GIFT OF 
 Le y 1 i e Van Ness Denman 
 
PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
BOOKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR. 
 
 "WORRY: THE DISEASE OF THE AGE." 
 "EVOLUTION: THE MASTER KEY." 
 "HEALTH, STRENGTH, AND HAPPINESS. 
 
 ETC., ETC. 
 
PARENTHOOD 
 
 AND 
 
 RACE CULTURE 
 
 An Outline of Eugenics 
 
 BY 
 CALEB WILLIAMS SALEEBY 
 
 M.D., CH.B., F.Z.R.EDiN. 
 
 FELLOW OF THE OBSTETRICAL SOCIETY OF EDINBURGH, 
 MEMBER OF COUNCIL OF THE EUGENICS EDUCATION SOCIETY, 
 
 THE SOCIOLOGICAL SOCIETY, 
 THE NATIONAL LEAGUE FOR PHYSICAL EDUCATION AND 
 
 IMPROVEMENT, 
 
 MEMBER OF THE ROYAL INSTITUTION, 
 THE SOCIETY FOR THE STUDY OF INEBRIETY, ETC. 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 MOFFAT, YARD AND COMPANY 
 1910 
 
C6pyright 1909 by 
 
 MOFFAT, YARD AND COMPANY 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 All Rights Reserved 
 
 Second Printing February 1910 
 
 GIFT OP 
 
THIS BOOK IS 
 
 Dedicate?) 
 
 TO 
 FRANCIS GALTON 
 
 THE 
 AUGUST MASTER OF ALL EUGENISTS 
 
 M103874 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PART I 
 THE THEORY OF EUGENICS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 I. INTRODUCTORY i 
 
 II. THE EXCHEQUER OF LIFE ig 
 
 III. NATURAL SELECTION AND THE LAW OF LOVE . 39 
 
 IV. THE SELECTION OF MIND 59 
 
 V. THE MULTIPLICATION OF MAN 80 
 
 VI. THE GROWTH OF INDIVIDUALITY 98 
 
 VII. HEREDITY AND RACE CULTURE 113 
 
 VIII. EDUCATION AND RACE CULTURE 137 
 
 IX. THE SUPREMACY OF MOTHERHOOD 166 
 
 X. MARRIAGE AND MATERNALISM 183 
 
 PART II 
 THE PRACTICE OF EUGENICS 
 
 XI. NEGATIVE EUGENICS 199 
 
 XII. SELECTION THROUGH MARRIAGE 213 
 
 XIII. THE RACIAL POISONS: ALCOHOL 237 
 
 XIV. THE RACIAL POISONS : LEAD, NARCOTICS, SYPHILIS 285 
 
 XV. NATIONAL EUGENICS : RACE CULTURE AND HIS- 
 TORY 294 
 
 XVI. NATIONAL EUGENICS : MR. BALFOUR ON DECA- 
 DENCE 323 
 
 XVII. THE PROMISE OF RACE CULTURE 333 
 
 APPENDIX A : CONCERNING BOOKS TO READ ... 353 
 
 " B: THE EUGENICS EDUCATION SOCIETY . 373 
 iii 
 
PREFACE 
 
 THIS book, a first attempt to survey and define the 
 whole field of eugenics, appears in the year which finds 
 us celebrating the centenary of the birth of Charles 
 Darwin and the jubilee of the publication of The Origin 
 of Species. It is a humble tribute to that immortal 
 name, for it is based upon the idea of selection for 
 parenthood as determining the nature, fate and worth 
 of living races, which is Darwin's chief contribution to 
 thought, and which finds in eugenics its supreme appli- 
 cation. The book is also a tribute to the august pio- 
 neer who initiated the modern study of eugenics in the 
 light of his cousin's principle. A few years ago I all 
 but persuaded Mr. Galton himself to write a general in- 
 troduction to eugenics, but he felt bound to withdraw 
 from that undertaking, and has given us instead his 
 Memories, which we could ill have spared. 
 
 The present volume seeks to supply what is un- 
 doubtedly a real need at the present day a general 
 introduction to eugenics which is at least considered 
 and responsible. I am indebted to more than one pair 
 of searching and illustrious eyes, which I may not 
 name, for reading the proofs of this volume. My best 
 hopes for its utility are based upon this fact. If there 
 be any other reason for hope it is that during the last 
 six years I have not only written incessantly on eugen- 
 ics, but have spoken upon various aspects of it some 
 
 vii 
 
via PREFACE 
 
 hundreds of times to audiences as various as one can 
 well imagine a mainly clerical assembly at Lambeth 
 Palace with the Primate in the Chair, drawing-rooms 
 of title, working-class audiences from the Clyde to the 
 Thames. It has been my rule to invite questions 
 whenever it was possible. Such a discipline is in- 
 valuable. It gives new ideas and points of views, 
 discovers the existing forms of prejudice, sharply cor- 
 rects the tendency to partial statement. It is my hope 
 that these many hours of cross-examination will be 
 profitable to the present reader. 
 
 It has been sought to define the scope of eugenics, 
 and my consistent aim has been, if possible, to preserve 
 its natural unity without falling into the error, which I 
 seem to see almost everywhere, of excluding what is 
 strictly eugenic. Our primary idea, beyond dispute, is 
 selection for parenthood based upon the facts of hered- 
 ity. This, however, is not an end, but a means. 
 Some eugenists seem to forget the distinction. Our 
 end is a better race. If then, beyond selecting for 
 parenthood, it be desirable to take care of those se- 
 lected as, for instance, to protect the expectant 
 mother from alcohol, lead or syphilis that is strict 
 eugenics on any definition worth a moment's notice. 
 It then appears, of course, that our demands come into 
 contact with those prejudices which political parties 
 call their principles. A given eugenic proposal or 
 argument, for instance, may be stamped as " Social- 
 ist " or as " Individualist/' and people who have la- 
 belled their eyes with these catchwords, which eugenics 
 will ere long make obsolete, proceed to judge eugenics 
 by them. But the question is not whether a given pro- 
 
PREFACE ix 
 
 posal is socialistic, individualistic or anything else, 
 but is it eugenic. If it is eugenic, that is final. To 
 this all parties will come, and by this all parties will be 
 judged. The question is not whether eugenics is, for 
 instance, socialist, but whether socialism is eugenic. 
 I claim for eugenics that it is the final and only judge 
 of all proposals and principles, however labelled, new 
 or old, orthodox or heterodox. Some years ago I 
 ventured to coin the word eugenist, which is now the 
 accepted term. With that label I believe any man or 
 woman may well be content. If this be granted, the 
 old catchwords and the bias they create forgotten, we 
 may be prepared to consider what the scope of eugen- 
 ics really is. 
 
 Eugenics is not, for instance, a sub-section of applied 
 mathematics. It is at once a science, and a religion, 
 based upon the laws of life, and recognising in them 
 the foundation of society. We shall some day have a 
 eugenic sociology, to which the first part of this vol- 
 ume seeks to contribute: and the sociology and poli- 
 tics which have not yet discovered that man is mortal 
 will go to their own place. 
 
 Only when we begin to think and work continuously 
 at eugenics is its range revealed. The present volume 
 is a mere introduction to the principles of the subject : 
 the full elucidation of its practice is a problem for gen- 
 erations to come. Nor is it easy to set logical limits 
 to our inquiry. We may say that eugenics deals with 
 conceptions : and that the care of the expectant mother 
 is outside its scope: but of what use is it to have a 
 eugenic conception if its product is thereafter to be 
 ruined by, for instance, the introduction of lead into 
 
x PREFACE 
 
 the mother's organism ? Again, the care of the indi- 
 vidual is, in part, a eugenic concern: for if we desire 
 his offspring we desire that he shall not contract trans- 
 missible disease nor vitiate his tissues with such a racial 
 poison as alcohol. Plainly, everything that affects 
 every possible parent is a matter of eugenic concern: 
 and not only those factors which affect the choice for 
 parenthood. 
 
 It follows that the second portion of this volume, 
 which deals with the practice of eugenics, cannot be 
 more than merely indicative. In the available space it 
 has been attempted to define certain constituents of 
 practical eugenics, but in any case the entire ground 
 has not been surveyed. The concept of the racial poi- 
 sons may be commended to special consideration. 
 Whether a poison be so-called " chemical," as lead, or 
 no less chemical, as the poison of syphilis, is of great 
 practical importance, because of the infection involved 
 in the second case : but, in principle, both cases belong 
 to the same category. Sooner or later, eugenists must 
 face the transmissible infections, and repudiate as hide- 
 ous and devilish the so-called morality which dis- 
 countenances any attempt to save unborn innocence 
 from a nameless fate. He or she who would rather 
 leave this matter is placing " religion " or " morality " 
 or " politics " above the welfare of the life to come, 
 and therein continuing the daily prostitution of those 
 great names. 
 
 Again, the practice of eugenics may be commended 
 and accepted as the business of the patriot: and two 
 chapters have been devoted to the question as seen 
 from the national point of view. I am of nothing 
 
PREFACE xi 
 
 more certain than that the choice for Great Britain 
 to-day is between national eugenics and the fate of all 
 her Imperial predecessors from Babylon to Spain. 
 The whole book might have been written from this 
 standpoint, but such a book would have been beneath 
 the true eugenic plane, which is not national but hu- 
 man. I believe in the patriotism of William Watson, 
 who desires the continuance of his country because, as 
 he addresses her, 
 
 " O England, should'st thou one day fall, 
 
 Justice were thenceforth weaker throughout all 
 The world, and truth less passionately free, 
 And God the poorer for thine overthrow." 
 
 This is a patriotism as splendid and vital as the pa- 
 triotism of the music-halls and the political and jour- 
 nalistic makers of wars is foul and fatal : and it is only 
 in terms of such patriotism that the appeal to love of 
 country is permissible in the advocacy of eugenics, 
 which is a concern for all mankind. 
 
 The prophet of that kind of Imperialism which has 
 destroyed so many Empires, has lately approved the 
 emigration of our best to the Colonies, on the ground 
 that "it is good to give the second eleven a chance." 
 But as students of history know, it is at the heart that 
 Empires rot. The case of Ireland is at present an 
 insoluble one because the emigration of the worthiest 
 has had full sway. So with the agricultural intellect : 
 the " first eleven " having gone to the towns. Rome 
 sent her " first eleven " to her Colonies : If you were 
 not good enough to be a Roman soldier you could at 
 least remain and be a Roman father : and the children 
 
xii PREFACE 
 
 of such fathers perished in the downfall of the Em- 
 pire which they could no longer sustain. I can im- 
 agine no more foolish or disastrous advice than this 
 of Mr. Kipling's, in commending that transportation 
 of the worthiest which, thoroughly enough persisted 
 in, must inevitably mean our ruin. 
 
 The national aspect of eugenics suggests its inter- 
 national aspect, and its inter-racial aspect. Not hav- 
 ing spent six weeks rushing through the United States, 
 I am unfortunately dubious as to the worth of any 
 opinions I may possess regarding the most urgent form 
 of this question to-day. I mistrust not merely the 
 brilliant students who, unhampered by biological 
 knowledge, pierce to the bottom of this question in the 
 course of such a tour, but also the humanitarian bias 
 of those who, like M. Finot, or the distinguished 
 American sociologist, Mr. Graham Brooks, would al- 
 most have us believe that the negro is mentally and 
 morally the equal of the Caucasian. Least of all does 
 one trust the vulgar opinions of the man in the street. 
 Wisdom on this matter waits for the advent of real 
 knowledge. Similarly in the matter of Caucasian 
 Mongolian unions. I question whether any living 
 man knows enough to warrant the expression of any 
 decided opinion on this subject. Merely I here recog- 
 nize miscegenation in general as a problem in eugenics, 
 to which increasing attention must yearly be devoted. 
 But it would have been ridiculous to attempt to deal 
 with that great subject here. As for the marriage of 
 cousins, to take the opposite case, I always reply to 
 the question, " Should cousins marry ? " that it depends 
 upon the cousins. The good qualities of a good stock, 
 
PREFACE xv 
 
 between this school and that of scientific workers are 
 to be regretted by the eugenist; but it is for him to 
 accept and use knowledge of eugenic significance no 
 matter by what method it has been obtained. Directly 
 he fails to do so he ceases to be a Eugenist and becomes 
 the ordinary partisan. No reference is made in the 
 following pages, for instance, to the law of ancestral 
 inheritance, formulated by the Master to whom the 
 volume is dedicated and of whom all eugenists are the 
 followers. I believe that law, despite its beauty, to be 
 without basis in fact and incompatible with demon- 
 strated Mendelian phenomena : and though the book is 
 dedicated to Mr. Galton, it is more deeply dedicated to 
 the Future. This, indeed, is the Credo of the Eugen- 
 ist : Expecto resurrectionem mortuorum, et vltam ven- 
 turi saeculi. 
 
 Woman is Nature's supreme instrument of the fu- 
 ture. The Eugenist is therefore deeply concerned 
 with her education, her psychology, the conditions 
 which permit her to exercise her great natural func- 
 tion of choosing the fathers of the future, the age at 
 which she should marry, and the compatibility be- 
 tween the discharge of her incomparable function of 
 motherhood and the lesser functions which some 
 women now assume. Obstetrics, and the modern 
 physiology and psychology of sex must thus be har- 
 nessed to the service of Eugenics, and I hope to em- 
 ploy them for the elucidation, in a future volume, of 
 the problems of woman and womanhood, thus con- 
 ceived. 
 
PART 1 
 THE THEORY OF EUGENICS 
 
PARENTHOOD AND RACE 
 CULTURE 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 INTRODUCTORY 
 
 "A Little Child Shall Lead Them" 
 
 THIS book will be mere foolishness to those who repeat 
 the inhuman and animal cry that we have to take the 
 world as we find it the motto of the impotent, the 
 forgotten, the cowardly and selfish, or the merely veg- 
 etable, in all ages. The capital fact of man, as dis- 
 tinguished 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 environ- 
 ment, 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 waste- 
 
 i 
 
2 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 fulness of Nature in her generations, with which this 
 book will be so largely concerned. 
 
 Beginning, perhaps, some six million years ago, 
 the fact w;hich we call human life has persisted hith- 
 erto, and shows no signs of exhaustion, much less im- 
 pending extinction, being indeed more abundant nu- 
 merically 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 being if not, indeed, as most 
 biologists appear to believe, the first life upon the earth. 
 Yet this continuous life has been and apparently al- 
 ways must be lived in a tissue of amazing discontinuity 
 amazing, at least, to those who can see the wonder- 
 ful in the commonplace. For though the world-phe- 
 nomenon which we call Man has been so long con- 
 tinuous, and is at this moment perhaps as much modi- 
 fied 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: abso- 
 lute and literal continuity of life, every cell from a pre- 
 ceding cell throughout the ages omnis cellula e eel- 
 
INTRODUCTORY 3 
 
 lula; 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 
 realized 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 be- 
 gan so humbly and to the sound of no trumpets, in 
 Southern Asia or the neighborhood 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 incom- 
 petent, 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 unprom- 
 ising 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 end- 
 less 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 
 
4 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 in size and color, 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 parent- 
 hood. We shall see, in due course, that no generation, 
 whether of men or animals or plants, determines or pro- 
 vides, as a whole, the future of the race. Only a per- 
 centage, as a rule a very small percentage indeed, of 
 any species reach maturity, and fewer still become 
 parents. Amongst ourselves, one-tenth of any gen- 
 eration 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 im- 
 mortal works ; but unless the parents of each new gen- 
 eration 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 appre- 
 ciate them. There is here expressed the distinction 
 between two kinds of progress: the traditional prog- 
 
INTRODUCTORY 5 
 
 ress which is dependent upon transmitted achieve- 
 ment, 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 realize 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 wom- 
 an, 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 son- 
 net of Wordsworth's might have expressed, or a paint- 
 ing 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 worshiped; 
 the spectacle which more nearly symbolizes the sub- 
 lime than any other upon which the eye of a man, him- 
 self once such a child can rest; the spectacle which 
 alone epitomizes the life of mankind and the unalter- 
 able conditions of all human life and all human socie- 
 ties, 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 
 
6 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 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, many reconcile 
 us to death; the spectacle of that which alone can sanc- 
 tify 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 prob- 
 ably some thirty -two or three years old, as time is meas- 
 ured by the revolutions of the earth around the sun. 
 Measured by some more relevant gauge, she was evi- 
 dently aged, her face gray 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 noth- 
 ing. The eyes were open but they were too tired to 
 see. The face had no beauty of feature nor of color 
 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 cer- 
 
INTRODUCTORY 7 
 
 tainly never hold a grand-child in her arms. The 
 pathologist may lay this crime at the door of the tu- 
 bercle 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 na- 
 tion may number Shakespeare and Newton amongst 
 the glories of its past, and the lands of ancient em- 
 pires amongst its present possessions, but it can have 
 no future; that if, worshiping 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 in- 
 sensible 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 wor- 
 ship 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 civilizations, that the race or society which succeeds 
 
8 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 with its mammoth ships and its manufactures but fails 
 to produce men and women, is on the brink of irretriev- 
 able doom; that the body of man is an animal, en- 
 dowed 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 foreshad- 
 owings of civilization, 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 un- 
 doubtedly widening. Means of communication, the 
 press, the camera, the decadence of obsolete dogmas, 
 
INTRODUCTORY 9 
 
 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 realize 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 organ- 
 ism in more than merely loose analogy ; that the classes 
 pay abundantly for the state of the masses, whilst medi- 
 cine 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 some- 
 where beween, offer their panaceas. To me, I con- 
 fess, they seem little better than the scholastic meta- 
 physicians 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 
 
io PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 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 ex- 
 traordinary discontinuity which inheres in the swift- 
 approaching death of all its parts, and their replace- 
 ment 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 realize what it 
 means. Human life is made up of generations, and 
 the key to all progress lies in the nature of the rela- 
 tion 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 pres- 
 ent fact of the merely quantitative relation be- 
 tween successive generations. So far as any influence 
 on their theory or practice is concerned, it is still un- 
 known to nearly all our advisers. Yet this fact of the 
 ceaseless multiplication of man, which has distin- 
 guished 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 mo- 
 rality 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, 
 
INTRODUCTORY n 
 
 and as the great moralizers and humanizers 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 hu- 
 man society but in all living species ; and they have yet 
 to appreciate the proposition which I have so often ad- 
 vanced and which, to me at any rate, seems absolutely 
 self-evident, that until we have learned 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 merci- 
 fully falling birth-rate, uncoupled with any attention 
 to the slaughter of the children actually born, are piti- 
 able 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 intensi- 
 fied by self-consciousness, the power of " looking be- 
 fore 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 ; 
 
12 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 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 mean- 
 est visual faculty suffices : but the strong imagina- 
 tion would rather open the closed windows of nur- 
 series or work at the mechanical problems of ven- 
 tilation, aye, or even at the structure of bacteriological 
 microscope finding the spectacle, in the mind's eye, 
 of healthy men and women fifty years hence as grate- 
 ful and as real a reward as the sight of a sanatorium 
 in the present. The pace of progress will be incalcu- 
 lably hastened when men, whether workers or be- 
 queathers or administrators, enlarge their imagina- 
 tions so as to perceive that the future will be, and there- 
 fore 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 thou- 
 sand a century hence? 
 
 It is, in a word, the idea of continuous causation or 
 evolution that explains the remarkable contrast be- 
 tween our outlook on the future and our fathers'. In 
 
 1 A tribute is due to the anonymous pioneer of sane and prov- 
 ident philanthropy who lately gave 20,000 to the London Hos- 
 pital for research. Such a thing is a commonplace in New 
 York, it is unprecedented in London. 
 
INTRODUCTORY 13 
 
 older that is to say, younger days, men's interest 
 in posterity was most naively 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 realized their responsibility for us, or be- 
 trayed it if they did. There is also the frank attitude 
 of Sir Boyle Roche's famous bull, " What has poster- 
 ity done for us ? " This is a quite familiar and conspic- 
 uous sentiment as familiar as any other form of sel- 
 fishness : 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 realized 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 realized, we must face 
 our tremendous responsibility and privilege in a spirit 
 worthy of those to whom such mighty truths have 
 bten 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 cursor es, vitai lampada tradunt like runners, 
 hand on the lamp of life, as Lucretius said. This it is 
 
14 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 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 realized. 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 edu- 
 cation, 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 happenings has depended upon fac- 
 tors 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 realizes how they can be controlled, how ef- 
 fectively, 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 hap- 
 pened 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 her- 
 
INTRODUCTORY 15 
 
 self, 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 predic- 
 tion in terms of heredity; if the future state of man- 
 kind is involved in these differences, which will in their 
 turn be transmitted to the children of such as them- 
 selves become parents; and if this business of parent- 
 hood will be confined to only a small proportion of 
 these babies, of whom one-half never reach pu- 
 berty. 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 fleet- 
 est 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 ex- 
 ceptionally superior people, was the only real and per- 
 manent 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 
 
16 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 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 ortho- 
 dox theology. We need to educate public opinion 
 that " chaos of prejudices " up to Mr. Wells' stand- 
 ard, 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 is the crowning and 
 practical conclusion to which all the teachings of mod- 
 ern 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 imperma- 
 nent, if not indeed at measures which directly war 
 against the selection of the best for parenthood : they 
 do not realize 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 
 know so far, we have abundance of assured knowledge 
 for immediate action in many directions knowledge 
 which is agreed upon by Lamarckians and neo- 
 
INTRODUCTORY 17 
 
 Lamarckians, Darwinians and Weismannians, Men- 
 delians 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 parent- 
 hood." 
 
 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, de- 
 pends absolutely upon the selection of parents; if the 
 establishment of this selective progress in the best "and 
 wisest manner were the admitted goal of all legislation 
 and all social and political speculation who can ques- 
 tion 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, noth- 
 ing 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 civilization like a new religion a re- 
 ligion 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 theater, 
 
1 8 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 but celestial in its theme, human in its means, but liter- 
 ally superhuman in its goal. If the intrinsic ennoble- 
 ment of mankind does not answer to this eulogy, where 
 is the ideal that does ? 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 THE EXCHEQUER OF LIFE 
 
 "This last lustrum has enabled us to make an astounding 
 discovery, of which neither Adam Smith nor Cobden nor Mal- 
 thus 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 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 
 
 19 
 
20 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 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 inquiry 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 ex- 
 ternal acquirements, material possessions and spirit- 
 ual 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 secon- 
 dary wealth. Amongst civilized mankind, therefore, 
 the essential question as to the breed of men and wom- 
 en is obscured by the secondary question as to their 
 traditional or transmitted possessions or external ac- 
 quirements. But if we remember the case of the 
 drowning man and his gold we shall realize that funda- 
 mentally, 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 be- 
 lieves it in any living sense. The true function of 
 government, said Ruskin, is the production and recog- 
 nition 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 up- 
 on it. 
 
 In this sense such a phrase as the National Ex- 
 chequer begins to take on a new meaning, and the 
 Chancellor of the Exchequer loses every whit of his im- 
 
THE EXCHEQUER OF LIFE 21 
 
 portance, except in so far as his proceedings tend to- 
 wards, 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 hu- 
 man life is discontinuous, since three times in a cen- 
 tury 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 Exche- 
 quer 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 cer- 
 tain proportion are as definitely and obviously un- 
 healthy at the very start as the more fortunate major- 
 ity 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 con- 
 cerning the principles of what we are pleased to con- 
 ceive as political economy. The principles of vital 
 economy we do not inquire into but outrage and defy 
 at every turn. So horribly and wastefully are we mis- 
 
22 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 guided that in point of fact we actually destroy alto- 
 gether 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 destruc- 
 tive 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 overcrowding, it is perhaps more dis- 
 astrous 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 con- 
 cerned bearing no marks of degeneration to corre- 
 spond 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. 
 // there be no process of selection, each new gener- 
 
THE EXCHEQUER OF LIFE 23 
 
 ation 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 in- 
 dictment that ought to be framed against civilization 
 for its treatment of its children, it is evidently incum- 
 bent upon us to answer the objector who should say 
 that the whole purpose and argument of our present 
 inquiry 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 dam- 
 age 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 be- 
 ing only too demonstrable that the environment we at 
 present provide for the great majority of them is 
 deadly and abominable in the extreme. This argu- 
 ment 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 com- 
 plain of in their environment. 
 
 If this objection is to be met at all, we must be most 
 careful and serious in our going. Whatever conclu- 
 sions 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 chil- 
 dren, once they are born nay, more, from the very 
 moment, months before, at which their individual his- 
 
24 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 tory 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, nursed 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 essen- 
 tially 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 be- 
 lieve that it would have been better had some of these 
 children never been born; he may believe that, in 
 the present unorganized 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 main- 
 tain that no such question of choice, selection or dis- 
 crimination can find any warrant in any form of mor- 
 ality eugenic or other from the moment at 
 which the child in question began its individual exist- 
 ence. Those of us who advocate the eugenic idea 
 must be perpetually on our guard against the insidious 
 
THE EXCHEQUER OF LIFE 25 
 
 alliance of any who, agreeing with our premises, de- 
 clare that it is a mistake, for instance, to prosecute a 
 j campaign against infant mortality. I myself have had 
 ja 'share by a continuous propaganda started in 1902 
 -in making this last a publicly recognized question, 
 i whilst, on the other hand, I have done my best to 
 ! popularize the idea of eugenics. Let me repeat here 
 ; what I have already said elsewhere : that I strenuously 
 j repudiate any suggestion that the eugenic end is legiti- 
 mately 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, 
 j as he conceives them : " We must agree that it 
 would be of the lower or lowest type of careless, thrift- 
 less, 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 re- 
 mains of natural weeding out of the unfit that our civ- 
 ilization 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 sympathize with its underlying assumption, viz., 
 that not all babies are such as we can desire to carry 
 on the race. Still more must we sympathize with any 
 author whatever who has the imagination and foresight 
 enough to write anywhere, on any subject, wrongly or 
 
26 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 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 i 
 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 a propos of the abolition of infant mortality: 
 " This last change which, as the Huddersfield experi- 
 ment shows, is easy of accomplishment, is likely to be 
 completely affected in the next few years, and we shall 
 then have abolished the one factor which in any im- 
 portant 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. Mc- 
 Dougall has subsequently shown that he repudiates the 
 apparent deduction from them, and entirely approves 
 of the present campaign of mercy to childhood. Never- 
 theless, these arguments, plainly derived from the 
 principle of natural selection, do express a most im- 
 portant truth viz., that indiscriminate survival must 
 lead to racial dacadence, 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 1 must 
 not ; then kill the unfit, says Nature. And this indeed, 
 in all living species other than man, is what Nature 
 
 1 The word is used in the ordinary loose sense, to which there 
 is no objection provided that there be no misunderstanding of its 
 exact scientific meaning, as in Spencer's phrase " survival of the 
 fittest "i.e., not the best, but the best adapted. 
 
THE EXCHEQUER OF LIFE 27 
 
 jdoes But " thou shalt not kill," says the moral law 
 jnot even the unfit. As the foregoing will have shown, 
 Isome thinkers to-day propose to avail themselves in 
 jthis 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 
 j solution, and that is the eugenic solution. Nature can 
 i preserve a race only by destroying the unfit. We who 
 jare intelligent must preserve and elevate the race by 
 i preventing the unfit from ever coming into existence at 
 all. We must replace Nature's relative death-rate by 
 | a relative 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 
 inatural 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 neutralize, 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 pro- 
 :esses 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 
 
28 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 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 at- 
 tend 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 con- 
 trary, they will cause deterioration * by an increased 
 survival of the unfit." The provision of "proper 
 shelter, food and training" will cause racial deca- 
 dence! Is it not evident, then, that such provisions 
 must rather be styled improper, and that we must re- 
 frain 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 se- 
 lection 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 ar- 
 rangements which, in a considerable degree, prevent 
 superiority from profiting by the rewards of superior- 
 ity, or shield inferiority from the evils it entails any 
 
 1 " Degeneration," I think, is the best word for the raci 
 "deterioration" for the individual, change. 
 
THE EXCHEQUER OF LIFE 29 
 
 arrangements which tend to make it as well to be in- 
 ferior as to be superior, are arrangements diametrically 
 opposed to the progress of organization, and the reach- 
 ing of a higher life." This is permanently and neces- 
 sarily true, and in our care for childhood we have to 
 reckon with it. Yet even Spencer himself did not pur- 
 sue this supremely important inquiry to what I shall 
 in a moment submit to be its logical and almost in- 
 credibly hopeful conclusion. 
 
