarded as unworthy on the eugenic scale—it being
assumed, of course, that the inferiority of physique in
the person in question is either native and therefore
transmissible, or else due to forms of disease, or poisoning,
such as, according to our knowledge of ante-natal
pathology, will probably involve degeneracy on
the part of his children. I would add that love is as
precious as ability, if not more so, and that we should
aim at its increase by making parenthood the most
responsible act in life, so that children are born only
to those who love children and who will transmit their
high measure of the parental instinct and the tender
emotion which is its correlate.[17]
“Increase and multiply”
The ceaseless multiplication of man is one of the facts
which distinguish him from all other living species, animal
or vegetable.[18]
We must not be misled by such a case as that of the
multiplication of rabbits in Australia. Apart from such
circumstances as human interference, the earth is already
crammed with life of a kind, not the highest life nor the
most intense life, but at any rate fully extended life. Man
alone multiplies persistently, irresistibly, and has done
so from the very first, so that, arising locally, he is now
diffused over the whole surface of the earth. To quote
from Professor Lankester again: “Man is Nature's rebel.
Where Nature says Die! Man says I will live! According
to the law previously in universal operation man should
have been limited in geographical area, killed by extremes
of cold or of heat, subject to starvation if one kind of diet
were unobtainable, and should have been unable to increase
and multiply, just as are his animal relatives, without
losing his specific structure.... But man's wits and
his will have enabled him ... to ‘increase and multiply,’
as no other animal, without change of form.”
Not only has man made himself the only animal which
constantly increases in numbers, but this increase, as Professor
Lankester points out in another part of his lecture,
already threatening certain difficulties, will be much more
rapid than at present, assuming the birth-rate to remain
where it is, when disease is controlled. It is within our
power, as Pasteur declared long ago, to abolish all parasitic,
infectious or epidemic disease. This must be and
will be done—within a century, I have little doubt. The
problem of the increase of human population will become
more pressing than ever. Professor Lankester suggests that
in one or five centuries the difficulty raised by our multiplication
“would, if let alone, force itself upon a desperate
humanity, brutalised by over-crowding and the struggle
for food. A return to Nature's terrible selection of the
fittest may, it is conceivable, be in this way in store for
us. But it is more probable that humanity will submit
to a restriction by the community in respect of the right
to multiply.” The lecturer added that we must therefore
perfect our knowledge of heredity in man, as to which
“there is absolutely no provision in any civilised community,
and no conception among the people or their
leaders, that it is a matter which concerns anyone but
farmers.”
The secret of multiplication.—Professor Lankester,
however, omits to point out the astonishing paradox
involved in the fact that—as I pointed out at the
Royal Institution in 1907—man, the only ceaselessly
multiplying animal, has the lowest birth-rate of any
living creature.[19] From the purely arithmetical point
of view, what does it mean? We may defer at present
any deeper interpretation.
It means necessarily and obviously that the effective
means of multiplication is not a high birth-rate but a low
death-rate. It is a necessary inference from the paradox
in question that the infant death-rate and the general
death-rate in man are the lowest anywhere to be found.
Producing fewer young he alone multiplies.[20] It follows
that a smaller proportion of those young must die. Unless
it is supposed by bishops and others, then, that a peculiar
value attaches to the production of a baby shortly to be
buried, the suggestion evidently is the same as that to
which every humanitarian and social and patriotic impulse
guides us, namely, the reduction of the death-rate and
especially the infant mortality. This is the true way in
which to insure the more rapid multiplication of man, if
that be desired. I believe it is not to be desired, but in
any case the reduction of the death-rate and especially of
the infant mortality is a worthy and necessary end in
itself, and need not inevitably lead to our undue multiplication
provided that the birth-rate falls. Hence the
eugenists and the Episcopal Bench may join hands so far
as the reduction of the death-rate is concerned, and the
only persons with whom a practical quarrel remains are
those who—in effect—applaud the mother who boasts
that she has buried twelve.
The facts of human multiplication.—Human population
continues to increase notwithstanding any
changes in the birth-rate. This fact remains true,
as shown by the latest obtainable figures. It should
be one of the dogmas never absent from the foreground
of the statesman's mind. Apparently nothing,
however, will induce us to take this little forethought.
When we build a bridge across the Thames, we ignore
it; when we widen a bridge we ignore it likewise.
When we make a new street we ignore it; when we build
railways and railway stations we ignore it—excusably,
perhaps, in this case; when we build hospitals we ignore
it: four times out of five there is no room for the addition
of a single ward in time to come. We have not yet even
learnt, as they are learning in America and Germany,
how to acquire the outlying lands of cities for the public
possession, so that they may be properly employed as the
city grows. The man who builds himself a villa on the
outskirts of a city, ignores it, and is staggered by it in ten
years. The lover of nature and the country ignores it:
“Just look at this,” he says, “this was in the country
when first I knew it, look at these horrible rows of villas!”
The only possible reply to such a person is simply, “Well,
my dear sir, what do you propose? General infanticide?”
Most important of all, this fact, that, to take the case of
Great Britain, some half million babies are born every year
in excess over the number of all who die at all ages, is
forgotten by our statesmen—or rather by our politicians.
It could, of course, not be forgotten by a statesman.
Quite apart from remoter consequences, especially in
relation to the wheat supply, this persistent multiplication—which
one has actually heard denied on the ground that
the birth-rate is falling—is of urgent moment to all of us.
In 1907 the Census Bureau of Washington published
some figures on the mortality statistics of nations, a summary
of which may be quoted: “In all parts of the
civilised world both the birth-rates and the death-rates
tend to decrease, and, as a rule, those countries having
the lowest death-rates have also the lowest birth-rates.
In Europe the lowest birth-rate is that of France, the
highest those of Servia and Roumania. The lowest death-rates
are in Sweden and Norway; the highest in Russia
and Spain. The downward tendency of the birth- and
death-rates is best shown by diagrams prepared by the
French Government, and it is probable that the downward
tendency is actually steeper than the diagrams show,
because both births and deaths are more accurately
registered than formerly.”
But these statements are by no means necessarily incompatible
with steady increase of population, which,
of course, increases so long as the birth-rate exceeds the
death-rate. I quote a few figures from the Science Year
Book of 1908:
In 1890 the total population of the world was estimated
at 1,487,900,000.
| Aryan (Europe, Persia, India, etc.) |
545,000,000 |
| Mongolian (N. and E. Asia) |
630,000,000 |
| Semitic (N. Africa) |
65,000,000 |
| Negro (C. Africa) |
150,000,000 |
| Malay and Polynesian |
35,000,000 |
| American Indian |
15,000,000 |
The total figure now must be something like sixteen
hundred millions at least.
Density of population, in so far as it means what is
commonly called over-crowding, is an important factor
in the death-rate, and has a most inimical influence upon
race-culture—in virtue of the opportunity afforded to
the racial poisons—syphilis, alcohol, etc. Thus Sweden
has the lowest death-rate in Europe, and has much
the least density of population—only 29 per square
mile as compared with our own 341. If now the fact
of the increase of population, with all that it means
and will mean, may be taken as dealt with and accepted,
there will be no danger of leading the reader to false
conclusions if we insist upon the fall of the birth-rate,
which in Great Britain in 1908 was the lowest on record.
The death-rate, however, persistently falls also. The
reader who thinks that the birth-rate alone determines the
increase of population, and those who believe in polygamy
on the ground that it necessarily makes for the rapid
multiplication and therefore strength of a nation,
should compare the death-rate of London, which
is under 16, with that of Bombay, which is just under 79.
It is asserted that in many large Indian cities the infant
mortality approaches one-half of all the children born.
What it amounts to in such cities as Canton and Pekin we
can only surmise with horror.
Notwithstanding the persistent fall in the birth-rate of
London the rate of increase in population remains
stupendous, according to the calculations of Mr. Cottrell,
which may be quoted from the Science Year Book of
1908. He estimates the population of Greater London
in 1910 at about 7½ millions, and in 1920 at well over
8½ millions—the falling birth-rate notwithstanding.
The increase of population of five great countries may
be briefly noted here. In all, with the possible exception
of Russia, the birth-rate is rapidly falling. In the course
of the nineteenth century the population of
| Russia (in Europe) |
rose |
from |
38 |
to |
105,000,000 |
| France |
" |
" |
26 |
" |
38,000,000 |
| Germany |
" |
" |
23 |
" |
55,000,000 |
| Great Britain |
" |
" |
15 |
" |
40,000,000 |
| United States |
" |
" |
5 |
" |
75,000,000 |
These are merely approximate figures, but accurate
enough to be of value. It need hardly be pointed out
that immigration accounts for the disproportionate increase
of population in the United States. But it may
be added that the imminent arrest or control of this immigration
will assuredly have the most serious and pressing
consequences for Europe. Plainly it must hasten the
coming of national eugenics.
The case of Germany.—Especial interest and importance
attach for many reasons to the case of Germany in this
connection, and, as might be expected, many precise facts
are available. Here I shall avail myself freely of the
paper contributed by Dr. Sombart to the International for
December, 1907. In the first seven years of this century
the population of Germany increased almost ten per cent.
The figure in 1870 was 40.8 millions and in 1907 61
millions. The population is increasing yearly at the rate
of about 800,000, as compared with about half a million
in the case of Great Britain. In France in 1907 the
population actually declined by a few thousands. In
regard to the growth of population Germany is now at
the head of all civilised countries, excepting those cases
in which immigration has augmented the number of
inhabitants. Does this expansion of population depend
upon an increasing birth-rate or a diminishing death-rate?
The fact, in strict parallel with the biological generalisation
already made, is that “Germany's population is
increasing so swiftly because the death-rate has been falling
steadily. At the beginning of the period, 1870–1880,
there were nearly 30 deaths per thousand inhabitants,
while in recent years only about 20 deaths in every
thousand inhabitants have taken place each year....
Notwithstanding, the birth-rate during the last ten years,
during which the principal growth of population occurs,
has not in anywise increased in Germany. Indeed, by
careful investigation it becomes apparent that it has
declined almost unintermittently for a generation.” The
average birth-rate for the ten years 1871–1880 was 40.7,
for 1891–1900 the average was 37.4. Since then it has fallen
further, and in 1905 the figure was 34, the lowest on record.
As Dr. Sombart observes, we shall only appreciate these
figures if we regard them as an expression of a tendency
which will continue, and that this is so he proves. He
observes that “the more highly advanced the country,
the lower its birth-rate.... From this we may already
draw the conclusion that a diminution of births is a concomitant
of our progress in civilisation. Secondly, this
is confirmed by the fact that the falling-off in the birth-rate
must be attributed largely to the big cities.... As a
third statistical argument that the birth-rate declines with
the advance of civilisation, the fact may be cited that in
the quarters of the well-to-do still fewer children are born
than in those of the poor.” (In London, as we have
seen, the birth-rate is highest in Stepney and lowest
in Hampstead).
Dr. Sombart finally points out what must never be
forgotten—that an increase in population, dependent upon
a fall in the death-rate, whilst the birth-rate also falls, is
necessarily self-limited. The decrease of the death-rate
is limited by definite natural age-limits, and “this indicates
that the increase of population in Germany is gradually
entering upon a period of less activity, and will perhaps
quite cease within a conceivable period unless other causes
operate in the opposite direction.”
The yellow peril.—The facts regarding the yellow
races are extremely difficult to ascertain. It appears,
however, that the birth-rate in Japan has almost doubled
in 27 years—rising from 17.1 to 31. (I doubt the
accuracy of the earlier figure.) In China the population
is largely controlled by infanticide, but there is little
doubt that the main contention of Pearson was correct,
and that the yellow races are multiplying much more
rapidly than the white races. It does not necessarily
follow, however, as we shall see, that this means yellow
ascendancy, any more than a similar comparison would
mean microbic ascendancy. It is not quantity but
quality of life that gives survival-value and dominance.
This disparity between white and yellow rates of increase
is by far the most pregnant of contemporary phenomena.
In the present introductory volume it can merely be
named. But since we shall not survive in virtue of
quantity, I, for one, am well assured that the choice for
Western civilisation will ere long be the final one between
eugenics or extinction.
The wheat problem.—Meanwhile, we must consider
briefly the question evidently raised by this fact of
human multiplication. As an expert has lately said,
the rise in the price of wheat “is not the transitory
result of market manipulation and ‘corners,’ forcing
prices up to an unnatural level, but of perfectly natural
and irresistible causes which, for all that, are the more
anxious and disquieting. The truth is we are for the
first time beginning to feel individually the effect of a
great natural process—the race which started long ago
between the population of the world and the growth of
the world's wheat supply. In this race the growth of
the world's population has been outstripping the growth
of its wheat-food production, and the consequence has
been a total growing shortage, in spite of the opening of
vast new areas in Canada and the Argentina.” In this
connection one of the best papers in Great Britain—the
Westminster Gazette—cheerfully remarked in a leading
article that, after all, we need not be alarmed as to the
difficulty in increasing the supply of wheat, since population
would, in any case, adapt itself to the food-supply.
This is true, indeed: there will never be more human
beings than there is food to feed. But the question is,
how will the population be kept down? In a word,
is it to be by the awful and bloody processes of Nature
or by the conscious, provident and humane methods of
man?
We are reminded of the argument advanced by Sir
William Crookes in his Presidential Address to the British
Association in 1898. The distinguished author has
himself written an invaluable book on the subject which
has been carefully revised and supplemented, and must
be read by the serious student.[21] We may note from the
point of view of the student of dietetics that wheat is
and remains, on physiological examination, what the
proverb suggests. Bread is the staff of life, wheat being,
in proportion to its price, by far the best and cheapest
of all foods.
The argument of Sir William Crookes was advanced
exactly a century after the publication of the great essay
of Malthus which we must soon consider. In the whole
intervening century no one, capable of being heard, had
considered the question. The relation of Crookes to
the earlier thinker remains, though it is curious that
Malthus was not mentioned by his successor. Writing
now, a decade later, I wish merely to point out that
Sir William's argument is found valid. He observed
that “the actual and potential wheat-producing capacity
of the United States is—and will be, for years to come—the
dominant factor in the world's bread-supply.”
Now the recent expert from whom we have already
quoted declares that “former great wheat exporting
countries like the United States, as well as Russia and
India, while their production remains as high, are sending
far less abroad under the pressure of their own increasing
needs. In this connection it may be recorded that a
great American corn expert declares that in twenty-five
years the United States will want all, or very nearly all,
of her wheat production for herself, and will have very
little indeed to send us.” In 1898 Sir William said,
“A permanently higher price for wheat is, I fear, a
calamity that ere long must be faced.” As everyone
knows, this prophecy is now being fulfilled. Sir William
declared that “the augmentation of the world's eating
population in a geometrical ratio” is a proved fact. The
phrase means, of course, simply that the yearly increase
increases. On the other hand, the wheat supply is subject
to a yearly increase which does not itself increase—in other
words the increase is in an arithmetical ratio. This, a
century later, precisely illustrates the principle of Malthus.
Sir William also declared that exports of wheat from the
United States are only of present interest, and that
“within a generation the ever-increasing population of
the United States will consume all the wheat grown
within its borders, and will be driven to import, and,
like ourselves, will scramble for the lion's share of the
wheat crop of the world.”
Next to the United States Russia is the greatest wheat
exporter, but the Russian peasant population increases
more rapidly than any other in Europe, even though it
is inadequately fed, and this source of supply must fail
ere very long. As Sir William points out, the Caucasian
civilisation is indeed founded upon bread. “Other races
vastly superior to us in numbers, but differing widely in
material and intellectual progress, are eaters of Indian
corn, rice, millet and other grains; but none of these
grains have the food-value, concentrated health-sustaining
power of wheat.” Sir William's argument was,
and is, that we must learn how to fix the nitrogen of
the atmosphere—that is to say, how to combine it in
forms on which the plant can feed. “The fixation
of nitrogen is a question of the not far distant
future. Unless we can class it among certainties to
come, the great Caucasian race will cease to be foremost
in the world, and will be squeezed out of existence by
races to whom wheat and bread is not the staff of
life.”
Sir William Crookes was himself the pioneer in the
discovery of the electric method of fixing the atmospheric
nitrogen, and now, a decade after the delivery
of his address, this method is in successful commercial
employment in Scandinavia. There is also a method of
sowing the bacteria which are capable of fixing nitrogen
and this, according to some, has been already proved
practicable. Further, the Mendelians offer us the possibility
of new varieties of wheat having more grains to
the stalk than we obtain at present. By these methods
the output of the land devoted to wheat may be doubled
or trebled, but it is evident that even then there will be
an impassable limit. We have to face, indeed, the
evident but unconsidered fact that there must be a maximum
possible human population for this finite earth,
whether a bread-eating population or any other. I do
not propose to speculate regarding this evident truth.
If human life is worth living and is the highest life we
know, we may desire to obtain that maximum population,
but it must be obtained, and its limits observed, by the
humane and decent processes which man is capable of
putting into practice, and not by the check of starvation.
It is of great interest to the British reader to look at
the question briefly from his point of view. At the
present time our wheat production is no more than one-eighth
of our needs, and in twenty-five years, when the
supply from the United States will probably have ceased,
we shall require 40,000,000 quarters of wheat per annum.
Yet already, in time of peace, careful observers such as
the Rt. Hon. Charles Booth and Mr. Seebohm Rowntree
declare that thirty per cent. of our own population are
living on the verge of starvation. Our available supply of
food of all kinds at any moment would last us about three
weeks. How many of us realise what a war would mean
for this country? Yet in the face of facts such as these,
the majority of those who attempt to guide public opinion
are urging us to increase our birth-rate and still pin their
faith to quantity rather than quality of population as
our great need.
The theory of Malthus.—The reader who is interested
in general biology will realise, of course, that we are
here back to the great argument of Malthus, advanced in
1798 in his Essay on the Principle of Population.
Malthus was a great and sincere thinker, a high and true
moralist, and the people who have a vague notion that
his name has some connection with immoral principles
of any kind have no acquaintance with the subject.
It is of the deepest interest for the history of thought
to know that it was the work of Malthus which suggested,
independently, both to Charles Darwin and to Dr. Alfred
Russel Wallace, that principle of natural selection, the
survival of the fittest and their choice for parenthood,
the discovery of which constituted one of the great
epochs in the history of human knowledge, and which
is the cardinal principle underlying the whole modern
conception of eugenics or race-culture.
Malthus found in all life the constant tendency to
increase beyond the nourishment available. In a given
area, not even the utmost imaginable improvement in
developing the resources of the soil can or could keep
pace with the unchecked increase of population.[22] This
applies alike to Great Britain and to the whole world.
At bottom, then, the check to population—and this is
true of microbes or men—is want of food, notwithstanding
that this is never the immediate and obvious check
except in cases of actual famine. There must therefore
be a “struggle for existence,” and as Darwin and Wallace
saw, it follows as a necessary truth that, to use Spencer's
term, the fittest must survive. The question is whether
we are to accept starvation as, at bottom, the factor
controlling population (which, in any case, must be
and is controlled) or whether we can substitute something
better—as for instance, the moral self-control which
Malthus recommended. The single precept of this
much maligned thinker was “Do not marry till you have
a fair prospect of supporting a family”—a fairly decent
and respectable doctrine. In the words of Mr. Kirkup,
“the greatest and highest moral result of his principle
is that it clearly and emphatically teaches the responsibility
of parentage, and it declares the sin of those who
bring human beings into the world for whose physical,
intellectual, and moral well-being no satisfactory provision
is made.” Who, alas, will declare that even after
a century and a decade this great lesson is yet learnt?
It is to be added, first, that though improvement in
agriculture is to be commended on every conceivable
ground, and though it may in some degree relieve and
postpone the difficulty, it is infinitely incapable of
abolishing it. Nothing but necessity can check the
prolificness of life. To this doctrine, however, there is,
as we shall shortly see, a great excepting principle, unrecognised
by Malthus, discovered by Herbert Spencer,
and of vast and universal importance. Secondly, it
is to be noted that emigration—a real remedy for over-population—is
so only for a time. It cannot possibly
abolish the problem—short of the development of interplanetary
communication, if then; and the observer of
contemporary politics must be well aware, as Germany,
for instance, is well aware already, that its effectiveness
as a practical remedy for over-population in some
European countries is already being arrested by the
invaded states.
The references already made to the work of Sir William
Crookes will suffice to show that the teaching of Malthus
is of practical importance to us to-day, and not least to
the population of Great Britain. I am tempted to quote
the actual case in this connection of a young student of
biology who applied for Malthus's book at one of the
greatest official libraries in this country. He was looked
at as a shameless young rascal, and the librarian curtly
said, “We have no books of that kind here.” I commend
this exquisite instance of misapplied and perfectly ignorant
British prudery to Mr. Bernard Shaw: not even he
could imagine anything to surpass it. No more impeccably
decent book than this of “Parson Malthus” has
ever been written, and I have no adequate comment for the
fact that its nature and contents were not merely wholly
unknown but grossly misimagined by this responsible
official, and that it could not be obtained in the great
library of science in question.
We pass in the following chapter to the momentous
discovery of Herbert Spencer that the great truth seen
by Malthus was not a whole but a half-truth, and that
there is a compensating principle, which is at once a
source of inspiration and of difficulty to the eugenist.
It is in general the principle that as life ascends it becomes
less prolific, and its consequences are infinitely more
vast than the phrase at first suggests. Had this principle
been discovered by a Continental thinker or by a member
of a British University instead of by a man who never
passed an examination, it would not now need the discussion
which we shall have to give it.
The laws of multiplication.—Implicit or explicit approval
of a falling birth-rate involves opposition to the opinion
of the man in the street, the general opinion of the medical
profession,[23] the bench of bishops and the social prophet
and publicist in general. Nevertheless a fall in the
birth-rate is a factor in organic progress, and, in general,
the level of any species is in inverse proportion to its
birth-rate, from bacteria to the most civilised classes of
men in the most civilised countries of to-day. But
in truth the uninformed opinion, totally contrary to the
whole history of life and to the most obvious comparative
facts of the birth-rate amongst and within present day
human societies, was utterly disposed of forty years ago
in the closing chapter of the greatest contribution yet
made to philosophic biology—Herbert Spencer's Principles
of Biology. The last chapter of that masterpiece
is entitled “The Laws of Multiplication.” Unfortunately
it has not been read by one in ten thousand of those
who think themselves entitled to hold, and even to express,
opinions about the birth-rate. Spencer's discovery is
the complementary half-truth to the discovery of Malthus,
and just as the law of Malthus is pessimistic, so the law
of Spencer is optimistic. In a word, Malthus assumed—indeed,
formally declared—that there was no natural
factor of an internal kind tending to limit the rate of
vital fertility. Spencer discovered that there is such a
factor, which can and does limit and has been limiting
vegetable, animal, and human fertility since the dawn
of life.
All reproduction involves an expenditure of energy
in some degree on the part of the parent. Now the
energy available by any individual is finite. If he
expends it all upon reproduction, he himself, or she
herself, must cease to exist. This happens in all the
lowest forms of life, which multiply by fission or simple
splitting. The young bacteria are their sub-divided
parent. At the other extreme is the case of the individual
who retains the whole of his energy for his own development
and life, and has no offspring at all. Such consummate
bachelor philosophers as Kant and Spencer
may be quoted, and the list of childless men of genius
might be extended quite indefinitely. This is not to
declare this last state to be the ideal, but merely to point
out the logical extremes.
Spencer's principle is that there is an “Antagonism,” or,
as we may rather say, an inverse ratio, between “Individuation”
and “Genesis”—between the proportion of energy
expended upon the individual and the proportion expended
upon the continuance of the race. Thus “Individuation,”
meaning all those processes which maintain
and expand the life of the individual, and “Genesis,”
meaning all those processes which involve the formation
of new individuals—are necessarily antagonistic. Every
higher degree of individual evolution is followed by a
lower degree of race multiplication, and vice versâ. Increase
in bulk (cf. the elephant), complexity or activity
involves diminution in fertility, and vice versâ. This is
an obvious à priori principle.
Should the reader declare that there must be something
the matter with an asserted principle of progress which
leads in theory or in practice to the production of a
childless generation, and therefore the end of all progress,
and that this principle suggests that the most completely
developed man and woman cannot be parents—then I
would join in the chorus of fathers and mothers generally,
who would say that, in human parenthood, if not, indeed,
in sub-human parenthood, the antagonism is reconciled
in a higher unity; that the best and most complete
development of the individual is effected only through
parenthood, in due degree—as Spencer, himself childless,
formally declared.
It is impossible here to show how complete is the
evidence for Spencer's law, both from the side of logical
necessity and from the side of observation. In order to
indicate the overwhelming character of the evidence, one
would have to transcribe the whole of his long chapter,
and to add to it all our modern knowledge of human
birth-rates. This cannot be done, but even without it
we may venture to say that people who regard a
falling birth-rate as in itself, and obviously, a sign
of racial degeneration or immorality, or approaching
weakness or failure of any kind, can have made no substantial
additions to their knowledge of the subject since
they themselves formed items in the birth-rate.
Spencer goes on to show, with profound insight, that, in
general, greater individuality, or, to put it in other words,
the more highly evolved organism, “though less fertile
absolutely, is the more fertile relatively.” The supreme
instance of this truth is, of course, the case of man, in
whom individuation has reached its unprecedented height,
who is absolutely the least fertile of creatures,[24] and yet
who is relatively the most fertile—unique in his actual
and persistent multiplication.
Their action in man.—Within the human species the
laws of multiplication hold. It is still worth while, after
half a century, to quote Spencer's remark as to infertility
in women due to mental labour carried to excess—“most
of the flat-chested girls who survive their high-pressure
education are incompetent to bear a well-developed
infant and to supply it with the natural food for the
natural period.” On all hands people with opened eyes
are rightly urging this truth upon us to-day. In the
United States the so-called higher education of girls has
been proved in effect to sterilise them—and these the
flower of the nation's girlhood, and therefore, rightly,
the very elect for motherhood. Here is simply an
instance of the Spencerian principle in its most unfortunate
misdirection by man.
Before leaving Spencer, we must refer briefly to the
predictions, based upon the foregoing principles, with
which he concluded his great work. The further evolution
of man, he declares, must take mainly the direction of a
higher intellectual and emotional development. Hitherto,
and even to-day, pressure of population is the original
cause of human competition, application, discipline,
expenditure of energy—and one may add, the possibility
of continued selection. Excess of fertility, then, says
Spencer, is the cause of man's evolution, but “man's
further evolution itself necessitates a decline in his
fertility.” The future progress of civilisation will be
accompanied by increased development of individuality,
emotional and intellectual. As Spencer observes, this
does not necessarily mean a mentally laborious life, for
as mental activity “gradually becomes organic, it will
become spontaneous and pleasurable.”
Finally, the necessary antagonism between individuality
and parenthood ensures the ultimate attainment of the
highest form of the maintenance of the race—“... a form
in which the amount of life shall be the greatest possible,
and the births and deaths the fewest possible.”
If now we look back at the law of Malthus we shall
realise the enormous significance of the law of Spencer.
In this respect we have the advantage over Malthus that
we are aware, as he was not, of the great fact of organic
evolution. We discover, then, that an actual consequence
of the pressure of population, leading as it does to the
struggle for existence, and, in the main, the survival of
higher types, is that the rate of fertility falls. This conception
of the fall in the birth-rate—which, it is maintained,
has been a great factor in all organic progress—was
entirely absent from the mind of Malthus. In a
word, the unlimited multiplication which Malthus observed
leads to its own correction. It provides abundance
of material for natural selection to work upon, and then
the survival-value of individuation, wherever it appears,
asserts itself, with the consequence that the rate of
multiplication declines. This is actually to be observed
to-day. Malthus desired that we should postpone
marriage to later ages so as to lower the birth-rate. The
increasing necessity and demand for individuation is
effecting that which Malthus desired. The average age
at marriage has been rising in our own country in both
sexes during the last thirty years: and the evidence
shows that as civilisation advances the age of marriage
becomes later and later. Professor Metchnikoff has discussed
some aspects of this question in his book The
Nature of Man.
The intensive culture of life.—For every student of
progress, and not least for the eugenist, Spencer's law is
a warrant of hope and a promise of better things to come.
It teaches that in the development of higher—that is to
say, more specialised—that is to say, more individualised—organic
types, Nature is working already, and has been
working for ages, towards the elimination of the brutal
elements in the struggle for existence. This is, of course,
what every worker for progress, and every eugenist in
especial, desires. Spencer's discovery teaches also that
individuality compensates a species for loss of high
fertility. The survival-value of individuation is greater
than the survival-value of rapid multiplication. The
very fact of progress is the replacement of lower by higher
life, the supersession of the quantitative by the qualitative
criterion of survival-value, the increasing dominance of
mind over matter, the substitution of the intensive for the
merely extensive cultivation of life. These various phrases
express, I believe, various aspects of one and the same
great fact, and I only wish it were possible to include here
an exhaustive study of the conception which may be
expressed by the phrase “the intensity of life”—as
distinguished from its mere extension. There is, I believe,
a real and significant analogy between the introduction
of what is called intensive cultivation in agriculture, and
the eugenic principle which seeks to replace the extensive
by the intensive cultivation of human life.
The eugenic difficulty.—But it will be already evident
to the reader that, though Spencer's law offers hope and
warrant to the eugenist, it also poses him with a permanent
and ineradicable difficulty which is inherent in natural
necessity—viz., the difficulty that, in consequence of the
operation of this law, those very classes or members of a
society whose parenthood he most desires must be, in
general, the least fertile. Throughout the animal world
the lesser fertility of higher species is no real handicap
to them, as we know; but where the conditions of selection
are so profoundly modified as in human society, the case
is very different. Furthermore, amongst mankind individuality
has often grown, and does grow, to such an
extent that parenthood disappears altogether. Indeed,
Spencer's law expresses itself—and the eugenist must
qualify his hopes by the fact—in the practical infertility
of many[25] of the most highly individualised and even
unique personalities, that is to say, in the ranks of what
we call genius. To this subject we must return.
A notable section in Mr. Galton's great work, Inquiries
into Human Faculty, states very plainly the difficulty
for the eugenist involved in Spencer's law, under its more
statistical aspect. What are the relative effects of early
and late marriages? Mr. Galton proves, mathematically,
that in a very few generations a group of persons who
marry late will be simply bred down and more than
supplanted by those who marry early. Now no one will
dispute that the less individualised, the lower types, the
more nearly animal, do in general marry earlier, and are
more fertile. Here, then, is an anti-eugenic tendency
in human society, depending really upon Spencer's law
and requiring us to recognise and counteract it by
throwing all the weight we can upon the side of
progress, which means increasing to our utmost the
survival-value and the effective fertility of the higher
types.
Much more space might be spent upon this gravest of
problems for the eugenist—the fact that the very persons
from whom he desires to recruit the future on account of
their greater individuality are also on that very account
the persons who, by natural necessity, tend to be less
fertile. The difficulty shows itself in the male sex, but
it shows itself still more conspicuously in the female sex,
where the proportion of the individual energy devoted to
the race, as compared with that devoted to individuation,
is necessarily far higher, and must so remain if the race
is to persist. Primarily, the body of woman is the temple
of life to come—and therefore, as we shall some day teach
our girls, the holy of holies. Without going further into
this matter now, it may be suggested that a cardinal
principle of practical importance is involved. It is that
the individual development of women, their higher
education, their self-expression in works of art and
thought and practice, cannot safely be carried to the
point at which motherhood is compromised; else the
race in question will necessarily disappear and be
replaced by any race whatsoever, the women of which
continue to be mothers. There are women of the worker
bee type whom this argument annoys intensely. No
one wants them to be mothers.
The proposition that all progress in the psychical world
depends upon individuality, just as all organic progress,
and indeed, all organic evolution, depends upon the
physical individuality which biologists call variation,
may suggest to the reader the importance which must
attach to our study of talent and genius, and the possibility
of aiding their production. Meanwhile, we must
look a little further at the general question of individuality
or quality versus quantity from the international point
of view.
Quantity versus quality.—The reader will understand
how it is that anyone writing from the biological standpoint
must view with something like contempt the
common assumption that, in international competition,
mere statistics of population furnish, as such, final and
adequate data for prophecy. Let us remind ourselves
once more that, according to these crude criteria, which
were really superseded untold æons ago, the dominance
of the world must belong in the near future not to Russia,
with its balance of more than two million births per
annum, rather than to France, with its approximately
stationary population, but to the bacteria, the growth
of population amongst which, if it be not controlled by
the less fertile creature we call man, may be of simply
inexpressible magnitude. But the world is not, and will
not be, ruled by bacteria, their fertility notwithstanding.
Indeed, the disease-producing bacteria have
already had sentence of death pronounced upon
them by the higher intelligence of man, and that
sentence will be carried out within a century. Similarly
within the bounds of humanity we must recognise the
limitations of mere statistics. The population of France,
some forty years ago, consisted of so many millions of
units. The figure does not matter,—let us put it at
30,000,001. Now that 1, so to say, was called Louis
Pasteur, and from the point of view of statistics or those
who think they can predict history by counting heads,
he was only an almost infinitesimal fraction, about one-thirty-millionth
part, of the French people. Yet, as
Huxley pointed out long ago, his mind sufficed to pay the
entire indemnity exacted from France after the Franco-Prussian
war. This single unit was worth more than a
host of soldiers of the merely mechanical kind. Or take
Athens, with its population of 30,000 people, mostly
slaves, and consider its influence upon the world. Or,
indeed, go where you please, whether to the history of
nations or the history of religion or science or art, and ask
whether the counting of heads, the ordinary census taking
which indeed amounts merely to weighing nations by the
ton, is an adequate one. In estimating national capital
by the methods of vital statistics alone, we are in a far
worse case than he would be who estimated monetary
wealth by numbers of coins, without considering whether
they were pounds, shillings or pence, whether they were
genuine or counterfeit. The illustration is ludicrously
inadequate, as every illustration must be, simply because
the human case is unique. In the units of a population,
which many prophets treat as if they were all of equal
value, there are not merely differences to which the
difference between a sovereign and a penny offers no
parallel; there is not merely an enormous quantity of
bogus or counterfeit units, but there is a very large
number of units in every population which, so far from
adding to the value of the rest, subtract from it, are
parasitic upon it. Students of money will find no parallel
to this. Yet in the face of facts which ought to be
common intellectual property amongst school-children,
we find many writers, bishops, socialist economists,
moralists, schoolboy Imperialists, and the rest, pointing
merely to the quantitative question of population as if
it were everything, though they must surely know that,
if international competition were the highest state of
mankind, and if the work of Kelvin and Lister had been
sold at its real worth by us to the rest of the world, those
two men alone, in their services to life, and in the power
which they give us over life, would be equal in value to,
shall we say, the lower four-fifths of the whole birth-rate
during the last generation. All human history teaches,
as all animal history teaches in lesser degree, that quality
and individuality is everything, that quantity is nothing
or far worse than nothing except in so far as it is quantity
of quality: yet though this lesson is written upon every
page of the past, the greater number of our publicists
and our public advisers still implicitly deny it. As Mr.
Crackanthorpe put it, speaking of the figures for 1907,
it is not the defective numbers, but the numbers of defectives,
that should give us concern.
Mass versus mind.—John Ruskin called Darwin “a dim
comet, wagging its tail of phosphorescent nothing
against the steadfast stars”—a description as delightful
as it is foolish. Yet the conception of eugenics, which
is indeed a necessary deduction from Darwin's great
discovery, finds abundant warrant and support in Ruskin's
own wonderful writings, and here I quote, from Time and
Tide, some sentences which still require to be read and
remembered by the majority of our present advisers.