 Huxley, writing his well-known Romanes Lecture, 
 " Evolution and Ethics," at a time when, unfortun- 
 ately, 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 se- 
 lection of the fittest] still less 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 be- 
 cause on the whole animals and plants have advanced 
 in perfection of organization, by means of the struggle 
 for existence and the consequent survival of the fittest ; 
 therefore men in society, men as ethical beings, must 
 
30 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 look to the same process to help them towards per- 
 fection." 
 
 With all this Huxley offers us no real solution what- 
 ever, no hint that he has realized 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 proc- 
 ess, and can reconcile cosmic with ethical evolution, 
 by extending to the unfit all our sympathy but forbid- 
 ding them parenthood. I deny that the provision of a 
 proper environment for the individual entails racial 
 deterioration. Cosmic and moral evolution are com- 
 patible if, whilst caring for each individual, whether 
 maim, halt, blind, or insane, and whilst admitting the 
 categorical imperative of the law of love which de- 
 mands our care for him, we continue to obey the indi- 
 cation 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 sum- 
 marily extinguish its potential ancestor, but we can pro- 
 hibit 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 chil- 
 dren without discrimination of any kind and, on the 
 other hand, in declaring that, if the degeneration of 
 
THE EXCHEQUER OF LIFE 31 
 
 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 this one hand is the improvident humanitarian 
 with his feeling heart, he who, seeing misery and dis- 
 ease and death, whether in babyhood, childhood, or 
 at any other time of life, seeks to improve the environ- 
 ment 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 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, de- 
 
32 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 claring that each has a great truth, but that his teach- 
 ing, 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 human- 
 itarian, blind to the truth which the Nietzscheans see, 
 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 civilized 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 re- 
 jection of the unworthy, not as individuals but as par- 
 ents, we shall assuredly breed for posterity, whose 
 lives and happiness and moral welfare are in our hands, 
 
THE EXCHEQUER OF LIFE 33 
 
 evils that can adequately neither be named nor num- 
 bered. Already, together with much blessed good, this 
 indiscriminate humanitarianism has done much evil. 
 Many of our most instant and, for this generation, in- 
 soluble problems are the lamentable fruit of this inher- 
 ently 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 be- 
 tween this campaign and the principles of eugenics. As 
 these two efforts will 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 environ- 
 ment l 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: 
 
 1 That is in the ordinary sense of the words, not in the more 
 exact sense as I think in which a good environment would 
 be denned as that which selects the good for parenthood. 
 
34 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 no motherhood, no man. The two campaigns, then, 
 are strictly complementary. We must endeavor to rid 
 ourselves of the popular notion that the whole result 
 of the campaign against infant mortality can be meas- 
 ured by the number of babies whose death is prevented. 
 The infant mortality is merely an index of a wide- 
 spread social disease an index and an extreme 
 symptom. But for every baby killed many are dam- 
 aged ; and to remove the causes of infant mortality is 
 to remove the causes which at present effect the de- 
 terioration of millions of human beings. The eugenic 
 campaign, then, without the other would be almost 
 futi.le. 
 
 THE TIME FOR EUGENICS. On our principles the 
 eugenic question can be decently raised only before con- 
 ception. 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 al- 
 low 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 infant- 
 icide 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, 
 
THE EXCHEQUER OF LIFE 35 
 
 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 de- 
 stroy the syphilitic child rather than allow it to come 
 into the world. But we cannot make these distinc- 
 tions. 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 fur- 
 ther : 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 fulfillment of the 
 eugenic ideal since what would be the good of 
 choosing the right parents if their children are then to 
 
36 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 be slain ? but it can be shown conversely that the 
 object of those who are working against infant mor- 
 tality 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, how- 
 ever, 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 re- 
 main a proportion, say ten per cent., whom not even 
 an ideal environment can save. They should never 
 have been conceived. At the Infantile Mortality Con- 
 ference held in London in 1908, this was clearly 
 recognized by more than one speaker. The maternal- 
 ist 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 creche 
 and the infant milk depot. But in the interval be- 
 tween the Conferences of 1906 and 1908 many things 
 became clear : so that, whereas the papers at the first 
 Conference were only accidentally connected, the pro- 
 gramme of the second proceeded upon a principle the 
 principle of the supremacy of motherhood. We see 
 now that the one fundamental method by which in- 
 fantile mortality may be checked is by the elevation of 
 motherhood. In the words of our President, Mr. John 
 
THE EXCHEQUER OF LIFE 37 
 
 Burns, " you must glorify, dignify, and purify mother- 
 hood 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 as- 
 siduous 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 sub- 
 ject 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 atten- 
 tion 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 sym- 
 pathy 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 the 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 
 
3 8 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 
 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 suf- 
 fices 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 be- 
 ware lest her veins become choked with yellow dirt, 
 and demanding that over all her legislative chambers 
 there be carved the more than golden words, " There 
 is no Wealth but Life." 
 
CHAPTER HI 
 
 NATURAL SELECTION AND THE LAW OF LOVE 
 
 Truth justifies herself; and as she dwells 
 
 With hope, who would not follow where she leads? 
 
 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 La plus haute tache de 1'action morale est le travail pour le 
 bien des generations futures. FOREL. 
 
 BEFORE looking more closely than we are commonly 
 apt to do at the meaning of the phrases " natural se- 
 lection " 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 realize 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 crea- 
 tures, small and great, which, murdering and being 
 murdered, have gradually evolved, 1 how shall we an- 
 swer the question To what end ? " 
 
 x The Italics are mine. 
 
 39 
 
40 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 " Murdering and being murdered " suggests the ad- 
 verse, and " have gradually evolved," the favorable, 
 ethical judgment. 
 
 Many thinkers, finding Nature " so careless of the 
 single life," finding the murderous struggle for exist- 
 ence 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 tem- 
 perament 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 realize that, if we are to succeed in 
 establishing the claim of natural selection to be the 
 natural model upon which those who desire the prog- 
 ress 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 
 
NATURAL SELECTION 41 
 
 " 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 as- 
 serted 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 agelong fact of " murder- 
 ing and being murdered " is the weapon with which he 
 attacks the theist, who, per contra, points to the be- 
 neficent result, the exquisite adaptaion 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 sure tn moic ^ A only to have the 
 case fairly stated, in ore and more a PP r ^-tbe "blood 
 
42 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 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 undoubt- 
 edly comes. Is not this the only verdict that is in con- 
 sonance with all the facts? Is it not less than philo- 
 sophic to look at the process alone, or to look at the 
 result alone? Is any real end to be served by the in- 
 cessant 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 pre- 
 mature in the eyes of those who can look forwards, but 
 would be irrelevant to our present inquiry. I certainly 
 am with those who repudiate as misleading Mill's de- 
 scription of Nature as a " vast slaughter-house " and 
 will declare that, apart from self-conscious and su- 
 premely sensitive man, it is easy to exaggerate the mis- 
 ery and to minimize 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 processgff^^ere '; Selection and the good 
 of its resul^gn'J being muS.te, yet when it is trans- 
 
 Jr-' 
 
NATURAL SELECTION 43 
 
 muted, 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 abun- 
 dantly and incomparably more rapidly, than ever here- 
 tofore, whilst the evil of the process can be abolished al- 
 together. 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 di- 
 rected one. In order that it shall be possible, certain 
 conditions must obtain. The choice or selection de- 
 pends 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 indiscrim- 
 inate 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 symbolized as the " will to life," ever 
 seeking to realize itself in more abundance and with 
 more success with more and more approximation to 
 
44 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 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 mur- 
 dered " : 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 lam- 
 entable, if her aim is to be realized. She must be cruel 
 to be kind. 1 a little cruel to be very kind. 
 
 It is imaginable, though no more, that natural selec- 
 tion, in certain circumstances, might have worked oth- 
 erwise: the penalty for less as against greater fitness 
 might imaginably have been not death but merely ster- 
 ility 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 com- 
 pelled to keep up the figure summarily to kill 
 
 1 We have seen that Huxley's assertion of the fundamental op- 
 position between moral and cosmic evolution is unwarrantable. 
 We do recognize, however, that in our present practice this op- 
 position exists. Our ancestors were cruel to the insane, but at 
 least they prevented them from multiplying. We are blindly 
 kind to them, and therefore in the long run cruel. But the di- 
 lemma, kind to be cruel, or cruel to be kind, is not necessary. 
 It is quite possible, as we have asserted, to be at once kind to 
 the individual and protective of the future. On the other hand, 
 it is also possible to be cruel to both. The London County 
 Council offers us, at the time of writing, a demonstration of this. 
 Sending wretched inebriates on the round of police-court, prison 
 and street, with intermittent gestations, rather than expend a 
 shilling a day, per individual, in decently detaining them, it serves 
 at least the philosophic purpose of demonstrating that it is pos- 
 sible to combine the maximum of brutality to the individual and 
 the present with the maximum of injury to the race and the future. 
 
NATURAL SELECTION 45 
 
 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 in- 
 disputable cruelty are inevitably involved, whilst it so 
 remains. 
 
 INTELLIGENCE MAY BE KIND TO BE KINDER. But, 
 and here is the great event this mechanical, auto- 
 matic, 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 proc- 
 ess altogether, as Huxley declares, on the grounds of 
 its murderous methods? Must intelligence simply 
 look on, recognize, but not reconstruct ? Must intelli- 
 gence 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 unfit- 
 ness shall become fitness, and vice versa? Or is it con- 
 ceivable that intelligence can transmute the process, so 
 that, whilst hitherto mechanical, automatic, and there- 
 fore 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 
 
46 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 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 blunder- 
 ing steps of trial and error. . . . Evolution is in any case a 
 grand phantasmagoria, but it assumes an infinitely more interest- 
 ing 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 recognizable from a distance as great as 
 that of the moon." 
 
 Hear also Sir E. Ray Lankester, in the Romanes 
 Lecture l 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 eugen- 
 ics 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 misappre- 
 hended and, as I cannot improve upon the words of 
 
 1 Reprinted in The Kingdom of Man, London 
 
NATURAL SELECTION 47 
 
 Professor Lankester, I shall freely use them in the at- 
 tempt 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 gen- 
 eration only one pair survive for every parental pair. Ani- 
 mal 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 realize 
 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 hered- 
 ity to another generation the specific qualities by which they 
 triumphed. 
 
 " It is not generally realized how severe is the pressure and 
 competition in Nature not between different species, but be- 
 tween the immature population of one and the same species, pre- 
 cisely because they are of the same species and have exactly the 
 same needs. ... A distinctive quality in the beauty of nat- 
 ural productions (in which man delights) is due to the unob- 
 trusive yet tremendous slaughter of the unfit which is incessantly 
 going on, and the absolute restriction of the privilege of parent- 
 age to the happy few who attain to the standard described as 
 ' the fittest/ " 
 
48 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 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 1 of " that same lack of a fine appreci- 
 ation 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 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 recognized when 
 he promptly incorporated Spencer's phrase in the sec- 
 ond edition of the Origin of Species as the best inter- 
 pretation of his own phrase " Natural Selection " 2 
 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 physi- 
 cal, social, intellectual and moral environment in the 
 
 1 Sociological Papers, 1905, p. 59. 
 
 2 Whilst allowing due weight to Mr. Wells' opinion, we may 
 also note that Charles Darwin, who, referring to his own phrase, 
 ' natural selection/ says, " But the expression often used by Mr. 
 Herbert Spencer of the Survival of the Fittest is ,,nore accurate." 
 (Origin of Species, Popular Edition, page 76.) 
 
NATURAL SELECTION 49 
 
 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 rec- 
 kons 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 connection whatever. If Herbert 
 Spencer had written the survival of the better, as Mr. 
 Wells desires, he would have written palpable non- 
 sense : 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 com- 
 munity ; the 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 par- 
 
50 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 ents, earth would long ago have become a demi-para- 
 dise indeed, there would have been no arrests, no re- 
 versals 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, ani- 
 mal or vegetable, the fittest have ultimately survived 
 and must survive. Once realize 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. 1 
 
 But, alas, the idea of the survival of the best or the 
 better is not a necessity of thought! The fittest mi- 
 crobes 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 irre- 
 sponsible 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 
 
 1 Collected Essays, vol. i. p. 493. A valuable controversy but 
 poor sport. Thinker versus politician is scarcely a match. 
 
NATURAL SELECTION 51 
 
 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 : per- 
 haps it may be hoped that we shall at last begin to 
 understand it, if we remember that a thing is fit be- 
 cause it fits. It is best not to be too sanguine, how- 
 ever, and therefore we may attempt to illustrate the 
 case from another aspect. 
 
 SURVIVAL-VALUE. Every living thing and really 
 every character or feature of a living thing that sur- 
 vives, survives because it has value or capacity for 
 life which may be called, in Professor Lloyd Mor- 
 gan'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 agelong struggle for existence 
 between atoms are those that have survival-value on 
 account of their internal stability : as Empedocles ar- 
 gued ages ago. In the case of living things, which in- 
 dividually die, it is evident that capacity to reproduce 
 themselves is one of supreme survival-value. If man- 
 kind lost this capacity, all its other characters of sur- 
 vival-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- 
 
52 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 value, as we shall see, seem to be in large measure 
 inimical to fertility : and this is perhaps the chief ob- 
 stacle to eugenics. 1 
 
 Fertility apart, the character having survival-value 
 may take a thousand forms. In the case of the para- 
 sitic microbe it is an evil character, the power to pro- 
 duce 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 en- 
 dowed. 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 en- 
 dowed 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 so- 
 ciety 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 organized so 
 
 1 This is discussed at length in the writer's papers, "The Ob- 
 stacles to Eugenics," read before the Sociological Society, March 
 8, 1909. 
 
NATURAL SELECTION 53 
 
 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, accord- 
 ing 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 hap- 
 pened and may happen again at any time. It does 
 not matter that the good thing, in virtue of sur- 
 vival-value then superior, has been evolved. Nature 
 never gives a final verdict in favor of good or bad but 
 only and always in favor of the fit. Let the condi- 
 tions 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 recognizes neither high nor low 
 but only fitness or value for life in the conditions that 
 actually obtain. These laws enthroned and dethroned 
 the civilizations 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 be- 
 cause it is the best, but because it is the fittest: had 
 the worst been the fittest it would have won. In so- 
 ciety to-day both forms of the process may be ob- 
 served. The balance between them determines its 
 
54 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 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 ex- 
 cessive space has been devoted to this distinction be- 
 tween 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. 1 The 
 great process of history, as revealed by biology, dis- 
 plays 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 re- 
 minded 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 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 affected 
 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 
 
 1 Spencer introduced the non-moral word evolution in 1857, 
 in order to avoid the moral connotation of the word progress, 
 which he had formerly employed. 
 
NATURAL SELECTION 55 
 
 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 be- 
 tween inorganic matter or the amoeba 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 sur- 
 vival 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 de- 
 generation 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 re- 
 peatedly led, and is now in large part leading, to 
 nothing other than process of racial degeneration of 
 which the tapeworm and the barnacle should be our 
 perpetual reminders. The case becomes serious 
 
56 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 enough when man interferes with the process of selec- 
 tion merely with the effect of suspending it, wholly or 
 in part : but it becomes far more serious when his inter- 
 ference constitutes a reversal of the process. This 
 most supremely disastrous of all conceivable conse- 
 quences 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 physical in all its 
 forms, does persistently tend to outweigh that of the 
 physical or material of this great truth the evolu- 
 tion 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 se- 
 lection 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; 
 
NATURAL SELECTION 57 
 
 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. 1 
 
 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 reproduc- 
 tion and its conditions in the world of life can question 
 the incalculable survival-value of love in animal his- 
 tory. The success of those most ancient of all socie- 
 ties, 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 up- 
 wards through amphibia, reptiles, birds and mammals 
 in succession, up to man. Natural selection thus ac- 
 tually 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 prod- 
 
 1 In his recent work, " The Origin of Vertebrates," Dr. W. 
 H. Gaskell, F.R.S., has adduced much evidence in support of this 
 thesis. He says, " The law of progress is this : The race is not 
 to the swift nor to the strong, but to the wise." And again; 
 " As for the individual, so for the nation ; as for the nation, so 
 for the race ; the law of evolution teaches that in all cases brain- 
 power wins. Throughout, from the dawn of animal life up to 
 the present day, the evidence given in this book suggests that the 
 same law has always held. In all cases, upward progress is as- 
 sociated with the development of the central nervous system. 
 The law for the whole animal kingdom is the same as for the 
 individual. " Success in this world depends upon brains." 
 
58 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 uct 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 vir- 
 tue of that morality which natural selection has se- 
 lected, not from any moral bias, but because of its 
 superior survival-value. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE SELECTION OF MIND 
 
 " Many are the mighty things, but none is mightier than man. 
 . . . He conquers by his devices the tenant of the fields." 
 SOPHOCLES. 
 
 "L'homme n'est gu'un yoseau, le plus faible de la Nature; 
 mais c'est an yoseau 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 selec- 
 tion works has largely been transferred, and, indeed, 
 if any further progress is to be effected, must be trans- 
 ferred, 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 sup- 
 port 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 
 
 59 
 
60 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 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 an- 
 ticipate the conclusion, we may say that, in and for 
 the future, the process of selection for life and parent- 
 hood, 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 epigram- 
 matic, 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, lon- 
 gevity, 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 con- 
 stantly 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 
 
THE SELECTION OF MIND 61 
 
 and the rest of the body, with all its attributes, the 
 servant. 
 
 THE BODY STILL NECESSARY. Should any one sup- 
 pose 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 prod- 
 uct would be a most misbegotten creature approaching 
 as near as possible and that imperfectly enough 
 to the ideal of disembodied thought, a creature mon- 
 strous 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 peo- 
 ple 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. Stat- 
 ure may be a point to breed for in the race-culture of 
 giraffes and muscle in the race-culture of the hippo- 
 
 
62 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 potamus : 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 descend- 
 ants will be abundantly concerned with the preserva- 
 tion and culture of those many bodily characters upon 
 which the health and vigor and sanity and durability 
 of the nervous system depend. Further, notwith- 
 standing all the nonsense that has been written concern- 
 ing the man of the future, with bald and swollen head, 
 begoggled eyes, toothless gums, and wicker-work skel- 
 eton, 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 com- 
 mended to the ox; those who respect brawn as the in- 
 strument 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 para- 
 graph. 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 agelong process which is by no means com- 
 
THE SELECTION OF MIND 63 
 
 pleted, 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 or- 
 ganic evolution are concerned, the body of man ap- 
 parently represents the logical and final conclusion of 
 the agelong 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 unquestion- 
 ably 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 mod- 
 ified into two pairs of limbs, the sole function of 
 which was locomotion. In the next group of verte- 
 brates, 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 specialized 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, how- 
 ever, 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 specialization 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 
 
&J. PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 apes and monkeys, however, this specialization 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 specialization 
 reaches its natural limit by the complete liberation of 
 the fore-limbs from the purpose 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 fad 
 has depended upon a shifting of the center 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 nat- 
 urally 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 corn- 
 
THE SELECTION OF MIND 65 
 
 plete erection of the spine means that the skull, in- 
 stead 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 educat- 
 ing their master, the brain, and enabling him to em- 
 ploy 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 atti- 
 tude, 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 rec- 
 ognizing what are the factors which in man possess 
 supreme survival-value, and it must aim at their rein- 
 forcement rather than at the maintenance of those fac- 
 tors which, of dominant value in lower forms of life, 
 have been superseded in him. A few words will suf- 
 fice to show in what fashion man has already shed 
 
66 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 vital characters which, superfluous and burdensome 
 for him, have in former times been of the utmost sur- 
 vival-value. 
 
 THE DENUDATION OF MAN. As contrasted with 
 the whole mass of his predecessors, man comes into 
 the world denuded of defensive armor, destitute of 
 offensive weapons, possessed alone of the potentialities 
 of the physical. So far as defense is concerned, he 
 has neither fur nor feathers nor scales, but is the most 
 naked and thinnest skinned of animals. In his Auto- 
 biography, 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 wonderul part they do on the 
 earth." l But man is not only without armor against 
 either living enemies or cold; he is also without 
 weapons of attack. His teeth are practically worth- 
 less 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 dis- 
 charge 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 in- 
 
 1 We may recall the words of Lear : 
 
 " Is man no more than this ? Consider him well : Thou owest 
 the worm no silk, the beast no hide, the sheep no wool, the cat 
 no perfume: . . . Thou art the thing itself: unaccommo- 
 dated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as 
 thou art." 
 
THE SELECTION OF MIND 67 
 
 stinct, has to be burnt in order to dread the fire, and 
 cannot find his own way to the breast. His sole in- 
 strument 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 physical or, if the reader dislikes 
 these expressions, the health and strength of that par- 
 ticular part of the physical which we call the nervous 
 system. 
 
 It used to be generally asserted that whilst, in a 
 civilized community, we do not expect to find the big- 
 gest 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 rec- 
 ognize. 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 rhinoce- 
 ros. Says Professor Ranke : " It is the mind of man 
 that shows itself superior to the most powerful brute 
 force, even where we meet for the first time." This 
 
68 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 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 in- 
 stinct, is its limitless applicability. With this one in- 
 strument 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, with 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 artifi- 
 cial 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 argu- 
 ment, 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 pre- 
 tensions 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 under- 
 
THE SELECTION OF MIND 69 
 
 stand 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 neighbors, 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 purpose of the human 
 foot. In point of fact the human foot is now deca- 
 dent, and probably not more than two or three speci- 
 men* of feet in a hundred contain the complete nor- 
 mal 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 
 
70 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 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, corre- 
 sponding 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 con- 
 tinued 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 reaction- 
 ary. 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 mus- 
 cular 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 nour- 
 ishment, 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-cul- 
 ture 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 pur- 
 
THE SELECTION OF MIND 71 
 
 poses, 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 em- 
 ployed. 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 characteris- 
 tic. Although, when considered from the outside, it 
 is simply a means of muscular development, properly 
 considered it is really the means of nervous develop- 
 ment. Here we see muscles used as human muscles 
 should alone be used as instruments of mind. In 
 schools * the same principles should be recognized. 
 From the biological and psychological point of view 
 the playing-field is immeasurably superior to the gym- 
 nasium. But it is in the barrack yard that the pitiable 
 confusion between the survival-value of the 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 
 
72 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 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, con- 
 sistently enough, an unintelligent worship. We do 
 not even recognize 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 doc- 
 tors are now protesting against this, but it is in ac- 
 cordance 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 Ru- 
 bicon 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 pro- 
 ducing the strongest and most perfect physical ma- 
 chine that could be made from the human body, the 
 species so produced would go down in a generation 
 
THE SELECTION OF MIND 73 
 
 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 edu- 
 cates 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 civilization 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 im- 
 portance 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 ma- 
 chinery 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 ma- 
 chine but the man who can make one. These ele- 
 mentary truths are hidden, however, from the politi- 
 cal 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 ; 
 
74 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 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 un- 
 der 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 na- 
 tional 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 so- 
 ciety to-day, the survival- value of mind and conse- 
 quently the selection of mind must predominate over 
 the survival-value and consequent selection of muscle. 
 Further, whatever factors tend to enhance the sur- 
 vival-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 prog- 
 ress 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 
 
THE SELECTION OF MIND 75 
 
 that the psychical is in any permanent danger. No 
 one can think so who knows its strength and the rela- 
 tive impotence of the physical, but it is certainly pos- 
 sible that the course of progress may be greatly de- 
 layed 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 neighbors, 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 ex- 
 ceptional muscular strength. Even in cases of the 
 most purely military dominance, it was not force as 
 such, but discipline and method, that determined suc- 
 cess; 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 so- 
 ciety 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 
 
76 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 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. 1 
 
 It is of interest to note, in passing from this ques- 
 tion, 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 favorable but unfavorable 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 sug- 
 gested, then, that any considerable increase of human 
 bulk and stature could only be obtained at the cost 
 
 1 Says Darwin, " So little is this subject understood, that I 
 have heard surprise repeatedly expressed at such great monsters 
 as the Mastodon . . . having become extinct; as if mere 
 bodily strength gave victory in the battle of life. Mere size, on 
 the contrary, would in some cases determine . . . quicker 
 extermination from the greater amount of requisite food." In 
 the Russo-Japanese War, one of the effective factors was the 
 greater area of the Russian soldier as a target, and the disparity 
 between the food requirements of the little victors and the big 
 losers. 
 
THE SELECTION OF MIND 77 
 
 of intelligence. It would be very dear at the 
 price. 
 
 When we come to the subject of selection for par- 
 enthood 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 favorably 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 civilized 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 ele- 
 ments of the chosen. This tendency must be fur- 
 thered 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 disfavor the 
 production of those who are unfit for citizenship. We 
 shall thereby dispose at least of those vexatious ob- 
 jectors who tell us that many eminent criminals are in- 
 
78 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 dividually superior to many eminent judges. The 
 statement is doubtless untrue, but if it were true it 
 would still be irrelevant. A criminal may be individ- 
 ually 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 meant 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, 
 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 sol- 
 diers, 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 accord- 
 ing to Worth, I should consider each of them under the three 
 heads of Physique, Ability, and Character, subject to the provi- 
 sion 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." * 
 
 We shall certainly misunderstand this quotation un- 
 less we clearly realize that Mr. Gal ton 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 
 
 1 Quoted from a Paper read by Mr. Galton before the Eugenics 
 Education Society, October 14, 1908, and published in Nature, 
 October 22, 1908. 
 
THE SELECTION OF MIND 79 
 
 physique outweighed superiority in ability and charac- 
 ter, so far as our estimate of an individual as an indi- 
 vidual 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 ques- 
 tion 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 meas- 
 ure of the parental instinct and the tender emotion 
 which is its correlate. 1 
 
 iSee the Author's paper, "The Psychology of Parenthood," 
 Eugenics Review, April, 1909. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 THE MULTIPLICATION OF MAN 
 
 " Increase and multiply " 
 
 THE ceaseless multiplication of man is one of the 
 facts which distinguish him from all other living 
 species, animals or vegetable. 1 
 
 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 ex- 
 tended life. Man alone multiplies, persistently, irre- 
 sistibly, and has done so from the very first, so that, 
 arising locally, he is now diffused over the whole sur- 
 face of the earth. To quote from Professor Lan- 
 kester again : " Man is Nature's rebel. Where Na- 
 ture 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 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 
 
 1 An authoritative statement on this point has already been 
 quoted from Sir E. Rav Lankester's Romanes Lecture of 1905, 
 
 80 
 
THE MULTIPLICATION OF MAN 81 
 
 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 in- 
 crease, as Professor Lankester points out in another 
 part of his lecture, already threatening certain difficul- 
 ties, will be much more rapid than at present, assum- 
 ing the birth-rate to remain where it is, when disease 
 is controlled. It is within our power, as Pasteur de- 
 clared 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, brutalized by over-crowd- 
 ing 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 com- 
 munity 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 civilized community, 
 and no conception among the people or their leaders, 
 that it is a matter which concerns any one but farm- 
 ers." 
 
 THE SECRET OF MULTIPLICATION. Professor Lan- 
 kester, 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 
 
82 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 ceaselessly multiplying animal, has the lowest birth- 
 rate of any living creature. 1 From the purely arith- 
 metical 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 mul- 
 tiplies. 2 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 sug- 
 gestion 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 espe- 
 cially 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 es- 
 pecially of the infant mortality is a worthy and neces- 
 sary 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 
 
 1 The exception of one or two large animals, like the elephant, 
 is not important. In proportion to body weight man's birth- 
 rate is lower than theirs. And it is to be noted that the " infant " 
 mortality is very low in this case, where the birth-rate is so low. 
 Says Darwin, of the young elephant, " None are destroyed by 
 beasts of prey ; for even the tiger in India most rarely dares to 
 attack a young elephant protected by its dam." The dam has no 
 factory to go to, and no beast of prey to sell her alcohols. 
 
 2 "The Fulmar petrel lays but one egg, yet it is believed to 
 be the most numerous bird in the world." (Origin of Species, 
 popular edition, p. 81.) 
 