He says:—
“And the question of numbers is wholly immaterial, compared
with that of character; or rather, its own materialness depends
on the prior determination of character. Make your nation consist
of knaves, and, as Emerson said long ago, it is but the case of
any other vermin—the more, the worse. Or, to put the matter in
narrower limits, it is a matter of no final concern to any parent
whether he shall have two children, or four; but matter of quite
final concern whether those he has shall, or shall not, deserve to
be hanged.... You have to consider first, by what methods of
land distribution you can maintain the greatest number of healthy
persons; and secondly whether, if, by any other mode of distribution
and relative ethical laws, you can raise their character, while
you diminish their numbers, such sacrifices should be made, and
to what extent?... The French and British public may and
will, with many other publics, be at last brought ... to see
farther that a nation's real strength and happiness do not depend
upon properties and territories, nor on machinery for their defence,
but on their getting such territory as they have, well filled with
none but respectable persons, which is a way of infinitely enlarging
one's territory, feasible to every potentate.”
Surely it is not necessary, one feels, and yet one knows
it is necessary, again to lay down propositions of such
shining truth, and one wonders whether they shine so
brightly as to blind those who should see them: or what
can conceivably be the explanation of such arguments
as those of the Bishop of London and others who, in the
face of our monstrous infant and child mortality, the
awful pressure of population and over-crowding in our
great cities, where every year a larger and larger proportion
of the population lives, and is born and dies—plead
for a higher birth-rate on moral grounds, of all
amazing grounds conceivable; and those also who, from
the military or so-called Imperial point of view, regarding
men primarily as “food for powder,” in Shakespeare's
phrase, read and quote statistics of population in order
to promulgate the same advice?
To the moralist we need make no reply except simply
to name the infant mortality which is at last coming to
be recognised everywhere as, perhaps, the most abominable
of all our scandals. To the militarist I would
quote the case of our ally, Japan. He recalls the war
between China and Japan, and its issue, and has some
idea, perhaps, of the population ratio of those two Empires.
How was it that Providence was on the side of the small
battalions? He recalls also the Russo-Japanese war
and its issue; and the population ratio of the two
Empires in that case. How many other instances does
not military history afford of the truth that in the human
species mind is the master of matter? One would suppose
that a critical historical enquiry had been made, proving
that the results of all past wars could have been predicted
by the simple method of estimating the total aggregate
weight of the combatant nations in flesh and blood and
bone! More than this, if the development of the art
of warfare means anything, if there has been any such
development since the days of fists and stones, it means,
as all human development in every sphere means, the
increasing dominance of mind over matter, character and
initiative over machinery, dead or alive. Meanwhile, the
estimate of warriors in terms of the scale and the
foot rule are still accepted just as if they had not been
rendered obsolete for ever with the passing of the
“dragons of the prime.”
As regards the psychical worth of the soldier, is it not
recognised, though too commonly forgotten, when we
applaud the value of the veteran or of seasoned troops?
Physically the veteran is, on the average, inferior to
the younger man. It is the psychical that gives him
his worth, just as it was patriotism and sobriety that
enabled the few sober Japanese to beat the many drunken
Russians. It is safe to prophesy that, in all future war,
the numerical criterion, which in effect weighs armies
by the ton, as if war were merely a tug-of-war, will
become less and less important—if, indeed, it is not
already negligible; whilst the purely psychical qualities,
from generalship and strategy and hygiene to initiative,
judgment, accuracy, memory, and down finally to mere
brutal red-blooded courage, will determine the issue.
Platitude, of course, but if true, why ignored? Why
cannot our military advisers learn, in this respect, from the
Navy? Owing to the very nature of the sea as compared
with the land, in relation to the merely physical capacities
of man, a Navy must be more intelligent than an Army,
just as it requires more intelligence to make a boat than
to walk; and it is in the Navy that the mechanical
factor has been most completely transferred, so that
the human machinery is at a discount and the steel
machinery made by the human mind is much, whilst
the value of the psychical in all its aspects dominates
and controls the whole. Great Britain, as the foremost
naval power in the world, should long ago have left to
its ultimate fate amongst other nations the idea that
quantity—so many tons of soldiers and so many tons
of sailors—affords an estimate of the warring force of
a nation: even if the whole history of this little isle and
the possession of our present Empire did not teach, as
the history of Rome taught and as the history of Athens
teaches in another sphere, that not mass but mind makes
a nation great.
“We cannot but feel that the application of biological results
is only beginning, and beginning with a tardiness which is a
reproach to human foresight. There can be no doubt that it
would pay the British nation to put aside a million a year for
research on eugenics, or the improvement of the human breed.”
(Prof. J. A. Thomson, Heredity, 1908.)
It is evident that the facts and principles of heredity
lie at the very basis of eugenics or race-culture in any of
its forms, practical or impractical, scientific or unscientific.
Our continual assumption throughout is that like tends
to beget like, and it is on this ground that we desire to
make parenthood the privilege of those whom we regard
as inherently the best. If there were no such thing as
heredity there could be no possibility of race-culture—nor
indeed should we be here to discuss it. If a man's
children were equally likely to be acorns or babies or
tadpoles, the living world would not be the living world
we know.
The potency of heredity is obscured to uncritical
examination by the fact that that which is inheritable
is that which was innate, inherent or germinal in the
parent, as we shall shortly see. We, however, are apt
to compare the child with the parent, who has perhaps
been much modified by circumstances, so that the
resemblance between father and child may seem to
be slight. Yet if we could bring back before us that
father, as he was, say at the age of two, and compare
him with his two-year-old child, we should perhaps be
astonished by the resemblance. But we see the acquirements
or acquired characters of the parent; make no
distinction between them and his inherent characters;
fail to discover these acquired characters in his child;—and
discount the importance of heredity. Then, again,
the eugenist may be utterly confounded if he estimates
the parental value of an individual without reference
to this limitation of heredity. Here is a man of culture
and accomplishment; his children, then, will presumably
tend to be cultured and accomplished. But every kind
of advantage that forethought and love and money
can afford may have been showered upon that man.
So far as native endowment was concerned, he may
have indeed been far below mediocrity. Now it is
native endowment alone that he can transmit, and our
eugenic estimate of him is therefore erroneous and will
lead to disappointment. It is impossible to lay too
great stress upon the truth that in all eugenic plans or
demands or practices we are assuming the fact of inheritance,
and that therefore it is our first business to
distinguish absolutely between that which tends to
be inherited and that which, on the other hand, is never
inherited.
Yet again, this distinction is of almost incalculable social
moment in so far as it affects the process of selection
actually occurring in society. This, perhaps, has not
been adequately recognised. One may repeat a former
statement of this point, which is cardinal for the
eugenist:—
“Even supposing that we were all identical at birth, yet, since
we would come to differ from one another in virtue of different
acquirements, due to our adaptation to differing environments,
natural selection would ultimately have different individuals from
which to select. Those who had made the most advantageous
acquirements, such as industry or great knowledge, would tend to
survive and prosper, whilst those who had made disadvantageous
acquirements, such as laziness or the loss of sight or limbs, would
be pushed to the wall. That process, of course, occurs in society
at the present day to a greater or less degree, but it has only
immediate and temporary or contemporary consequences. For if
we recall the assertion that acquirements cannot be transmitted,
we shall see that the selection of those who have made
advantageous acquirements cannot benefit the next generation,
since these acquirements die with their makers. The only process
of natural selection which can result in progress is one which
consists in the selection of favourable ... inborn and therefore
transmissible characters, such as good digestion, the musical sense,
exceptional intelligence, the sympathetic temperament or what
not (in so far as these are inborn)—the reason being that such are
transmissible and that the children of persons so selected will tend
to inherit their parents' good fortune. There is a fictitious way in
which we speak of a child inheriting his father's acquirements, as
when his father has acquired a fortune; but the child does much
better to inherit his father's good sense or good health, which
were characters inborn in him. Acquirements, then, are all very
well for the day, but it is inborn characters that alone count for
the morrow.”[26]
It may be added that the time is coming when there
will be a radical “transvaluation,” as Nietzsche would say,
of the two fashions in which a father “leaves” something
to his children. When a question is asked on
this head now-a-days, we mean, foolishly enough, to
enquire how much money the father left his child, and
we say of a man that he has “inherited” a fortune.
We can see plainly enough, as Theognis did two thousand
five hundred years ago, that such an “inheritance”
may and often does work in an anti-eugenic fashion.
The gilded fool is swallowed by the maiden whose native
sense would have rejected such a pill without its coat,
and so the most pitiable degenerate becomes the father
of his like. This point will be alluded to later. The
present argument is that when we ask what a father
“left” his children, we should really desire to learn
what he gave them when he was still alive and begot them.
These vital, or mortal, characters which they inherit—shall
we say good health or insanity—are of incalculably
more moment to them as individuals than any monetary
fortune, and of incalculably more moment for the future.
Yet again is it true that there is no wealth but life, and
the best “fortune” or wealth that you can leave your
children is sane and vigorous life.
The case of slum childhood.—We have already seen
that even in the slums the children make a fresh start
in a wonderful way, that their stunted growth, their
proneness to disease, are mainly due to their environment,
which it is therefore our duty to improve. This is in
general true, and depends evidently upon the fact that the
acquired deterioration of the parents—e.g., dental decay—is
not transmitted to their children—poisonings apart—so
that the children make a fresh start where their parents
did. It is necessary to point this out again and again, as
the present writer for one has long been weary of doing,
because it indicates our immediate duty in this respect,
and forbids us to shirk it with any too-comprehensive
phrases about “national degeneration.” Now who could
have predicted that this plain and simple truth would be
regarded by some people as constituting a denial—on
strict scientific grounds, and as the very latest scientific
pronouncement—of the principle of heredity? “The
bubble of heredity has been pricked,” says Mr. Bernard
Shaw.
But popular muddleheadedness does not affect the
palpable and universal truth that the inherent characters
of parents do tend to be inherited by their children; nor
yet that these inherent characters differ profoundly in
different individuals; nor yet the eugenic argument,
which is that for purposes of parenthood, which means
for the entire future, some of these should be taken and
others left.
“Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather
grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?... Wherefore
by their fruits ye shall know them.” These classical
words surely have a special value for the eugenist. As
we have said, it is his particular necessity, alike in theory
and in practice, to “know” the real nature, the innate,
inherent, germinal characters, of the individuals who
may or may not be parents: and these, as we have seen,
are frequently obscured by the action of the environment—as,
for instance, in the population of the slums on the
one hand, or the man of factitious culture on the other
hand. But “by their fruits ye shall know them.” In
general, the children inherit what was innate in their
parents, and in many an instance the surest way in which
you could ascertain what the parent really was by nature—what,
as we say, Nature “meant” him to be—is
by a study of his children. Only, of course, we must
take the children very young indeed, before environment
has made its mark upon them also, for better or for
worse. Thus, when we find the new-born baby of
some pallid, half-starved, stunted mother in the
slums, to be healthy and vigorous and beautiful,[27] by this
fruit we shall know what the mother might and should
have been. A healthy baby goes far to demonstrate
that the stock is healthy. This is one of the cardinal
truths which emerge from the study of infant mortality,
and it may be perhaps permitted to warn some students
of race-culture of the errors into which they are bound
to fall if they do not reckon with what the student of
infant mortality is constantly asserting: viz., that the
babies of the slums, seen early, before ignorance and
neglect have had their way with them, are physically
vigorous and promising in certainly not less than ninety
per cent. of cases. This primarily demonstrates, of
course, the murderous nature of our infant mortality;
but it also demonstrates to the eugenist that these classes
are perhaps not so unworthy as he may fancy. By their
new-born babies ye shall know them. It is under the
influence of such considerations that the present writer,
for one, is somewhat chary of predictions and proposals
based upon the relative fertility of different classes of
the community or of the masses as compared with the
classes. Directly the eugenist begins to talk in terms of
social classes (as Mr. Galton has never done), he is
skating on thin ice, and if it lets him through, he will
find the remains of many of his rash predecessors beneath
it.[28]
In fine, then, if we observe the distinction between
the innate and the acquired, which is the distinction
between the transmissible and the intransmissible, this
is so far from denying the fact of heredity at all as
in reality to emphasise its potency whilst undoubtedly
diminishing its range.
A criticism of terms.—In order that this distinction
may be clear and never forgotten, it is well to look to
our vocabulary—words being good servants but bad
masters. We should certainly have this vocabulary
purged altogether of a certain word in common and
uncritical employment, especially by the medical profession.
This is the thoroughly misleading, indeterminate
and useless word “congenital.” Not on one occasion in
a hundred of its use does any examined meaning attach
to it. The word is commonly used as the equivalent of
innate, inherent, inborn or germinal. Now nothing is
truly innate or inborn save what was present in the germ.
But with childish confusion of thought, we persist in
attaching quite undeserved importance to the birth of
those animals which are brought forth “alive”—as if a
bird's egg were not alive. Hence we speak of any character
present at birth as congenital, and then we assume that
congenital is synonymous with inherent or germinal.
But it is an irrelevant detail that a young mammal
happens to leave its mother at the ninth week or month.
During the whole period that it spends within its mother,
it is to be regarded as an individual organism with its
own environment. If that environment so affects it as
to strangle a limb, the result is an acquirement, though
it may be present at birth. An acquirement is an
acquirement, whether it be acquired five minutes or
months before, or five minutes or months after, the
change of environment which we call birth. Thus a
character may be congenital—that is, present at birth—but
not inherent or germinal, not inborn at the real
birth, which was the union of the maternal and paternal
germ-cells at conception. Such congenital characters are
really acquirements, and—poisonings apart—are not
transmissible. In common discussion this distinction is
wholly ignored; and two distinct things, fundamentally
different in origin and in potency, are lumped together
under the blessed word “congenital.”
This word is equally foolish and useless in an opposite
direction. It constantly leads those who use it to suppose
that the inherent characters of an individual are
conterminous with his congenital characters or his characters
at birth, and that thus any characters which he
displays at a later age are acquired. All this comes of
the absurdly delusive significance attached to the change
of environment called birth, and may doubtless be traced
historically to the remotest superstitions which imagined
that a baby is not alive until it is born and breathes, or
that the soul or breath or pneuma or “vital principle”
is breathed into it at the moment of birth. We know,
however, that a man may display for the first time at
the age of twenty or sixty a character which was as truly
inherent in his constitution as his nose or his spinal
column—perhaps a beard, perhaps a mental character,
perhaps a disease, or what not. Now this was not congenital
though it was inherent. But as long as the
stupid[29] word “congenital” is used as it is, we shall fail
to realise that inherent characters may display themselves
in an individual at any time after birth as at any time
before birth. Thus, to sum up, a character may be
congenital or rather pre-congenital, yet not inherent but
acquired: a character may be post-congenital, yet not
acquired but inherent. Now the all-important question
as regards heredity is not at what date in the history of
an individual a character appears—as, for instance, before
birth or after birth; but, whether that character is
inherent and therefore transmissible and therefore a
possible architect of the future of mankind; or merely
an acquirement, with which—the racial poisons apart—heredity
has no concern.
It is suggested, then, that the word congenital be
expunged from the vocabulary of science, or that, if it be
retained, some meaning or other—any will do—be
attached to it. If the word is to be retained, and if it
be agreed to attach a meaning to it, probably “at birth”
would be the most convenient. If this were agreed upon,
then the phrase “congenital blindness,” now in common
use, could be retained, as it would then accurately indicate
the nature of the blindness in question, which is due
almost invariably, if not invariably, to an infection
acquired at the moment of birth.
Yet further. When we say that a man's intelligence
or length of limb or whatever it be is hereditary, we mean
in ordinary speech that this character can be traced in
one or more of his ancestors; and that is, of course, an
accurate use of the term. But Shakespeare, for instance,
had unremarkable ancestors, so that no one would say
that his genius was hereditary; are we, then, to say
that it was acquired? Every one would protest at once
that a poet is born and not made—than which there is
certainly no truer popular saying. What, then, is to be
said of it if it was neither hereditary nor acquired? The
truth is that language is again at fault. Shakespeare's
genius was of inherent or germinal origin—the poet is
born and not made: or, more accurately, the poet is
conceived and not made, either before birth or after it.
Therefore, though Shakespeare did not inherit his
mother's genius or his father's genius, neither of them
having such a gift to transmit, yet his genius was certainly
potential either in the maternal or paternal germ-cell
which united to form him, or in both; or at the least arose
in consequence of that compromise or rearrangement or
settlement, shall we say, which is in effect always agreed
upon by the two germ-cells in bi-parental reproduction.
Now the two germ-cells are the hereditary material.
They were given to Shakespeare by his parents; nay
more, they made him. His genius, then, was hereditary
in an absolutely correct sense of the word, yet not in the
sense of ordinary speech, nor even in the sense in which
it is employed by Mr. Galton in his book on Hereditary
Genius. This confusion of terms is responsible for much
confusion of thought. It must the more urgently be
cleared up because of the discoveries in heredity initiated
by the Abbot Mendel, forty years ago, and now included
in the department of the science of heredity which is
called Mendelism. We learn from this that highly
definite characters may appear in offspring though there
was no sign of them in either parent. These, then, are not
hereditary in the sense of ordinary speech. Yet, in a
more accurate sense of the word they can be proved to
be hereditary—nay more, the manner and proportion of
their transmission can be predicted in the most exact
mathematical terms. These characters were not present
in the parent's body; they did not lie open to view in
the parent; they were not patent in the parent. They
were latent, however, they lay hid, in the parent, or
rather in the germ-plasm of which that parent was the
host. In many such cases, if we go back a generation
further we find that the character in question was patent
in a grand-parent. A mother's son may suffer from
hæmophilia or the bleeding disease, yet she is not a
“bleeder,” nor is the boy's father; but her father was a
bleeder, and the disease is, of course, hereditary in her
son, though neither of his parents displayed a trace of it.
Thus an individual may inherit or may have inherent
in the germ-cells from which he was formed characters
which were not present in either parent. They were,
however, potentially present in the germ-cells of which
those parents were the trustees.