THE MULTIPLICATION OF MAN 83 
 
 join hands so far as the reduction of the death-rate 
 is concerned, and the only persons with whom a prac- 
 tical 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, how- 
 ever, will induce us to take this little forethought. 
 When we build a bridge across the Thames, we ig- 
 nore 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 hos- 
 pitals 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 
 
84 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 number of all who die at all ages, is forgotten by our 
 statesman 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 pub- 
 lished some figures on the mortality statistics of na- 
 tions, a summary of which may be quoted : " In all 
 parts of the civilized world both the birth-rates and 
 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 Rou- 
 mania. 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 Gov- 
 ernment, and it is probable that the downward ten- 
 dency is actually steeper than the diagrams show be- 
 cause both births and deaths are more accurately 
 registered than formerly." 
 
 But these statements are by no means necessarily in- 
 compatible 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 esti- 
 mated at 1,487,900,000. 
 
THE MULTIPLICATION OF MAN 85 
 
 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 six- 
 teen 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, per- 
 sistently falls also. The reader who thinks that the 
 birth-rate alone determines the increase of population, 
 and those who believed 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 as- 
 serted that in many large Indian cities the infant mor- 
 
86 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 tality 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. Cot- 
 trell, which may be quoted from the Science Year Book 
 of 1908. He estimates the population of Greater 
 London 1910 at about jy 2 millions and in 1920 at 
 well over 8j/2 millions the falling birth-rate not- 
 withstanding. 
 
 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 im- 
 
THE MULTIPLICATION OF MAN 87 
 
 portance attach for many reasons to the case of Ger- 
 many 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 pop- 
 ulation is increasing yearly at the rate of about 800,- 
 ooo, 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 civilized countries, excepting those cases in 
 which immigration has augmented the number of in- 
 habitants. Does this expansion of population depend 
 upon an increasing birth-rate or a diminishing death- 
 rate? The fact, in strict parallel with the biological 
 generalization already made, is that " Germany's pop- 
 ulation 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 prin- 
 cipal growth of population occurs, has not in anywise 
 increased in Germany. Indeed, by careful investiga- 
 tion 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 
 
88 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 fallen further, and in 1905 the figure was 34, the low- 
 est on record. As Dr. Sombart observes, we shall only 
 appreciate these figures if we regard them as an ex- 
 pression 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 conclu- 
 sion that a diminution of births is a concomitant of our 
 progress in civilization. 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 civilization, the fact may be cited 
 that in the quarters of the well-to-do still fewer chil- 
 dren 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 con- 
 ceivable period unless other causes operate in the op- 
 posite direction." 
 
 THE YELLOW PERIL. The facts regarding the yel- 
 low races are extremely difficult to ascertain. It ap- 
 pears, 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 MULTIPLICATION OF MAN 89 
 
 the population is largely controlled by infanticide, but 
 there is little doubt that the main contention of Pear- 
 son was correct, and that the yellow races are multi- 
 plying 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 sur- 
 vival-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 
 civilization will ere long be the final one between 
 eugenics or extinction. 
 
 THE WHEAT PROBLEM. Meanwhile, we must con- 
 sider 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 tran- 
 sitory 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 out- 
 stripping 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 
 
90 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 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, in- 
 deed: 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. 1 We may 
 note from the point of view of the student of dietetics 
 that wheat is and remains, on physiological examina- 
 tion, 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 suc- 
 
 1 The Wheat Problem, by Sir Wm. Crookes, F.R.S., 2nd edi- 
 tion, 1905. The Chemical News Office, 15, Newcastle St., Far- 
 ringdon St., E.C. 
 
THE MULTIPLICATION OF MAN 91 
 
 cessor. 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 Ameri- 
 can 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 ca- 
 lamity that ere long must be faced." As every one 
 knows, this prophecy is now being fulfilled. Sir Wil- 
 liam 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, pre- 
 cisely illustrates the principle of Malthus. Sir Wil- 
 liam 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 
 
92 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 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 civilization is indeed founded upon 
 bread. " Other races vastly superior to us in numbers, 
 but differing widely in material and intellectual prog- 
 ress, 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." As 
 every one knows, 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 de- 
 livery 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 hav- 
 
THE MULTIPLICATION OF MAN 93 
 
 ing 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 Unite 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, care- 
 ful observers such as the Rt. Hon. Charles Booth and 
 Mr. Seebohm Rowntree declared that thirty per cent of 
 our own population are living on the verge of starva- 
 tion. Our available supply of food of all kinds at any 
 moment would last us about three weeks. How many 
 of us realize 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. 
 
94 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 THE THEORY OF MALTHUS. The reader who is in- 
 terested in general biology will realize, 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 acquaint- 
 ance 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. 1 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, notwith- 
 standing 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 terms, the fittest must survive. The 
 1 See Chap. III., The Origin of Species. 
 
THE MULTIPLICATION OF MAN 95 
 
 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 em- 
 phatically 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, 
 unrecognized 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- 
 
96 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 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 libarian 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 any- 
 thing 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. This, one may add, was not 
 in the provinces but in London. 
 
 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 
 
THE MULTIPLICATION OF MAN 97 
 
 by a member of a British University instead of by a 
 man who never passed an examination, it would not 
 now need the discussion which we shall have to give 
 it. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 THE GROWTH OF INDIVIDUALITY 
 
 THE LAWS OF MULTIPLICATION. Implicit or explicit 
 approval of a falling birth-rate involves opposition to 
 the opinion of the man in the street, the general opinion 
 of the medical profession, 1 the bench of bishops and 
 the social prophet and publicist in general. Neverthe- 
 less a fall in the birth-rate is a factor in organic prog- 
 ress, and, in general, the level of any species is in 
 inverse proportion to its birth-rate, from bacteria to 
 the most civilized classes of men in the most civilized 
 countries of to-day. But in truth the uniformed opin- 
 ion, 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 phil- 
 osophic biology Herbert Spencer's Principles of 
 Biology. The last chapter of that masterpiece is en- 
 titled " 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 ex- 
 press, opinions about the birth-rate. Spencer's dis- 
 
 1 Including even such an exceptional student as Dr. George 
 Newman, who, in his book on Infant Mortality, regards a fall- 
 ing birth-rate as an essential evil, and actually' declares without 
 qualification that the factors "which lower the birth-rate tend 
 to raise the infant death-rate." 
 
 98 
 
THE GROWTH OF INDIVIDUALITY 99 
 
 co very is the complementary half-truth to the discovery 
 of Malthus, and just as the law of Malthus is pessi- 
 mistic, 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 child- 
 less 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 pro- 
 portion 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 in- 
 
ioo PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 volve the formation of new individuals are neces- 
 sarily antagonistic. Every higher degree of individ- 
 ual evolution is followed by a lower degree of race 
 multiplication, and vice versa. Increase in bulk (cf. 
 the elephant) complexity or activity involves diminu- 
 tion in fertility, and vice versa. This is an obvious 
 a priori principle. 
 
 Should the reader declare that there must be some- 
 thing 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 par- 
 ents 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 in- 
 dividual is effected only through parenthood, in due 
 degree as Spencer, himself childless, formally de- 
 clared. 
 
 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-rate. 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 ob- 
 viously, a sign of racial degeneration or immorality, 
 or approaching weakness or failure of any kind, can 
 
THE GROWTH OF INDIVID^AI^TY^ ,:pi , 
 
 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 all creatures, 1 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 labor 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 nat- 
 ural food for the natural period." In all lands people 
 with opened eyes are rightly urging this truth upon us 
 to-day. In the United States the so-called higher A 
 education of girls has been proved in effect to sterilize 
 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 
 
 1 It is not necessary to point out again the exception of the 
 elephant, nor to explain it. 
 
PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 which he concluded his great work. The further evo- 
 lution of man, he declares, must take mainly the direc- 
 tion 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 necessi- 
 tates a decline in his fertility." The future progress 
 of civilization will be accompanied by increased de- 
 velopment of individuality, emotional and intellectual. 
 As Spencer observes, this does not necessarily mean a 
 mentally laborious life, for as mental activity " grad- 
 ually becomes organic, it will become spontaneous and 
 pleasurable." 
 
 Finally the necessary antagonism between individ- 
 uality 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 
 realize 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 
 
THE GROWTH OF INDIVIDUALITY 103 
 
 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 individ- 
 uation, wherever it appears, asserts itself, with the 
 consequence that the rate of multiplication declines. 
 This is actually to be observed to-day. Malthus de- 
 sired 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 
 civilization 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 stu- 
 dent 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 develop- 
 ment of higher that is to say, more specialized 
 that is to say, more individualized 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 
 
104 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 high fertility. The survival-value of individuation 
 is greater than the survival-value of rapid multipli- 
 cation. The very fact of progress is the replacement 
 of lower by higher life, the supersession of the quanti- 
 tative by the qualitative criterion of survival value, the 
 increasing dominance of mind over matter, the substi- 
 tution of the intensive for the merely extensive culti- 
 vation of life. These various phrases express, I be- 
 lieve, 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 ex- 
 pressed by the phrase " the intensity of life " as dis- 
 tinguished from its mere extension. There is, I be- 
 lieve, 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 in- 
 herent 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 selections 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 parent- 
 
THE GROWTH OF INDIVIDUALITY 105 
 
 hood disappears altogether. Indeed, Spencer's law 
 expresses itself and the eugenist must qualify his 
 hopes by the fact in the practical infertility of 
 many 1 of the most highly individualized 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. Gal ton's great work Inquir- 
 ies into Human Faculty, states very plainly the diffi- 
 culty for the eugenist involved in Spencer's law, under 
 its more statistical aspect. What are the relative ef- 
 fects of early and late marriages ? Mr. Gal ton 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 individualized, 
 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 recog- 
 nize 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 conspic- 
 uously in the female sex, where the proportion of the 
 
 1 Mr. Galton believes their number has been exaggerated. 
 
 
io6 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 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. Mean- 
 while, 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 un- 
 derstand how it is that any one writing from the 
 biological standpoint must view with something like 
 contempt the common assumption that, in international 
 competition, mere statistics of population furnish, as 
 
THE GROWTH OF INDIVIDUALITY 107 
 
 such, final and adequate data for prophecy. Let us 
 remind ourselves onca more that, according to these 
 crude criteria, which were really superseded untold 
 aeons 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 recognize the limitations of mere statistics. The 
 population of France, some forty years ago con- 
 sisted of so many millions of units. The figure does 
 not matter, let us put it at 30,000,001. Now that i, 
 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 al- 
 most 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 in- 
 demnity exacted from France after the Franco-Prus- 
 sian 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 
 
 ! 
 
io8 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 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 num- 
 bers, of coins, without considering whether they were 
 pounds, shillings or pence, whether they were genuine 
 or counterfeit. The illustration is ludicrously inade- 
 quate, as every illustration must be, simply because 
 the human case is unique. In the units of a popula- 
 tion, 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 econ- 
 omists, moralists, schoolboy Imperialists, and the rest, 
 pointing merely to the quantitative question of popu- 
 lation as if it were everything, though they must surely 
 know that,, if international competition were the high- 
 est 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 
 
THE GROWTH OF INDIVIDUALITY 109 
 
 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 indi- 
 viduality 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 de- 
 fectives, 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 major- 
 ity 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 con- 
 sist 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 mat-^ 
 ter 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 
 
i io PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 strength and happiness do not depend upon properties and ter- 
 ritories, nor on machinery for their defense, 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 sim- 
 ply to name the infant mortality, which is at last com- 
 ing to be recognized 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 
 
THE GROWTH OF INDIVIDUALITY in 
 
 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 
 inquiry 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 develop- 
 ment since the days of fists and stones, it means, as all 
 human development in every sphere means, the increas- 
 ing 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 forever with the passing of the 
 " dragons of the prime." 
 
 As regards the psychical worth of the soldier, is it 
 not recognized, 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 im- 
 portant if, indeed, it is not already negligible : 
 whilst the purely psychical qualities, from generalship 
 and strategy and hygiene to initiative, judgment, ac- 
 
ii2 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 curacy, 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 in- 
 telligent than an Army, just as it requires more intelli- 
 gence to make a boat than to walk; and it is in the 
 Navy that the mechanical factor has been most com- 
 pletely transferred, so that the human machinery is at 
 a discount and the steel machinery made by human 
 mind is much, whilst the value of the psychical in all 
 its aspects dominates and controls the whole. Great 
 Britain, as the foremost naval power in the world, 
 should long ago have left to its ultimate fate amongst 
 other nations the idea that quantity so many tons 
 of soldiers and so many tons of sailors affords an 
 estimate of the warring force of a nation : even if the 
 whole history of this little isle and the possession of 
 our present Empire did not teach, as the history of 
 Rome taught and as the history of Athens teaches in 
 another sphere, that not mass but mind makes a nation 
 great. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 HEREDITY AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 "We cannot but feel that the application of biological results 
 is only beginning, and beginning with a tardiness which is a re- 
 proach 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 un- 
 scientific. 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 possi- 
 bility 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 that 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 re- 
 semblance between father and child may seem to be 
 
ii4 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 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 ac- 
 quirements or acquired characters of the parent ; make 
 no distinction between them and his inherent charac- 
 ters; 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 with- 
 out reference to this limitation of heredity. Here is 
 a man of culture and accomplishment; his children, 
 then, will presumably tend to be cultured and accom- 
 plished. But every kind of advantage that fore- 
 thought and love and money can afford may have been 
 showered upon that man. So far as native endow- 
 ment was concerned, he may have indeed been far be- 
 low 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 recognized. One may repeat 
 a former statement of this point, which is cardinal for 
 the eugenist. 
 
 
HEREDITY AND RACE CULTURE 115 
 
 " 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 disadvanta- 
 geous 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 trans- 
 mitted, 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 favorable . . . inborn and there- 
 fore 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 se- 
 lected will tend to inherit their parents' good fortune. There is 
 a fictitious way in which we speak of a child inheriting his fath- 
 er'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. Acquire- 
 ments, then, are all very well for the day, but it is inborn char- 
 acters that alone count for the morrow." 1 
 
 It may be added that the time will come when there 
 is a radical " transvaluation," as Nietzsche would say, 
 of the two fashions in which a father " leaves " some- 
 thing to his children. When a question is asked on 
 this head now-a-days, we mean, foolishly enough, to 
 inquire how much money the father left his child, and 
 we say of a man that he has " inherited " a fortune. 
 This kind of " inheritance " may or may not be desir- 
 
 1 Quoted from the author's lectures on Individualism and Col- 
 lectivism (Williams and Norgate, 1906). 
 
n6 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 able as a social institution, but we can see plainly 
 enough that it 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 al- 
 luded 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 im- 
 prove. 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 chil- 
 dren 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 
 
HEREDITY AND RACE CULTURE 117 
 
 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 charac- 
 ters of parents do tend to be inherited by their chil- 
 dren : nor yet that these inherent characters differ pro- 
 foundly 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 ne- 
 cessity, 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 environment as, for instance, in the popu- 
 lation 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 
 
ii8 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 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, 1 by this 
 fruit we shall know what the mother might and 
 should have been. A healthy baby goes far to demon- 
 strate that the stock is healthy. This is one of the car- 
 dinal 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 eu- 
 genist 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 con- 
 siderations that the present writer, for one, is some- 
 what chary of predictions and proposals based upon 
 the relative fertility of different classes of the com- 
 munity 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 
 
 1 As is usually the case, except when the mother or father is 
 alcoholic or syphilitic. 
 
HEREDITY AND RACE CULTURE 119 
 
 remains of many of his rash predecessors beneath it. 1 
 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 emphasize its potency whilst undoubtedly 
 diminishing its range. 
 
 A CRITICISM OF TERMS. In order that this distinc- 
 tion 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 vocabu- 
 lary purged altogether of a certain word in common 
 and uncritical employment, especially by the medical 
 profession. This is the thoroughly misleading, inde- 
 terminate 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 germi- 
 nal. 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 
 
 1 If we make a diagram of society, with the social strata 
 labeled, and then proceed to make a eugenic comment upon it, 
 certainly the line dividing the sheep from the goats, as for 
 parenthood, would not be horizontal, at any level. Nor would 
 it be vertical as if the proportions of worth and unworth were 
 the same in all classes. Some would draw it diagonally, count- 
 ing most of the aristocracy good and most of the lowest strata 
 bad: others would slope it the other way. I should not venture 
 to draw it at all: there are individuals good and bad in all 
 classes and races, and their relative proportions are unknown, 
 at least for me. 
 
120 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 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 ac- 
 quirement, 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 pa- 
 ternal 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 po- 
 tency, are lumped together under the blessed word 
 " congenital." 
 
 This word is equally foolish and useless in an op- 
 posite direction. It constantly leads those who use it 
 to suppose that the inherent characters of an individ- 
 ual 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 super- 
 stitions which imagined that a baby is not alive until 
 
HEREDITY AND RACE CULTURE 121 
 
 it is born and breathes, or that the soul or breath or 
 pneunia 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 per- 
 haps 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 1 . 
 word " congenital " is used as it is, we shall fail to 
 realize that inherent characters may display them- 
 selves 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 in- 
 herent but acquired : a character may be post-congen- 
 ital, 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 trans- 
 missible 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," 
 
 1 " For words are wise men's counters, they do but reckon by 
 them; but they are the money of fools" (Hobbes, Leviathan, Pt. 
 I. chap. iv.). 
 
122 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULtURE 
 
 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 in- 
 variably, 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 hered- 
 itary nor acquired ? The truth is that language is again 
 at fault. Shakespeare's genius was of inherent or ger- 
 minal 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 Shake- 
 speare did not inherit his mother's genius or his fath- 
 er's genius, neither of them having such a gift to trans- 
 mit, 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 conse- 
 quence of that compromise or rearrangement or settle- 
 ment, 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 heredi- 
 
HEREDITY AND RACE CULTURE 123 
 
 tary 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 dis- 
 coveries 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 trans- 
 mission can be predicted in the most exact mathemati- 
 cal 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 haemophilia 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 inher- 
 ent in the germ-cells from which he was formed char- 
 acters which were not present in either parent. They 
 
124 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 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, pres- 
 ent 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 combina- 
 tion of qualities. And the Mendelians are now able 
 to call into existence organisms of new kinds by com- 
 bination 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 Cam- 
 bridge 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 dis- 
 ease known as " rust," this immunity having never 
 been found before associated with the other good qual- 
 ities in question. These advances will not long be 
 limited to the vegetable world merely. Perhaps it re- 
 quires 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 
 
HEREDITY AND RACE CULTURE 125 
 
 properties to heredity, and yet there was never any- 
 thing like it before. Its "genius" is not "hered- 
 itary." 
 
 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 in- 
 born. 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 inher- 
 ent 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 whatso- 
 ever, our ultimate fates in every particular, partly de- 
 pend upon inheritance. 1 
 
 Nature and nurture are antithetic terms of Shake- 
 spearean origin which are in frequent use and much 
 favored by Mr. Galton. That which comes by nature 
 is the inborn, inherent, or germinal ; and that is due to 
 
 *It might be supposed that the words "inherent" and "in- 
 herited " were allied etymologically. This is not so. " Inherit " 
 is derived from "heir," and this from a verb meaning "to 
 take." In natural inheritance the heir inherits what is inherent 
 in the germ-cells which make him. Says Professor Thomson: 
 "The organization of the fertilized ovum is the inheritance" 
 and the heir, we may add. 
 
126 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 nurture which is the result of the converse of the ger- 
 minal with the environment a man's accent for in- 
 stance. 
 
 Perhaps, in some ways, germinal is the most useful 
 word of all, though inherent is so convenient and fa- 
 miliar, 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 sug- 
 gests the idea of the germ-plasm, and has the particular 
 virtue of avoiding all reference to the change of en- 
 vironment 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 char- 
 acters 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 ger- 
 minal, 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 in- 
 dividual, like every living organism, takes its origin. 1 
 The terms " congerminal " or " conceptional " might 
 be employed. 
 
 1 Unless indeed it be an organism so lowly as only to consist 
 of one cell throughout. 
 
HEREDITY AND RACE CULTURE 127 
 
 " Acquired character," even, is a bad term. It re- 
 placed " functionally-produced modification," which 
 was long employed by Spencer. The blacksmith's bi- 
 ceps answers to this phrase. It is this and other such 
 modifications that are non-transmissible. Alcoholic 
 degeneration is not a " functionally-produced modifi- 
 cation," 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 se- 
 vere and conclusive Mendelian criticism. The " rever- 
 sion "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 hered- 
 ity, in a position to consider certain doctrines and 
 popular beliefs which bear very directly upon race- 
 culture. Realizing, for instance, that " congenital " 
 means nothing; realizing as perhaps some of us have 
 not so clearly realized before, when exactly it is that 
 the new human being comes into existence, we shall 
 be prepared to understand how definite and indisput- 
 
128 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 able 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 un- 
 born baby, the expectant mother may faithfully follow 
 the example of Lucy in Richard Feverel* Does this 
 have its intended effect? The answer is an unquali- 
 fied 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 ve- 
 nous. There is no nervous connection whatever : abso- 
 lutely 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 inter- 
 changed. 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 
 
 1 The reader will remember the chapter, " A Berry to the Res- 
 cue." " Says Lucy demurely ' Now you know why I read history, 
 and that sort of books ... I only read sensible books and 
 talk of serious things . . . because I have heard say 
 . . . dear Mrs. Berry ! don't you understand now ? ' * 
 
HEREDITY AND RACE CULTURE 129 
 
 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 educa- 
 tion? 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 de- 
 voted 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 realize 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 consid- 
 erable quantity she is feeding her child on poisoned 
 food. Surely the reader must see the distinction be- 
 tween 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) possibil- 
 ity, which is palpably inconceivable, logically carries 
 
I 3 Q PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 with it a denial of the other possibility, which is indeed 
 a palpable necessity. Or, to state the criticism in an- 
 other 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! " J 
 
 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 read- 
 er'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. 2 
 
 This, in the judgment of most unbiased people, Mr. 
 Galton conclusively proved: and we do not at all re- 
 alize to-day how repugnant and revolutionary this doc- 
 trine appeared to popular opinion some forty years 
 ago. Mr. Galton has, however, followed up his cita- 
 
 1 Contrast Mr. Galton, the propounder of the now accepted 
 view : 
 
 " As a general rule, with scarcely any exception that cannot 
 be ascribed to other influences, such as bad nutrition or trans- 
 mitted microbes, the injuries or habits of the parents are found 
 to have no effect on the natural form or faculties of the child." 
 (Hereditary Genius, Prefatory Chapter to the Edition of 1892, 
 p. xv.) 
 
 2 In the later edition Mr. Galton discusses the question of the 
 title, and says that if it could now be altered, it should appear 
 as Hereditary Ability. We may note that, as the author says 
 himself, " The reader will find a studious abstinence throughout 
 the work from speaking of genius as a special quality." 
 
HEREDITY AND RACE CULTURE 131 
 
 tion of facts on more than one occasion since, 1 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 labor, found necessary by less for- 
 tunate people, of reading it. 
 
 The following quotation states the question of na- 
 tional 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 pur- 
 poses, 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 pro- 
 portion 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 honorably succeeded in life, and who are presumably, on 
 the whole, the most valuable portion of our human stock, con- 
 tribute 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 evolu- 
 tion of man in each particular country, favorably or injuriously 
 affected by its special form of civilization? 
 
 " Enough is already known to make it certain that the pro- 
 ductiveness 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 con- 
 
 1 The reader may note " A eugenic investigation : Index to 
 achievements of near kinsfolk of some of the Fellows of the 
 Royal Society," Sociological Papers, 1904, pp. 85-99 (Macmil- 
 lan) ; also Noteworthy Families (John Murray, 1906). 
 
i 3 2 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 ditions are favorable 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 inquiries in 
 special cases the judges of England between 1660 
 and 1865, statesmen, commanders, authors, men of 
 science, poets, musicians, painters, divines, senior class- 
 ics 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 votar- 
 ies: 
 
 " Whenever a man or woman was possessed of a gentle nature 
 that fitted him or her to deeds of charity, to meditation, to litera- 
 ture 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 conse- 
 quence 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 bru- 
 talized 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 practiced 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 
 
HEREDITY AND RACE CULTURE 133 
 
 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 intelli- 
 gent, in their modes of thought, and therefore the most suitable 
 parents of a high civilization, and put a strong check, if not a 
 direct stop, to their progeny. Those she reserved on these oc- 
 casions, to breed the generations of the future, were the servile, 
 the indifferent, and, again, the stupid. Thus, as she to repeat 
 my expression brutalized human nature by her system of celib- 
 acy applied to the gentle, she demoralized 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 civiliza- 
 tion." 
 
 For this final quotation no apology is needed : 
 
 " The best form of civilization 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 
 honor as in ancient Jewish times ; where the pride of race was 
 encouraged (of course I do not refer to the nonsensical senti- 
 ment 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 naturalized." 
 
 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 
 
134 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 which new inquiry is needed. The naive assertions 
 of the actuary as to the inheritance of, say, " conscien- 
 tiousness," 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 psy- 
 chologists must analyze out for us those elementary 
 units of the mind upon which experience and the so- 
 cial state, education and suggestion act, to make hu- 
 man nature as we know it. The reader may be di- 
 rected to Dr. McDougall's recent work on Social Psy- 
 chology 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 realizing the importance of dealing 
 with real primary units. Their law seems to apply 
 to the musical sense in man and to the brooding in- 
 stinct in the hen. 1 The line of study here suggested is 
 earnestly commended to the psychologists for their 
 indispensable help. 
 
 EUGENICS AND PARTIES. Let us once again con- 
 sider the fashion in which men and women are classi- 
 fied to the eugenic eye. We have already realized 
 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 par- 
 ents. It is the object of eugenics to make the real and 
 the ideal divisions coincide. And let us here say with 
 
 1 These researches have not yet been published. 
 
HEREDITY AND RACE CULTURE 135 
 
 all possible force that before such classifications as 
 these all others are trivial and nearly all others impu- 
 dent. 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 sub- 
 scribe 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 conserv- 
 atism 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 think- 
 ing 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 
 
i 3 6 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 other hand, repressed ; and year by year the basal facts 
 of heredity will furnish ever surer criteria for the the- 
 ory and practice of a New Imperialism which knows, 
 for instance, what militarism did for Rome and Napo- 
 leon for France, and which will some day sweep all the 
 money changers out of the Temple of Life. 1 
 
 1 In the later chapters of a former book, " Health, Strength, 
 and Happiness" (Grant Richards, London; Mitchell Kennerley, 
 New York, 1908), I have discussed various aspects of heredity 
 from the eugenic point of view more fully than has been possible 
 here. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 EDUCATION AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 " Education is but the giving or withholding of opportunity." 
 BATESON. 
 
 IT is true that education can seem to accomplish mir- 
 acles ; 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 pre- 
 vailed, 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 gen- 
 eral 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 impor- 
 tance 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 efflores- 
 cence of the mightiest genius, we may almost be in- 
 clined to inquire whether genius could not in effect be 
 
 133 
 
138 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 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 diges- 
 tion the more worthless the material the more ac- 
 curate the analogy: then applied an emetic and esti- 
 mated your success by the completeness with which 
 everything was returned, more especially if it was re- 
 turned " 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 vio- 
 lent 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 di- 
 gestion. 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 
 
EDUCATION AND RACE CULTURE 139 
 
 Anglo-Saxon germ-plasm to credit it with the abun- 
 dant stupidity of its products. Much of this stupidity 
 is factitious and artificial. We shall continue to pro- 
 duce 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 practice 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 ex- 
 amining it, should be heaving bricks, but such a 
 teacher does not exist. In Berlin they are now learn- 
 ing that the depression caused by these emetics, for 
 which the best physical parallel is antimony, often 
 lead to child suicide a steadily-increasing phenom- 
 enon 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 gov- 
 ernment, which believes that there are ideas, but 
 fears and suppresses them: the third by the British 
 
140 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 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 de- 
 cadence 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 dis- 
 gorge 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 labor 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 in- 
 adequate 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 be- 
 come blinded to the possibilities offered us by reason- 
 
 I 
 
EDUCATION AND RACE CULTURE 141 
 
 able education even of the very heterogeneous mate- 
 rial 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 practice at present will be 
 necessary if the ideal of race-culture is ever to be 
 realized, yet education alone, however good, can never 
 enable us to achieve our end. It must be main- 
 tained, 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 con- 
 ception 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 realizing what is so given. 
 