But, the reader will say, do we find in the case of every
“sport” or “transilient variation,” such as Shakespeare,
that the new character was, after all, present in some one
or other of his ancestors though absent in his immediate
parents? The answer is negative, certainly. But genius,
to take this case, is a combination of qualities. And the
Mendelians are now able to call into existence organisms
of new kinds by combination of qualities derived from
one parent, or rather from one parental line, with other
qualities, formerly apparently incompatible with them
derived from the other parental line. Thus Professor
Biffen of Cambridge has called into existence a new kind of
wheat such as never existed before—a wheat combining
the quality technically called “strength,” hitherto lacking
in all kinds of wheat capable of being profitably grown in
Great Britain, with the power of yielding a large crop
and other good qualities found in home-grown wheat.
He has also produced a wheat which, together with other
desirable qualities, is immune from the disease known as
“rust,” this immunity having never been found before
associated with the other good qualities in question.
These advances will not long be limited to the vegetable
world merely. Perhaps it requires no very great imagination,
after all, to suppose that even something like that
combination of qualities which we call genius may some
day be produced at will in mankind.
Such a new wheat, then,—I will not say such a Shakespeare—owes
its unique and unprecedented properties to
heredity, and yet there was never anything like it before.
Its “genius” is not “hereditary.”
The words innate and inborn are harmless and may be
employed, though the apparent emphasis on birth is rather
unfortunate. We mean, however, by innate or inborn
qualities, qualities which were potential in the germ. The
genius of Shakespeare was innate or inborn. It was
present potentially at his real birth, the union of the
parental cells. It preceded his “birth” in the ordinary
sense of the word: Shakespeare, when only in embryo,
was a Shakespeare in embryo.
Better still is the word inherent, which, of course,
literally means “sticking in.” By anything inherent we
mean that which was there from the first as part and
parcel of, as indeed essential to, the entity to which we
refer. Now inherent characters are always inherited in
the accurate sense that they inhere in the germ-cells,
which are the inherited material. As these germ-cells
make us or as we are made out of them, it follows, of
course, that all our potentialities whatsoever, our ultimate
fates in every particular, partly depend upon inheritance.[30]
Nature and nurture are antithetic terms of Shakespearean
origin which are in frequent use and much
favoured by Mr. Galton. That which comes by nature
is the inborn, inherent, or germinal; and that is due to
nurture which is the result of the converse of the germinal
with the environment—a man's accent, for instance.
Perhaps, in some ways, germinal is the most useful
word of all, though inherent is so convenient and familiar,
as well as being accurate etymologically, that it has been
employed throughout this book. Not only is the word
germinal strictly accurate, but also it suggests the idea
of the germ-plasm, and has the particular virtue of
avoiding all reference to the change of environment to
which young mammals are subjected and which is called
birth.
There remains the terminological difficulty that, as I
have tried to show, the individual may display characters
which were potential in the germ, inherent and necessarily
inherited, though they did not appear in the parent nor
yet in any ancestor. We have to face the paradox, then,
that in natural inheritance a parent can transmit what
he has not got, though this does not apply to the unnatural
inheritance of property in human society. Now
what word is there which shall indicate the origin or at
least the time and conditions of origin, of such characters
as these? They are germinal, yet they are—in some
cases—not wholly present in either of the germ-cells which
united to form the new individual in question. They
are present, however, in the new single cell from which
this individual, like every living organism, takes its
origin.[31] The terms “congerminal” or “conceptional”
might be employed.
“Acquired character,” even, is a bad term. It replaced
“functionally-produced modification,” which was
long employed by Spencer. The blacksmith's biceps
answers to this phrase. It is this and other such modifications
that are non-transmissible. Alcoholic degeneration
is not a “functionally-produced modification,” but
it is an “acquired character,” as is lead poisoning. These
do produce results in offspring—naturally enough. If the
older phrase were still the one employed, we should see
that the Weismannian argument as to non-transmission
does not apply to such “acquired characters.”
The word “reversion,” also, not to say “atavism,”
may well be dropped. The attempted justification of its
older meaning by Professor Thomson has led to severe
and conclusive Mendelian criticism. The “reversion” of
fancy pigeons to the blue ancestor is simply due to the
coming together of Mendelian units long separated. The
“reversion” of the feeble-minded is not reversion but the
result of poisoning—diversion, or perversion, if you like.
Primitive man was not feeble-minded, nor is the ape.
Science has no further use for the word as it is at present
employed.
Maternal impressions.—We are now, at last, after
our attempt to clear up the vocabulary of heredity, in
a position to consider certain doctrines and popular
beliefs which bear very directly upon race-culture.
Realising, for instance, that “congenital” means nothing;
realising as perhaps some of us have not so clearly realised
before, when exactly it is that the new human being comes
into existence, we shall be prepared to understand how
definite and indisputable are the denials which science
offers to certain popular ideas.
Thus, for instance, in the interests of race-culture, or, to
be more particular, in the interests of her unborn baby, the
expectant mother may faithfully follow the example of
Lucy in The Ordeal of Richard Feverel.[32] Does this have its
intended effect? The answer is an unqualified negative.
Consider the case. The baby is at this time already a baby,
though rather small and uncanny, floating in a fluid of its
own manufacture. Its sole connection with its mother is
by means of its umbilical cord—that is to say, blood vessels,
arterial and venous. There is no nervous connection
whatever: absolutely nothing but the blood-stream,
carried along a system of tubes. This blood is the child's
blood, which it sends forth from itself along the umbilical
cord to a special organ, the placenta or after-birth, half
made by itself and half made by the mother, in which
the child's blood travels in thin vessels so close to the
mother's blood that their contents can be interchanged.
Yet the two streams never actually mix. The child's
blood, having disposed of its carbonic acid and waste-products
to the mother's blood, and having received
therefrom oxygen and food, returns so laden to the child.
Pray how is the mother's reading of history to make the
child a historian? If, after birth, a small operation were
performed, so that some of the mother's blood should
run along an artificial tube into one of her baby's veins,
the effective connection between the two organisms would
in a sense be actually closer than it was before birth, when,
as has been said, the two streams are always kept apart.
Should we expect such an operation to serve the child for
education? If the mother then acquired a scar should
we expect it to give the child a similar scar?
We see now why the learning of geometry on the part of
the mother before its birth will not set her baby upon that
royal road to geometry of which Euclid rightly denied the
existence—any more than after its birth. Such a thing
does not happen, and there is no conceivable means by
which it could happen—unless we are to call in telepathy.
All maternal hopes and efforts of this kind are utterly
misguided: as misguided as if the father entertained
similar hopes. Let the devoted mother acquaint herself
not with what historians are pleased to call history, but
with the history of the developing human mind and body,
so that she may be a fit educator of her child when it is
born.
Let her also realise that her blood is everything to her
child. It is food and air and organ of excretion. If she
introduces alcohol into her blood in any considerable
quantity she is feeding her child on poisoned food. Surely
the reader must see the distinction between a case like
this and the supposed transmission of historical knowledge
or even historical aptitude from mother to baby by
the diligent perusal of histories. Yet though the distinction
is so palpable and evident, there are extremists
who believe and even print their beliefs that the denial
of the one (supposed) possibility, which is palpably inconceivable,
logically carries with it a denial of the other
possibility, which is indeed a palpable necessity. Or,
to state the criticism in another way, there are those who,
if we protest that the introduction of poisons into the
mother's organism must surely involve risk to the child
who is nourished by her blood, will retort, “Oh, well, I
suppose you believe that if you learn a number of languages
before your next child is born, he or she will be a
linguist!”[33]
Hereditary genius.—Mr. Galton's world-famous work
on Hereditary Genius was published in 1869 and reprinted
with a most valuable additional chapter in 1892. It
has long been out of print, however, and for the definite
purpose of attempting to arouse the reader's interest
in it so that he may somehow or other obtain a
copy to read, I may here go over one or two points,
chosen to that end. The argument, of course, is that
ability is hereditary.[34]
This, in the judgment of most unbiassed people, Mr.
Galton conclusively proved: and we do not at all realise
to-day how repugnant and revolutionary this doctrine
appeared to popular opinion some forty years ago. Mr.
Galton has, however, followed up his citation of facts
on more than one occasion since,[35] and those who now
deny his view belong to that very large majority of
any population which finds itself able to pronounce
confidently upon the value of an author's work without
the labour, found necessary by less fortunate people, of
reading it.
The following quotation states the question of national
eugenics in final form:—
“As an example of what could be sought with advantage, let
us suppose that we take a number, sufficient for statistical purposes,
of persons occupying different social classes, those who are
the least efficient in physical, intellectual, and moral grounds
forming our lowest class, and those who are the most efficient
forming our highest class. The question to be solved relates to
the hereditary permanence of the several classes. What proportion
of each class is descended from parents who belong to the
same class, and what proportion is descended from parents who
belong to each of the other classes? Do those persons who have
honourably succeeded in life, and who are presumably, on the
whole, the most valuable portion of our human stock, contribute
on the aggregate their fair share of posterity to the next generation?
If not, do they contribute more or less than their fair
share, and in what degree? In other words, is the evolution
of man in each particular country favourably or injuriously
affected by its special form of civilisation?
“Enough is already known to make it certain that the productiveness
of both the extreme classes, the best and the worst,
falls short of the average of the nation as a whole. Therefore,
the most prolific class necessarily lies between the two extremes,
but at what intermediate point does it lie? Taken altogether, on
any reasonable principle, are the natural gifts of the most prolific
class, bodily, intellectual, and moral, above or below the line of
national mediocrity? If above that line, then the existing conditions
are favourable to the improvement of the race. If they
are below that line, they must work towards its degradation.”
The main body of the book deals with enquiries in
special cases—the judges of England between 1660 and
1865, statesmen, commanders, authors, men of science,
poets, musicians, painters, divines, senior classics of
Cambridge, oarsmen and wrestlers.
The concluding chapters should be printed in gold.
Only one or two notes can here be made. Mr. Galton
believes that the dark ages were largely due to the celibacy
enjoined by religious orders on their votaries:—
“Whenever a man or woman was possessed of a gentle nature
that fitted him or her to deeds of charity, to meditation, to literature
or to art, the social condition of the time was such that they
had no refuge elsewhere than in the bosom of the Church. But
the Church chose to preach and exact celibacy, and the consequence
was that these gentle natures had no continuance, and
thus, by a policy so singularly unwise and suicidal that I am
hardly able to speak of it without impatience, the Church
brutalised the breed of our forefathers. She acted precisely as if
she had aimed at selecting the rudest portion of the community
to be, alone, parents of future generations. She practised the arts
which breeders would use, who aimed at creating ferocious,
currish, and stupid natures. No wonder that club law prevailed
for centuries over Europe; the wonder rather is that enough good
remained in the veins of Europeans to enable their race to rise to
its present very moderate level of natural morality.”
Yet further:—
“The policy of the religious world in Europe was exerted in
another direction, with hardly less cruel effect on the nature of
future generations, by means of persecutions which brought
thousands of the foremost thinkers and men of political aptitudes
to the scaffold, or imprisoned them during a large part of their
manhood, or drove them as emigrants into other lands. In every
one of these cases the check upon their leaving issue was very
considerable. Hence the Church, having first captured all the
gentle natures and condemned them to celibacy, made another
sweep of her huge nets, this time fishing in stirring waters, to
catch those who were the most fearless, truth-seeking, and intelligent,
in their modes of thought, and therefore the most suitable
parents of a high civilisation, and put a strong check, if not a
direct stop, to their progeny. Those she reserved on these
occasions, to breed the generations of the future, were the servile,
the indifferent, and, again, the stupid. Thus, as she—to repeat
my expression—brutalised human nature by her system of celibacy
applied to the gentle, she demoralised it by her system of persecution
of the intelligent, the sincere, and the free. It is enough to
make the blood boil to think of the blind folly that has caused
the foremost nations of struggling humanity to be the heirs of
such hateful ancestry, and that has so bred our instincts as to keep
them in an unnecessarily long-continued antagonism with the
essential requirements of a steadily advancing civilisation.”
For this final quotation no apology is needed:—
“The best form of civilisation in respect to the improvement of
the race, would be one in which society was not costly; where
incomes were chiefly derived from professional sources, and not much
through inheritance; where every lad had a chance of showing
his abilities, and, if highly gifted, was enabled to achieve a first-class
education and entrance into professional life, by the liberal
help of the exhibitions and scholarships which he had gained in
his early youth; where marriage was held in as high honour as in
ancient Jewish times; where the pride of race was encouraged
(of course I do not refer to the nonsensical sentiment of the
present day, that goes under that name); where the weak could
find a welcome and a refuge in celibate monasteries or sisterhoods,
and lastly, where the better sort of emigrants and refugees from
other lands were invited and welcomed, and their descendants
naturalised.”
The study of psychical inheritance.—This early work of
Mr. Galton has been followed by much more on the same
lines. Contemporary psychology, however, is just beginning
to indicate the lines on which new enquiry is needed.
The naïve assertions of the actuary as to the inheritance
of, say, “conscientiousness” are not useful to the psychologist,
who has some idea of the structure and history of
that most complex social product we call conscience. The
psychologists must analyse out for us those elementary
units of the mind upon which experience and the social
state, education and suggestion act, to make human nature
as we know it. The reader may be directed to Dr.
McDougall's recent work on Social Psychology—written
at the present writer's suggestion—for an outline analysis
of what is really inherent, and therefore alone transmissible,
in the human mind—certain instincts and
impulses, together with native varieties in capacity of
memory, and so on. Recently the Mendelians have
entered this field, and they have the advantage of
realising the importance of dealing with real primary
units. Their law seems to apply to the musical sense in
man and to the brooding instinct in the hen.[36] The line
of study here suggested is earnestly commended to the
psychologists for their indispensable help.
Eugenics and parties.—Let us once again consider the
fashion in which men and women are classified to the
eugenic eye. We have already realised that the most essential
division of fact is that between those who will and
those who will not be parents. The most essential division
of ideal is of those who are worthy and those who are not
worthy to be parents. It is the object of eugenics to make
the real and the ideal divisions coincide. And let us here
say with all possible force that before such classifications
as these all others are trivial and nearly all others impudent.
The eugenist has nothing to do with the low
game called party politics: terms like socialism and so
forth mean very little for him. He may or may not be a
socialist, but if he be, at least he does not subscribe to
what, so far as I can judge, is the first article in the creed
of socialism—that all evil is of economic origin; he knows
that there is much evil of germinal origin. As for
conservatism and liberalism, he might have some use for
these terms if the creed of conservatism were that there is
no wealth but life, which must be conserved; and the
creed of liberalism that life has not yet reached its zenith,
and there must be liberty for all progressive variations
of body and mind and thought and practice. As it is, all
these things are somewhat nauseating. If and when there
is a thinking party, and that party will have the eugenist,
he will doubtless join it. Meanwhile he appeals to that
great and growing section of the community which knows
party-politics for the humbug and sham that it is, and the
House of Commons as a lethal chamber for souls.
Similarly, the eugenic classification of mankind cuts
right across the ordinary social classification. The parasite
and the parent of parasites must be branded, whether
he be at the top or the bottom of the social scale. The
quality of the germ-plasm which men and women carry is
the supremely important thing. Its architecture is the
architect of all empires. Year by year we shall more
surely be able to infer the nature and the worth of the
germ-plasm in particular cases, though its host may have
been veneered or, on the other hand, repressed; and year
by year the basal facts of heredity will furnish ever surer
criteria for the theory and practice of a New Imperialism
which knows, for instance, what militarism did for Rome
and Napoleon for France, and which will some day sweep
all the money changers out of the Temple of Life.[37]
“Education is but the giving or withholding of opportunity.”—Bateson.
It is true that education can seem to accomplish miracles;
that in a single generation the results of an ideal education
would be amazing. It is true, also, that in certain
epochs of history, when wise counsels have prevailed, great
results have been attained. It is true that at present
scarcely a man or woman amongst us, if any, has reached
the full stature which would have been attained under an
ideal system of education. It is true, finally, that no
system of race-culture can ignore education or be effective
without it. Though the general question of education is
not the specific question of the present volume, yet there
is only too good reason for some brief allusion to the subject
here, especially since it bears on the question of the
measure of importance which we ascribe to heredity.
Modern education—the destruction of mind.—When we
observe in such contrasted cases as those of Herbert
Spencer and Wordsworth, for instance, that absence of
early education, especially in the first septennium, has
co-existed with the subsequent efflorescence of the
mightiest genius, we may almost be inclined to enquire
whether genius could not in effect be made to order even
in the very next generation by the simple device of suspending
the process which we are pleased to call education.
Doubtless that is scarcely so, though every one who has
any knowledge of the subject is well assured that mere
suspension of the present destructive process might suffice
to produce a population that would wonder at its ancestors.
A simple analogy will show the disastrous character of
the present process, which may be briefly described as
“education” by cram and emetic. It is as if you filled
a child's stomach to repletion with marbles, pieces of coal
and similar material incapable of digestion—the more
worthless the material the more accurate the analogy:
then applied an emetic and estimated your success by the
completeness with which everything was returned, more
especially if it was returned “unchanged,” as the doctors
say. Just so do we cram the child's mental stomach, its
memory, with a selection of dead facts of history and the
like (at least when they are not fictions) and then apply a
violent emetic called an examination (which like most
other emetics causes much depression) and estimate our
success by the number of statements which the child
vomits on to the examination paper—if the reader will
excuse me. Further, if we are what we usually are, we
prefer that the statements shall come back “unchanged”—showing
no signs of mental digestion. We call this
“training the memory.”
Such a process as one has imagined in the physical case
would assuredly ruin the physical digestion for life. In
the mental case, which is not imaginary but actual, a
similar result ensues. It is thus unfair to the Anglo-Saxon
germ-plasm to credit it with the abundant stupidity of its
products. Much of this stupidity is factitious and artificial.
We shall continue to produce it so long as by
education or drawing forth we understand intrusion or
thrusting in, and so long as the only drawing forth which
we practise is by means of the emetics we call examinations.