142 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 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 palaeography 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 realize that what really 
 seems to be the product of education is often the re- 
 sult 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 sim- 
 ilarly speak sentences at the first attempt. Very com- 
 monly 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 per- 
 fect. 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 
 
EDUCATION AND RACE CULTURE 143 
 
 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 the child is seven. 
 The first seven years of life should really have the 
 term of childhood confined to them, for there is a nat- 
 ural 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 practiced before that date, we should ap- 
 plaud it as ideal. Probably there is no such system 
 much less any that will improve on the spontan- 
 eous process. 
 
 EDUCATION THE PROVISION OF AN ENVIRONMENT 
 We are prepared, then, to realize 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 
 realizing, is accomplished by the action of circum- 
 stances 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 
 
H4 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 instance, air and food, mother-love and the school- 
 master. I therefore define education as the pro- 
 vision' of an environment. This definition prepares 
 us to understand the limitations of the process. If 
 we think of education as a packing or cram- 
 ming process, we shall err in this respect; we 
 shall expect limitless results from education pro- 
 vided that one packs early and tightly and care- 
 fully enough. It is this erroneous conception which 
 rules us and daily betrays us in practice. If, how- 
 ever, we think of education as the provision of an 
 environment, capable of creating nothing, but merely 
 of causing the expression or the repression of poten- 
 tial 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 the least for the eugenists, 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 
 
EDUCATION AND RACE CULTURE 145 
 
 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 an- 
 swered, 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 
 stone-deaf and Shakespeare a gibbering idiot hence, 
 but incorrectly, we argue that environment is prac- 
 tically everything. Per contra, we can easily and cor- 
 rectly 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 incor- 
 rectly, we argue that the material to be operated upon 
 is everything. We have to learn, however, that the 
 analogy is not one of addition but of multiplication. 
 Neither inheritance nor environment, as such, gives 
 anything. The environmental factor may be poten- 
 tially 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 daresay a well-trained beetroot might write 
 a musical comedy. The point is that one hundred mul- 
 tiplied by nothing equals nothing. Similarly, the in- 
 
i 4 6 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 nate 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 is 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 realize infinity or nothing, according to 
 what it is multiplied by. With all deference, I sub- 
 mit this as a real answer to these endless disputes. 
 
 But further, granted that neither factor in itself 
 produces any actuality, which is normally the weight- 
 ier of the two factors? We must make the qualifica- 
 tion, " normally," because such a thing as disease or 
 poison, included in the environmental factor, will 
 dominate the result, completely overshadowing the im- 
 portance 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 recognize 
 its true nature. Indeed the more we realize its 
 ideal, the more do we realize its limitations. The 
 more we study education the more important does 
 heredity appear. If the reader has not had the oppor- 
 tunities of observing children for himself let him re- 
 fer to such a book as Mr. Galton's Inquiries into Hu- 
 man Faculty, and he will begin to realize how large 
 
EDUCATION AND RACE CULTURE 147 
 
 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 de- 
 pends 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 po- 
 tentialities constitute a limiting condition which no 
 education can transcend. Education can educate only 
 what heredity gives. Long ago Helvetius * thought 
 that the differences between men were due to differ- 
 ences 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 Wel- 
 lington, that " the battle of Waterloo was won on the 
 playing-fields of Eton/' is an instance in point. Re- 
 cently, 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 ac- 
 cepted school will do.) If Eton produced him, why 
 does it not produce thousands like him? There is 
 plenty of material: but it is not the right material. 
 
 iAs did Kant. 
 
I 4 8 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 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 un- 
 equal. To realize the nature of education is not only 
 to avoid the popular assumption that an ideal educa- 
 tion will do everything for us, forgetting that no 
 amount of polishing will make pewter shine like sil- 
 ver; 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 leveling process. On the con- 
 trary, it accentuates the differences between men. 
 You may confuse the unpolished pebble and the dia- 
 mond, 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 ad- 
 dition of a large sum to figures such as, i, 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 i, 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 run of contem- 
 porary Socialism implicitly denies; though it is of 
 course abundantly recognized 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 
 
EDUCATION AND RACE CULTURE 149 
 
 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 materials to work upon, we 
 shall have a Utopia, and as for forms of government 
 they may be left for fools to contest. Forel, incom- 
 parably 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 pic- 
 tures, for in that great eugenic treatise Die Sexuel 
 Frage, he tells us how to realize them by pedagogic 
 reform working upon the materials provided by hu- 
 man selection. A paragraph may be quoted from 
 Forel : 
 
 "Malgre tout Tenthousiasme qu'on doit montrer pour une 
 pedagogic rationelle, il ne faut jamais oublier qu'elle est incapa- 
 ble de remplacer la selection. Elle sert au but immediat et 
 rapproche, qui est d'utiliser le mieux possible le material 
 humain tel qu'il existe maintenant. Mais, par elle-meme, elle 
 n'ameliore en rien la qualite des germes a venir. Elle peut 
 neanmoins, grace a 1'instruction donnee a la jeunesse sur la 
 valeur sociale de la selection, la preparer a mettre cette derniere 
 en ceuvre." 
 
 and another from Spencer: 
 
150 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 "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 skillful 
 discipline, children may be made altogether what they should be. 
 Contrariwise, we are satisfied that though imperfections of na- 
 ture may be diminished by wise management, they cannot be re- 
 moved by it. The notion that an ideal humanity might be forth- 
 with 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 
 Tide: 
 
 ". . . Education was desired by the lower orders because 
 they thought it would make them upper orders, and be a leveler 
 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 ap- 
 pointed, an instant effacer and reconciler. Whatever is undi- 
 vinely 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 
 jeweler's trenchant education of them will tell you another story. 
 
EDUCATION AND RACE CULTURE 151 
 
 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 colors 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 sorrowfulest 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 in- 
 finite." 
 
 So much for one relation of this question to Social- 
 ism. Quite lately (The New Age, April nth, 1908) 
 Mr. Havelock Ellis has summed the matter up as fol- 
 lows : 
 
 "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 organized so- 
 cial 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 organization permits the breeding 
 of individuals who count. On this plane Socialism and Individ- 
 ualism 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 
 
152 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 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 sys- 
 tem 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 go- 
 ing 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 con- 
 cern 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 Pa- 
 triotism, that might be quite decent) ; if so, then it 
 seems to me that we must look to the socialists for sal- 
 vation. But books which describe future externals, 
 books which assume that education is a panacea, for- 
 getting that education can educate only what heredity 
 gives, turn us away again when we are almost per- 
 suaded. The economic panacea must fail (at least as 
 a panacea) ; the educational panacea must fail; the eu- 
 genic 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 labor will not be wasted, or far worse 
 than wasted, as it now too often is. 
 
 EDUCATION is A SISYPHEAN TASK. But the belief 
 in education as in itself an adequate instrument of 
 
EDUCATION AND RACE CULTURE 153 
 
 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 edu- 
 cated, and its children would outstretch both itself and 
 their grand-parents. This doctrine of the transmis- 
 sion 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 in- 
 stance, the skin of the heel of every new baby is al- 
 most 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 rapid- 
 ity and certainty. It would not reform the world in 
 a single generation because, as we have seen, its re- 
 sults 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 
 
154 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 habits acquired by one generation would be innate in 
 the next. If the father learned one language in ad- 
 dition 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 gen- 
 erations 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, men- 
 tal 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 man- 
 kind, 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 lim- 
 itations 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 popu- 
 lar mind of the Lamarckian idea, the more especially 
 as members of the medical profession, who are re- 
 
EDUCATION AND RACE CULTURE 155 
 
 garded as authorities on heredity, contentedly accept 
 this idea themselves. Yet the advocates of eugenics 
 or race-culture have to recognize 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 popu- 
 lar 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 sur- 
 passed 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 parent- 
 hood than others, but only let education be wise and 
 universal, and any question of selection by marriage 
 or otherwise will be superfluous. A thousand diffi- 
 culties offered by public sentiment, by convention, by 
 the churches, by the large measure of uncertainty 
 which attends the working of heredity, could be ig- 
 nored, if race-culture were simply a matter of educa- 
 tion. 
 
 Nevertheless, these difficulties have to be faced by 
 the eugenist. The popular misconception of heredity 
 - instanced by Sir James Simpson's belief, not inex- 
 cusable sixty years ago, that the education of a future 
 mother will enlarge her child's brain must be re- 
 moved. 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 
 
i!56 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 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 realize the inherent potentialities of the in- 
 dividual. 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 sug- 
 gests 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 endeavor to produce them by breeding if that be 
 possible than to make the most of them when they 
 are vouchsafed to 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 some- 
 what 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 in- 
 tuition, 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 AND RACE CULTURE 157 
 
 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 civilizations, yet the case 
 may be different to-day, in that our acquired or tradi- 
 tional progress, transmitted by the process of educa- 
 tion 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 cir- 
 cumvented in a sense has reached the point at which 
 the laws of racial or inherent progress have been re- 
 vealed to us, as to none of our predecessors. 1 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 will realize per- 
 fection. 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 edu- 
 
 1 See the last sentence of the quotation from Forel on p. 149. 
 
158 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 cation may indeed become the factory of an effective 
 race-culture. 
 
 THE POWER OF INDIVIDUAL OPINION. Since ulti- 
 mately 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 center of eugenic opin- 
 ion, and the time has assuredly come for attempting 
 to realize this ideal though a thousand years should 
 pass before the facts of heredity are completely ascer- 
 tained 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 child- 
 hood. 
 
 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 fre- 
 quently 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 utilized, suffi- 
 ciently 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 con- 
 trollable 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 
 
EDUCATION AND RACE CULTURE 159 
 
 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 Educa- 
 tion Society, as a Society which amongst other pur- 
 poses 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 realize the importance of eu- 
 genic 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 sub- 
 ject has been entirely ignored by the pioneers of this 
 matter. But if we turn to such a work as Forel's mas- 
 terpiece we begin to realize 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 direc- 
 tion of negative eugenics. 1 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. 
 
 ipor definition of these terms see p. 199 et seq 
 
160 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 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 programs of education is entirely 
 overlooked. While much is being done in the detailed improve- 
 ment 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 school- 
 masters 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 fulfill, 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 
 unrecognized, but the complexity of the subject renders it the 
 one of all others in which self -instruction is least likely to suc- 
 ceed." 
 
 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 
 
EDUCATION AND RACE CULTURE 161 
 
 is at our service in this regard, the products of horti- 
 culture 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. Number- 
 less 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 choos- 
 ing for many generations of the least ferocious wolves, 
 you may make a domesticated race ? 1 
 
 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 ap- 
 pears 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 
 
 1 By some such means we may hope that man too may some 
 day become domesticated without losing his fertility! 
 
i6a PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 better that by silence, both as to the fact and as to its 
 meaning, we should make it unmentionable, indecent, 
 dishonorable? 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. 1 
 
 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 suc- 
 cessful, because the development of this instinct is in- 
 evitable 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 inquirer that this 
 thing exists for parenthood, and is therefore holy and 
 to be treated as such. 
 
 Perhaps we are wrong in principle also, since tnat 
 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 ex- 
 ists; and therefore, as part of that process of educa- 
 tion by which we desire to make the young into rea- 
 sonable, moral and fully human beings to teach expli- 
 citly, without unworthy shame, that this thing exists 
 
 1 Corinthians xii, 22, 23, 24. 
 
EDUCATION AND RACE CULTURE 163 
 
 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 common- 
 place that may appear to common eyes, and that ac- 
 cordingly this instinct is to be guarded, treated, used, 
 honored 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 diffi- 
 cult, 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 pre- 
 sent his teachings in terms of patriotism. He would 
 urge that " there is no wealth but life" ; that nations 
 are made not of provinces or property but of peo- 
 ple; that modern biology is teaching historians to 
 explain such phenomena as the fall of Rome in terms 
 
164 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 of the quality of the national life; that therefore, in- 
 dividuals 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 ig- 
 nores 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 alco- 
 hol 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 parent- 
 hood, and must act upon his knowledge of that rela- 
 tion. 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 recognize 
 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 mar- 
 riage 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 
 
EDUCATION AND RACE CULTURE 165 
 
 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 im- 
 measurably 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 affec- 
 tion never brooks control, may become wholly irrele- 
 vant, 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 possibil- 
 ity 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 eu- 
 genic 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. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 THE SUPREMACY OF MOTHERHOOD 
 
 "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 ques- 
 tion which can never safely be ignored in any consid- 
 eration of race-culture, but the importance of which, 
 as I think I see it, is recognized 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 abil- 
 ity, 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 impor- 
 tance of motherhood as a factor in the evolution of all 
 the higher species of animals, and its absolute suprem- 
 
 166 
 
THE SUPREMACY OF MOTHERHOOD 167 
 
 acy, inevitable and persistent whether recognized or 
 ignored, in the case of man. Any system of eugenics 
 or race-culture, any system of government, any pro- 
 posal for social reform as, for instance, the reduc- 
 tion of infant mortality which fails to reckon with 
 motherhood or falls short 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 eu- 
 genics or race-culture be made or carried out, the fact 
 will remain that the race is made up of mortal individ- 
 uals; 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, and the execution of which is never long 
 postponed. 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 scien- 
 tific, which can provide the mother's breast and the 
 
168 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 mother's love, individual motherhood, in its exqui- 
 sitely complementary aspects, physical and psychical, 
 will remain the dominant factor of history so long as 
 the final judgments upon every present and the final de- 
 terminations for every future lie in the hands of help- 
 less babyhood which will be the case so long as man 
 is mortal. When, if ever, science, having previously 
 conquered disease, identifies the cause 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 anni- 
 hilative vengeance. 
 
 It is the master paradox that at his first appearance 
 the lord of the earth should be the most helpless of liv- 
 ing 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 ; ut- 
 terly 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 ludi- 
 crously 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 per- 
 manent abode in its alimentary canal by the eleventh 
 day) where is to be found a more complete picture 
 of helpless dependence?" * How comes it that this 
 creature is to be lord of the earth, and a member 
 
 * Quoted from the author's "Evolution, the Master Key." 
 
THE SUPREMACY OF MOTHERHOOD 169 
 
 of the only species which succeeds in continually multi- 
 plying 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 cer- 
 tain 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 
 offense and defense are concerned, these have disap- 
 peared 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 in- 
 stinctive 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 in- 
 stinctive creature reacts to certain sets of circumstances 
 
170 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 in certain effortless, perfect and fixed ways. The re- 
 actions 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 crea- 
 ture in question. But, on the other hand, they are al- 
 most 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 circum- 
 stances. 
 
 A creature cannot be at once purely instinctive and 
 intelligent. An instinctive action is simply a cpm- 
 pound reflex action, a highly adapted automatism: 
 now automatism and intelligence are necessarily in- 
 versely proportional. It is possible for an intelligent 
 creature to acquire automatisms, which are popularly 
 described as instinctive. They are not instincts, how- 
 ever, but the acquired equivalents of instincts : " sec- 
 ondary automatisms." If they are used to replace 
 intelligence, the individual, in so far, sinks from the 
 human to the sub-human level. Their proper func- 
 tion is to leave the intelligence free for higher pur- 
 poses 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 
 
THE SUPREMACY OF MOTHERHOOD 171 
 
 determine your own acts if they are already deter- 
 mined for you by your nervous organization. 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 cir- 
 cumstances; 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 inde- 
 pendent life almost wholly bereft of all the instru- 
 ments which have served the lower creatures so well, 
 whilst, on the other hand, he is provided with an ut- 
 terly undeveloped, and indeed, at that time non-ex- 
 istent, 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 fol- 
 lows that motherhood is supremely important in the 
 case of man. It is the historical fact that its impor- 
 tance in the history of the animal world has been 
 steadily increasing throughout seonian 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 
 
172 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 lives and their own chances of physical maternity. 
 
 The development of maternal care may be steadily 
 traced throughout the vertebrate series pari passu 
 with evolution of sexual relations towards the ideal of 
 monogamy, which is ideal just because of its incom- 
 parable services to motherhood. But whilst mother- 
 hood is of the utmost service for lower creatures, end- 
 ing 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 in- 
 telligence, 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 pro- 
 duce 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 re- 
 form or race-culture. Some of them will even ad- 
 mit that purely physical motherhood, so far as the 
 mother's breasts are concerned, cannot wisely be dis- 
 pensed 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 produc- 
 tive of vast and widespread physical deterioration 
 
THE SUPREMACY OF MOTHERHOOD 173 
 
 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 su- 
 perseded. I do not believe in the creche or the munici- 
 pal milk depot 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, dis- 
 playing the elements of sanity, our girls will be in- 
 structed in these matters. At present the most im- 
 portant profession in the world is almost entirely 
 carried 'on by unskilled labor, and until this state 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 neces- 
 sary 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 op- 
 posed 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 mother- 
 hood 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 
 
174 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 least equally important. What is the outlook for the 
 baby when the bonus is spent? In fact, with all def- 
 erence 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 ob- 
 ject, I should say, for any other kind of bribe or lure. 
 The woman who "would rather have a spare bed- 
 room " 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 ele- 
 ments of motherhood are of little moment in eugen- 
 ics. I see no sign or prospect that they can be dis- 
 pensed 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 frac- 
 tion of that which should be obtained. Scientific 
 biography is yet to seek, and it is the ironical fac 
 that when Herbert Spencer, in his Autobiography, 
 devoted a large amount of space to the discussion o1 
 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 
 
THE SUPREMACY OF MOTHERHOOD 175 
 
 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 mention- 
 ing. 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 knowl- 
 edge 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 mo- 
 ment 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 counter- 
 feiting or replacing the psychical component of com- 
 plete maternity, and a generation of the highest in- 
 telligence borne by unmaternal women would prob- 
 ably succeed only in writing the blackest and maddest 
 page in history. 
 
 THE EUGENIC DEMAND FOR LOVE. Mr. Galton de- 
 sires that we breed for physique, ability, and energy. 
 But we also need more love, and we must breed for 
 
1 76 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 that. Nothing is easier or more inevitable once we 
 make human parenthood conscious and deliberate. 
 When children are born only to those who love chil- 
 dren, and who will tend to transmit their high meas- 
 ure of that parental instinct from which all love is 
 derived, we shall bring to earth a heaven compared 
 with which the theologians' is but a fool's paradise. 
 
 The first requisite, then, for the mothers of the 
 future, the elements of physical health being as- 
 sumed, 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 com- 
 pared with its slightest whimper. I will grant even 
 that the maternal instinct is so deeply rooted and uni- 
 versal that its absence must be regarded as either a 
 rare abnormality or else as the product of the gross- 
 est 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. 
 
 Be-fore we go on to consider these perversions of a 
 
THE SUPREMACY OF MOTHERHOOD 177 
 
 great idea, it may briefly be observed that, though 
 fatherhood is historically a mushroom growth com- 
 pared with motherhood, and though its importance 
 is vastly less, yet as a complementary principle, aid- 
 ing 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 dan- 
 gers 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 mak- 
 ing 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 cir- 
 cles. 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 individualization of Society. Others hope to 
 increase the production of German geniuses by the ' hellenic 
 friendship/ [ !] The three movements are strongly organized, 
 command large pecuniary means, a phalanx of original and 
 prolific writers, and enthusiastic devotion to their cause. More 
 
178 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 even than the support of Courts and aristocracy is, in my eyes, 
 that of the Universities. It is there that the destinies of Ger- 
 many have always been shaped, and if they are determined to 
 reform the Family in that way, it will be done. . . . The Her- 
 ren 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 estab- 
 lished things. We dare not repudiate the sacred prin- 
 ciples of protest and rebellion, which have been the 
 conditions of all progress, but believing in mother- 
 hood as we must, believing it to be authorized 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 im- 
 mediate interest attaches to the views of a much ad- 
 mired 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 sofar 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 civilization from the 
 fate that has overtaken all previous civilizations." 
 And further: 
 
 
THE SUPREMACY OF MOTHERHOOD 179 
 
 "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 moral- 
 ity 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 def- 
 inite public conditions, without loss of honor." 
 
 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 ele- 
 ments 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 con- 
 
i8o PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 ditions, 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 chil- 
 dren 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 chil- 
 dren 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 de- 
 liberate 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 re- 
 semblance 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 em- 
 ployed, to cause the useful classes in the community 
 to contribute more than their proportion to the next 
 
THE SUPREMACY OF MOTHERHOOD 181 
 
 generation." Mr. Gallon would be the first to as- 
 sert 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 idea 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, with- 
 out 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, reas- 
 onable 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. 1 
 
 It must be asserted as fervently and plainly as pos- 
 sible that, if the idea of race-culture is even in the 
 smallest degree to be realized, 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, 
 
 1 Mr. G. K Chesterton, one of the most amusing of contempo- 
 rary phenomena, has lately said, " The most serious sociologists, 
 the most stately professors of eugenics, calmly propose that for 
 the good of the race people should be forcibly married to each 
 other by the police." Readers unacquainted with Mr. Chester- 
 ton's standard of accuracy and methods of criticism, might be 
 misled by this gay invention. 
 
1 82 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 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 at- 
 tainment 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 indi- 
 vidual life, its great function for society and for the 
 race is in relation to childhood. Thus considered, 
 the dictum of Professor Westermarck may be un- 
 derstood, 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 oc- 
 cupy our attention. 
 
CHAPTER X 
 
 MARRIAGE AND MATERNALISM 
 
 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 mar- 
 riage, ages before mankind itself. We must first re- 
 mind 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 mul- 
 tiply 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 be- 
 come 5,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, with the weight, 
 according to the calculations of Cohn, of about 7,366 
 
 183 
 
184 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 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 in proportion to his body weight, 
 the longest ante-natal period, the longest period of 
 maternal feeding, and by far the lowest infant mor- 
 tality and general death-rate. A chief fact of prog- 
 ress has been, in a word, the supersession of the quan- 
 titative 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 un- 
 realized 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 suc- 
 cessive 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 ac- 
 centuation of infancy makes for variety of develop- 
 ment and, as we have seen, is supremely instanced in 
 man, where it depends upon the transmutation of 
 
MARRIAGE AND MATERNALISM 185 
 
 fixed instincts into the plastic thing we call intelli- 
 gence. Thus, to quote the words of Dr. Parsons, 1 
 " 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 these immensely significant creatures, 
 the social insects, we find well-marked though prim- 
 itive 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 mam- 
 mals, 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, (i) 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 devel- 
 opments of parental care after birth, it concentrates 
 the advantage of that care upon a few instead of 
 
 1 The Family, p. 20. 
 
i86 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 scattering it, thereby weakening its influence, upon 
 many." 
 
 Now how are these facts connected with that re- 
 lation between the parents which we call marriage, 
 temporary or permanent, foreshadowed or perfected? 
 
 It may be submitted that the racial function or sur- 
 vival-value of marriage in all its forms, low or high, 
 animal or human, consists in its services to the prin- 
 ciple of motherhood, these services depending upon 
 the help and strength which are afforded to mother- 
 hood 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 of- 
 fend the reader, but is there any reason to be offended 
 at the suggestion that the principle of marriage ac- 
 tually has a warrant older even than mankind? It 
 has lately been pointed out by a distinguished nat- 
 uralist, 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. Pro- 
 miscuity, it is true, does occur, but so also does strict 
 monogamy, " and promiscuous animals, such as rab- 
 bits 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 
 
MARRIAGE AND MATERNALISM 187 
 
 by living up to the spirit of them the Hebrew ulti- 
 mately was forced into pure monogamy. It is ex- 
 tremely 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 ex- 
 actly the same conclusion. Monogamy is their best 
 solution of the marriage question, and is the rule 
 among all the higher and more successful animals." 
 
 The moose, Mr. Seton tells us, has several wives 
 in one season but only one at a time. The hawks 
 practice 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 re- 
 mains 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 mar- 
 riage 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 ef- 
 fectively. 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 import- 
 ance 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 
 
i88 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 is that of survival-value. We are discussing a nat- 
 ural phenomenon exhibited by living creatures. This 
 is what so few people realize 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 one hand, it is sup- 
 ported 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 recog- 
 nized, is found every possible warrant and sanction, 
 and indeed imperative demand, for this most precious 
 of all institutions. Here we must endeavor to look 
 upon it as an exceedingly ancient fact of life, vastly 
 more ancient than mankind; and judging it and ex- 
 plaining 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 institu- 
 tion by which the survival-value of fatherhood is 
 added to that of motherhood. 
 
 The pioneer student of marriage from the stand- 
 point of science was Herbert Spencer, who with great 
 labor, 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 prim- 
 itive state, and taught that human marriage has de- 
 veloped from this through polygamy towards the ideal 
 of monogamy. The work of Professor Westermarck, 
 
MARRIAGE AND MATERNALISM 189 
 
 however Spencer's chief follower in this path 
 has shown, and later writers have abundantly con- 
 firmed it, that this primitive promiscuity never ex- 
 isted. 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 un- 
 faithful wife. Furthermore, polygamy, the only his- 
 torical rival of monogamy, is now known to have 
 played a quite trivial part in history, not merely com- 
 pared with monogamy, but as compared with that 
 which it was supposed to have played. Even in coun- 
 tries which we call polygamous to-day, polygamy is the 
 relatively rare exception and monogamy is the rule. 
 On this most important question it is well, however, 
 to quote the words of Professor Westermarck him- 
 self: 
 
 "The great majority of peoples are, as a rule, monogamous, 
 and the other forms of marriage are usually modified in a monog- 
 amous 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 pre- 
 dominant form of marriage, has been more- prevalent at the 
 lowest stages of civilization 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 civilization, up to a certain point, is favorable to 
 polygyny; but it is equally certain that in its highest forms it 
 leads to monogamy." "But, though civilization up to a certain 
 point is favorable 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 
 
190 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 and wholly militant societies, in which polygamy ob- 
 tained 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 his- 
 tory 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 monog- 
 amy in respect of the one criterion which time and 
 death recognize, 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 sub- 
 ject, but the teaching of Plato, from whom Mr. Shaw's 
 ideas on this particular subject are apparently derived. 
 
MARRIAGE AND MATERNALISM 191 
 
 It is in the fifth book of his Republic that the pioneer 
 eugenist lays down his ideas for race-culture. He 
 realized, 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 chil- 
 dren 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 nurs- 
 ery 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 psy- 
 chical aspects of motherhood and fatherhood alike. 
 Plato's first critic, however, 'his own great pupil Aris- 
 totle, devoted the best part of his work, the Polities, 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 de- 
 struction of warm feelings, and the substitution of a 
 
192 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 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 be- 
 cause it is based on those instincts, and because it sat- 
 isfies the moral nature of man, in giving him objects 
 of permanent yet vivid interest above and beyond him- 
 self." The truth of this matter is that the rest may 
 reason and welcome but we fathers know. 
 
 MARRIAGE A EUGENIC INSTRUMENT. It has defi- 
 nitely 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 practice 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 mod- 
 ern eugenists. The applicability of marriage for this 
 purpose will be shown by reference to actual facts. 
 Mr. Galton himself has shown how effectively an edu- 
 cated public opinion can employ marriage for the pur- 
 poses of race-culture, its services to which have indeed 
 
MARRIAGE AND MATERNALISM 193 
 
 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 al- 
 ready 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 meas- 
 ure of effectiveness and the fact is of the utmost 
 promise. 
 
 " Marriage," said Goethe, " is the origin and the 
 summit of all civilization." 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 con- 
 cerned, but it is certainly not the origin of civilization, 
 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 com- 
 mend 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, how- 
 ever, 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 collecti- 
 vist legislation will permanently abolish it. 
 
194 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 THE PRINCIPLE OF MATERNALISM. The merits of 
 monogamy can be defined in terms of the principle 
 which I would venture to call maternalism the prin- 
 ciple 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 unquali- 
 fied known, but the longest maintained; it would ob- 
 serve 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 possi- 
 ble the development of instinct into that intelligence 
 which, itself dependent upon motherhood for the pos- 
 sibility of its development, has dependent upon it the 
 fact that the earth is now man's and the fulness there- 
 of; 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 realize that marriage is invaluable 
 because it makes for the enthronement of motherhood 
 as nothing else ever did or can; do you realize that, 
 metaphors about State maternity notwithstanding, the 
 
MARRIAGE AND MATERNALISM 195 
 
 State has neither womb nor breasts, these most rever- 
 end 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 center 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 there- 
 fore, race-culture. 
 