The present type of education is a curse to modern
childhood and a menace to the future. The teacher who
cannot tell whether a child is doing well without formally
examining it, should be heaving bricks; but such a teacher
does not exist. In Berlin they are now learning that the
depression caused by these emetics, for which the best
physical parallel is antimony, often leads to child suicide—a
steadily-increasing phenomenon mainly due to educational
over-pressure and worry about examinations.
Short of such appalling disasters, however, we have to
reckon with the existence of this enormous amount of
stupidity, which those who fortunately escaped such
education in childhood have to drag along with them in
the long struggle towards the stars. This dead weight of
inertia lamentably retards progress.
Our factitious stupidity is injurious both in the governing
and the governed. As Professor Patrick Geddes once
remarked to the present writer, there are three kinds of
governments: the government of the future—as yet only
ideal, which believes that there are ideas and that they may
be worth acting upon: the second is instanced by the
Russian government, which believes that there are ideas,
but fears and suppresses them: the third by the British
government, which denies that there are ideas at all, and
prefers the method of “muddling through”—to use a
Cabinet Minister's contented phrase—though truth is one
and error infinite, though there are a million ways of going
wrong for one of going right. This characteristic is not
to be attributed to any germinal stupidity of the ruling
classes in England. If it were we should of course look
upon the decadence of their birth-rate with the utmost
gratitude. It is a factitious product of their education.
If you have been treated with marbles and emetics long
enough, you may begin to question whether there is such
a thing as nourishing food; if you have been crammed
with dead facts, and then compelled to disgorge them,
you may well question whether there are such things as
nourishing facts or ideas.
Not less disastrous is this factitious stupidity amongst
the governed. It produces, of course, the kind of man
with whom we are all familiar. Having at great labour
been taught to read, he is incapable of reading anything
but rubbish. He never thinks for himself, and if he does
you wish he had not, so inadequate is his machinery and
so deplorable the result. He believes in politicians. He
is, as we have said, so much dead weight for the reformer,
whose energy is diverted from the discovery of new truth
by the need of directing the eyes of stupidity to the old,
though it shines as the sun in his strength.
Therefore, let not the reader suppose that in the advocacy
of eugenics or race-culture we have become blinded
to the possibilities offered us by reasonable education even
of the very heterogeneous material offered us by heredity.
The limits of education—individual and racial.—Yet
it must be maintained that, though we cannot do without
education, and though something infinitely better than
we practise at present will be necessary if the ideal of race-culture
is ever to be realised, yet education alone, however
good, can never enable us to achieve our end. It must
be maintained, in the first place, that education is limited
in its powers by the inherent nature of the educated
material—it is a process of drawing out, and you cannot
draw out what is not there: and secondly, that its value,
so far as the nature of individuals is concerned, is confined
to the individuals in question and is not reproduced or
maintained in their children. Thus education alone would
have similar material to act upon from age to age, would
have to make a fresh beginning in each generation, and its
results, however good, relatively, would still be limited
and finite. We shall do well, perhaps, to obtain and retain
an adequate definition of education. No true conception
of education was possible, notwithstanding the derivation
of the word, so long as the child's mind was likened to a
piece of “pure white paper” for us to write upon: or an
empty box waiting to be filled. The tabula rasa of Locke
is, we now know, the last thing in the world to resemble a
child's mind. Indeed, if any such figure be demanded,
the child's mind is a piece of mosaic—made of ancestral
pieces—and education is the process of realising what is
so given. Or, if a child's mind is a portmanteau, to
educate is not to pack but to unpack it. We understand,
at least, that education never can begin at the beginning,
nor anywhere near it—that, as Professor MacCunn says
in his admirable book, The Making of Character, “the page
of the youngest life is so far from being blank that it bears
upon it characters in comparison with which the faded
ink of palæography is as recent history.”
We are learning, too, though none but the very few know
this, that the process by which the “faded ink” is made
visible must not be credited with having done the writing:
any more than the fire to which you hold a paper written
upon with ink that fire makes visible. Still less do we
realise that what really seems to be the product of education
is often the result of an inherent mechanism now
developed, which was not yet formed when we began the
educational process. One reason why the baby cannot
walk is that it has not the nervous apparatus. A child
may walk at the first attempt, if that attempt be delayed
until the machinery is developed. A child may similarly
speak sentences at the first attempt. Very commonly we
start teaching a child something, which, after some years,
it learns. We have done nothing but interfere. The learning
is none of our doing: merely the mental apparatus is
now evolved—and lo! the result. At birth the sucking
apparatus is perfect. If we could, doubtless we should
start teaching the unborn infant to suck long before the
machinery was ready—and should applaud ourselves for
its facility at birth; only that probably this facility would
be impaired by our efforts, as many capacities of later
development are damaged by our interference. What we
understand, or misunderstand, by education should begin
approximately when a child is seven. The first seven years
of life should really have the term of childhood confined
to them, for there is a natural term so indicated. The
growth of the brain is a matter of the first seven years
almost wholly. It grows relatively little after that period;
and until that is completed the physical apparatus of
mind is not ready for educational interference. Without
any such interference, and with merely the provision of
conditions, physical and mental, for its spontaneous
development, the brain of the seven year old will suffice
for surprising things—so surprising that if their evolution
were possible under any system of schooling practised
before that date, we should applaud it as ideal. Probably
there is no such system—much less any that will improve
on the spontaneous process.
Education the provision of an environment.—We
are prepared, then, to realise the limits to the action of
education upon the individual. We shall not confuse
this great and many-sided thing with such of its factors
as instruction or schooling. It is not intrusion but
education: “the guidance of growth,” to use Sir James
Crichton-Browne's phrase. This guidance, this process
of unpacking, educing or realising, is accomplished
by the action of circumstances or the environment.
Environment is a large word and is invariably abused
when it is used in less than the large sense. Here it
includes, for instance, air and food, mother-love and
the schoolmaster. I therefore define education as the
provision of an environment. This definition prepares
us to understand the limitations of the process. If we
think of education as a packing or cramming process,
we shall err in this respect; we shall expect limitless
results from education provided that one packs early
and tightly and carefully enough. It is this erroneous
conception which rules us and daily betrays us in practice.
If, however, we think of education as the provision of
an environment, capable of creating nothing, but merely
of causing the expression or the repression of potential
characters inherent in the individual educated, then we
shall begin to recast our methods on the lines determined
by this truth. Yet, further, we shall begin to understand
the cardinal truth, one of the many platitudes which
we have yet to appreciate, that “you cannot make a
silk purse out of a sow's ear.”
Heredity and environment.—Let us consider the question
in general terms. The characters of any living thing
are determined by two factors—heredity and environment.
The old phrases were character and circumstances, but
they were less than useful, since character is modified
by circumstances. Now one of the most important
questions in the world, and not least for the eugenist,
is as to the relative importance of these two factors.
The technical terms may not be in our mouths, but we
discuss this instance or that of the question in point almost
every day of our lives. One part of the business of
philosophy and of science is not only to answer questions
but to ask them correctly. This question is always
wrongly asked, and therefore cannot be answered, or
is incorrectly answered. We persist in using the
mathematical idea of addition, and we seek to show that,
say, seventy per cent. of the result is due to the innate
factor and thirty per cent. to the acquired. But the
truth is that so long as we begin with this idea we may
prove what we please. If we keep our attention fixed
upon the environmental or educational factor we can
easily and correctly demonstrate that in certain circumstances
Mozart would have been tone-deaf and Shakespeare
a gibbering idiot—hence, but incorrectly, we
argue that environment is practically everything. Per
contra, we can easily and correctly demonstrate that no
education in the world could enable a door-mat or a
cabbage or ourselves to write Don Giovanni or Hamlet—hence,
but incorrectly, we argue that the material to be
operated upon is everything. We have to learn, however,
that the analogy is one not of addition but of multiplication.
Neither inheritance nor environment, as such, gives anything.
The environmental factor may be potentially
one hundred—an ideal education—but the innate or
inherited factor may be nothing, as when the pupil is a
door-mat or a fool. The result then is nothing. Darwin
had the trombone played to a plant, but he did not make
a Palestrina. No academy of music will make a beetroot
into a Beethoven, though I dare say a well-trained beetroot
might write a musical comedy. The point is that
one hundred multiplied by nothing equals nothing.
Similarly, the innate factor may be one hundred, as in
the case of a potential genius, but he may be brought
up upon alcohol and curses amongst savages, and the
result again is nothing. Keep the idea of multiplication
in the mind, and the facts are seen rightly. No matter
how big either factor be, if it be multiplied by nothing
it yields nothing, or if it be multiplied by a fraction, as
in the ordinary education of a genius, it yields less than
it should. But in this controversy people persist in
assuming that inheritance or education gives definitely
so much which is there anyhow, whereas, really, it only
supplies a potential figure, which may realise infinity or
nothing, according to what it is multiplied by. With
all deference, I submit this as a real answer to these
endless disputes.
But further, granted that neither factor in itself produces
any actuality, which is normally the weightier of
the two factors? We must make the qualification,
“normally,” because such a thing as disease or poison,
included in the environmental factor, will dominate
the result, completely overshadowing the importance
of whatever heredity gave. Such things apart, however,
we may be thoroughly assured that heredity is the
weightier of the two factors. The more we study
education, the more we recognise its true nature.
Indeed, the more we realise its ideal, the more do we
realise its limitations. The more we study education
the more important does heredity appear. If the
reader has not had opportunities of observing children
for himself let him refer to such a book as Mr. Galton's
Inquiries into Human Faculty, and he will begin to realise
how large is the factor given by inheritance and how
relatively small is the factor given by education.
Education can educate only what heredity gives.—Heredity,
as the eugenist must never forget, gives not
actualities but only potentialities. It depends upon
circumstances whether they shall become actualities.
That, however, we all know. No one supposes that
education is superfluous or impotent. We do, however,
persistently forget the converse truth that education,
on the other hand, makes no definite contribution, but
merely multiplies—or alas, divides—the potentialities
given by inheritance. These potentialities constitute a
limiting condition which no education can transcend.
Education can educate only what heredity gives. Long
ago Helvetius thought, as did Kant, that the differences
between men were due to differences in education. But it is
not so. We make, of course, the most ridiculous claims for
education. The remark wrongly attributed to the Duke
of Wellington, that “the battle of Waterloo was won
on the playing-fields of Eton,” is an instance in point.
Recently, when Francis Thompson, the poet, died, the local
newspaper of his birthplace said that it should be proud
to have produced him. We may laugh at this conception
of the genesis of genius, but we all talk in this
fashion. A genius was educated at Eton, and we say
that Eton produced him. The truth is, of course, that
Eton failed to destroy him. (One says Eton for convenience,
but the name of any accepted school will do.)
If Eton produced him, why does not it produce thousands
like him? There is plenty of material: but it is not
the right material. We should cease to speak, in our
pride for our own Alma Mater or our own methods, as
if education created genius or anything else. Men
are born unequal. To realise the nature of education
is not only to avoid the popular assumption that an
ideal education will do everything for us, forgetting
that no amount of polishing will make pewter shine like
silver; it is not only to send us back to the principle
of selection in recognition of the power of inheritance;
it is not merely to dispose of the idea that men are born
inherently equal; but it is also to combat the idea
that education is a levelling process. On the contrary,
it accentuates the differences between men. You may
confuse the unpolished pebble and the diamond, but not
when education has done its utmost for both. If education
were a process of addition to what inheritance gives,
it would almost level men: the addition of a large sum
to figures such as, say, 1, 2, and 3, would almost obliterate
their original disproportion. But the analogy is with
multiplication, as I have suggested: and the larger the
sum by which 1, 2 and 3 are multiplied, the greater is
the disparity between the products. This is, perhaps,
one of the truths of vast importance which the common
rim of contemporary Socialism implicitly denies: though
it is of course abundantly recognised by such a socialist
as that master-thinker Professor Forel. The socialist's
panacea, ideal education for all, is much to be desired,
and will accomplish much, as we began by admitting;
but it is not a panacea. Those who believe it to be
such do not understand the nature of education nor its
limitations. They should remember the remark of
Epictetus, “the condition and characteristic of a fool
is this: he never expects from himself profit nor harm,
but from externals.” The dogma of the unthinking
socialist—who exists, though he is doubtless rarer than
the unthinking individualist—is that all evil is of economic
origin: correct your economics and your education and
you obliterate evil. But it is not so. As Lowell said,
“A great part of human suffering has its root in the
nature of man, and not in that of his institutions.”
When by means of eugenics we can give education the
right material to work upon, we shall have a Utopia, and
as for forms of government they may be left for fools to
contest. Forel, incomparably the greatest socialist thinker
of the day, sees this. He makes his Utopian predictions
not so much as to mere externals, like clothing and
language, but as regards the kind of man and woman:
and, unlike some writers, he entitles himself to paint
these pictures, for in that great eugenic treatise
Die Sexuel Frage, he tells us how to realise them by
pedagogic reform working upon the materials provided
by human selection. A paragraph may be quoted from
Forel:—
“Malgré tout l'enthousiasme qu'on doit montrer pour une
pédagogie rationelle, il ne faut jamais oublier qu'elle est incapable
de remplacer la sélection. Elle sert au but immédiat et
rapproché, qui est d'utiliser le mieux possible le matérial
humain tel qu'il existe maintenant. Mais, par elle-même, elle
n'améliore en rien la qualité des germes à venir. Elle peut,
néanmoins, grâce à l'instruction donnée à la jeunesse sur la
valeur sociale de la sélection, la préparer à mettre cette dernière
en œuvre.”
and another from Spencer:—
“We are not among those who believe in Lord Palmerston's
dogma, that all children are born good. On the whole, the
opposite dogma, untenable as it is, seems to us less wide of the
truth. Nor do we agree with those who think that, by skilful
discipline, children may be made altogether what they should be.
Contrariwise, we are satisfied that though imperfections of nature
may be diminished by wise management, they cannot be removed
by it. The notion that an ideal humanity might be forthwith
produced by a perfect system of education, is near akin to that
implied in the poems of Shelley, that would make mankind give
up their old institutions and prejudices, all the evils in the world
would at once disappear; neither notion being acceptable to such
as have dispassionately studied human affairs.”
Ruskin on education and inequality.—Three great
paragraphs may be quoted from Ruskin's Time and
Tide:—
“... Education was desired by the lower orders because they
thought it would make them upper orders, and be a leveller and
effacer of distinctions. They will be mightily astonished, when
they really get it, to find that it is, on the contrary, the fatallest
of all discerners and enforcers of distinctions; piercing, even to
the division of the joints and marrow, to find out wherein your
body and soul are less, or greater, than other bodies and souls,
and to sign deed of separation with unequivocal seal.
“171. Education is, indeed, of all differences not divinely
appointed, an instant effacer and reconciler. Whatever is undivinely
poor, it will make rich; whatever is undivinely maimed,
and halt, and blind, it will make whole, and equal, and seeing.
The blind and the lame are to it as to David at the siege of the
Tower of the Kings, ‘hated of David's soul.’ But there are
other divinely-appointed differences, eternal as the ranks of the
everlasting hills, and as the strength of their ceaseless waters.
And these, education does not do away with; but measures,
manifests, and employs.
“In the handful of shingle which you gather from the sea-beach,
which the indiscriminate sea, with equality of fraternal
foam, has only educated to be, every one, round, you will see
little difference between the noble and the mean stones. But the
jeweller's trenchant education of them will tell you another story.
Even the meanest will be the better for it, but the noblest so
much better that you can class the two together no more. The
fair veins and colours are all clear now, and so stern is nature's
intent regarding this, that not only will the polish show which is
best, but the best will take most polish. You shall not merely see
they have more virtue than the others, but see that more of virtue
more clearly; and the less virtue there is, the more dimly you shall
see what there is of it.
“172. And the law about education, which is sorrowfullest to
vulgar pride, is this—that all its gains are at compound interest;
so that, as our work proceeds, every hour throws us farther
behind the greater men with whom we began on equal terms.
Two children go to school hand in hand, and spell for half an
hour over the same page. Through all their lives, never shall
they spell from the same page more. One is presently a page
a-head, two pages, ten pages—and evermore, though each toils
equally, the interval enlarges—at birth nothing, at death infinite.”
So much for one relation of this question to Socialism.
Quite lately (The New Age, April 11th, 1908) Mr. Havelock
Ellis has summed the matter up as follows:—
“Education has been put at the beginning, when it ought to
have been put at the end. It matters comparatively little what
sort of education we give children; the primary matter is what
sort of children we have got to educate. That is the most
fundamental of questions. It lies deeper even than the great
question of Socialism versus Individualism, and indeed touches a
foundation that is common to both. The best organised social
system is only a house of cards if it cannot be constructed with
sound individuals; and no individualism worth the name is
possible, unless a sound social organisation permits the breeding
of individuals who count. On this plane Socialism and Individualism
move in the same circle.”
We cannot agree with Socialism when, as we think,
it assumes that all evil is of economic or of educational
origin. The student of heredity finds elements of evil
abundant in poisoned germ-plasm and not absent from
the best. Surely, surely, the products of progress are
not mechanisms but men; and surely no economic
system as such can be the only mechanism worth naming—which
would be one that made men. The germ-plasm
is such a mechanism, indeed; and hence its quality is
all important.
But if Socialism, sooner than any other party, is going
to identify itself with the economic principle of Ruskin
that “there is no wealth but life”; and if in its discussion
of the conditions of industry it will concern itself primarily
with the culture of the racial life, which is the vital
industry of any people (and basis enough for a New
Imperialism, or at least a New Patriotism, that might
be quite decent); if so, then it seems to me that we must
look to the socialists for salvation. But books which
describe future externals, books which assume that
education is a panacea, forgetting that education can
educate only what heredity gives, turn us away again
when we are almost persuaded. The economic panacea
must fail (at least as a panacea); the educational panacea
must fail; the eugenic panacea may not fail.
Education, then, cannot achieve our ideal of race-culture.