 PROPOSED DEFINITION OF MARRIAGE. Recognizing 
 the existence of subhuman marriage, we may be at a 
 loss to define marriage as distinguished from sex-re- 
 lations 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. 
 
PART II 
 THE PRACTICE OF EUGENICS 
 
 N'abandonnons pas 1'avenir de notre race a la fatalite d' Allah ; 
 creons-le nous-memes. FOREL. 
 
 " It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly 
 directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race ; but except 
 in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as 
 to allow his worst animals to breed. 
 
 " With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated, 
 and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of 
 health. We civilized men, on the other hand, do our utmost to 
 check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the 
 imbecile, the maim and the sick ; we institute poor laws ; and our 
 medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one 
 to the last moment. . . . Thus the weak members of civil- 
 ized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to 
 the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be 
 highly injurious to the race of man." DARWIN, The Descent of 
 Man, 1871, Pt. i., chap. v. 
 
THE PRACTICE OF EUGENICS 
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 
 NEGATIVE EUGENICS 
 
 HITHERTO we have mainly concerned ourselves with 
 broad aspects of theory, endeavoring to prove that 
 conscious race-culture is a necessity for any civili- 
 zation which is to endure, and to show how alone 
 it can be effected. But evidently for a great many of 
 the practical proposals that might be, and for not a 
 few that have been, based upon these views, public 
 opinion is not ripe. We may be thankful to believe 
 that for some it will never be ripe : it would be rotten 
 first. Marriage, for instance, we hold sacred and es- 
 sential : we find intolerable the idea of the human 
 stud-farm ; we are very dubious as to the help of sur- 
 gery ; we are much more than dubious as to the lethal 
 chamber. It is necessary to be reasonable, and, in 
 seeking the superman, to remain at least human. 
 Now if we were to achieve any immediate success we 
 must clearly divide our proposals, as the present writer 
 did some years ago, with Mr. Galton's approval, into 
 two classes: positive eugenics and negative eugenics. 
 The one would seek to encourage the parenthood of 
 the worthy, the other to discourage the parent- 
 hood of the unworthy. Positive eugenics is the 
 original eugenics, but, as the writer endeavored to 
 show at the time, negative eugenics is one with it in 
 
 199 
 
200 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 principle. The two are complementary, and are both 
 practiced by Nature : natural selection is one with nat- 
 ural rejection. To choose is to refuse. 
 
 In regard to positive eugenics I, for one, must 
 ever make the criticism that I cannot believe in the 
 propriety of attempting to bribe into parenthood peo- 
 ple who have no love of children: we have to con- 
 sider the parental environment of the children we 
 desire, as well as their innate quality. Thus, positive 
 eugenics must largely take the form, at present, of 
 removing such disabilities as now weigh upon the de- 
 sirable members of the community, especially of the 
 more prudent sort. 
 
 For instance, it was recently pointed out by a cor- 
 respondent of the Morning Post that in Great Britain, 
 despite the alarm caused by the decreasing marriage- 
 rate, no one has protested against 
 
 i 
 
 ". . . the tax which the propertied middle classes have to 
 pay on marriage. ... To take a few instances. Two per- 
 sons each having 160 a year marry. Previous to marriage they 
 were exempt from income tax ; after marriage they pay 6 per 
 annum. Two persons each having 400 a year pay 18 before 
 and 30 after marriage. Similarly the additional income tax 
 payable on marriage by people each having 600 a year is 9, by 
 those having 1,200 a year 30, and by those having 2,000 a 
 year 50. It is difficult to see how our legislators arrived at this 
 result unless they started to average the incomes of married 
 people and then forgot to divide by two. . . . If, as I con- 
 tend, a man and his wife should be counted as two people, not 
 one, should not children also be counted in any scheme of grad- 
 uated taxation, and an income be divided by the number of per- 
 sons it has to support in order to fix the rate at which the tax 
 is to be charged? It is ridiculous to suppose that a man with 
 a wife and six children is as well off on 1,000 a year as a 
 bachelor with the same income. It is, I believe, acknowledged 
 that the moderately well-off professional classes marry later and 
 
NEGATIVE EUGENICS 201 
 
 have fewer children than the wage-earners, and I think there 
 can be no doubt that the special burden they have to bear is 
 a material influence contributing to this result. Thus, while we 
 are deploring the decadence of the race, the State is doing what 
 it can to discourage marriage in a class whose children would in 
 all probability prove its most valued citizens." 
 
 But it is in negative eugenics that we can accom- 
 plish most at this stage, and in so doing can steadily 
 educate public opinion, the professional jesters not- 
 withstanding. There is here a field for action which 
 does not demand a great revolution in the popular 
 point of view ; and, further, does not require us to wait 
 for certainty until the facts and laws of heredity have 
 been much further elucidated. The services which a 
 conscious race-culture, thus directed, may even now 
 accomplish, can scarcely be over-estimated; and even 
 if we cannot reach the public heart at once we can 
 reach the public head by means of the public pocket 
 which will benefit obviously and greatly when these 
 proposals are carried out. As Thoreau observes, for 
 a thousand who are lopping off the branches of an 
 evil there is but one striking at its roots. If we 
 strike at the roots of certain grave and costly evils 
 of the present day, we shall abundantly demonstrate 
 that this is a matter of the most vital economy. 
 
 THE DEAF AND DUMB. We might begin with the 
 case of the deaf and dumb, since the facts here are ut- 
 terly beyond dispute. The condition known as deaf- 
 mutism is congenital or due to innate defect in about 
 one-half of all the cases in Great Britain. Says Dr. 
 Love, 1 "In every institution examples may be found 
 of deaf-mute children who have one or two deaf par- 
 
 1 Encyclopaedia Medico, vol. ii., Article "Deaf-Mutism." 
 
202 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 ents or grandparents, and of two or more deaf-mute 
 children belonging to one family." A recent report 
 from Japan is of a similar order, and the evidence 
 might be multiplied indefinitely. The obvious con- 
 clusion that the inherently deaf should not marry " is 
 generally conceded by those who work amongst the 
 deaf, but the present arrangements for the education 
 of the deaf, and their management in missions and in- 
 stitutes for the deaf during the period of adolescence, 
 is eminently fitted to encourage union between the con- 
 genitally deaf. If not during the school period, at least 
 during the period of adolescence, everything should be 
 done to discourage the association of the deaf and 
 dumb with each other, and the danger of their meet- 
 ing with those similarly afflicted should be constantly 
 kept before the congenitally deaf by those in charge 
 of them." Dr. Love quotes the following newspaper 
 report : " At an inquest yesterday, on Will Earnshaw, 
 59, a St. Pancras saddler, it was stated that the rela- 
 tives could not identify the body, as the wife and sister 
 were blind, deaf and dumb, and that the four Children 
 were deaf and dumb. The deceased was deaf and 
 dumb, and was so when he was married." 
 
 THE FEEBLE-MINDED. The case of the feeble- 
 minded is of course parallel. The problem would be 
 at once reduced to negligible proportions if all cases 
 of feeble-mindedness were dealt with as they should 
 be. These unfortunate people might lead quite happy 
 lives, the utmost be done for their feeble capacities, 
 the supreme demands of the law of love be completely 
 but providently complied with. The feeble-minded 
 girl might be protected from herself and from others 
 
NEGATIVE EUGENICS 203 
 
 her fate otherwise is often too deplorable for defini- 
 tion and the interests of the future be not compro- 
 mised. These two words were written whilst awaiting 
 the long overdue Report of the Royal Commission on 
 this subject which abundantly confirms them. The 
 proportion of the mentally defective in Great Britain 
 is now 0.83 per cent. : and it is doubtless rising yearly. 
 Only by the recognition and application of negative 
 eugenics can this evil be cured. I have elsewhere 1 
 discussed the supposed objection which will be raised 
 in the name of " liberty " by persons who think in 
 words instead of realities. The right care of the 
 feeble-minded involves the greatest happiness and lib- 
 erty and self -development possible for them. The in- 
 terests of the individual and the race are one. What 
 liberty has the feeble-minded prostitute, such as our 
 streets are filled with? 
 
 THE INSANE. As regards obvious insanity, the 
 same principles of negative eugenics must be enforced. 
 It is probably fair to say that the whole trend of mod- 
 ern research has been to accentuate the importance, if 
 not indeed the indispensableness, of the inherent or 
 inherited factor in the production of insanity. Yet, 
 on the other hand, the trend of treatment of the insane 
 has undoubtedly been towards permitting them more 
 liberty, sometimes of the kind which the principles of 
 race-culture must condemn. It is well, of course, that 
 we should be humane in our treatment of the insane. 
 It is well that curative medicine should do its utmost 
 for them, and it seems well, at first sight, that the pro- 
 
 1 In a lecture, " The Obstacles to Eugenics," delivered before 
 the Sociological Society, March 8, 1909. 
 
204 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 portion of discharges from asylums on the score of 
 recovery should be as high as it is. But at this point 
 the possibility of the gravest criticism evidently arises. 
 I have no intention whatever of exposing the question 
 of race-culture to legitimate criticism by laying down 
 dogmatically any doctrines as to the perpetual incar- 
 ceration of insane persons, including those who have 
 been, but are not now, insane. Pope was of course right 
 when he hinted at the nearness of the relation between 
 certain forms of genius and certain forms of insanity. 
 It may well be that if we could provide a fit environ- 
 ment we might welcome the children of some of those, 
 highly and perhaps uniquely gifted in brain, who, un- 
 der the stress of the ordinary environment of modern 
 life, have broken down for greater or longer periods. 
 On the other hand, there are forms of insanity which, 
 beyond all dispute, should utterly preclude their vic- 
 tims from parenthood. As a result of recent contro- 
 versies it seems on the whole probable, if not certain, 
 that the apparent persistent increases in the propor- 
 tion of the insane in civilized countries generally dur- 
 ing many years past, is a real increase, and not due 
 simply to such factors as more stringent certification 
 or increase of public confidence in lunatic asylums. 
 If, then, there be in process a real increase in the pro- 
 portion of the insane, who will question that no time 
 should be lost in ascertaining the extent un- 
 doubtedly most considerable to which the principles 
 of negative eugenics can be invoked in order to arrest 
 it? 
 
 As regards epilepsy and epileptic insanity there can 
 be no question. There is, of course, such a thing as 
 
NEGATIVE EUGENICS 205 
 
 acquired epilepsy, and we may even assume for the 
 sake of the argument that no inherent and therefore 
 transmissible factor of predisposition is involved in 
 such cases. Yet, wholly excluding them, there re- 
 mains the vast majority of cases in which epilepsy and 
 epileptic insanity are unquestionably germinal in or- 
 igin, and therefore transmissible. The principle of 
 negative eugenics cannot too soon be applied here. 
 
 THE CRIMINAL. When we come to consider the 
 question of crime the cautious and responsible eugenist 
 is bound to be wary chiefly, perhaps, because such 
 a vast amount of sheer nonsense has been written on 
 this subject. The whole question, of course, is the 
 old one, is it heredity or environment that produces 
 the criminal? If and when it is the environment, 
 race-culture has nothing to do with the question, since 
 the merely acquired criminality is, as we know, not in 
 any degree transmissible. If the criminal, however, 
 is always or ever a " born criminal," then the eugenist 
 is intimately concerned. At the one extreme are those 
 who will tell us that the idea of crime is a purely con- 
 ventional one, that the criminal is the product of cir- 
 cumstances or environment, and that we, in his case, 
 would have done likewise. The remedy for crime, 
 then, is education. It is pointed out, however, that 
 education merely modifies the variety of crime. There 
 is less murder but more swindling, and so forth. 
 Then, on the other hand, there are those who declare 
 that criminality is innate, and that if we are to make 
 an end of crime we must attach surgeons to our gaols ; 
 or at any rate must extend the principle of the life- 
 sentence. 
 
206 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 Doubtless, the truth lies between these two extremes. 
 In the face of the work of Lombroso and his school, 
 exaggerated though their conclusions often be, we can- 
 not dispute the existence of the born criminal, and the 
 criminal type. There are undoubtedly many such 
 persons in modern society. There is an abundance of 
 crime which no education, practiced or imaginable, 
 would eliminate. Present day psychology and medi- 
 cine, and, for the matter of that, ordinary common- 
 sense, can readily distinguish cases at both extremes 
 - the mattoid or semi-insane criminal at one end, and 
 the decent citizen who yields to exceptional temptation 
 at the other end. Thus even though there remain a 
 vast number of cases where our knowledge is insuffi- 
 cient, we could accomplish great things already if the 
 born criminal, the habitual criminal and his like were 
 rationally treated by society, on the lines of the re- 
 formatory, the labor colony, indeterminate sentences, 
 and such other methods as aim, successfully or un- 
 successfully, at the reform of the individual, whilst 
 incidentally protecting the race. Here, as in some 
 other cases, the nature of the environment provided 
 for their children by certain sections of the community 
 may be taken into account when we decide whether 
 they are to be prohibited from parenthood. Hered- 
 ity or no heredity, we cannot desire to have children 
 born into the alcoholic home ; heredity or no heredity, 
 we cannot desire to have children born into the crim- 
 inal environment. In Great Britain we are no longer 
 to manufacture criminals in hundreds by sending chil- 
 dren to prison. It remains to be seen, after the practi- 
 cal disappearance of the made criminal, what proper- 
 
NEGATIVE EUGENICS 207 
 
 tion of crime is really due to the born criminal. He, 
 when found, must certainly be dealt with on the lines 
 indicated by our principles. 1 
 
 So far we have considered exclusively diseases and 
 disorders of the brain, the question of alcoholism be- 
 ing deferred to a special chapter. When we come to 
 other forms of defect or disease we find a long grad- 
 uation of instances: at the one extreme being cases 
 where the fact of disastrous inheritance is palpable and 
 inevitable, whilst at the other extreme are kinds of 
 disease and defect as to which the share of heredity is 
 still very uncertain. In some instances, then, the eu- 
 genist is bound to lay down the most emphatic proposi- 
 tions as, for instance, that parenthood on the part of 
 men suffering from certain diseases is and should and 
 must be regarded and treated as a crime of the most 
 heinous order : whilst in other instances all we can say 
 is that here is a direction in which more knowledge is 
 needed. 
 
 Some particular cases may be referred to. 
 
 The diseases known as Daltonism or color-blindness, 
 and haemophilia or the " bleeding disease/' are cer- 
 tainly hereditary. The sufferers are usually male, but 
 the disease is commonly transmitted by their daugh- 
 ters (who do not themselves suffer) to their male de- 
 scendants. As regards color-blindness, the defect is 
 evidently insufficient to concern the eugenist, but 
 haemophilia is a serious disease the transmission of 
 
 1 Since these words were written there has been passed the 
 "Prevention of Crimes Act," which is the first attempt in this 
 country to apply the elementary truths of the subject in legis- 
 lation. As an essentially eugenic proposal it is to be heartily wel- 
 comed. 
 
208 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 which should not be excused. It may seem hard to 
 assert that the daughter of a haemophilic father should 
 not become a mother, she herself being free from all 
 disease. But it has to be remembered that the possi- 
 bility of this hardship depends upon the fact that a 
 haemophilic man has become a father, as he should 
 not have done. 
 
 This point, as to the amount of hardship involved 
 in the observance of negative race-culture, has always 
 to be kept in mind. If negative eugenics were gener- 
 ally enforced upon a given generation some persons 
 would, of course, suffer in greater or less degree from 
 the disabilities imposed upon them. But their number 
 would depend upon the neglect of eugenics by previous 
 generations, and thereafter the number of those upon 
 whom our principles pressed hardly would be relatively 
 minute. 
 
 EUGENICS AND TUBERCULOSIS. It would not be 
 correct to say that the old view of consumption re- 
 garded it as hereditary. In this and a hundred other 
 matters, medical, astronomical, or what we please, if 
 we go back to the Arabic students, or further, to the 
 Greeks, we are lucky enough to find sound observa- 
 tion and reasoning. Many quotations might be made 
 to show that the infectious nature of tuberculosis was 
 recognized long ago, just as the revolution of the earth 
 around the sun was recognized a millenium and a half 
 before Copernicus. But the view of our more im- 
 mediate fathers was that tuberculosis is a hereditary 
 degeneration, and the medical profession proclaimed 
 with no uncertain sound the hopeless and paralyzing 
 doctrine that an almost certain doom hung over the 
 
NEGATIVE EUGENICS 209 
 
 children of the consumptive. Then, in memorable 
 succession, came Villemin, Pasteur, and lastly Koch, 
 with his discovery of the bacillus in 1882. The doc- 
 trine was then altered in its statement. There was, of 
 course, no choice in the matter, since it was easy to 
 show that not one new-born baby in millions harbors 
 a tubercle bacillus; so all-but-miraculous and, rightly 
 considered, beautiful are the ante-natal defenses. It 
 was taught, then, that we inherit a predisposition from 
 consumptive parents, that the bacillus is ubiquitous, 
 and that variations in susceptibility determine the inci- 
 dence of the disease in one and not in another. It was 
 lightly assumed (simply through what may be called 
 the inertia of belief) that these variations in suscepti- 
 bility were hereditary; but we are wholly without evi- 
 dence that the hereditary factor counts for anything 
 substantial, even assuming that it appreciably exists 
 at all. These differences, so far from being inherent, 
 may be most palpably acquired. Under- feeding, alcohol, 
 and influenza, let us say, will adequately prepare any 
 human soul. Furthermore, we are learning that the 
 bacillus is nothing like so ubiquitous as used to be sup- 
 posed. Tuberculosis is now sometimes described as 
 a dwelling disease. It might probably be described 
 with still more accuracy as a bed-room disease, or a 
 bed-room and public-house disease. It has been evi- 
 dent for many years past that the more we learned 
 about tuberculosis the less did we talk about heredity ; 
 and in one of the most recent authoritative pronounce- 
 ments * upon the subject, the lecturer did not even al- 
 lude to heredity at all. Many readers will be up in 
 
 1 Dr. Bulstrode's Lecture to the Royal Institution, May 15, 1908. 
 
2io PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 arms at once with apparently contrary instances; and 
 much labor may be spent in the mathematical analysis 
 of statistical data as that of cases where a father 
 and a child have tuberculosis. But suppose the fa- 
 ther kissed the child ? What have you proved regard- 
 ing heredity? No mathematics can get more out of 
 the data than is in them. 
 
 The statistics designed to measure the degree of in- 
 heritance in this disease labor under the cardinal fal- 
 lacy of assuming that where father and son suffer, the 
 case is one of inheritance, and then proceed to measure 
 the average extent of his inheritance. These statis- 
 tics are so much waste paper and ink assuming 
 what they claim to prove. They do not allow for the 
 fact that the child is very frequently exposed in grave 
 measure to infection by the parent ; they ignore wholly, 
 indeed, the entire question of exposure to infection, 
 both as regards its extent in time and the virulence of 
 the infection in question. At the present day, discus- 
 sions as to the inheritance of consumption and tuber- 
 culosis in general are not fit for practical application : 
 and a practical disservice is rendered by those who 
 seek to divert public attention from the removable en- 
 vironmental causes upon which the disease mainly de- 
 pends. We know, for instance, that the incidence of 
 tuberculosis is directly proportional to over-crowding: 
 this being universally true, we must work to abolish 
 over-crowding and to provide fresh air for every one 
 by day and by night. When that is done, alcoholism 
 disposed of, and our milk-supply purified, we may turn 
 to the question of heredity: but the incidence of the 
 
NEGATIVE EUGENICS 211 
 
 i 
 
 disease will then present merely trivial instead of the 
 present appalling proportions. 
 
 It is not asserted that inherent variations in suscepti- 
 bility to this disease are not existent. The case would 
 be unique if it were so. But it is asserted that the 
 more we learn of the disease the less importance we at- 
 tach to this factor, and the more surely do we see that 
 the three syllables constituting the word " infection " 
 substantially suffice to dispose of all the confident dog- 
 mas with which we are too familiar. One is almost 
 tempted to quote a forcible phrase of Mill's, and say 
 that, given this point of view, " once questioned, they 
 are doomed." The only method of accurately study- 
 ing the question of inherited predisposition would be 
 by comparative study of the resistance of new-born 
 infants as measured by their " opsonic index " which 
 may be (very roughly) described as the measur-e of 
 the power of the white cells of the blood to eat up 
 tubercle bacilli. 1 Nor will even this method be free 
 from fallacy. 
 
 The present writer believes that eugenics is going 
 to save the world ; that there is no study of such urgent 
 and practical importance as that of heredity; that if 
 we get the right people born and the wrong people 
 not born, forms of government and such questions will 
 be left even without fools to contest regarding them. 
 Thus he has every bias in favor of emphasizing the 
 hereditary factor in tuberculosis. The fact will at 
 least not discredit the foregoing views, which are in 
 
 1 This suggestion, first made by the present writer in March, 
 1908, and in the paper referred to is, I believe, to be the subject 
 of an official inquiry. 
 
212 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 absolute accord with those of Dr. Newsholme, our 
 leading authority, in his recent work upon the sub- 
 ject. Nothing need here be said about cancer, the best 
 and most recent evidence tending to show that the 
 disease is not hereditary. 
 
 The foregoing may briefly suffice to illustrate the 
 general proposition that negative eugenics will seek 
 to define the diseases and defects which are really he- 
 reditary, to name those the transmission of which is 
 already certainly known to occur, and to raise the 
 average of the race by interfering as far as may be 
 with the parenthood of persons suffering from these 
 transmissible disorders. Only thus can certain of the 
 gravest evils of society, as, for instance, feeble-minded- 
 ness, insanity, and crime due to inherited degeneracy, 
 be suppressed : and if race-culture were absolutely in- 
 capable of effecting anything whatever in the way of 
 increasing the fertility of the worthiest classes and 
 individuals, its services in the negative direction here 
 briefly outlined would still be of incalculable value, 
 No other proposal will save so much life, present and 
 to come; and save so much gold in doing so, as one 
 would insist if one were writing a Eugenic Primer 
 for Politicians. To this policy we shall most certainly 
 come : but here, as in other cases, I trust far more in the 
 influence of an educated public opinion than in legisla- 
 tion; though there are certain forms of transmissible 
 disease, interfering in no way with the responsibility of 
 the individual, the transmission of which should be 
 visited with the utmost rigor of the law and regarded 
 as utterly criminal no less than sheer murder. 
 
CHAPTER XII 
 SELECTION THROUGH MARRIAGE 
 
 HISTORICAL EVIDENCE OF CONTROL OF MARRIAGE: 
 WESTERMARCK'S EVIDENCE. To begin with the most 
 recent refutation of the doctrine that marriage se- 
 lection is uncontrollable, one may quote from the in- 
 augural lecture delivered by Dr. Westermarck in De- 
 cember, 1907, on his appointment as Professor of 
 Sociology in the University of London. He said: 
 
 " For instance, when the suggestion has been made that the 
 law should step in and prevent unfit individuals from contracting 
 marriage, the objection has at once been raised that any such 
 measure would be impracticable. Now we find that many sav- 
 ages have tried the experiment and succeeded. Mr. Im Thurn 
 tells us that among the wild Indians of Guiana, a man, before he 
 is allowed to choose a wife, must prove that he can do a man's 
 work and is able to support himself and his family. In various 
 Bechuana and Kaffir tribes, according to Livingstone, a youth 
 is prohibited from marrying until he has killed a rhinoceros. 
 Among the Dyaks of Borneo no one can marry until he has in 
 his possession a certain number of human skulls. Among the 
 Arabs of Upper Egypt a man must undergo an ordeal of whip- 
 ping by the relatives of his bride, in order to test his courage; 
 and if he wishes to be considered worth having, he must receive 
 the chastisement, which is sometimes exceedingly severe, with an 
 expression of enjoyment. 
 
 " I do not say that these particular methods are worthy of 
 slavish imitation, but the principle underlying them is certainly 
 excellent, and especially the fact that they are recognized and 
 enforced by custom shows that it has been quite possible among 
 many people to prohibit certain unfit individuals from marrying. 
 
 213 
 
214 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 The question naturally arises whether, after all, something of the 
 same kind may not be possible among ourselves." 
 
 MR. GALTON'S EVIDENCE. But Mr. Galton him- 
 self, with his characteristic thoroughness, and in full 
 recognition of the fact that this young science must 
 meet ignorant as well as other objections, read before 
 the Sociological Society * a paper entitled " Restric- 
 tions in Marriage/' with special reference to the ob- 
 jection " that human nature would never brook inter- 
 ference with the freedom of marriage. . . . How 
 far have marriage restrictions proved effective, when 
 sanctified by the religion of the time, by custom and 
 by law? I appeal from armchair criticism to histor- 
 ical facts." Mr. Galton then proceeds to quote seven 
 forms of restriction in marriage which have actually 
 been practiced monogamy, endogamy, exogamy, 
 Australian marriages, taboo, prohibited degrees and 
 celibacy. He shows how powerful under each of these 
 heads is the influence of " immaterial motives " upon 
 marriage selection, how they may all become hallowed 
 by religion, accepted as custom and enforced by law. 
 " Persons who are born under their various rules, 
 live under them without any objection. They are 
 unconscious of their restrictions as we are unaware of 
 the tension of the atmosphere." In many cases the 
 establishment of monogamy and the prohibition of 
 polygamy " has been due not to any natural instinct 
 against the practice, but to consideration of social 
 well-being." It was penal for a Greek to marry a 
 barbarian, for a Roman patrician to marry a plebeian, 
 for a Hindoo of one caste to marry one of another 
 
 1 Sociological Papers (Macmillan, 1905), p. 3. 
 
SELECTION THROUGH MARRIAGE 215 
 
 caste, and so forth. Similar restrictions have been 
 enforced in multitudes of communities, even under 
 the penalty of death." Cases from ancient Jewish 
 law are quoted, and, to take a very different case, 
 that of the marriage rule amongst the Australian bush- 
 men, it is shown that " the cogency of this rule is 
 due to custom, religion and law, and is so strong that 
 nearly all Australians would be horrified at the idea of 
 breaking it." Passing further on, one need offer no 
 excuse for quoting, regarding marriage in general, 
 the following words of the founder of eugenics: 
 " The institution of marriage as now sanctified by re- 
 ligion and safeguarded by law in the more highly 
 civilized nations, may not be ideally perfect, nor may 
 it be universally accepted in future times, but it is the 
 best that has hitherto been devised for the parties pri- 
 marily concerned, for their children, for home life, 
 and for society" 
 
 Mr. Galton then proceeds to show how extensive 
 are the restrictions in marriage already recognized and 
 practiced amongst ourselves and quite contentedly 
 accepted. He proves also that our objection to mar- 
 riage within prohibited degrees depends mainly upon 
 what he calls immaterial considerations, and adds " it 
 is quite conceivable that a non-eugenic marriage should 
 hereafter excite no less loathing than that of a brother 
 and sister would do now." Then, in allusion to the 
 possibility " of a whole-hearted acceptance of eugenics 
 as a national religion . . . the thorough convic- 
 tion by a nation that no worthier object exists for 
 man than the improvement of his own race," Mr. 
 Galton shows from the history of conventual life what 
 
2i6 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 abundant evidence there is " of the power of re- 
 ligious authority in directing and withstanding the 
 tendencies of human nature towards freedom in mar- 
 riage." This paper was discussed by no less than 
 twenty-six authorities, British and Continental, and 
 in his reply Mr. Gal ton observes that not one of them 
 impugns his main conclusion " that history tells how 
 restrictions in marriage, even of an excessive kind, 
 have been contentedly accepted very widely, under the 
 guidance of what I called immaterial motives." 
 Lastly, we may quote Mr. Galton's admirable distinc- 
 tion between the two stages of love, " that of slight 
 inclination and that of falling thoroughly into love, 
 for it is the first of these rather than the second that 
 I hope the popular feeling of the future will success- 
 fully resist. Every match-making mother appre- 
 ciates the difference. If a girl is taught to look upon 
 a class of men as tabooed, whether owing to rank, 
 creed, connections or other causes, she does not re- 
 gard them as possible husbands and turns her thoughts 
 elsewhere. The proverbial ' Mrs. Grundy ' has enor- 
 mous influence in checking marriages she considers 
 indiscreet." 
 