No matter how good our polishing, we must
have silver and diamonds to work upon, not pewter
and pebbles. When we have the right material to
work upon, our labour will not be wasted, or far worse
than wasted, as it now too often is.
Education a Sisyphean task.—But the belief in
education as in itself an adequate instrument of race-culture
chiefly depends upon the popular doctrine as
to its influence upon the race. It is supposed, in a word,
that if we educate the parents, the child will begin
where the parents left off. This is the doctrine of
Lamarck, who said that if the necks of the parent giraffe
were educated or drawn out, the baby giraffe would have
this anatomical acquirement transmitted to it, and, so
to speak, when it grew up, would be able to begin feeding
on the leaves of trees at the level where its parents had
to leave off. In the course of its life its own neck would
become elongated or educated, and its children would outstretch
both itself and their grand-parents. This doctrine
of the transmission of acquired characters by heredity,
as we have seen, is, at the present day, repudiated by
biologists. It is generally believed by the medical
profession and by the public, notwithstanding the fact
that, for instance, the skin of the heel of every new baby
is almost as thin and delicate as it is anywhere else,
though for unthinkable generations all the ancestors
of that baby on both sides have greatly thickened the
skin of both heels by the act of walking.
It is quite evident that, if the Lamarckian theory
were true, education would be a completely adequate
instrument of race-culture, incomparable in its rapidity
and certainty. It would not reform the world in a
single generation because, as we have seen, its results
would be limited by the inherent nature of its material;
but since those results would involve the vast amelioration
of the material upon which it worked in the second
generation, mankind would be little lower than the
angels in a century. The good habits acquired by one
generation would be innate in the next. If the father
learnt one language in addition to his own, the child
would start with the knowledge of two, waiting only
for opportunity, and could accumulate more and hand
them on to its child. “My father's environment would
be my heredity.” If we desired muscular strength we
could in two generations produce a race amongst whom
Sandow would be a puny weakling. We should not need to
discuss any question of selection for parenthood. Without
any such process we could answer Browning's prayer and
“elevate the race at once”—physically, mentally and
morally.
But the Lamarckian theory does not correspond with
facts. The results of education, physical, mental, or
moral, are limited to the individuals educated. The
children do not begin where the parents left off, but
they make a fresh start where the parents did. Thus even
though we had and employed an ideal method of education,
we should make no permanent improvement by its means
alone in the breed of mankind, any more than the breeder
of race-horses could attain his end by the same means.
In each generation the same problem, the same difficulties,
the same limitations inherent in the nature of the new
material, would have to be faced. We must learn from
the horse-breeder, who knows that the blood of a single
horse, Eclipse, runs in the veins of the great majority of
winners since his time.
It is exceedingly difficult to dispossess the popular
mind of the Lamarckian idea, the more especially as
members of the medical profession, who are regarded
as authorities on heredity, contentedly accept this idea
themselves. Yet the advocates of eugenics or race-culture
have to recognise that, so long as the Lamarckian
idea obtains, their crusade will fail to find a hearing.
We believe that nothing can really be accomplished
in the way of race-culture until public opinion—that
“chaos of prejudices,” as Huxley called it—is marshalled
on our side. But the popular notion of heredity is a
most formidable obstacle. The Lamarckian idea seems
to provide a method for the improvement of a species
which cannot be surpassed for simplicity, rapidity and
certainty. It even excludes the possibility of mistakes.
You cannot go wrong if you simply educate every one to
the utmost. Doubtless some persons are more suited for
parenthood than others, but only let education be wise and
universal, and any question of selection by marriage or
otherwise will be superfluous. A thousand difficulties
offered by public sentiment, by convention, by the
churches, by the large measure of uncertainty which
attends the working of heredity, could be ignored, if
race-culture were simply a matter of education.
Nevertheless, these difficulties have to be faced by
the eugenist. The popular misconception of heredity—instanced
by Sir James Simpson's belief, not inexcusable
sixty years ago, that the education of a future mother
will enlarge her child's brain—must be removed. It can
scarcely be doubted that the sway of the Lamarckian
idea will soon be diminished, and then, at last, those
who are interested in the future will discover that only by
the process of selection for parenthood, which has brought
mankind thus far, can further progress be assured.
Real functions of education for race-culture.—Nevertheless
education has a true function for race-culture
in addition to the obvious fact of its necessity in
order to realise the inherent potentialities of the individual.
One of its functions is to provide a level of public opinion
and public taste such that the finer specimens of each generation
shall receive their due reward and shall not be
crushed out of existence or perverted. There is a passage
in Goethe which suggests the true function of education,
and makes us suspect that, so far as many kinds of genius
and talent are concerned, our immediate business is
perhaps less to endeavour to produce them by breeding—if
that be possible—than to make the most of them when
they are vouchsafed us. Says Goethe:—
“We admire the Tragedies of the ancient Greeks; but to take a
correct view of the case, we ought to admire the period and the
nation in which their production was possible rather than the
individual authors; for though these pieces differ in some points
from each other, and though one of these poets appears somewhat
greater and more finished than the other, still, taking all things
together, only one decided character runs through the whole.
“This is the character of grandeur, fitness, soundness, human
perfection, elevated wisdom, sublime thought, pure, strong intuition,
and whatever other qualities one might enumerate. But
when we find all these qualities, not only in the dramatic works
which have come down to us, but also in lyrical and epic works—in
the philosophers, orators, and historians, and in an equally
high degree in the works of plastic art that have come down to
us—we must feel convinced that such qualities did not merely
belong to individuals, but were the current property of the nation
and the whole period.”
Education as to the principle of selection.—Further, the
hope may be warranted that, though education, as such,
will not achieve the ideal of true race-culture, and though
it has never hitherto averted the ultimate failure of all
civilisations, yet the case may be different to-day, in that
our acquired or traditional progress, transmitted by the
process of education accumulating from age to age—not
in our blood and bone and brain, but mainly in books,
whereby the non-transmission of the results of education
is circumvented in a sense—has reached the point at
which the laws of racial or inherent progress have been
revealed to us, as to none of our predecessors.[38] Having
the knowledge of these laws it is possible that we may
avert our predecessors' fate by putting them into force.
If we do not, we must ultimately become “one with
Nineveh and Tyre.” Fifty years have now elapsed since
the principle of natural selection was demonstrated for
all time by the genius of Darwin. We must not be guilty
of starting to tell the story of organic evolution and
leaving out the point. So long as we supposed that man
was created as he is, the idea of racial progress was an
absurdity. It is the correct thing now-a-days to decry
the possibility of human perfection. This possibility is
rightly to be decried if it be assumed that ideal education
of the present material or anything like it would realise
perfection. We have seen that it would not. It is the
principle of selection, in which Darwin has educated
us, that must be taught to all mankind, and thus
education may indeed become the factor of an effective
race-culture.
The power of individual opinion.—Since ultimately
opinion rules the world, it is for us to create sound opinion.
That is the purpose of this book. But every individual
may be a centre of eugenic opinion, and the time has
assuredly come for attempting to realise this ideal,
though a thousand years should pass before the facts of
heredity are completely ascertained and understood.
The main principles are of the simplest character, and
can be readily imparted to a child. Especially does the
responsibility fall upon parents and those who are in
charge of childhood.
The young people of the next and all succeeding generations
must be taught the supreme sanctity of parenthood.
The little boy who asks what he is to become when he
grows up, must be taught that the highest profession and
privilege he can aspire to is responsible fatherhood; the
little girl may less frequently ask these questions, the
answer to which has been imparted to her by her own
Mother-Nature—as the doll instinct, so little appreciated
or utilised, sufficiently demonstrates; but she likewise
must be taught reverence for Motherhood. As childhood
gives place to youth, what may be called the eugenic
sense must be cultivated as a cardinal aspect of the moral
sense itself; so that even personal inclination—at the
controllable and self-controllable stage which precedes
“head over ears” affection—will wither when it is
directed to some one who, on any ground, offends
the educated eugenic sense. There is here a field
for moral education of the highest and most valuable
kind, both for the individual and for the race.
Is there any other aspect of duty which can claim
a higher warrant? Is there any hitherto so wholly
ignored?
The preceding paragraph is re-printed from a brief
account of its objects written for the Eugenics Education
Society, as a Society which amongst other purposes
exists “to further eugenic teaching at home and in the
schools and elsewhere.” The difficulties of teaching
this subject to children are more apparent than real. I
may freely confess that though I have been speaking,
writing, and thinking about eugenics for six years, I did
not realise the importance of eugenic education until I
heard the views of some of the women who belong to this
Society, and even then I was at first sceptical as to its
practicability. The subject has been entirely ignored by
the pioneers of this matter. But if we turn to such a
work as Forel's masterpiece we begin to realise that the
eugenic education of children is the real beginning at the
beginning, that it is in fact indispensable, and must be
antecedent to all legislation in the direction of positive
eugenics, though not to certain forms of legislation in the
direction of negative eugenics.[39] In the earlier chapters
of his great work Professor Forel offers the parent and the
guardian abundant, detailed and accurate guidance as
to the lines and methods of this teaching. It is urgently
necessary for both sexes, but more especially for girls,
who may suffer incredibly from the cruel prudery ordained
by Mrs. Grundy, the only old woman to whom the word
“hag” should be applied. We must remove the reproach
of Herbert Spencer, made nearly fifty years ago in words
which may well be quoted:—
“The greatest defect in our programmes of education is entirely
overlooked. While much is being done in the detailed improvement
of our systems in respect both of matter and manner, the
most pressing desideratum, to prepare the young for the duties of
life, is tacitly admitted to be the end which parents and schoolmasters
should have in view; and happily, the value of the things
taught, and the goodness of the methods followed in teaching
them, are now ostensibly judged by their fitness to this end. The
propriety of substituting for an exclusively classical training, a
training in which the modern languages shall have a share, is
argued on this ground. The necessity of increasing the amount
of science is urged for like reasons. But though some care is
taken to fit youth of both sexes for society and citizenship, no care
whatever is taken to fit them for the position of parents. While it
is seen that for the purpose of gaining a livelihood, an elaborate
preparation is needed, it appears to be thought that for the
bringing up of children, no preparation whatever is needed.
While many years are spent by a boy in gaining knowledge
of which the chief value is that it constitutes ‘the education of
a gentleman’; and while many years are spent by a girl in those
decorative acquirements which fit her for evening parties; not an
hour is spent by either in preparation for that gravest of all
responsibilities—the management of a family. Is it that this
responsibility is but a remote contingency? On the contrary, it
is sure to devolve on nine out of ten. Is it that the discharge
of it is easy? Certainly not; of all functions which the adult has
to fulfil, this is the most difficult. Is it that each may be trusted
by self-instruction to fit himself, or herself, for the office of parent?
No; not only is the need for such self-instruction unrecognised,
but the complexity of the subject renders it the one of all others
in which self-instruction is least likely to succeed.”
The lines of eugenic education.—The teaching of the
main facts of heredity must come first in order to the
end of eugenic education. The vegetable world is at our
service in this regard, the products of horticulture with
their beauty and grace and novelty are illustrations one
and all of what heredity means and what the due choice
of parents will effect. There need be no personal allusions
at this stage; the thing can be presented in an impersonal
biological setting. And as heredity produces these
wonderful results in plants, so also does it in the animal
world. Numberless domestic forms are at our service.
You take your children and your dog to the Zoological
gardens, and show the resemblance between wolf and
dog. What easier, then, than to point out that by
consistent choosing for many generations of the least
ferocious wolves, you may make a domesticated race?[40]
The mind of any child that has fortunately escaped
“education” will make the transition for itself from sub-human
races to mankind, and instances will occur, say,
where extreme short-sightedness or deafness appears in
children whose parents were similarly afflicted, and were
perhaps closely related. At yet a later age a boy or girl
may learn the doom which often falls upon the children of
drunkards.
And then may it not be possible, when a little boy asks
what he is to be when he grows up, to suggest that the
highest profession to which he can be called, for which
he may strive to make himself worthy, is fatherhood?
And when the racial instinct awakes, would it be wrong,
improper, indecent, to teach that it has a purpose, that
no attribute of mind or body has a higher purpose, that
this is holy ground? Or is it better that by silence, both
as to the fact and as to its meaning, we should make it
unmentionable, indecent, dishonourable? The Bible is
used now-a-days as an instrument of political immorality,
but if and when it should be employed for the function
of other great literature, there is a passage sufficiently
relevant to our present argument.[41]
Perhaps we are wrong in regarding and treating the
racial instinct as if it were animal and low, a thing as far
as possible to be ignored, repressed, treated with silent
contempt in education and elsewhere. We may be
wrong in practice because the method is not successful,
because the development of this instinct is inevitable
and little short of imperious in every normal child if
that child is ever to become a man or a woman, and
because our silence does not involve the silence of less
responsible persons who are less likely even than we
ourselves to teach the young enquirer that this thing
exists for parenthood, and is therefore holy and to be
treated as such.
Perhaps we are wrong in principle also, since that which
exists for parenthood, and without which the continuance
and future terrestrial hope of mankind is impossible,
cannot be animal and low, unless human life, even at its
best attained or attainable, be animal and low. Our
business rather is to treat this great fact in a spirit
worthy of the purpose for which it exists; and therefore,
as part of that process of education by which we desire
to make the young into reasonable, moral and fully
human beings, to teach explicitly, without unworthy
shame, that this thing exists for the highest of purposes
that nothing which the future holds for boy or girl can
conceivably be higher or happier than worthy parenthood,
however commonplace that may appear to common
eyes, and that accordingly this instinct is to be guarded,
treated, used, honoured as for parenthood, a fact which
immediately raises it from the egoistic to the altruistic
plane. We have to learn and to teach that worthy
parenthood is the highest end which education can
achieve—highest alike on the ground of its services to
the individual and its services to the future, and the
relation of the racial instinct to parenthood being what
it is, we have to look upon it in that light, at once austere
and splendid.
In the teaching of girls, only a false and disastrous
prudery offers any great obstacle. The idea of motherhood
is essentially natural to the normal girl. It is the
eugenic education of boys that is more difficult, and the
possibility of which will be questioned in some quarters,
especially by those who regard the type of boy evolved
in semi-monastic institutions, devoid of feminine influence,
as a normal and unchangeable being. Co-educationists,
however, are teaching us to revise that
opinion, and will yet demonstrate, perhaps, that the
inculcation of the idea of fatherhood is not so impossible
nor so alien to the boy nature as some would suppose.
If such a duty devolved upon the present writer, he would
feel inclined, perhaps, to present his teaching in terms
of patriotism. He would urge that “there is no wealth
but life”; that nations are made not of provinces nor
property but of people; that modern biology is teaching
historians to explain such phenomena as the fall of Rome
in terms of the quality of the national life; that therefore,
individuals being mortal, parenthood necessarily
takes its place as the supreme factor of national destiny;
that the true patriotism must therefore concern itself
with the conditions and the quality of parenthood—much
less with its quantity; that the patriotism which ignores
these truths is ignorant and must be disastrous; that we
must turn our attention therefore from flag waving to
questions of individual conduct; that if alcohol and
syphilis, for instance, can be demonstrated to be what
I would call racial poisons, the young patriot must make
himself aware of their relation to parenthood, and must
act upon his knowledge of that relation. It can thus be
demonstrated that righteousness exalteth a nation not
only in the spiritual but also in the most concrete sense.
To this we shall come. We may even recognise eugenic
education as the most urgent need of the day, as the
most radical and rational, perhaps even the most hopeful,
of the methods by which the cleansing of the city, and
much more, is to be achieved. We must create a eugenic
aspect for the moral sense. We can associate this alike with
individual and civic duty, and with those very ideals to
which, as we all know, the young most readily respond.
Thus I believe it shall be said of us in the after time that
we have raised up the foundations of many generations.
And so, finally, the unselfish significance of marriage
might conceivably be taught, alike to boys and girls, and
especially in the case of undoubtedly good stocks might
we inculcate, as Mr. Galton has pointed out, a rational
pride in ancestry—that is to say, a rational pride in the
quality of the germ-plasm which has been entrusted to
us. And so may be cultivated a eugenic aspect of the
moral sense—which is immeasurably more plastic than
any but the student of moral ideas knows—and, thus
endowed, the young man or woman will be prepared for
the possibility of marriage. It is perfectly conceivable
that in days to come the argument—in any case false—that
affection never brooks control, may become wholly
irrelevant, when there arises a generation in whose
members there has been cultivated or created the eugenic
sense. It is conceivable that, just as to-day the mere
possibility of falling in love is arrested by any of a thousand
trivial considerations, so misplaced affection may be
incapable of arising because its possible object affronts
the educated eugenic sense. The natural basis for such
education already exists. But the natural eugenic sense
still works mainly on the physical plane, and although
we owe to it the maintenance of our present modest
standard of physical beauty, we aim at higher ideals—and
will one day thus attain them.
“The dregs of the human species—the blind, the deaf mute, the
degenerate, the imbecile, the epileptic—are better protected than
pregnant women.”—Bouchacourt.
“I hold that the two crowning and most accursed sins of the
society of this present day are the carelessness with which it
regards the betrayal of women, and the brutality with which
it suffers the neglect of children.”—Ruskin.
A chapter must be included here concerning a question
which can never safely be ignored in any consideration
of race-culture, but the importance of which, as I think
I see it, is recognised by no one who has concerned himself
at all with this subject, from Mr. Francis Galton himself
downwards. We must all be agreed, Mr. Galton declares,
as to the propriety of breeding, if it be possible, for health,
energy and ability, whatever else may be doubtful. To
this I would add that, whether we are agreed or not, we
must breed for motherhood, and that, even if we do not,
we shall have to reckon with it. The general eugenic
position, I fancy, is that the requirements which we
should make of both sexes, the mothers of the future as
well as the fathers, are essentially identical: but it seems
to me that we have not yet reckoned with the vast importance
of motherhood as a factor in the evolution of all
the higher species of animals, and its absolute supremacy,
inevitable and persistent whether recognised or ignored,
in the case of man. Any system of eugenics or race-culture,
any system of government, any proposal for
social reform—as, for instance, the reduction of infant
mortality—which fails to reckon with motherhood or
falls short of adequately appraising it, is foredoomed to
failure and will continue to fail so long as the basal facts
of human nature and the development of the human
individual retain even approximately their present
character. Whatever proposals for eugenics or race-culture
be made or carried out, the fact will remain that
the race is made up of mortal individuals; that every
one of these begins its visible life as a helpless baby, and
that the system which does not permit the babies to
survive, they will not permit to survive.