 Surely all the foregoing sufficies to show, first, 
 that eugenics or race-culture is compatible with marri- 
 age, and secondly, that it is compatible with the love of 
 the sexes two conclusions of the most cardinal and 
 fundamental importance. This importance it is, and 
 the obstinate stupidity of critics of a kind, which must 
 excuse me for having devoted so much space to 
 propositions which the thoughtful reader would nat- 
 urally have arrived at for himself. 
 
SELECTION THROUGH MARRIAGE 217 
 
 THE PRESENT INFLUENCE OF MARRIAGE ON RACE- 
 CULTURE. We must turn now from the past to the 
 present aspect of the question, viz., the actual relation 
 of marriage to eugenics at the present day. Its nature 
 is very much disputed. On the one hand, there are 
 those who see in our present methods what Jias else- 
 where been called reversed selection that is to say, 
 an anti-eugenic process, involving the mating of the 
 least desirable. On the other hand, there are many 
 conservative critics who, starting from a general op- 
 position to any new thing, such as eugenics, maintain 
 that we are doing very well as we are, and that, with- 
 out any conscious interference, as they call it as if 
 there were no such interference selection by mar- 
 riage is actually working for .the eugenic end. Dr. 
 Maudsley, for instance, is " not sure but that nature 
 in its own blind impulsive way does not manage things 
 better than we can by any light of reason: " an 
 astounding opinion from the veteran pioneer who 
 has devoted so many decades to successfully modify- 
 ing natural processes by the light of his own splendid 
 reason ! 
 
 This most important question, as to what is actually 
 happening within the limits of marriage, may legit- 
 imately be regarded as substantially equivalent to the 
 question of the extent and nature of selection, for good 
 or for evil, as it occurs in society to-day. If we re- 
 member that an overwhelming proportion of children 
 are born in wedlock, that the death-rate of illegitimate 
 children is gigantic, whilst the illegitimate birth-rate 
 is generally falling, we shall be fully entitled to as- 
 sume that the answer to the one question is the an- 
 
218 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 swer to the other; in a word, if under the present 
 conditions of selection for marriage we find a eugenic 
 tendency or an anti-eugenic tendency or a mere neu- 
 trality, the answer will be, on the whole, the approx- 
 imate answer to the larger question as to the present 
 state of selection for parenthood and therefore of our 
 racial prospects, marriage or no marriage. The con- 
 clusion which we shall maintain is that both forms of 
 selection occur in society to-day the selection of the 
 desirable and the selection of the undesirable. We 
 shall go ludicrously wrong if we agree, with one party, 
 that society in general to-day exhibits reversed selec- 
 tion; or, with the second party, that everything is go- 
 ing on admirably on the whole; or with the third 
 party, which jumbles the whole mass of facts and 
 tendencies, and declares that there is no process of 
 selection of any kind occurring in society to-day 
 an opinion which, in the face of disease, the enormous 
 premature death-rate, and the fact that whilst vast 
 numbers of women are unmarried, the choice of 
 women for marriage does not occur by lot, beggars 
 comment; is a girl with a birth-mark covering half 
 her face, or a nose destroyed by transmissible disease, 
 as likely to marry as a " beauty " ? If not, surely 
 we are actually selected to-day for beauty and therefore 
 for whatever beauty depends upon for instance, 
 health. But really it cannot be necessary to deal se- 
 riously with the proposition that no selection occurs in 
 society to-day. 
 
 Let us attempt to state clearly the point at issue. 
 There is granted, in the first place, that by far the 
 greater part of all parenthood, in civilized and unciv- 
 
 I 
 
SELECTION THROUGH MARRIAGE 219 
 
 ilized communities alike, occurs within the limits of 
 marriage; to which may be added that, owing to the 
 excessive death-rate of illegitimate children, the pro- 
 portion of effective parenthood, so to say, that occurs 
 within the limits of marriage is even larger; and this 
 intervention of marriage, and any selection that may 
 be involved in it, steadily recur from generation to 
 generation. Thus even those born outside wedlock 
 will nevertheless be selected for parenthood, on their 
 own part, mainly by the selective factors in marriage. 
 SELECTION BY MARRIAGE HAS THE LAST WORD. 
 It follows, then, though the fact is almost constantly 
 ignored by eugenic writers, that selection by marriage 
 in effect has the last word. Thus supposing that all 
 other forms of selection, depending upon, for instance, 
 the various causes of death amongst the immature, 
 were what we call reversed selection; or supposing 
 that, as is actually the case, society permitted large 
 numbers of so-called unfit to survive, even so, 
 marriage selection (if it meant that many or most 
 of these were rejected by it) would control and correct 
 the dangerous tendency. On all hands, scientific and 
 unscientific, we have writers telling us of the disas- 
 trous multiplication of the unfit. Such multiplication 
 does occur and is disastrous. Yet hitherto they have 
 failed to recognize that if to take an extreme case 
 all these unfit are rejected by marriage selection 
 - that is to say, do not themselves become parents 
 this alarming multiplication is, after all, not a persist- 
 ent factor in racial change, but merely the throwing 
 up or throwing aside in each generation of a certain 
 number of undesirables whose breed gets no further. 
 
220 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 Of course there would be much less urgent need for 
 eugenics if this last were wholly and happily the case. 
 Our object, indeed, is to make it the case: but so 
 long as selection by marriage exists and its occur- 
 rence is palpably indisputable it is a serious Haw In 
 the common argument to assume that the production 
 and preservation of undesirables necessarily involves 
 their own parenthood in due course. It is neces- 
 sary that strict statistical inquiry be made on 
 this point. It would show, I believe, that the 
 marriage-rate and the birth-rate amongst the grossly 
 unfit is much lower than that of the general commun- 
 ity, or, in other words, that the influence and value 
 of selection by marriage (which, as we have shown, 
 is in effect selection for parenthood, the only selection 
 that ultimately matters) has not yet been fully ap- 
 preciated. I very strongly incline to the view that 
 if this protective factor were not constantly at work, 
 the " multiplication of the unfit " would long ago have 
 led to the destruction of every civilized nation on the 
 earth: they would have swamped us long ago. In- 
 deed, the proposition may be laid down that, supreme 
 and indispensable as are the services of marriage to 
 race-culture, in its protection of motherhood, and the 
 support of motherhood by fatherhood, probably the 
 services of marriage as in effect the working of sexual 
 selection, are worthy of being rated almost, if not 
 quite, as high. 
 
 SEXUAL SELECTION is CERTAINLY TRUE OF MAN- 
 KIND. Before adducing the outlines of the evidence 
 in favor of marriage as an instrument of selection, it 
 may be well to point out that here we are really dis- 
 
SELECTION THROUGH MARRIAGE 221 
 
 cussing what Darwin called " sexual selection/' mod- 
 ified by the psychology and peculiar characters of 
 mankind. We must protect ourselves from the critics 
 who will remind us that sexual selection is very largely 
 discredited to-day, rather more than a generation 
 after Darwin's enunciation of it in The Descent of 
 Man (1871). The controversy regarding sexual 
 selection as the producer of feathers and markings 
 and song, and so forth, amongst the lower animals, is 
 fortunately quite irrelevant to our present discussion, 
 which is concerned with mankind. We can afford to 
 note with equanimity the observation that, in lower 
 species, no mature female goes unmated, for instance ; 
 the fact remains that in the case of mankind a very 
 considerable percentage of women remain unmarried. 
 The case is similar as regards the male sex. In short, 
 one may declare that, whether or not sexual selection 
 is possible, or occurs, or accomplishes anything, in the 
 case of lower animals, it palpably and patently is pos- 
 sible, and does occur, amongst mankind, and espe- 
 cially amongst civilized peoples, in the form of selection 
 by or for marriage which, as we have seen, is in 
 effect selection for parenthood. Let us first note the 
 statistical evidence regarding marriage-selection of 
 health and energy. 
 
 SPENCER ON MARITAL LONGEVITY. We are all 
 aware that married people live longer, on the average, 
 than unmarried people, the conclusion being, " of 
 course," that marriage is good for the health. But 
 some are taken and others left in this respect, and if, 
 for any conceivable reason, health is a factor making 
 for selection by marriage, that may be a real expla- 
 
 i 
 
222 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 nation, in whole or in part, of the longer life of mar- 
 ried people. Considering the risks to life involved 
 in motherhood, the superior longevity of married as 
 compared with unmarried women would be incompre- 
 hensible except on some such assumption. Yet it is 
 the fact, so imperfect still is the entry of the idea of 
 selection into the popular and even the expert mind, 
 that the superior longevity of married people is still 
 constantly asserted to mean that marriage makes for 
 long life; every year, when the statistics are printed, 
 this argument may be seen in the newspapers, and I 
 remember encountering it in the Encyclopedia Bri- 
 tannica, to my utter astonishment. This uncritical 
 conclusion was disposed of by the author of the phrase 
 "the survival of the fittest" appropriately enough 
 more than thirty years ago. If the reader will 
 turn to Herbert Spencer's Study of Sociology (a mas- 
 terpiece which may be commended to the publishers 
 for the purpose of indexing twenty editions without 
 an index are too many) he will find in Chapter V. a 
 discussion of this question. It is an astonishing thing 
 that though Spencer conclusively exposed it a gener- 
 ation ago, the childish fallacy is still apparently as 
 flourishing as ever. He shows how the greater 
 healthfulness of married life was supposed to be proved 
 by Dr. Stark from comparison of the rates of mortal- 
 ity among the married and among the celibate. Then 
 no less an authority than M. Bertillon went into the 
 matter and contributed a paper called " The Influence 
 of Marriage" thus begging the question in its 
 very title to the Brussels Academy of Medicine. 
 He showed that, from twenty-five to thirty years of 
 
SELECTION THROUGH MARRIAGE 223 
 
 age, several continental countries being taken into 
 the reckoning. " The mortality per thousand is 4 in 
 married men, 10.4 in bachelors, and 22 in widows. 
 This beneficial influence of marriage is manifested at 
 all ages, being always more strongly marked in men 
 than in women." The absurdity of the apparent con- 
 clusion regarding widows is surely, as Spencer says, 
 too obvious for discussion. But, for the rest, Spencer 
 goes on to show that, in reality, "marriage and 
 longevity are concomitant results of the same cause " 
 -in other words, "that superior quality of organ- 
 ization which conduces to long life also conduces to 
 marriage. It is normally accompanied by a predom- 
 inance of the instincts and emotions prompting marri- 
 age ; there goes along with it that power l which can 
 secure the means of making marriage practicable ; and 
 it increases the probability of success in courtship." 
 Spencer shows how " of men whose marriages depend 
 upon getting the needful income" those who will 
 succeed are in general " the best, physically and men- 
 tally the strong, the intellectually capable, the 
 morally well-balanced." He shows also how " women 
 are attracted towards men of power physical, emo- 
 tional, intellectual; and obviously their freedom of 
 choice leads them, in many cases, to refuse inferior 
 samples of men; especially the mal- formed, the dis- 
 eased, and those who are ill-developed, physically and 
 mentally. So that, in so far as marriage is determined 
 by female selection, the average result on men is that 
 
 1 " In any scheme of eugenics, energy is the most important 
 quality to favor ; it is, as we have seen, the basis of every action, 
 and it is eminently transmissible by descent." GALTON. 
 
224 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 while the best easily get wives, a certain proportion of 
 the worst are left without wives/' 
 
 Very likely the stupid conclusion into which so many 
 distinguished men have been betrayed will survive 
 for many years yet amongst less distinguished people, 
 but at any rate we may free our minds from it here, 
 and may recognize in the figures to which I have re- 
 ferred, and which are of the same order to-day, the 
 statistical proof of what any observer, however casual, 
 might have inferred from what he sees even amongst 
 his own friends only that marriage is, as it probably 
 always has been, a selective agent of much value in 
 preserving and augmenting the desirable inherent 
 qualities of the race. It is, of course, the object of 
 race-culture or eugenics to strengthen the hands of 
 marriage in this respect to the utmost possible degree. 
 WOMAN AS PRACTICAL EUGENIST. We must espe- 
 cially note one most important matter, radically affect- 
 ing race-culture, which is referred to by Herbert 
 Spencer in the passage cited, and has been greatly in- 
 sisted upon by Dr. Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-dis- 
 coverer with Darwin of the principle of natural selec- 
 tion. The matter in question is the possibliity of race- 
 | culture through the choice of their husbands by women. 
 Not long ago Dr. Wallace 1 described selection 
 through marriage as the " more permanently effective 
 agency through which the improvement of human 
 character may be achieved." This, in his opinion, can 
 only be perfectly achieved " when a greatly improved 
 social system renders all our women economically and 
 socially free to choose; while a rational and complete 
 
 1 Fortnightly Review, January, 1908. 
 
SELECTION THROUGH MARRIAGE 225 
 
 education will have taught them the importance of 
 their choice both to themselves and to humanity. It 
 will act through the agency of well-known facts and 
 principles of human nature, leading to a continuous 
 reduction of the lower types in each successive gener- 
 ation, and it is the only mode yet suggested which will 
 automatically and naturally effect this." Thus " for 
 the first time in the history of mankind his Character 
 his very Human Nature itself will be improved 
 by the slow but certain action of a pure and beautiful 
 form of selection a selection which will act, not 
 through struggle and death, but through brotherhood 
 and love." 
 
 Dr. Wallace is a socialist, and he believes that only 
 through socialism can we achieve " that perfect free- 
 dom of choice in marriage which will only be possible 
 when all are economically equal, and no ques- 
 tion of social rank or material advantage can have the 
 slightest influence in determining that choice." As I 
 have said elsewhere, I would call myself neither a 
 socialist nor an anti-socialist, but if the labels are 
 necessary, a eugenist and maternalist. As such, I 
 can only say that this argument for socialism that it 
 is the necessary condition of eugenics or race-culture 
 - is, for me, incomparably the best argument for that 
 creed ; and if it were proved that only through social- 
 ism could the utmost be made of women's choice of 
 husbands, then no other argument against socialism 
 could have any appreciable weight at all. The funda- 
 mental and permanent argument against certain of the 
 highly various and incompatible doctrines which, for 
 our confusion, are commonly lumped together as so- 
 
226 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 cialism, is that they would arrest the process by which 
 Nature rewards worth and permits it to perpetuate 
 itself. If, then, it can be shown, as may or may not 
 be the case, that only through socialism can male worth 
 be most effectively chosen and male unworth be re- 
 jected for fatherhood, the supreme that is, the 
 eugenic argument against socialism becomes the 
 conclusive argument in its favor. 
 
 THE FIELD OF CHOICE. But, however this may be, 
 there can be no question that the eugenic purpose, as 
 well as the happiness and elevation of individuals in 
 the present, will be greatly served by whatever meas- 
 ures increase, to the utmost extent possible, the op- 
 portunities for choice in marriage afforded to women 
 and also to men. One of the most amazing and satis- 
 factory facts about marriage as at present practiced is, 
 I think, the large proportion often estimated at sev- 
 enty-five per cent. of unions which, apart from any 
 eugenic question, turn out happily, in Great Britain, at 
 any rate. What makes this fact more amazing is the 
 almost incredible limitation of the field of choice 
 within which both sexes are still confined as a whole. 
 If the reader will consider the cases most familiar to 
 him or her, it will surely be admitted that the consid- 
 erable success of marriage takes on an astonishing 
 aspect when the present strait conditions of choice are 
 taken into account. I am convinced that few more 
 radical and far-reaching, because eugenic, reforms can 
 be conceived than any which, in accordance with Dr. 
 Wallace's argument, tend to widen the field of choice, 
 and that not for one sex only but for both. He would 
 be a rash man who ventured to allot superior value to 
 
SELECTION THROUGH MARRIAGE 227 
 
 the selection of a man by woman rather than of woman 
 by man, or vice versa. Quite apart from any deeper 
 and more difficult reforms, such as Dr. Wallace alludes 
 to, I am sure that even the mere widening of the field 
 of choice, as such, is the most desirable. To take 
 an instance, which the reader may very likely think 
 trivial and absurd, I have witnessed in my brief career 
 as a hockey player, two unions most happy and eu- 
 genic in every way, which entirely depended upon 
 the existence of the amusement called mixed hockey 
 whereat the contracting parties met one another ! It is 
 not asserted that these two cases suffice for world-wide 
 generalization. They are merely cited as instances 
 which set at least one hockey player thinking, even 
 on the field the field of choice. It is a great argu- 
 ment, because it is a eugenic argument, in favor of com- 
 munity of sports and amusements amongst young peo- 
 ple of, both sexes, that it does widen the field of choice 
 in marriage, and that in doing so it also tends to favor 
 those factors of selection which the eugenist would de- 
 sire to see selected: and this especially as compared 
 with the ball-room. I think that the reader will agree 
 that the conditions, the " atmosphere," the costume, and 
 the other features of what young people call a 
 " dance," whilst undoubtedly serving the purpose of 
 marriage and widening somewhat a field of choice 
 which might otherwise be ludicrously and impractic- 
 ably restricted, compare most unfavorably with the con- 
 ditions of even the mixed hockey field, which, decried 
 though they often be, are to my mind immeasurably 
 healthier on every conceivable ground than those of 
 the ball-room, and not least of all on the eugenic 
 
228 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 ground of the prominence gained by most desirable 
 qualities, of which mere strength and energy and 
 neuro-muscular skill are quite the least, whilst unsel- 
 fishness, capacity for self-control, patience, real gal- 
 lantry as when a male " full-back " refrains from 
 hitting the ball with all his might against the toes of a 
 girl " forward " the sporting spirit and other true 
 and radical virtues, are the greatest. It is undoubtedly 
 the case that the personal factors, physical and psych- 
 ical which determine the mutual attraction of young 
 people, have dependent upon them the whole of human 
 destiny. In society to-day, what one may call the 
 incidence of parenthood, upon which all the future 
 necessarily depends, is determined by nothing other 
 than the humanized form of what Darwin called " sex- 
 ual selection." Therefore it is not trivial but su- 
 premely important to discuss the conditions under 
 which the selection obtains. 1 
 
 It has already been suggested that in order to en- 
 hance the eugenic value of marriage we should en- 
 deavor to widen the field of choice, at present ludi- 
 crously restricted by custom, class, religion, economic 
 position, and so forth. The increased locomotion of 
 to-day will be of real eugenic service to the race in 
 this respect, I believe. 
 
 Then it has been hinted that young people should 
 meet one another under conditions which make prom- 
 
 1 " As the German philosopher Schopenhauer remarks, the final 
 aim of all love intrigues, be they comic or tragic, is really of 
 more importance than all other ends in human life. What it 
 all turns upon is nothing less than the composition of the next 
 generation. . . . It is not the weal or woe of any one 
 individual, but that of the human race to come, which is at 
 stake." DARWIN, Descent of Man, p. 893. 
 
SELECTION THROUGH MARRIAGE 229 
 
 inent the psychical and put the merely physical or ani- 
 mal into the background e.g. on the hockey field or 
 the ice (or in the " literary circle ") rather than in the 
 ball-room. This proposition accords, of course, with 
 what has been said elsewhere as to that great factor of 
 progress which I define as the enhancement of the sur- 
 vival-value of the psychical as against that of the phys- 
 ical. (Note the obvious sequence survival-value, 
 selection-value, marriage-value, parenthood-value, 
 progress- value.) This proposition and the last might 
 both be worked out, I believe, in considerable detail 
 and not without profit. 
 
 Arguing on the same lines, we may agree that even 
 such a small matter, usually considered wholly domes- 
 tic, as the length of engagements, is of eugenic or 
 racial importance. The eugenist, I think, must wel- 
 come long engagements simply because, though they 
 may involve a reduced marriage-rate and a reduced 
 birth-rate the latter partly in consequence of the 
 reduced marriage-rate, and partly because of the later 
 age at marriage they tend by the mere operation 
 of time, as we say, to enhance the importance of the 
 psychical and to reduce the importance of the physical 
 factors which determine sexual attraction. 
 
 To these three points a fourth, of great importance, 
 must be added. It is that we should favor, as far as 
 possible, those factors of choice for marriage which 
 are inherent, and therefore transmissible, as against 
 those which are acquired, accidental, and therefore 
 not transmissible, and therefore of no racial or eugenic 
 importance. This, of course, is the point made by 
 Dr. Wallace in the article quoted above or at any 
 
230 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 rate it is involved in the point he makes. I simply 
 mean that every time a marriage is brought about by, 
 for instance, money, the eugenic value of marriage 
 is at least nullified and may become actually anti- 
 eugenic. Again I say, if Socialism 1 be necessary in 
 order that selection for marriage shall be determined 
 by the possession of personal qualities of racial value 
 rather than the power of the purse, which has al- 
 ways been a racial curse, then the sooner socialism is 
 established the better. 
 
 THE EUGENIC VALUE OF CONTEMPORARY MARRIAGE. 
 
 The first purpose of this chapter has been to show 
 that in marriage, wherever, and in so far as, it is de- 
 termined by the mutual attractiveness of young peo- 
 ple, there exists a eugenic factor in society to-day ; and 
 since the race is in effect recruited by the married 
 people, this aspect of marriage deserves the closest 
 study and attention. I commend this subject, the 
 eugenic value of contemporary marriage, to the small 
 but rapidly increasing number of students who realize 
 that eugenics or race-culture will be the supreme 
 science of the future, and who are now devoting them- 
 selves to its foundations. No more important and 
 urgent inquiry can be undertaken at this stage. 
 Which, for instance, is the more eugenic the English 
 system or the French? 
 
 The second purpose has been to show that one may 
 believe in and work for eugenics or race-culture with- 
 out proposing to overthrow all human institutions, or 
 to adopt the methods of the stud-farm, or to initiate 
 a vast campaign of surgery, or sensational and dras- 
 tic legislation, or even, yet, the employment of mar- 
 
 1 or the abolition of Unnatural inheritance, 
 
SELECTION THROUGH MARRIAGE 231 
 
 riage certificates. One or all of these things may 
 have their place, now or hereafter; or may, on the 
 other hand, be far worse than futile. But most as- 
 suredly it is possible now for the individual parent of 
 marriageable children, for the clergyman, the leader 
 of fashion, the doctor, not to start but to strengthen 
 such by no means impotent eugenic forces as already 
 exist in society, without outraging sentiment or cus- 
 tom indeed, without attracting public attention to 
 their action at all. 
 
 Eugenics has already suffered much at the hands 
 of its so-called friends. It is to be hoped that a real 
 service may be discharged by this attempt to show 
 that on the highest, most accurate and scientific eugenic 
 grounds, we may recognize, claim and welcome every 
 father and mother who desire that the son or daugh- 
 ter whom they care for shall marry for psychical and 
 not for physical love. Every such parent is a eugenist, 
 in effect, though his sole motive may be the welfare 
 of his individual child. 
 
 At present we interfere with marriage on every 
 imaginable ground, many utterly trivial, many worse. 
 We encourage or discourage on economic grounds; 
 we recognize many taboos, of caste, creed, color. It 
 is not for us, certainly, acting as we do, to- be of- 
 fended at the suggestion that we should use our 
 influence to affect marriage on the highest conceivable 
 ground the life of mankind to come. What we 
 really need is not so much the abolition of Mrs. 
 Grundy as her conversion to the eugenic idea. It is 
 the business of those who believe that eugenics is the 
 greatest ideal in the world to make a eugenist of Mrs. 
 
232 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 Grundy, as we shall some day: and then it will be 
 realized how potent for good public opinion may be- 
 come, once it is rightly educated. 
 
 Says Mr. Galton, in his latest contribution to the 
 subject : 
 
 The power of social opinion is apt to be rather under-rated 
 than over-rated. Like the atmosphere which we breathe and by 
 which we live, social opinion operates powerfully without our 
 being conscious of its existence. Everyone knows that govern- 
 ments, manners, and beliefs which were thought to be right, 
 decorous, and true at one period have been judged wrong, in- 
 decorous, and false at another; and that views which we have 
 heard expressed by those in authority over us in our childhood 
 and early manhood tend to become axiomatic and unchangeable 
 in mature life. 
 
 Speaking for myself only, I look forward to local eugenic ac- 
 tion in numerous directions, including the accumulation of con- 
 siderable funds to start young couples of " worthy " qualities in 
 their married life, and to assist them and their families at crit- 
 ical times. The gifts to those who are the reverse of " worthy " 
 are enormous in amount; it is stated that the charitable dona- 
 tions in the year 1907 amounted to 4,868,050. I am not pre- 
 pared to say how much of this was judiciously spent, or in what 
 ways, but merely quote the figures to justify the inference that 
 many of the thousands of persons who are willing to give freely 
 at the prompting of a sentiment based upon compassion, might 
 be persuaded to give largely also in response to a more virile 
 sentiment, based on the desire of promoting the natural gifts and 
 the National Efficiency of future generations. 
 
 In circumscribed communities especially, social approval and 
 disapproval exert a potent force. Its presence is only too easily 
 read by every one who is the object of either, in the counte- 
 nances, bearing, and manner of those with whom they daily meet 
 and converse. Is it then, I ask, too much to expect that when 
 a public opinion in favor of Eugenics has once taken sure hold 
 of such communities and has been accepted by them as a quasi- 
 religion, the result will be manifested in sundry and very effec- 
 tive modes of action which are as yet untried and many of them 
 even unforeseen? 
 
SELECTION THROUGH MARRIAGE 233 
 
 BREACH OF PROMISE" AND RACE-CULTURE. It 
 may be added that perhaps we shall have to learn to 
 reconsider our ill-judged and stupid censoriousness, 
 directed against young people who get engaged but 
 then become tired of one another as they accurately 
 say, discover that they are not suited for one another. 
 Not only is it obvious that we are fools in denounc- 
 ing this discovery of impermanence in their attrac- 
 tion, happily made before marriage, whilst we ignore 
 the disasters of its lamentably postmature discovery, 
 after marriage: but also it should be obvious that 
 the eugenic end is negatively served whenever what 
 would have been an unfortunate union is broken off 
 in time. Our imbecile standard of honor, and the 
 law of breach of promise, which is outrageously 
 abused, at present condemn the man, for instance, who 
 finds that he has made a mistake, whilst passively 
 applauding him who, finding his mistake, thinks it his 
 duty to make it irreparable. Far better would it be that 
 the man incapable of forming an attachment made of 
 the non-material ties which last, should not marry at 
 all. The man who cannot see, or seeing, cannot find 
 it in his heart to love, the spiritual beauties of woman- 
 hood, is just the man who can be safely omitted in the 
 eugenist's scheme for fatherhood. 
 
 The plea of insanity is, in English law, no protection 
 against a claim for damages for breach of promise to 
 marry, unless it be proved insanity at date of contract 
 in the defendant. A valid contract once made, it is no 
 excuse for non-performance that insanity has been dis- 
 covered in the family of the other party. This wicked 
 law must be altered, 
 
234 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 THE NEED FOR FURTHER STUDY. In his study of 
 this subject the student will naturally turn to Mr. 
 Havelock Ellis's volume entitled Sexual Selection in 
 Man. 1 This, of course, has its own scientific value as 
 a statement of facts, notwithstanding its intensely nau- 
 seating character. But anything less relevant to what 
 most of us understand by psychology, it would be diffi- 
 cult to imagine. The book considers seriatim, touch, 
 smell, hearing, and vision as the bases of so-called 
 love. It thus deals with " sensology " not psychology. 
 Indeed, to the best of one's recollection, after very close 
 and careful reading, there is no allusion to the human 
 mind in it anywhere. If men and women were simply 
 animals, this book would doubtless cover the ground, 
 and perhaps the word "psychology" would even be 
 justified in connection with it. From end to end men 
 and women are consistently treated as animals and no 
 more. Since, however, the human species is possessed 
 of psychical characters which distinguish it from the 
 lower animals, it is not unreasonable to suppose that 
 a volume which really dealt with sexual selection in 
 man would, to say the least of it, recognize the exist- 
 ence of those characters even if only to reject them 
 as irrelevant to the subject under discussion. 
 