This is a general and universal proposition, admitting
of no exceptions, past, present or to come. It
applies equally to conscious systems of race-culture,
to forms of marriage, to forms of government, to any
other social institution or practice or character that
can be named or conceived. Upon every one of
these the babies pronounce a judgment from which
there is no appeal. The baby may be a potential Newton,
Shakespeare, Beethoven or Buddha, but it is at its birth
the most helpless thing alive, the potentialities of which
avail it not one whit. It is in more need of care, immediate
and continuous, than a baby microbe or a baby
cat, whatever the unpublished glories of which its brain
contains the promise; and in the total absence of any
apparatus, mechanical, legal, or scientific, which can
provide the mother's breast and the mother's love,
individual motherhood, in its exquisitely complementary
aspects, physical and psychical, will remain the dominant
factor of history so long as the final judgments upon
every present and the final determinations for every
future lie in the hands of helpless babyhood—which will
be the case so long as man is mortal. When, if ever,
science, having previously conquered disease, identifies
the causes of natural death and removes them, then
motherhood and babyhood may be thrown upon the
rubbish heap; but until that hour they are enthroned
by decree of Nature, and can be dethroned only at the
cost of Her certain and annihilative vengeance.
It is the master paradox that at his first appearance
the lord of the earth should be the most helpless of living
things. Consider a new-born baby. “Unable to stand,
much less to wander in search of food; very nearly deaf;
all but blind; well-nigh indiscriminating as to the nature
of what is presented to its mouth; utterly unable to keep
itself clean, yet highly susceptible to the effects of dirt;
able to indicate its needs only by alternately turning its
head, open-mouthed, from side to side and then crying;
possessed of an almost ludicrously hypersensitive interior;
unable to fast for more than two or three hours, yet
having the most precise and complicated dietetic requirements;
needing the most carefully maintained warmth;
easily injured by draughts; the prey of bacteria (which
take up a permanent abode in its alimentary canal by
the eleventh day)—where is to be found a more complete
picture of helpless dependence?”[42] How comes it that this
creature is to be lord of the earth, and a member of the only
species which succeeds in continually multiplying itself?
Motherhood and intelligence.—We have maintained
that the vital character which is of supreme survival-value
for man is his intelligence, and this, as we know,
is his unique possession. It is very largely for intelligence,
therefore, that race-culture or eugenics proposes, if
possible, to work. But if there be certain conditions
which must be complied with before intelligence can
possibly be evolved, eugenics will come to disaster should
it ignore them. These conditions do exist, and have
hitherto been entirely ignored by all students of this
question. Let certain great facts be observed.
Why is the human baby the most helpless of all
creatures? Since it is to become the most capable, should
it not, even in its infant state, show signs of its coming
superiority? What is the meaning of this paradox?
The answer is that, so far as physical weapons of offence
and defence are concerned, these have disappeared because
intelligence makes them superfluous or even burdensome.
But the peculiar helplessness of the human infant depends
not upon its nakedness in the physical sense but upon its
lack of very nearly all instinctive capacities. It is this
absence of effective instincts which distinguishes the baby
from the young of all other creatures. Why should its
endowment in this respect be so inferior?
It is because of the fact that, if instinct is to give rise to
intelligence, it must be plastic. A purely instinctive
creature reacts to certain sets of circumstances in certain
effortless, perfect and fixed ways. The reactions are the
whole of its psychical life. They need no education,
being as perfectly performed on the first occasion as on
the last, and in many instances being performed only once
in the whole history of the creature in question. But, on the
other hand, they are almost incapable of education, and
even in the cases where they lack absolute perfection at
first, they only require the merest modicum of opportunity
in order to acquire it. Perfect within their limits, they are
yet most definitely limited. They never achieve the new,
they are utterly at fault in novel circumstances, and they
are wholly incapable of creating circumstances.
A creature cannot be at once purely instinctive and
intelligent. An instinctive action is simply a compound
reflex action, a highly adapted automatism: now automatism
and intelligence are necessarily inversely proportional.
It is possible for an intelligent creature to acquire
automatisms, which are popularly described as instinctive.
They are not instincts, however, but the acquired equivalents
of instincts: “secondary automatisms.” If they
are used to replace intelligence, the individual, in so far,
sinks from the human to the sub-human level. Their
proper function is to leave the intelligence free for higher
purposes more worthy of it than, say, the act of dressing
oneself.
In order that an intelligent creature should be evolved
it was necessary that instinct should become plastic.
Intelligence could not be superposed upon a complete and
final instinctive equipment. You cannot determine your
own acts if they are already determined for you by your
nervous organisation. The incomparable superiority of
intelligence depends upon its limitless and creative
character, in virtue of which, as Disraeli puts it, “men are
not the creatures of circumstances: circumstances are
the creatures of men.” But whilst intelligence can learn
everything, it has everything to learn, and the most nearly
intelligent creature whom the earth affords thus begins
his independent life almost wholly bereft of all the instruments
which have served the lower creatures so well,
whilst, on the other hand, he is provided with an utterly
undeveloped, and indeed, at that time non-existent,
weapon which, even if it did exist, he could not use.
Hence the unique helplessness of the human baby: one
of the most wonderful and little appreciated facts in the
whole of nature—effectively hidden from the glass eyes of
the kind of man who calls a baby a “brat,” but, to eyes that
can see, not only the master paradox from the philosophical
point of view but also a fact of the utmost moment
from the practical point of view.
The evolution of motherhood.—It directly follows that
motherhood is supremely important in the case of man.
It is the historical fact that its importance in the history
of the animal world has been steadily increasing throughout
æonian time. The most successful and ancient
societies we know, those of the social insects, which antedate
by incalculable ages even the first vertebrates, could
not survive for a single generation without the motherhood
or foster-motherhood to which the worker females
sacrifice their lives and their own chances of physical
maternity.
The development of maternal care may be steadily
traced throughout the vertebrate series—pari passu with
the evolution of sexual relations towards the ideal of
monogamy, which is ideal just because of its incomparable
services to motherhood. But whilst motherhood is
of the utmost service for lower creatures, tending always
to lessen infant mortality—if it may be so called—and to
increase the proportion of life to death and birth, it is of
supreme service in the case of man because of the absolute
dependence upon it of intelligence, the solitary but unexampled
weapon with which he has won the earth. Hence
in breeding for intelligence we cannot afford to ignore that
upon which intelligence depends. Even if we could produce
genius at will, we should find our young geniuses just
as dependent upon motherhood as the common run of
mankind. Newton himself was a seven months' baby, and
the potentialities of gravitation and the calculus and the
laws of motion in his brain could not save him: motherhood
could and did.
Even our least biological reformers must admit that
purely physical motherhood, up to the point of birth, can
scarcely be omitted in any schemes for social reform or
race-culture. Some of them will even admit that purely
physical motherhood, so far as the mother's breasts are
concerned, cannot wisely be dispensed with. The psychical
aspects of motherhood, however, many of these writers—I
do not call them thinkers—ignore. In relation to infant
mortality—which is the most obvious symptom of causes
productive of vast and widespread physical deterioration
amongst the survivors, and which must be abolished before
any really effective race-culture is possible—it is worth
noting that motherhood cannot safely be superseded. I
do not believe in the crèche or the municipal milk depôt
except as stop-gaps, or as object-lessons for those who
imagine that the slaughtered babies are not slaughtered
but die of inherent defect, and that therefore infant
mortality is a beneficent process. In working for the reduction
of this evil we must work through and by motherhood.
In some future age, boasting the elements of sanity, our
girls will be instructed in these matters. At present the
most important profession in the world is almost entirely
carried on by unskilled labour, and until this state of
things is put an end to, it is almost idle to talk of race-culture
at all. But under our present system of education,
false and rotten as it is in principles and details alike,
it is necessary for us to send visitors to the homes of the
classes which, in effect, supply almost the whole of the
future population of the country, and to establish
schools for mothers on every hand.
Psychical motherhood.—I confess myself opposed to
the principle of bribing a woman to become a
mother, whether overtly or covertly, whether in the
guise of State-aid or in the form of eugenic premiums
for maternity. It may sound very well to offer a bonus
for the production of babies by mothers whom the
State or any eugenic power considers fit and worthy. But
though the bonus may help motherhood in its physical
aspects, the importance of which no one questions, I do
not see what service it renders to motherhood in its
psychical aspects—which are at least equally important.
What is the outlook for the baby when the bonus is spent?
In fact, with all deference to Mr. Galton, and with such
deference as may be due to the literary triflers who have
discussed this matter, I am inclined to think that a
cardinal requisite for a mother is love of children. Ignorant
this may be, and indeed at first always is, but if it is
there it can be instructed. The woman who does not
think the possession of a baby a sufficient prize is no fit
object, I should say, for any other kind of bribe or lure.
The woman who “would rather have a spare bedroom
than a baby” is the woman whom I do not want to have
a baby. Thus I look with suspicion on any proposals
which assume that the psychical elements of motherhood
are of little moment in eugenics. I see no sign or prospect
that they can be dispensed with, and I think eugenics is
going to work on wrong lines if it proposes to ignore them.
Even if you turn out Nature with a fork she will yet
return—tamen usque recurret.
In this question we should be able to derive great
assistance from biography. Real guidance, I believe, is
obtained from this source, but only a pitiable fraction of
that which should be obtained. Scientific biography
is yet to seek, and it is the ironical fact that when Herbert
Spencer, in his Autobiography, devoted a large amount
of space to the discussion of both his parents and their
relatives, the literary critics were bored to death. Nevertheless,
we cannot know too much about the ancestry, on
both sides, and the early environment, of great men. At
present it is always tacitly assumed that a great man is
the son of his father alone. The biographer would probably
admit, if pressed, that doubtless some woman or
other was involved in the matter, and that her name was
so and so—if any one thinks it worth mentioning. On
the score of heredity alone, however, we derive, men and
women alike, with absolute equality from both parents;
and we cannot know too much about the mothers of men
of genius. Such knowledge would often avail us materially
in cases where the paternal ancestry offers little
explanation of the child's destiny.
We do owe, however, to great men themselves many
warm and unqualified tributes to their mothers, not on
the score of heredity, but on the score of the psychical
aspects of motherhood. This, indeed, is one of the great
lessons of biography which some eugenists have forgotten.
It is all very well to breed for intelligence, but intelligence
needs nurture and guidance, and that need is the more
urgent, the more powerful and original the intelligence in
question. The physical functions of motherhood from the
moment of birth onwards can be effected, no doubt, though
at very great cost, by means of incubators and milk laboratories,
and so forth. But there is no counterfeiting or
replacing the psychical component of complete maternity,
and a generation of the highest intelligence borne by
unmaternal women would probably succeed only in
writing the blackest and maddest page in history.
The eugenic demand for love.—Mr. Galton desires
that we breed for physique, ability, and energy. But
we also need more love, and we must breed for that.
Nothing is easier or more inevitable once we make
human parenthood conscious and deliberate. When
children are born only to those who love children, and
who will tend to transmit their high measure of that
parental instinct from which all love is derived, we shall
bring to earth a heaven compared with which the
theologian's is but a fool's paradise.
The first requisite, then, for the mothers of the future,
the elements of physical health being assumed, is that
they should be motherly. They may or may not, in
addition, be worthy of such exquisite titles as “the female
Shakespeare of America,” but they must have motherliness
to begin with. For this indispensable thing there is
no substitute. It must certainly be granted, and the fact
should not be ignored, that the hidden spring of motherliness
in a girl may be revealed only by actual maternity,
and the frivolous damsel who used to think babies “silly
squalling things” may be mightily transformed when the
silly squalling thing is her own—and the Fifth Symphony
sound and fury signifying nothing compared with its
slightest whimper. I will grant even that the maternal
instinct is so deeply rooted and universal that its
absence must be regarded as either a rare abnormality
or else as the product of the grossest mal-education
in the wide sense. But the reader will not blame me
for insisting at such length upon what, as he would
think, no one could deny, when he discovers that these
salient truths are denied, and that in what should be
the sacred name of eugenics, they are openly flouted and
defied.
Before we go on to consider these perversions of a great
idea, it may briefly be observed that, though fatherhood
is historically a mushroom growth compared with motherhood,
and though its importance is vastly less, yet as a
complementary principle, aiding and abetting motherhood,
and making for its most perfect expression, fatherhood
played a great part in animal evolution, in the right
line of progress, ages before man appeared upon the earth
at all, and that its work is not yet done. To this subject
we must return. Meanwhile it is well to note the dangers
with which eugenics is at present threatened in the form
of certain proposals which, if for a time they became
popular—and they have elements making for popularity—would
inevitably throw the gravest discredit upon the
whole subject.
Eugenics and the family.—Certain remarkable
tendencies invoking the name of eugenics are now to be
observed in Germany. These have considerable funds,
much enthusiasm, journalistic support, and even a large
measure of assistance in academic circles. In pursuance
of the idea of eugenics there is a movement the nature of
which is indicated by the following quotation from a
private letter:—
“I wonder if your attention was drawn to the German projects
of the reform of the Family. They all aim at improving the
German race and rendering decisive its superiority over all others.
The means seem to be too revolutionary. The more modern wish
the establishment of the matriarchal family (ein nach Mutterrecht),
the more logical require universal polygamy and polyandry, an
individualisation of Society. Others hope to increase the production
of German geniuses by the ‘hellenic friendship.’[!] The
three movements are strongly organised, command large pecuniary
means, a phalanx of original and prolific writers, and enthusiastic
devotion to their cause. More even than the support of Courts
and aristocracy is, in my eyes, that of the Universities. It is there
that the destinies of Germany have always been shaped, and if
they are determined to reform the Family in that way, it will be
done.... The Herren Professoren are terribly in earnest, yet
they say things which even to the least prejudiced minds appear
ridiculous and even vulgar. Still, their projects have some
relation to Eugenics, and to Sociology in general.”
This sufficiently indicates the dangers run by the eugenic
principle at the hands of those who see in it an instrument
of protest and rebellion against established things. We
dare not repudiate the sacred principles of protest and
rebellion, which have been the conditions of all progress,
but believing in motherhood as we must, believing it to be
authorised by nature herself and not by any human conventions,
we must deplore any tendencies such as the two
last cited. For us in this country, however, a more immediate
interest attaches to the views of a much admired
and discussed writer who claims to be a social philosopher
of the first order, and whose claims must now be examined.
The opinions of Mr. Bernard Shaw on the question of
eugenics may be quoted from his contribution to the
subject published in Sociological Papers 1904, pp. 74, 75,
in discussion of Mr. Galton's great paper. Mr. Shaw
begins by saying: “I agree with the paper and go so far
as to say that there is now no reasonable excuse for refusing
to face the fact that nothing but a eugenic religion can
save our civilisation from the fate that has overtaken all
previous civilisations.” And further:—
“I am afraid we must make up our minds either to face a
considerable shock to vulgar opinion in this matter or to let
eugenics alone.... What we must fight for is freedom to breed
the race without being hampered by the mass of irrelevant conditions
implied in the institution of marriage. If our morality is
attacked, we can carry the war into the enemy's country by
reminding the public that the real objection to breeding by
marriage is that marriage places no restraint on debauchery, so
long as it is monogamic.... What we need is freedom for
people who have never seen each other before and never intend to
see one another again, to produce children under certain definite
public conditions, without loss of honour.”
The conception of individual fatherhood here stated
involves a deliberate reversion to the order of the beast:
it excludes individual fatherhood from any function in
aiding motherhood or in serving the future. It involves,
of course, the total abolition of the family. It denies
and flouts the very best elements in human nature. It
assumes that the best women will find motherhood worth
while without the interest and sympathy and help and protection
of the father. It does not, however, condemn or
exclude the psychical functions of motherhood, since so far
as this quotation goes it might be assumed that the mother
would be permitted to live with her own child. On this
point, however, Mr. Shaw offered us further guidance in his
controversy with myself in the Pall Mall Gazette, in
December, 1907. One or two of his dicta must here be
quoted—they followed upon my remark, “Anything less
like a mother than the State I find it hard to imagine”:—
“When the State left the children to the mothers, they got
no schooling; they were sent out to work under inhuman conditions,
under-ground and over-ground for atrociously long hours,
as soon as they were able to walk; they died of typhus fever
in heaps; they grew up to be as wicked to their own children as
their parents had been to them. State socialism rescued them
from the worst of that, and means to rescue them from all of it. I
now publicly challenge Dr. Saleeby to propose, if he dares, to
withdraw the hand of the State and abandon the children to
their mothers as they fall.... All I need say is that before Dr.
Saleeby can persuade me to sacrifice the future of human society
to his maternalism, he will have to tackle me with harder weapons
than the indignant enthusiasm of a young man's mother worship.”
Mr. Shaw's teaching constitutes a brutal and deliberate
libel upon the highest aspects of womanhood. For his own
purposes he attributes to the mothers all the abominations
which, as every one knows, have lain and in some measure
still lie, at the door of the State. The man who has this
opinion of motherhood is complacently ignorant of the
elements of the subject. His charge is denied by every one
who has worked as doctor or nurse or visitor or missionary
amongst the poorer classes, and knows that the mothers
there met are of the very salt of the earth.
It is well to state plainly here that these utterly irresponsible
dicta have absolutely no relation or resemblance
whatever to the opinions or proposals of Mr. Francis Galton
himself, who desires to effect race-culture through marriage,
and whose whole propaganda is based upon this assumption.