 The foregoing remarks do not imply that the purely 
 anatomical and sensory factors are irrelevant to the 
 selection of parents in any generation, and for meth- 
 odological purposes it might be of value to abstract 
 from the factors of sexual selection in human society 
 such things as odor and contour. But it would be ur- 
 
 1 Studies in the Psychology of Sex, vol. iv. (F, A. Davis Co., 
 Philadelphia, 1905.) 
 
SELECTION THROUGH MARRIAGE 235 
 
 gently necessary in the course of such a study, if it 
 were to be other than extremely misleading, to observe 
 that this selection of factors was made for purposes 
 of convenience and that the relation of their import- 
 ance to that of other factors was a matter for further 
 and by no means casual consideration. 
 
 We may certainly agree with Mr. Havelock Ellis 
 that sexual selection occurs in human society, and may 
 welcome his volume as supporting that assertion. There 
 follows the extremely interesting and indeed urgent 
 necessity of ascertaining what the factors of this selec- 
 tion really are, what is their relative potency and what 
 is their capacity for modification. We may further 
 inquire whether they tend to be eugenic. A contri- 
 bution to this subject is furnished by Mr. Ellis when 
 he shows that width of hips is a female character 
 commonly admired by men. Since a wide pelvis is 
 one which can accommodate and safely give birth to a 
 large foetal head, there is here, as a practically solitary 
 case, a bearing on the eugenic issue : large heads mean, 
 in general, large brains, and it would be ill for the 
 white races if men admired hips as narrow as those of, 
 for instance, the negress, whose pelvis could not find 
 room for the average head of a purely white baby, and 
 who suffers terribly in many cases where the father is 
 white, especially if the child be a boy. 
 
 Meanwhile we must wait for studies of this great 
 question from various points of view, notably for a 
 study of the economics of sexual selection as it obtains 
 in human society. Yet further, we require a detailed 
 study of the influence of legislation, custom and pub- 
 lic opinion upon sexual selection on the lines of 
 
236 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 Mr. Galton's paper on " Restrictions in Marriage." 
 Mr. Havelock Ellis has more than adequately dealt 
 with the nervous physiology of sexual selection ; there 
 remain the psychology and sociology of it these lat- 
 ter comprehending, one may suppose, ninety-nine per 
 cent, of the whole subject. In the preceding pages 
 allusion has been made to one or two of the more 
 salient aspects of this matter. 
 
CHAPTER XIII 
 
 THE RACIAL POISONS : ALCOHOL * 
 
 IN the first chapter of our second Part, which deals 
 with the practice of eugenics, there were introduced, 
 defined, and briefly illustrated the terms positive eu- 
 genics, and negative eugenics. Of these the latter, as 
 the more urgent and the more completely and immedi- 
 ately practicable, claims our special attention; though 
 the present writer, notwithstanding that he has de- 
 voted to it the greater part of his eugenic work, is 
 bound to protest that the positive increase of ability 
 and worth is never to be regarded as of secondary 
 importance. The two methods are, of course, com- 
 plementary in practice, as they are one in principle 
 to select is to reject, to choose is to refuse. The 
 preceding chapter, on selection (and rejection) 
 through marriage, has dealt with the conditions under 
 which both aims are to be pursued. In the following 
 pages we must discuss a specially urgent and practi- 
 cable and indisputable portion of negative eugenic 
 practice: none the less urgent because of the contem- 
 porary emergence and future world-importance of 
 sober nations, such as Japan and Turkey. The term 
 
 1 Part of the matter of this chapter was included in a paper 
 entitled " Racial Hygiene or Negative Eugenics, with special 
 reference to the extirpation of Alcoholism/' read before the 
 Congress of the Royal Institute of Public Health, at Buxton, 
 1908, and " Alcoholism and Eugenics," read before the Society 
 for the Study of Inebriety. April, 1909. 
 
 237 
 
238 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 racial poisons, introduced by the present writer in the 
 year 1907, is self-explanatory. After dealing with 
 the most important of these poisons, we shall proceed, 
 in the next chapter, to discuss some others. The ra- 
 cial poisons constitute a special department of eugenics 
 which has not hitherto been considered by the pioneers 
 of this subject, but for which I press the claim of the 
 utmost gravity and moment, and which I conceive to 
 be certainly a part, and a most important part, of our 
 manifold yet single subject. 
 
 The argument of this chapter is that parenthood 
 must be forbidden to the dipsomaniac, the chronic in- 
 ebriate or the drunkard, whether male or female; and 
 this whether Lamarck or Galton and Weismann be 
 right, or whether, as we may believe with Galton and 
 Weismann themselves, the controversy between the 
 two parties is wholly irrelevant to the question in 
 hand. This conclusion, that on no grounds whatever, 
 theoretical or practical, can we continue to permit par- 
 enthood on the part of the drunkard, is one temper- 
 ance reform, perhaps the only one, on which disagree- 
 ment is absolutely impossible. It is, further, the most 
 radical that can be named within the sphere of practi- 
 cal politics, and it is conspicuously practicable. It has 
 hitherto been lamentably neglected by workers and re- 
 formers of all schools. Indeed, at the time of writ- 
 ing, the London County Council, governing the great- 
 est city in the world, is pursuing a course of action in 
 this regard, which will be detailed later, and which, as 
 will appear, is misguided and deplorable in the last 
 degree. 
 
THE RACIAL POISONS: ALCOHOL 239 
 
 ALCOHOL AND HEREDITY. According to Dr. Arch- 
 dall Reid, " alcohol, year after year, eliminates from 
 the race a great number of people so constituted that 
 intoxication affords them keen delight, leaving the 
 perpetuation of the race in great measure to those on 
 whom intoxication confers little or no delight. . . . 
 Now since alcohol weeds out enormous numbers of 
 people of a particular type, it is a stringent agent of 
 selection an agent of selection more stringent than 
 any one disease.' 5 The factor that really makes the 
 drunkard " is certainly inborn, and therefore as cer- 
 tainly transmissible to offspring. The man who has 
 it is cursed with the ' alcohol diathesis/ with the ' pre- 
 disposition to drunkenness/ Thus most savages are 
 keenly capable of enjoying drink, and their offspring 
 inherit the capacity." Fere has shown that " it is one 
 of the characteristics of the degenerate that they are 
 prone to have recourse to the poisons, like alcohol and 
 morphia, which hasten their decadence and elimina- 
 tion." Thus, as Dr. W. C. Sullivan points out, alco- 
 hol " might certainly be adjudged a salutary evil if 
 its incidence were limited to individuals whose extreme 
 inferiority of organization renders them wholly un- 
 desirable and useless to the community. But this is 
 very far from being the case." 1 
 
 The whole crux of the question lies in this last sen- 
 tence. Alcohol certainly destroys many degenerate 
 stocks, and that is good, though it would be better to 
 do what we shall do some day hasten and amelior- 
 ate the process by forbidding parenthood to the de- 
 generate. But does alcohol also make degenerates; 
 
 1 Italics mine. 
 
240 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 does it even make more degenerates than it destroys? 
 A somewhat similar difficulty arises in the case of in- 
 fant mortality. The causes of infant mortality 
 destroy many children inherently unfit, diseased or 
 weakly. But we are not justified in keeping up 
 our infant mortality, if we find, as we do, that for 
 every diseased child whom they destroy they kill many 
 who were healthy at birth and damage for life many 
 more. 
 
 A man was born sober in most cases, but not al- 
 ways, 1 as we shall see and any changes produced 
 in his body by alcohol are " acquired." Therefore, 
 rejecting Lamarck, are we to reject the doctrine that 
 the effects produced by alcohol on parents are trans- 
 mitted to offspring? 
 
 The controversy between Lamarck and Weismann 
 has absolutely nothing to do with the question. Let 
 us consider what would be a case of Lamarckian trans- 
 mission in the sense which the modern student of he- 
 redity denies. The birth of a child with a scar on its 
 scalp, to a father who had acquired a similar scar be- 
 fore the child was conceived, would be such a case: 
 and this does not happen. Or suppose that instead 
 of a scar on the scalp the father has an inflammatory 
 change, not so dissimilar to a scar, produced by alco- 
 hol in the membranes covering his brain. Then it 
 would be a case of Lamarckian transmission if the 
 membranes of his baby's brain were similarly affected ; 
 
 1 To-day many of the children who make our destiny are born 
 drunk, owing to maternal intoxication during labor. I have 
 myself attended the birth of such children, both in Edinburgh 
 and in York. 
 
THE RACIAL POISONS: ALCOHOL 241 
 
 and this does not happen. Such is the kind of trans- 
 mission of which exhaustive experiment and observa- 
 tion fail to find a conclusive instance anywhere. 
 
 But what has such a supposition to do with the the- 
 ory, as definitely supported by observation and experi- 
 ment as the other is not, that if a man saturates his 
 body with alcohol carried by his blood, he injures all 
 the tissues which are nourished by that blood, includ- 
 ing the racial elements of his body with the rest : and 
 therefore that his child may be degenerate? 
 
 What says Weismann himself? In The Germ- 
 Plasm, p. 386, under the heading " The influence of 
 temporary abnormal conditions of the parents on the 
 child," he writes as follows : 
 
 " Although I do not consider that the cases which come under 
 the above heading have anything to do with heredity, I should 
 not like to leave them entirely on one side. 
 
 "It has often been supposed that drunkenness of the parents 
 at the time of conception may have a harmful effect on the 
 nature of the offspring. The child is said to be born in a 
 weak bodily and mental condition, and inclined to idiocy, or 
 even to madness, etc., although the parents may be quite nor- 
 mal both physically and mentally. 
 
 " Cases certainly exist in which drunken parents have given 
 rise to a completely normal child, although this is not a con- 
 vincing proof against the above-named view; and in spite of 
 the fact that most, or perhaps even all, the statements with 
 regard to the injurious effects on the offspring will not bear 
 a very close criticism, 1 I am unwilling to entirely deny the 
 possibility that a harmful influence may be exerted in such 
 cases. These, however, have nothing to do with heredity, but 
 are concerned with an affection of the germ by means of an 
 external influence." 
 
 was written in 1892, before the accumulation of the 
 modern evidence on the subject. 
 
242 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 Weismann goes on to quote cases showing how 
 germ-cells may be injured by various agents, and con- 
 tinues : 
 
 "It does not appear to me impossible that an inter-mixture 
 of alcohol with the blood of the parents may produce similar 
 effects on the ovum and sperm cell. According to the relative 
 quantity of alcohol either an exciting or a depressing influence 
 might be exerted, either of which would lead to abnormal de- 
 velopment. . . . 
 
 "New predispositions can certainly never arise owing to such 
 deviations from the normal course of development, and there- 
 fore a modification of the process of heredity itself is out of 
 the question. It is, however, conceivable that more or less 
 considerable abnormalities may affect the course of develop- 
 ment, and either cause the death of the embryo, or else produce 
 more or less marked deformities. The question as to whether 
 such deformities really result in consequence of the drunken 
 condition of the parents can only be decided by observation." * 
 
 This is all that Weismann has to say on the subject, 
 since, not referring to functionally-produced modifica- 
 tions, 2 it does not concern his theory of heredity at all : 
 yet it is upon this theory that the most palpable facts 
 of the racial influence of alcohol are denied. Weis- 
 mann's own remarks are quite open to criticism, as, 
 for instance, where he denies that new predispositions 
 can arise in the manner indicated. This is possibly 
 only a question of words, and Weismann is perhaps 
 merely denying that alcohol can produce progressive 
 
 1 " Alcohol taken into the stomach can be demonstrated in the 
 testicle or ovary within a few minutes, and, like any other 
 poison, may injure the sperm or the germ element therein 
 contained. As a result of this intoxication of the primary ele- 
 ments, children may be conceived and born who become idiots, 
 epileptics, or feeble-minded. Therefore it comes about that 
 even before conception a fault may be present." McAoAM 
 ECCLES, F.R.C.S., in the British Journal of Inebriety, April, 1908. 
 
THE RACIAL POISONS: ALCOHOL 243 
 
 variations. Also his remarkably brief discussion of 
 the subject seems to concern itself mainly with the in- 
 fluence of alcohol on the germ-cells just before their 
 union. He has not a word to say regarding the in- 
 fluence on the germinal tissues of years of soaking in 
 alcohol. It suffices, however, to make the point which 
 is quite clearly made, that the Weismannians are go- 
 ing absurdly beyond their book in denying what, in- 
 deed, the book of Nature demonstrates. 
 
 Let us turn now to the experimental side of this 
 question. An American botanist, Dr. T. D. Mac- 
 Dougal, read an address on " Heredity and Envi- 
 ronic Forces " at the Chicago Meeting of the Ameri- 
 can Association for the Advancement of Science in 
 1907. His experiments require confirmation, but may 
 be provisionally accepted. He has permanently modi- 
 fied the germ-plasm of plants under the influence of 
 various chemicals. There is here a vast field for ex- 
 periment with alcohol. I quote one paragraph indi- 
 cating the remarkable results of these experiments. 
 The reader will see their bearing on our present ques- 
 tion, and will also see that they do not for a moment 
 affect Weismann's denial of the doctrine that by cut- 
 ting off rats' tails you can produce a race of tailless 
 rats, or that by learning a language you can save your 
 future children the trouble of doing so for them- 
 selves : 
 
 " It was found that the injection of various solutions into 
 ovaries of Raimannia was followed by the production of seeds 
 bearing qualities not exhibited by the parent, wholly irreversible, 
 and fully transmissible in successive generations. One of the 
 seeds produced by a plant of CEnothera biennis which had been 
 

 244 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 treated with zinc sulphate differed so widely from the parental 
 form that it could be distinguished from it by a novice. This 
 new form has been tested to the third generation, and transmits 
 all its characteristics fully." 
 
 ALCOHOL A PROVED RACIAL POISON But the 
 reader will rightly desire some kind of experimental 
 proof that alcohol itself can act as a cause of racial de- 
 generation. We may first refer to the chapter on al- 
 coholism and human degeneration in Dr. W. C. Sulli- 
 van's Alcoholism, a Chapter in Social Pathology * for 
 a recent resume of the subject. Without actually 
 quoting Weismann, Dr. Sullivan begins by showing 
 that, as we have seen, the doctrinal objection of Dr. 
 Reid and others to the theory of alcoholic degener- 
 ation is quite irrelevant " the effects attributed to 
 parental alcoholism are not in the category of trans- 
 mitted acquirements at all; they are the results, ex- 
 pressed in defect and deviation of development, of a 
 deleterious influence exerted on the germ-cells, either 
 directly through the alcohol circulating in the blood, 
 or indirectly, through the deterioration of the parental 
 organism in which these cells are lodged, and from 
 which they draw their nutriment." Later Dr. Sulli- 
 van points out that the racial effects of alcoholism in 
 man are similar to those obtained by experimental in- 
 toxication in the lower animals. Combemale, for 
 instance, found that pups begotten of a healthy bitch 
 by an alcoholized dog, were congenitally feeble and 
 showed a marked degree of asymmetry of the brain. 
 Recent experiments have shown the same thing as re- 
 gards other poisons, and it is especially to be noted that 
 
 1 London: James Nisbet and Co. 1906. 
 
THE RACIAL POISONS: ALCOHOL 245 
 
 in the experiments cited the mother was healthy. 
 They prove that paternal alcoholism alone (all ques- 
 tions of the nourishment of the growing child before 
 birth, for instance, thus being excluded) can deter- 
 mine degeneration. Mr. Galton * himself long ago 
 quoted the case " of a man who after begetting several 
 normal children, became a drunkard and had imbecile 
 offspring " ; and another case has been recorded " of a 
 healthy woman who, when married to a drunken hus- 
 band, had five sickly children, dying in infancy, but 
 in subsequent union with a healthy man, bore normal 
 and vigorous children." Other intoxications show 
 similar results though they are not yet of grave racial 
 importance. For instance, " a man who had had two 
 healthy children acquired the cocaine habit, and while 
 suffering from the symptoms of chronic poisoning en- 
 gendered two idiots." Brovardel and others have dis- 
 covered that the expectant mother who is a morphino 
 maniac may give birth to a child who shows all the 
 phenomena of the morphia habit. Demme has traced 
 the appalling contrast between the offspring in ten 
 sober families and in ten families where one or both 
 parents suffered from chronic alcoholism. Dr. Sulli- 
 van himself, realizing the obviously greater importance 
 of maternal alcoholism, since here we have the action 
 of poisoned food the maternal blood upon the 
 child before birth, made an inquiry of his own. He 
 found that 
 
 1 Will our modern extremists be good enough to remember 
 that Mr. Galton is the prime author of the doctrine that func- 
 tionally-produced modifications are not inherited? 
 
 V 
 
246 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 ". . . of 600 children born of 120 drunken mothers 335 
 (55.8 per cent.) died in infancy or were still-born, and that 
 several of the survivors were mentally defective, and as many 
 as 4.1 per cent, were epileptic. Many of these women had 
 female relatives, sisters or daughters, of sober habits and mar- 
 ried to sober husbands; on comparing the death-rate amongst 
 the children of the sober mothers with that amongst the chil- 
 dren of the drunken women of the same stock, the former was 
 found to be 23.9 per cent., the latter 55.2 per cent., or nearly 
 two and a half times as much. It was further observed that 
 in the drunken families there was a progressive rise in the 
 death-rate from the earlier to the later born children." 
 
 Dr. Sullivan cites as a typical alcoholic family one 
 in which " the first three children were healthy, the 
 fourth was of defective intelligence, the fifth was an 
 epileptic idiot, the sixth was dead-born, and finally the 
 productive career ended with an abortion." Dr. Claye 
 Shaw told the Interdepartmental Committee on Physi- 
 cal Deterioration, " we have inebriate mothers, and 
 either abortions or degenerate children. The teleolog- 
 ical 1 relationship between the two seems to be as 
 certain as any other conditions of cause and effect.'* 
 The general rule is that any narcotic substance affects 
 highly developed tissues sooner and more markedly 
 than simpler tissues, and so it is in the case of alcohol 
 and the infant. It is the developing nervous system 
 that is most markedly affected. This leads, of course, 
 to an increased child mortality, especially by way of 
 convulsions. This was the cause of sixty per cent, of 
 all the deaths that occurred amongst the six hundred 
 children in Dr. Sullivan's series. But it has especially 
 to be remembered that a large number of children 
 
 1 The use of this word thus is unusual, to say the least of it. 
 Dr. Claye Shaw simply means causal relation. 
 
THE RACIAL POISONS: ALCOHOL 247 
 
 whose nervous systems are injured for life by parental 
 and more especially by maternal alcoholism do not die 
 either as infants or children. Instead of dying of 
 convulsions they live as epileptics. Of the children in 
 Dr. Sullivan's series "219 lived beyond infancy, and 
 of these 9, or 4.1 per cent., became epileptic, as com- 
 pared with o.i per cent, of the whole population/' 
 Other observers have found epilepsy in 12 per cent, 
 and even 15 per cent, of the children of alcoholic par- 
 ents. Of course these data, as such, do not demon- 
 strate Dr. Sullivan's conclusion that " this action of al- 
 coholism on the health and vitality of the stock is the 
 most serious of the evils that intemperance brings on 
 the community." 
 
 Dr. Sullivan's inquiries show a very high rate of 
 still-births and abortions amongst the children of 
 drunken mothers quite sufficient to 'prove that " the 
 detrimental effect of maternal alcoholism must be in a 
 large measure due to a direct influence on the germ- 
 cells and on the developing embryo, and cannot be 
 explained as merely a result of the neglect and malnu- 
 trition from which the children of a drunken mother 
 are naturally apt to suffer." The point is of some 
 theoretical importance. Practically it matters little; 
 in either case the drunken woman must not become a 
 mother. 
 
 The same conclusion is reached even though we ac- 
 cord unlimited weight to the unquestionably valid argu- 
 ment that the drunkard is himself or herself usually 
 degenerate from the first, and that the children are 
 therefore degenerate, and would indeed be degenerate 
 even if the parents had taken no alcohol. Let us, 
 
2 4 S PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 then, erroneously enough, but for the sake of the argu- 
 ment, assume that solely and always alcoholism is a 
 symptom of degeneracy. It is, then, an indication of 
 unfitness for parenthood no less, and the practical is- 
 sue is the same: one radical cure for alcoholism, at 
 any rate, is the prohibition of parenthood on the part 
 of the alcoholic. 1 
 
 THE MOST RECENT EVIDENCE. The most thorough 
 and comprehensive inquiry into this matter yet made 
 is also the most recent. We owe it to Dr. W. A. 
 Potts, of the University of Birmingham, who did val- 
 uable work as Medical Investigator to the Royal Com- 
 mission on the Care and Control of the Feeble-minded. 
 His paper, entitled " The Relation of Alcohol to 
 Feeble-mindedness," is printed in the British Journal 
 of Inebriety for January, 1909, together with commu- 
 nications from many authorities. It is quite impos- 
 sible to summarize here the enormous mass of evidence 
 which Dr. Potts has accumulated from the literature 
 of the subject, and to which he has added his own 
 work. I believe that nothing could be more moderate 
 and assured than the following conclusions to which 
 
 1 The subject of alcoholism and race-culture really demands 
 a large volume. There is no space here to detail the fashion 
 in which the drunken mother poisons her child after birth, 
 when she nurses it, since, as has been chemically proved, alcohol 
 is excreted in her milk. Says a most distinguished authority, 
 Mrs. Scharlieb, "the child, then, absolutely receives alcohol 
 as part of his diet, with the worst effect upon his organs, for 
 alcohol has a greater effect upon cells in proportion to their 
 immaturity" ("The Drink Problem," in the New Library of 
 Medicine), and Dr. Sullivan refers to "numerous cases on 
 record of convulsions and other disorders occurring in in- 
 fants when the nurse has taken liquor, and ceasing when she 
 has been put on a non-alcoholic diet." The reader may be 
 referred to my brief paper, "Alcohol and Infancy," published 
 in the form of a tract by the Church of England Temperance 
 Society. 
 
THE RACIAL POISONS: ALCOHOL 249 
 
 he commits himself after a study of the subject the 
 quality and range of which can only be appreciated at 
 first hand : 
 
 ". . . the evidence is not clear that alcoholism, by itself, in 
 the father will procure amentia; but it is quite plain that in 
 combination with other bad factors it is a most unfavorable 
 element, while maternal drinking, and drinking continued 
 through more than one generation, are potent influences in 
 mental degeneracy." 
 
 It is impossible, within the scope of the present vol- 
 ume to analyze in detail the Report of the Royal Com- 
 mission on the Care and Control of the Feeble-minded. 
 In this present outline of eugenics it is our business, 
 however, to show main principles, and as the princi- 
 ple expressed in the phrase " racial poisons " is to my 
 mind absolutely cardinal for eugenics, it is necessary 
 here to comment, as I have already done in the Journal 
 above quoted, upon the following most unfortunate 
 deliverance of the Commissioners : " That both on the 
 grounds of fact and of theory, there is the highest 
 degree of probability that feeble-mindedness is usually 
 spontaneous in origin that is, not due to influences 
 acting on the parent. . . ." 
 
 The word spontaneous has, of course, no meaning 
 for science, or rather is a denial of the fundamental 
 axiom of science that causation is universal. What 
 the Commissioners mean when they say spontaneous 
 is " sportaneous," like the occasional production of a 
 nectarine by a peach tree. Apart from this highly 
 suspicious phraseology, there is the still more unfor- 
 tunate fact that the Commissioners have lent their au- 
 thority to the view that feeble-mindedness is not due to 
 
250 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 influences acting on the parent. The modern student 
 of syphilis will be astonished at this pronouncement, 
 and also the student of lead-poisoning, as we shall see 
 in the following chapter. 
 
 Every reader of Dr. Potts's admirable paper will 
 realize that this conclusion of the Commissioners 
 " not due to influences acting on the parent " is di- 
 rectly opposed to an extraordinary mass of evidence 
 and to the opinion of, I suppose, every authority on 
 the subject, British, Continental or American. The 
 Commissioners' reference to " theory," coupled with 
 portions of the evidence given before them by wit- 
 nesses who suppose that the alleged influence of alco- 
 hol as a cause of feeble-mindedness controverts the 
 doctrine of the non-transmission of " acquired char- 
 acters/' makes it necessary to point out for the hun- 
 dredth time that, for lack of analysis and criticism of 
 terms, the most prominent followers of Galton and 
 Weismann persistently misunderstand their masters' 
 teaching. The modern doctrine of the individual as 
 the trustee of the germ-cells and of the non-transmis- 
 sion of acquired characters is Mr. Galton's. Mr. Gal- 
 ton himself does not question and never has questioned 
 the possibility that alcohol may cause feeble-minded- 
 ness. There is no reason why he should. If we take 
 the somewhat unusual course of consulting the words 
 of the masters before we swear by them, we find as 
 has been shown that Weismann, who subsequently 
 stated and has so greatly supported Mr. Galton's view, 
 has expressly repudiated the Commissioners' idea of 
 his " theory." The Galton- Weismann doctrine is a 
 doctrine of heredity proper, the organic relation of 
 
THE RACIAL POISONS: ALCOHOL 251 
 
 living generations. It does not assert that there are 
 two unconnected universes the one made of germ- 
 plasm and the other of the rest of nature. The 
 " grounds of theory," or rather, our elementary physi- 
 ological knowledge of the nutrition of the germ-plasm 
 by the blood of its host, are in reality precisely the 
 grounds which would lead us to expect those conse- 
 quences of parental alcoholism which in fact we find. 
 ALCOHOLISM AS A SYMPTOM OF DEGENERACY. We 
 have seen that alcohol may be a cause of degeneracy: 
 we now have to recognize the converse relation. For 
 an authoritative and radical discussion of the problem, 
 the reader may be referred to the second Norman 
 Kerr Memorial Lecture, delivered by Dr. Welsh 
 Branthwaite, H.M. Inspector under the Inebriates' 
 Act, in iQoy. 1 He speaks as " the only man in close 
 touch with all inebriates under legal detention in Eng- 
 land." He reaches most important conclusions which 
 are generally accepted, as the discussion shows. He 
 says, " the more I see of habitual drunkards, the more 
 I am convinced that the real condition we have to 
 study, the trouble we have to fight, and the source of 
 all the mischief, is ... defect 2 in mental me- 
 chanism, generally congenital, sometimes more or less 
 acquired. ... In the absence of alcohol, the same 
 persons, instead of meriting the term inebriate would 
 have proved unreliable in many ways; they would 
 have been called ne'er-do-weels, profligates, persons of 
 
 1 This is printed in the British Journal of Inebriety, January, 
 1908, under the title " Inebriety, its Causation and Control " 
 with comments by numerous authorities. 
 
 2 The author says " inherent defect." I have omitted the ad- 
 jective, as it is obviously misused. Antecedent would have 
 been the better word, surely. 
 