This we shall afterwards see. Meanwhile we may
note Mr. Galton's own words: “The aim of eugenics is to
bring as many influences as can be reasonably employed,
to cause the useful classes in the community to contribute
more than their proportion to the next generation.” Mr.
Galton would be the first to assert that influences designed
to supersede motherhood and to abolish everything but
the physical aspect of fatherhood, would not be reasonable,
but insane in the highest degree.
The ideal of race-culture without fatherhood or motherhood,
except in the mere physiological sense, constitutes
a denial of the greatest facts in evolution, as we have seen.
It ignores everything that is known and daily witnessed
regarding the development of the individual, and the
formation of character, without which intelligence is a
curse. There is not the slightest fear that any such reversion
to the order of the beast is possible, absolutely forbidden
as it is by the laws of human nature. There is,
however, reasonable ground for apprehension, especially
when the recent developments in Germany are remembered,
that the public may obtain its notions of eugenics
in a highly-garbled form.[43]
It must be asserted as fervently and plainly as possible
that, if the idea of race-culture is even in the smallest
degree to be realised, it must work through motherhood
and fatherhood not less in their psychical than in their
physical aspects. It is time to have done with the gross
delusions of Nietzsche regarding the nature and course of
organic evolution. Morality is not an invention of man
but man the child of morality, and it is not by the
abolition of motherhood, in which morality originated,
nor of fatherhood, its first ally, that the super-man is
to be evolved: but by the attainment of those lofty
conceptions of the function, the responsibility and the
privilege of parenthood which it is the first business of
eugenics to inculcate.
As for marriage, invaluable though at its best it be for
the completion and ennoblement of the individual life,
its great function for society and for the race is in relation
to childhood. Thus considered, the dictum of Professor
Westermarck may be understood, that children are not
the result of marriage but marriage the result of children.
This, in other words, is to say that marriage has become
evolved and established as a social institution because of
its services to race-culture. It is, in short, the supreme
eugenic institution. This great subject must next occupy
our attention.
Our present concern is the relation of marriage to race-culture,
and for this purpose we must investigate an
epoch ages before the institution of human marriage,
ages before mankind itself. We must first remind
ourselves of what may be called the trend of
progress from the first in respect of that reproduction
upon which all species depend, all living individuals
being mortal.
At first, in the effort for survival and increase, life tried
the quantitative method. If we take the present day
bacteria as representatives of the primitive method, we
see that not quality nor individuality but quantity and
numbers are the means by which, in their case, life seeks
to establish itself more abundantly. We express our own
birth-rate in its proportion per year to one thousand
living: but twenty thousand bacteria injected into a
rabbit have been found to multiply into twelve thousand
million in one day. “One bacterium has been actually
observed to rear a small family of eighty thousand within
a period of twenty-four hours.” “The cholera bacillus
can duplicate every twenty minutes, and might thus in
one day become 5,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, with the
weight, according to the calculations of Cohn, of about
7,366 tons. In a few days, at this rate, there would be
a mass of bacteria as big as the moon, huge enough to
fill the whole ocean.”
If now we trace the history of life up to man, we find
in him—as we have seen—the lowest birth-rate of any
animal and the longest ante-natal period in proportion to
his body weight, the longest period of maternal feeding,
and by far the lowest infant mortality and general death-rate.
A chief fact of progress has been, in a word, the
supersession of the quantitative by the qualitative
criterion of survival-value. Immeasurably vast vital
economy and efficiency have thus been effected. The
tendency of progress, in short—a tendency coincident
with the evolution of ever higher and higher species—is to
pass from the horrible Gargantuan wastefulness of the
older methods towards the evident but yet lamentably
unrealised ideal—that every child born shall reach
maturity. This great historical tendency, which will
ultimately involve the restriction of parenthood to the fit,
fine and relatively few, has occurred under the impartial
rule of natural selection simply and solely because it has
endowed with survival-value the successive species in
which it has been demonstrated.
The rise of parenthood.—Consistently with this fact
and with the argument of the previous chapter is the
tendency towards the lengthening of infancy, a very
characteristic condition of the evolution of the higher
forms of life. This lengthening and accentuation of
infancy makes for variety of development, and, as we have
seen, is supremely instanced in man, where it depends
upon, and makes possible, the transmutation of fixed
instincts into the plastic thing we call intelligence. Thus,
to quote the words of Dr. Parsons,[44] “we find that as
infancy is prolonged in the progress of species, the care
given to offspring by parents is increased. It extends
over a longer period and it is directed more and more
towards the total welfare of offspring. The need of a
potentially many-sided and enduring kind of parental
care is filled through the social group we call the family.”
Apart from those immensely significant creatures, the
social insects, we find well-marked though primitive signs
of motherhood amongst the fishes, and in a few cases,
such as the stickleback, the beginnings of fatherhood.
But it is not until we reach the mammals, and especially
the monkeys and apes, that we find a great development
of motherhood, far more prolonged and far more important
than the more frequently extolled parental care
found amongst the birds.
Very interesting, however, in the case of the fishes is
the fact observed by Sutherland that “as soon as the
slightest trace of parental care is discovered the chance
of survival is increased and the birth-rate is lowered.”
As a general summary these words of Dr. Parsons will
serve:—“Diminution of offspring is a threefold gain to
a species. (1) It lessens the vital drain upon the parent.
(2) It enables the size and capacity of the limited number
of offspring to be increased. (3) In the case of the higher
developments of parental care after birth, it concentrates
the advantage of that care upon a few instead of scattering
it, and thereby weakening its influence, upon many.”
Now how are these facts connected with that relation
between the parents which we call marriage, temporary
or permanent, foreshadowed or perfected?
It may be submitted that the racial function or survival-value
of marriage in all its forms, low or high, animal or
human, consists in its services to the principle of motherhood,
these services depending upon the help and strength which
are afforded to motherhood by fatherhood.
Animal marriage.—Let us now look very briefly at the
facts of animal marriage from this point of view. The
phrase, animal marriage, may possibly offend the reader,
but is there any reason to be offended at the suggestion
that the principle of marriage actually has a warrant
older even than mankind? It has lately been pointed
out by a distinguished naturalist, Mr. Ernest Thompson
Seton, that animals, like men, have long been groping, so
to say, for an ideal form of marriage. We now know, as
will be shown, that, contrary to popular opinion, promiscuity
does not prevail amongst the lowest races of
men. Equally false is the popular notion that promiscuity
prevails amongst most of the lower animals.
Promiscuity, it is true, does occur, but so also does strict
monogamy, “and promiscuous animals, such as rabbits
and voles, while high in the scale of fecundity, are low
in the scale of general development.” Says Mr. Seton:
“It is commonly remarked that while the Mosaic law
did not expressly forbid polygamy, it surrounded marriage
with so many restrictions that by living up to the spirit
of them the Hebrew ultimately was forced into pure
monogamy. It is extremely interesting to note that the
animals, in their blind groping for an ideal form of union,
have gone through the same stages, and have arrived at
exactly the same conclusion. Monogamy is their best
solution of the marriage question, and is the rule among
all the higher and most successful animals.”
The moose, Mr. Seton tells us, has several wives in one
season but only one at a time. The hawks practise monogamy
lasting for one season, “the male staying with the
family, and sharing the care of the young till they are
well-grown.” The wolves consort for life, but the death of
one leaves the other free to mate again. There is a fourth
method “in which they pair for life, and, in case of death,
the survivor remains disconsolate and alone to the end.
This seems absurd. It is the way of the geese.” The point
especially to be insisted upon as regards animal marriage
is its evident service to their race-culture, in accordance
with the principle here laid down that marriage is of
value because it supports motherhood by fatherhood, and that
its different forms are of value in proportion as they do
so more or less effectively. We may note also, as a corollary
to this, that marriage must be more important in
proportion as the young of a species are helpless and in
proportion as their helplessness is long continued. The
importance of marriage for man, therefore, must necessarily
be higher than for any of the lower animals.
Human marriage.—We must turn now to human
marriage, and the principle which we must remember is
that of survival-value. We are discussing a natural
phenomenon exhibited by living creatures. This is what
so few people realise when they speak of marriage. They
cannot disabuse themselves of the idea that it is a human
invention, and especially an ecclesiastical invention.
Thus, on the one hand, it is supported by persons who base
its claims on mystical or dogmatic grounds; whilst, on the
other hand, it is attacked by those who are opposed to
ecclesiasticism or religion of any kind, and attacked in the
name of science—in which, if the fact could only be recognised,
is found every possible warrant and sanction, and
indeed imperative demand, for this most precious of all
institutions. Here we must endeavour to look upon it as
an exceedingly ancient fact of life, vastly more ancient
than mankind; and in judging it and explaining it we must
apply Nature's universal criterion, which is that of its
survival-value or service to race-culture. Let us then
glance very briefly at the actual facts of human marriage—conceived
as an institution by which the survival-value
of fatherhood is added to that of motherhood.
The pioneer student of marriage from the standpoint
of science was Herbert Spencer, who with great labour
supported the conclusion that monogamy is the highest,
best and latest form of marriage. But in the absence of
the great mass of evidence which is now before us, Spencer
too readily assumed the truth of the popular notion that
promiscuity was the primitive state, and taught that
human marriage has developed from this through polygamy
towards the ideal of monogamy. The work of
Professor Westermarck, however—Spencer's chief follower
in this path—has shown, and later writers have abundantly
confirmed it, that this primitive promiscuity never
existed. There is no nation or race or clan of man now
extant, however primitive or barbaric, that has not definite
marriage laws; there is no society on earth, however
rude, that does not punish the unfaithful wife. Furthermore,
polygamy, the only historical rival of monogamy,
is now known to have played a quite trivial part in history,
not merely compared with monogamy, but as compared
with that which it was supposed to have played. Even
in countries which we call polygamous to-day, polygamy
is the relatively rare exception and monogamy the rule.
On this most important question it is well, however, to
quote the words of Professor Westermarck himself:—
“The great majority of peoples are, as a rule, monogamous,
and the other forms of marriage are usually modified in a monogamous
direction.” “As to the history of the forms of human
marriage, two inferences regarding monogamy and polygyny may
be made with absolute certainty; monogamy, always the predominant
form of marriage, has been more prevalent at the
lowest stages of civilisation than at somewhat higher stages;
whilst, at a still higher stage, polygyny has again, to a great
extent, yielded to monogamy.” “We may thus take it for
granted that civilisation, up to a certain point, is favourable
to polygyny; but it is equally certain that in its highest forms
it leads to monogamy.” “But, though civilisation up to a certain
point is favourable to polygyny, its higher forms invariably and
necessarily lead to monogamy.”
It is the principle of survival-value that explains the
dominance of monogamy at all stages of human society—with
the single exception of continuously and wholly
militant societies, in which polygamy obtained in consequence
of the great numerical excess of women. It is
the fate of the children, in which everything is involved,
that has determined the history of human marriage.
Furthermore, we may see here one more illustration of the
truth that quality is ousting quantity in the course of
progress, and that a low birth-rate represents a more
advanced stage than a high birth-rate. The birth-rate
under polygamy is undoubtedly high, but polygamy does
not make for the survival and health of the children, and
the infant mortality is gigantic. As I have said elsewhere,
“the form of marriage which does not permit the babies
to survive, they do not permit to survive. There is the
beginning and the end of the whole matter in a nutshell.
It is not a question of the father's taste and fancy, but of
what he leaves above ground when the worms are eating
him below.... No system yet conceived can compare
for a moment with monogamy in respect of the one
criterion which time and death recognise, the fate of the
children.”
In a word, the wholly adequate and only possible
explanation of the historical fact of the dominance of
monogamy is its supreme survival-value. It has competed
with every other kind of sex relation and has been
selected by natural selection because of its supreme service
for race-culture—the most perfect conceivable addition
of fatherhood to motherhood.
Plato and motherhood.—Thus eugenics must repudiate
not only the ideas of Mr. Shaw on this subject,
but the teaching of Plato, from whom Mr. Shaw's
ideas on this particular subject are apparently derived.
It is in the fifth book of his Republic that the pioneer
eugenist lays down his ideas for race-culture. He realised,
indeed, the importance, after birth, of the nurture of
children—“it is of considerable, nay, of the utmost importance
to the State, when this is rightly performed or otherwise;”
and he refers also to their nurture while very
young, “in the period between their generation and their
education, which seems to be the most troublesome of all.”
His method involved a complete community of wives and
children amongst the guardians of the State, and on no
account were the parents to know their own children nor
the children their parents. The best were to be chosen
for parents, on the analogy of animal race-culture by man.
The children of inferior parents were to be killed. The
others were to be conveyed to the common nursery of the
city, but every precaution was to be taken that no mother
should know her own child. This practice was to be the
cardinal point of the Republic and “the cause of the
greatest good to the city.”
We see here, then, that the very first proposals for
race-culture involved the destruction of marriage and the
family, and a total denial of the value of the psychical
aspects of motherhood and fatherhood alike. Plato's
first critic, however, his own great pupil Aristotle, devoted
the best part of his work, the Politics, to showing that the
suggestions of Plato were not only wrong in themselves,
but would not secure his end. Aristotle showed, in the
words of Mr. Barker, that “the destruction of the family,
and the substitution in its place of one vast clan, would
lead but to the destruction of warm feelings, and the
substitution of a sentiment which is to them as water is
to wine.... So with the system of common marriage, as
opposed to monogamy. The one encourages at best a poor
and shadowy sentiment, while it denies to man the satisfaction
of natural instinct and the education of family life;
the other is natural and right, both because it is based on
those instincts, and because it satisfies the moral nature
of man, in giving him objects of permanent yet vivid
interest above and beyond himself.” The truth of this
matter is that the rest may reason and welcome—but we
fathers know.
Marriage a eugenic instrument.—It has definitely
to be stated, then, that the abolition of marriage
and the family is in no degree whatever a part of
the eugenic proposal. We desire to achieve race-culture
by and through marriage, on the lines which
indeed many lower races of men successfully practise at
the present day. We must make parenthood more
responsible, not less so. It will afterwards be shown that
the suggested incompatibility between marriage and the
family, on the one hand, and race-culture or eugenics on
the other, does not exist. It will be shown that we have
in marriage not only the greatest instrument of race-culture
that has yet been employed—half-consciously—by
man, but also an instrument supremely fitted, and
indeed without a rival, for the conscious, deliberate, and
scientific intentions of modern eugenists. The applicability
of marriage for this purpose will be shown by
reference to actual facts. Mr. Galton himself has shown
how effectively an educated public opinion can employ
marriage for the purposes of race-culture, its services to
which have indeed led to its evolution. It has furthermore
to be added that only the formation of public opinion can
ever lead to the ideal which we desire. This opinion already
exists in some degree as regards one or two transmissible
diseases, and, though without adequate scientific warrant,
as regards the marriage of first cousins. In these respects
it is not without some measure of effectiveness, and the
fact is of the utmost promise.
“Marriage,” said Goethe, “is the origin and the
summit of all civilisation.” Perhaps it would be more
accurate to say the family rather than marriage. The
childless marriage may be and often is a thing of the
utmost beauty and value to the individuals concerned,
but it is certainly not the origin of civilisation, and if
it be its summit it is also its grave. The eugenic
support of marriage, therefore, depends upon a belief
in the family, and that form of marriage will commend
itself which provides the best form of family. From
the point of view of certain eugenists, polygamy would
be desirable in many cases, as extending the parental
opportunities of the man of fine physique or intellectual
distinction. The problem remains, however, as to the
nurture of the children so obtained, and historical study
returns us a very clear answer as to the relative merits
of the polygamous family and the monogamous family.
It is this last that pre-eminently justifies itself on the score
of its services to childhood and therefore to the race. Its
survival is a matter of absolute certainty, because of its
survival-value. Neither Plato nor Mr. Shaw, nor any kind
of collectivist legislation will permanently abolish it.
The principle of maternalism.—The merits of monogamy
can be defined in terms of the principle which
I would venture to call maternalism—the principle of
the permanent and radical importance of motherhood
and whatever institutions afford it the greatest aid.
Maternalism would point, I think, to the supreme
paradox that the dominant creature of the earth is
born of woman, and born the most absolutely helpless
of all living creatures whatsoever, animal or vegetable;
it would note that this utter dependence upon others,
mother or foster-mother, is not only the most unqualified
known, but the longest maintained; it would observe
that of all the human beings now alive, all that have
lived, all that are to be, not one could survive its birth
for twenty-four hours but for motherhood; it would
note that only motherhood has rendered possible the
development of instinct into that intelligence which,
itself dependent upon motherhood for the possibility of its
development, has dependent upon it the fact that the
earth is now man's and the fulness thereof; and to
the advocates of all the political -isms that can be named,
and the small proportion of them that can be defined,
it would apply its specific criterion: Do you regard
the safeguarding and the ennoblement of motherhood
as the proximate end of all political action, the end
through which the ultimate ends, the production and
recognition of human worth, can alone be attained;
do you realise that marriage is invaluable because it
makes for the enthronement of motherhood as nothing
else ever did or can; do you realise that, metaphors
about State maternity notwithstanding, the State has
neither womb nor breasts, these most reverend and
divine of all vital organs being the appanage of the
individual mother alone?
The maternalist principle being assumed, and the
value of monogamy on the ground that it supports
motherhood by fatherhood, the forthcoming discussion
as to the possibilities of race-culture will assume the
persistence of monogamy and will centre upon the
possibility of selecting or rejecting, for the purposes of
race-culture, those who are available for entrance into
the marriage state. The reader who has not studied social
anthropology—and this is true of nearly all the critics of
eugenics, very few of whom have studied anything—will
be astounded, I believe, to discover the practically
unlimited extent to which public opinion, whether or
not formulated as law, has always been capable of
controlling marriage, and therefore, race-culture.
Proposed definition of marriage.—Recognising the
existence of subhuman marriage, we may be at a loss to
define marriage as distinguished from sex-relations in
general. It is that form of sex-relation which involves
or is adapted to common parental care of the offspring—the
support of motherhood by fatherhood.