252 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 lax morality, excitably or abnormally passionate in- 
 dividuals, persons of melancholic tendency or eccen- 
 tric. ... It seems to me exceedingly doubtful 
 whether habitual inebriety. ... is ever really 
 acquired in the strictest sense of the word i.e. in the 
 absence of some measure of pre-existing defect." 
 Having studied 2,277 inebriates, committed under the 
 Inebriates Acts, up to December 3ist, 1906, Dr. 
 Branthwaite finds 62.6 per cent, of these mentally de- 
 fective. The remainder he regards as of average men- 
 tal capacity, using, however, an exceedingly low stand- 
 ard of what that capacity is. He concludes that in a 
 large majority of police-court cases, " mental disease 
 was the condition for which they were repeatedly im- 
 prisoned mental disease merely masked by alcoholic 
 indulgence. . . . The majority of our insane in- 
 ebriates have become alcoholic because of their tend- 
 ency to insanity. . . . Certain peculiarities in 
 cranial conformation, general physique, and conduct, 
 have long been recognized as evidences of congenital 
 defect. Nearly all the 1,375 cases included in the two 
 defective sections of our table have given evidence of 
 possessing some of these characteristic peculiarities, 
 and it is morally certain that the large majority of 
 them started life handicapped by imperfect brain de- 
 velopment." 1 The lecture is accompanied with many 
 photographs clearly showing the physical marks of 
 congenital defect, and Dr. Branthwaite remarks that 
 " even the untrained eye should meet with no difficulty 
 in recognizing ' something wrong ' with all of them." 
 Of the proportion of mentally defective inebriates 
 
 1 Italics mine. 
 
THE RACIAL POISONS: ALCOHOL 253 
 
 (62.6 per cent, of the whole) mentioned by Dr. 
 Branthwaite, all are " practically hopeless from a re- 
 formation standpoint." This is a sufficient comment, 
 if any were needed, upon repeated imprisonment for 
 habitual drunkenness which, as Dr. Branthwaite 
 says " is indefensible and inhumane/ ' He adds in clos- 
 ing that, in his judgment, habitual drunkenness, so far 
 as women are concerned, has materially increased, dur- 
 ing the last twenty-five years, " which I have spent en- 
 tirely amongst drunkards and drunkenness." The un- 
 fortunate people whom he studies " are not in the least 
 affected by orthodox temperance efforts; they continue 
 to propagate drunkenness, and thereby nullify the good 
 results of temperance energy. Their children, born 
 of defective parents, and educated by their surround- 
 ings, grow up without a chance of decent life, and con- 
 stitute the reserve from which the strength of our pres- 
 ent army of habituals is maintained. Truly we have 
 neglected in the past, and are still neglecting, the main 
 source of drunkard supply the drunkard himself; 
 cripple that, and we should soon see some good result 
 from our work. 3 ' 
 
 A foremost authority, Dr. F. W. Mott, F.R.S., has 
 independently reached the same conclusion as Dr. 
 Branthwaite that the chronic inebriate comes as a 
 rule of an inherently tainted stock. (Dr. Mott, how- 
 ever, reminds us that " if alcohol is a weed killer, pre- 
 venting the perpetuation of poor types, it is probably 
 even more effective as a weed producer.") Professor 
 David Ferrier, F.R.S., the great pioneer of brain lo- 
 calization, in reference to these people, speaks of " the 
 risk of propagation of a race of drunkards and im- 
 
254 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 beciles." Dr. J. C. Dunlop, H.M. Inspector under 
 the Inebriates Act, Scotland, states that his experi- 
 ence leads him to precisely the same conclusion as 
 that of Dr. Branthwaite. Dr. A. R. Urquhart, an 
 asylum authority, affirms that chronic inebriety " is 
 largely an affair of heredity ... is a symptom 
 of mental defect, disorder, or disease." Dr. Fleck, an- 
 other authority, says : " It is my strong conviction that 
 a large percentage of our mentally defective children, 
 including idiots, imbeciles and epileptics, are the de- 
 scendants of drunkards." Mr. McAdam Eccles, the 
 distinguished surgeon, agrees; so does Dr. Langdon 
 Down, Physician to the National Association for the 
 Welfare of the Feeble-minded; so does Mr. Thomas 
 Holmes, the Secretary of the Howard Association, 
 who remarks that " our habitual criminals, equally 
 with our mental inebriates, are not responsible beings, 
 but victims of mental disease." Finally Miss Kirby, 
 Secretary of the National Association for the Feeble- 
 minded, insists upon the obvious conclusion that these 
 people must be detained permanently. She says, 
 " when one case of a dissolute feeble-minded woman 
 in America is quoted as the mother of nine feeble- 
 minded children, we see the cause why inebriate homes, 
 and also reformatories, penitentiaries, and workhouses 
 are full to overflowing, and society taxed beyond 
 bearing to keep them there. Such institutions out- 
 number homes for the feeble-minded." l Speaking of 
 the 62.6 per cent, noted by Dr. Branthwaite, she says 
 " would it not have been the more logical course to 
 
 1 Italics are mine. A thousand pounds for cure which does 
 not cure and twopence for prevention is, of course, the rule 
 with a half-educated nation always. 
 
THE RACIAL POISONS: ALCOHOL 255 
 
 have dealt with them in earlier years ? " Now what 
 would that have accomplished? It would have saved 
 the future. 
 
 THE INEBRIATE AS PARENT. Is it a mere supposi- 
 tion that these women become mothers? Amongst 
 those committed as criminal inebriates (under the 
 London County Council) in 1905-6, three hundred and 
 sixty-five of those admitted to reformatories had two 
 thousand two hundred children. These are the offi- 
 cial figures. As to the quality of these children there 
 is unfortunately no possibility of question. 
 
 We may quote from Dr. Sullivan a notable in- 
 quiry : 
 
 " Even more striking results with regard to the several forms 
 of degeneracy were obtained by Legrain, who investigated the 
 question from a somewhat different point of view. Selecting 
 from the material at his disposal all those cases in which 
 ancestral intemperance had appeared to exercise a causal in- 
 fluence, and working out their family history, he collected 215 
 observations of heredo-alcoholism referring to one generation, 
 98 referring to two generations, and 7 referring to three gen- 
 erations. Of the children of the first generation, 508 in num- 
 ber, 196 were mentally degenerate, the affection of the brain 
 being shown more particularly by moral and emotional abnor- 
 mality, while intellectual defects were less pronounced; 106 
 were insane, 52 were epileptic, 16 suffered from hystero-epilepsy, 
 and 3 from chorea; and 39 had convulsions in infancy. 
 Amongst the children of the second generation, who numbered 
 294, the intellectual defects were more marked, idiocy, im- 
 becility, or debility, being noted in the offspring of 54 out of 
 the 98 families investigated. In 23 out of the 33 families in 
 which the children of the second generation had reached adult 
 age, one or more of them were insane. Epilepsy was found 
 in 40 families, infantile convulsions in 42, and meningitis in 14. 
 The third generation in 7 families was represented by 17 chil- 
 dren, all of whom were weak-minded, imbecile, or idiotic; 2 
 suffered, moreover, from moral insanity, 2 from hysteria, and 
 
256 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 2 from epilepsy; 3 were scrofulous, and 4 had convulsions in 
 childhood. In the three generations taken together there were, 
 in addition to the children referred to above, 174 infants who 
 were dead-born or died shortly after birth." 
 
 Therefore, the chronic inebriate must not become a 
 parent. Let it be said that these people are wicked 
 or have no self-control, drink for fun or love of deg- 
 radation, then become drunkards, and prejudicially 
 affect their children. The conclusion is the same. 
 Have any theory of heredity you please Lamarckian- 
 ism, Darwin's pangenesis, Weismannism, Mendelism; 
 it matters not a straw. Look at the thing from the 
 uncharitable religious point of view, or from the char- 
 itable scientific view which realizes, in the case of these 
 women, that to know all is to pardon all the con- 
 clusion is still the same. 
 
 THE PRESENT SCANDAL OF LONDON'S INEBRIATES. 
 
 This then, being so, abundance of official evidence 
 having been gathered in addition to all the unofficial 
 evidence, let us consider the shameful facts which are 
 in process as I write, and are still so, on revision of 
 these pages a year later. They are outlined in the 
 reply of Mr. Herbert Gladstone, the Home Secretary, 
 to a question in the House of Commons. The reply 
 is printed in full in The Times, February iQth, 1908. 
 There was a paltry squabble between the Government 
 and the London County Council as to the exact num- 
 ber of shillings that each was to contribute per week 
 for the maintenance of inebriates. The London 
 County Council was plainly in the wrong, its ignor- 
 ance being sufficiently indicated by the letter to The 
 Times, which I will quote. The result of the squab- 
 
THE RACIAL POISONS: ALCOHOL 257 
 
 ble is that, as Mr. G. R. Sims said, " We shall have 
 something like five hundred women, all habitual drunk- 
 ards, passing in and out of the prisons, a peril to pub- 
 licans, a pest to the police, an evil example to the 
 women with whom they mix, and free to bring chil- 
 dren into the world, their little lives poisoned at the 
 source." We have therefore reverted to the shameful, 
 brutal, and disastrous system sufficiently indicated by 
 the history of Jane Cakebread, at whom, when one was 
 a schoolboy as ignorant as those who now govern us, 
 one used to laugh because she had been convicted so 
 many hundreds of times. 1 As the present writer said 
 in raising the matter at a meeting of the Eugenics 
 Education Society, the future children of these women 
 are not only doomed by the very nature of their germ- 
 plasm, but they will actually be many times intoxi- 
 cated not merely in their cradles but before their 
 birth. There is no wealth but life, and this future 
 wealth of England is to be fed on poisoned food and 
 many times made drunken before it sees the light. 
 The meeting of the Society passed a unanimous reso- 
 lution "that this society enters a protest against 
 the present administration of the Inebriates Act, 
 whereby through the closing of inebriate homes some 
 hundreds of chronic inebriate women will be set adrift 
 in London, with an inevitably deteriorating result to 
 the race." 2 
 
 For this particular scandal the London County 
 Council was the more to blame. Let not the reader 
 suppose that a Liberal government, however, was 
 
 1 She died in a lunatic asylum. I have not heard that society 
 ever offered her a public apology for its brutality to her. 
 
 2 See Times Report, February 28, 1908. 
 
258 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 likely to remedy the immoderate ignorance of a " Mod- 
 erate " County Council on this matter. Mr. Glad- 
 stone's reply in Parliament was an exceptionally long 
 one, but did not contain a syllable to suggest that any 
 question of the future is involved, or that a woman 
 may become a mother. Further, the Licensing Bill 
 introduced just when we were drawing public atten- 
 tion to this scandal contained nowhere any hint of the 
 principle that you must attack drunkenness by attack- 
 ing " the main source of drunkard supply the 
 drunkard himself." These, the reader will remem- 
 ber, are the words of His Majesty's Inspector. There 
 is no question of party-feeling, then, the reader will 
 understand, in what has here been said. Whether la- 
 beled Liberal, Conservative, Progressive or Moderate, 
 ignorance is still ignorance, and when in action is still 
 what Goethe called it, the most dangerous thing in the 
 world. 
 
 Pure ignorance, of course, is one of the things 
 against which the advocate of race-culture must fight. 
 The lack of imagination, however, is another. At 
 present we have few homes for the feeble-minded, and 
 many for what the feeble-minded become : few for pre- 
 vention which is possible and cheap, many for cure, 
 which is impossible and dear. The average county 
 councillor or politician, of course, is rather more short- 
 sighted than the average man, simply because you can- 
 not be far-sighted and a partisan. What his defect 
 of vision requires is impossible, but it would be effec- 
 tive. It is that the consequences of unworthy parent- 
 hood should be immediate, instead of taking months 
 or years to develop. Any one, even a politician, 
 
THE RACIAL POISONS: ALCOHOL 259 
 
 can see cause and effect when they are close enough 
 together. It is the little interval that the political eye 
 cannot pierce. Nevertheless, we shall one day learn 
 to think of the next generation and then there will be 
 an end of the politician who thinks only of the next 
 election. 
 
 IGNORANCE ON ITS DEFENSE. The state of what 
 has no excuse for being uninformed opinion was only 
 too well illustrated in a letter from the Chairman of the 
 Public Control Committee of the London County 
 Council which appeared in The Times for February 
 27th, 1908. In defending the London County Coun- 
 cil the writer used the following words : " Reform- 
 ation, not mere detention, was its object when it insti- 
 tuted its reformatory under the Inebriates Acts. 
 . . . The case of the Public Control Committee is 
 that the removal and detention of the hopeless habit- 
 uals is a matter for the police." The explanation ag- 
 gravates the offense. In the face of reiterated expert 
 opinion, which has no dissentient, as to the practical 
 impossibility of reformation you cannot reform 
 what has never been formed, viz., a normally devel- 
 oped brain here we find a man in this responsible 
 position, a man who has the power to put his ignor- 
 ance into action, telling us that the London County 
 Council aims at the impossible in this respect; whilst, 
 in utter defiance of the future and of the useless bru- 
 tality of the police court method, he tells us that these 
 " hopeless habituals " are a matter for the police. 
 Then, by way of making the thing complete, he speaks 
 of " mere detention." What he calls " mere deten- 
 tion " is everything, for it saves the future by pre- 
 
260 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 venting parenthood on the part of members of the 
 community who, more certainly than any others that 
 can be named, are unworthy of it. The adjective 
 " mere " is only too adequate a measure of the state of 
 opinion which, by such retrograde courses as that un- 
 der discussion, promises to destroy the British people 
 ere long and therefore, of course, the Empire of 
 which that people is the living and necessary founda- 
 tion. 
 
 It may be noted in passing that the word " reforma- 
 tory," employed in the Inebriates Act of 1898, is a 
 highly unfortunate one. It suggests a practically im- 
 possible hope, and it ignores what, I submit, must and 
 will ere long be regarded as the essential purpose, 
 function and value of the detention of inebriates 
 the prohibition of parenthood on their part. In the 
 case of women beyond the child-bearing age, the whole 
 is radically altered. If it amuses the legislature to 
 cherish fantastic hopes, let it speak about the reforma- 
 tion of these women. If it prefers the futile and dis- 
 gusting cruelty of the Jane Cakebread method for 
 such women, when the plan for reformation is found 
 to fail, that is no affair of ours in the present volume. 
 Such women have been in effect sterilized by natural 
 processes, and the advocate of race-culture can afford 
 to ignore them, for they do not concern him. Let me 
 note, however, that, of 294 female inebriates admitted 
 to reformatories in the year 1906, 170 were under 
 forty years of age, 92 of whom a considerable pro- 
 portion would be possible mothers, were between forty 
 and fifty, and only 32 of the total were over fifty years 
 
THE RACIAL POISONS: ALCOHOL 261 
 
 of age. 1 It may be said that the lives of these un- 
 happy women tend to be terminated early. The only 
 pity is that our present blindness and ignorance in 
 dealing with them are not neutralized, so far as the fu- 
 ture is concerned, by death at much earlier ages. If 
 such a reflection strikes the reader as cruel, how much 
 more cruel are those who are responsible for the pres- 
 ent case of the women inebriates of London? 
 
 The Pall Mall Gazette, on March 4th, 1908, gave 
 the utmost prominence to an article of mine on this 
 subject, entitled "An Urgent Public Scandal, The 
 Case of London's Inebriates." In this article I 
 quoted The Times letter referred to above, and leveled 
 the most vigorous indictment I could against the au- 
 thors of the outrage under discussion. N-one of them 
 ventured to reply. In the Referee for March 8th, 
 1908, however, a member of the Public Control Com- 
 mittee of the London County Council made an at- 
 tempt to defend its action. The curious reader may 
 refer to that letter as one more instance of that abso- 
 lute blindness to the nature of the problem and to any 
 question of the future which had already been indi- 
 cated in The Times letter from the Chairman of the 
 Committee. Taking these two letters together, we 
 may say that never has a public outrage committed by 
 men in authority been more lamely or ignorantly de- 
 fended. 
 
 IGNORANCE IN ACTION THE PRESENT FACTS. 
 Since the beginning of January, 1908, the brutal 
 
 1 Report of the Inspector under the Inebriates Acts for the 
 year 1906. 
 
262 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 course decreed by the London County Council has 
 been pursued. The wretched and deeply to be pitied 
 women have been and are being discharged at the rate 
 of some twenty to twenty-five per month as their terms 
 expire. The wiser sort of Magistrates and the Police- 
 court missionaries are at their wits' ends, and no won- 
 der. This country offers these women at the mo- 
 ment no refuge whatever; nothing but the degrading 
 and destructive round police-court, prison, public- 
 house, pavement ; da capo. Writing to The Times in 
 relation to the correspondence there published (April 
 1 8th, 1908) between the London County Council and 
 the Eugenics Education Society, Sir Alfred Reynolds, 
 Chairman of the State Inebriate Reformatory Visiting 
 Board and a Visiting Justice of Holloway Prison, said 
 (April 2ist, 1908) : 
 
 " The correspondence published in The Times of April 18, 
 between the London County Council and the President of the 
 Eugenics Education Society convinces me more than ever that 
 the dispute between the London County Council and the 
 Treasury is a scandal and folly of the worst description. For 
 the sake of 6d. per case per day, the London County Council 
 (the same body which receives half a million sterling from the 
 sale of intoxicating liquor) has made it impossible for the 
 metropolitan magistrates to carry out the Act of 1898, and 
 the result is that 500 of the worst female inebriates are al- 
 ternately on the streets or in prison again, and the former 
 scenes of horror and drunken violence reappear. Holloway 
 Prison will soon fill up again, and all the good which has been 
 done during the last few years will be lost. ... I will not 
 trouble you further, except by emphasizing what I have said 
 by adding that since January last year 1,500 women have been 
 notified to Scotland Yard as always in and out of prison from 
 the County of London, are qualified for inebriate homes, and 
 at the present moment there are over 50 of this number in 
 
THE RACIAL POISONS: ALCOHOL 263 
 
 Holloway Prison serving absolutely useless short terms of im- 
 prisonment." 
 
 THE LONDON COUNTY COUNCIL PERFORMS A SERV- 
 ICE FOR PHILOSOPHY. As we have seen, there exists 
 or seems to exist a radical antagonism in certain groups 
 of cases between the interests of the individual and 
 the interests of the race. You may preserve the 
 quality of the race, as the Spartans did, by exposing 
 defective infants; you may be kind to feeble-minded 
 children, as we are, but you will injure the race in 
 the long run. Darwin saw this more than a gener- 
 ation ago, but instead of suggesting the prohibition 
 of parenthood to the unfit, he said that we must bear 
 the ill effects of their multiplication rather than sacri- 
 fice the law of love. Huxley similarly said that moral 
 evolution consisted in opposing natural evolution. 
 Now it has for some time been evident that this an- 
 tagonism need not be radical if, whilst devoting hos- 
 pitals and charity and medical science to the care of 
 the unfit, we deny them the privilege of parenthood. 
 On the other hand, the London County Council by 
 its present action has performed a service to biolog- 
 ical philosophy by showing that it is possible to com- 
 bine the maximum of brutality to the individual and 
 to the present with the maximum of injury to the race 
 and to the future. In his report for 1906 Dr. Branth- 
 waite cites the history of a girl who, at the age of 
 fifteen years and nine months, was convicted in 1881 
 for being drunk and disorderly. During the next 
 quarter of a century she was sentenced 115 times, 
 and in January 1906 was sent to a Reformatory. 
 
264 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 She has twice attempted to commit suicide. Her 
 case is, of course, now hopeless, and Dr. Branthwaite 
 predicts that her life will end by suicide. Let any 
 one read Dr. Branthwaite' s Report or Dr. Robert 
 Jones' account of Jane Cakebread, or let him acquaint 
 himself with instances as they are to be daily seen, 
 and he will agree that the maximum of brutality is 
 no excessive phrase to describe the policy of shame 
 at present pursued in London : if, indeed, seeing that 
 we now have knowledge, it should not be described 
 as something still worse. 
 
 As for the injury to the future, we already know 
 what the present policy effects. We may grant, then, 
 to the London County Council that it has performed 
 a service for philosophy in showing that it is possible 
 to combine both kinds of evil in one harmonious pol- 
 icy. Nor let the reader suppose that any partisan 
 feeling infects this protest. The Government is also 
 to blame. Even had the L.C.C. declined to contribute 
 anything at all to the cost of the proper policy, no 
 really educated and honorable Government had any 
 choice but to undertake all the cost itself even at 
 the cost of office! Better were in Mr. Bal four's 
 words, the wisest ones he ever uttered " the barren 
 exchange of one set of tyrants, or jobbers, for an- 
 other," than the horrible birth of thousands of feeble- 
 minded babies. 
 
 THE ARGUMENT FROM ECONOMY. It would be easy 
 to show that the present policy is not economical 
 even as regards the cost of these women themselves, 
 and even if it be assumed that gold is wealth. But 
 consider the remoter cost. During the period when 
 
THE RACIAL POISONS: ALCOHOL 265 
 
 the present writer was making public protests very 
 nearly every day on this matter without any imme- 
 diate effect, and only one month after the London 
 County Council had attempted to defend itself on 
 the ground of economy when challenged by the Eugen- 
 ics Education Society, there was formally opened, 
 with a flourish of trumpets, the eighty-seventh school 
 for feeble-minded children established by the London 
 County Council. It accommodates sixty such children 
 (besides sixty physically defective). This school cost 
 6,000 to build alone. The sixty feeble-minded chil- 
 dren whom it accommodates are not a very large pro- 
 portion of the 7,000 admittedly feeble-minded school 
 children in London a number which is probably 
 not more than a third or a fourth of the real number. 
 It has been exhaustively proved that feeble-minded 
 children are mainly, at any given time, the progeny 
 of feeble-minded persons such as constitute the ma- 
 jority of chronic inebriates. Ignorance is again in 
 action. On the one hand, the London County Coun- 
 cil, quarreling over pence, effectively suspends the 
 working of the Inebriates Acts, and thus ensures that 
 the supply of feeble-minded children shall be kept up. 
 On the other hand, it takes these children, cares for 
 them until they are capable of becoming parents, and 
 then turns them upon the world. The Chairman at 
 the opening ceremony of the School referred to said 
 that " at the special schools work was being done 
 which would advance the intelligence of the pupils, 
 and thus benefit the entire race." It would be diffi- 
 cult to concentrate more ignorance in fewer words or 
 in ten times as many. 
 
266 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 A HOME OFFICE COMMITTEE APPOINTED. The 
 almost continuous protest of two months did, how- 
 ever, bear fruit, the Home Secretary appointing a 
 Committee to consider the question of the amendment 
 of the Inebriates Acts. But the legal brutalities de- 
 scribed are still being perpetrated, and the future is be- 
 ing compromised. The London County Council may 
 be advised to make arrangements for building a few 
 score more schools for defective children in antici- 
 pation of the growing need which it is assuring. 
 
 Never again, when it is past, must we permit the 
 present abominable policy. It is for public opinion 
 to effect this, and public opinion has only to be di- 
 rected to the case in order to realize its nature. If 
 the reader pleases he may discount altogether the eu- 
 genic argument, though I believe that in the long run 
 that is more important than any other. But if he 
 confines his attention solely to the cruelties perpe- 
 trated upon these helpless women, infinitely more 
 sinned against than sinning, and especially if he con- 
 siders the testimony of Sir Alfred Reynolds above 
 quoted; he will surely lend his aid to put an end to a 
 state of affairs which is a disgrace to our civilization. 
 We talk of progress, and we are indeed incalculably 
 indebted to our ancestors, but let any one consider the 
 case of the poor child, now a wrecked woman, quoted 
 above, and let him consider what it may be to be an 
 heir of all the ages in the greatest city of the world 
 to-day. 
 
 It will be sufBciently evident that if any warrant 
 were needed for the formation of the Eugenics Edu- 
 cation Society or for the publication of the present 
 
THE RACIAL POISONS: ALCOHOL 267 
 
 volume, it would be found only too abundantly in the 
 outrage upon decency and morality and science and the 
 future which is at present in perpetration. Further, 
 if any warrant were required for the incessant reiter- 
 ation of the principle that there is no wealth but life, 
 it would be found in the fact that this outrage is being 
 committed in the name of economy. Yet even if the 
 sane and sober London rate-payer were saved a few 
 shillings now, as he will not be, his children will have 
 to pay pounds in the future for the support of these 
 women's children. Economy, forsooth, when the 
 rates of London benefited to the extent of 559,000 
 out of the sale of intoxicating liquors in 1905, and 
 spent 8,000 in the maintenance of committed ineb- 
 riates! Need one apologize for declaring again, that 
 we require a new political economy which teaches 
 that gold is for the purchase of life, and not life for 
 the purchase of gold. For the public outrage under 
 discussion, whereby an untold measure of life, present 
 and tq come, " breathing and to be," is to be destroyed 
 and defiled for a squabble over shillings, one can 
 adequately quote only the words of Romeo to the 
 apothecary : " There is thy gold ; worse poison to 
 men's souls, doing more murders in this loathsome 
 world, than those poor compounds that thou may'st 
 not sell." 
 
 THE LAST TOUCHES OF ART. If this protest hurts 
 any one's feelings, that cannot be helped. When the 
 production of thousands of feeble-minded children is 
 involved, the self-esteem of what Mr, George Mere- 
 dith calls the " accepted imbecile " does not matter. 
 The question is how soon do we propose to rectify our 
 
268 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 present course in this respect, a course which is a 
 shame and a disgrace to our age and nation, and 
 which shall in any case be placed on record in printed 
 words, as well as in young children stamped with de- 
 generacy in order to point for future ages the 
 question "An nescis, mi fili, quantilla prudentia reg- 
 itur orbis?" "With how little wisdom" and, 
 whilst perpetrating this shame, ignoring the one in- 
 disputable means by which legislation can and must 
 check drunkenness, nearly all other measures having 
 failed since Babylon was an Empire, they were quar- 
 reling about a temperance measure, so-called, which 
 regarded the question of transference of money from 
 one pocket to another as vital, and ignored the one 
 vital question, which is the question of life : a measure 
 showing scarcely a sign, either in its text or in the 
 words of its supporters or in the words of its oppo- 
 nents, that the question of the future race had ever en- 
 tered into the head of a public man ; a measure which 
 left the protection of children from the public-house to 
 the discretion of local magistrates; a measure which 
 certainly, whatever else it might effect, could not have 
 been more carefully drawn if its object were to pro- 
 mote that secret drinking amongst women 1 which 
 means the poisoning of the racial life even before it 
 sees the light. This then " mi fill'/ was what was 
 called practical statesmanship in the year 1908 of 
 the Christian Era: and in order that no last touch 
 might be wanted from the hand of ignorance and the 
 
 i 1 This drinking by women, which means drinking by mothers 
 present, expectant or possible, is rapidly increasing in Great 
 Britain, though almost unknown in our Colonies. It is at 
 the heart that Empires rot. 
 
THE RACIAL POISONS: ALCOHOL 269 
 
 blasphemous idolatry which worships gold to the neg- 
 lect of the only true god, which is life, they an- 
 nounced just at this time the issue of a Royal 
 Commission to inquire and report upon the manufac- 
 ture and variations in the compositions of whiskey. 
 It has been a public joke for years past that no one 
 can answer the question " what is whiskey ? " Well, 
 then, I will answer the question, and we may save the 
 labor of such commissions hereafter. Whiskey is a 
 racial poison, and there is nothing else to know about 
 it worth knowing for the future. Those who will 
 never become, or can no longer become, fathers or 
 mothers, may do as they please about whiskey, so far 
 as the ideal of eugenics or race-culture is concerned. 
 They may say, if they like, that their personal habits 
 are their affair and concern no one else. Under the 
 influence of whiskey they may, perhaps, even believe 
 this. But for those who are to be the fathers and 
 mothers of the future, such a plea is idle. The ques- 
 tion is not solely their affair ; it is the affair of the un- 
 born, and we who champion the unborn are bound to 
 say so. 
 
 The time will come when it is recognized that there 
 are two classes of active mind in society: those who 
 worship and uphold the past, and will always sacrifice 
 the living to the dead, nay more, the unborn to the 
 dead. The ultimate fate of these is the fate of her 
 who looked backwards to the shame and destruction 
 from which she had escaped. She was turned into a 
 pillar of salt. And there are those who worship and 
 work for the future, who will, without hesitation, sac- 
 rifice the interests of the dead (who are no longer in- 
 
270 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 terested) to those of the living and the coming race 
 nay more, who will even sacrifice the interests of a few 
 worthless living to those of many yet unborn, that 
 they may be worthy. Let the dead bury their dead ; 
 let the worshipers of the dead and dying ask them- 
 selves whether the life that is and the life that is to 
 be do not demand their homage and service. Not 
 until some such principles as these are recognized shall 
 we rightly deal with the drink problem, amongst many 
 others, and bring to it the mental and moral enlight- 
 enment which makes for life on the higher plane, just 
 as surely and just as indispensably as the light of the 
 sun creates all life whatsoever. 
 
 MR. BALFOUR ON LEGISLATION. Surely the moral 
 of this argument is clear. The most important, the 
 most radical, the most practicable of all temperance 
 measures is that which attacks the main source of 
 supply of the drunkard. When a Licensing Bill is 
 brought before the House of Commons, Mr. Balfour 
 repeats the ancient piece of nonsense that you cannot 
 make people moral by Act of Parliament an as- 
 sertion that any child can see to be a muddle. We 
 may let that pass for the moment, but Mr. Balfour is 
 a thinker, a student of biology, and heredity in espe- 
 cial, and he has lately been lecturing on " Decadence." 
 Might it not have been expected that such a man 
 would take an opportunity to say what the humblest 
 serious student of the subject would have said, and 
 thereby to bring far more damaging criticism against 
 the opposing party's bill than any he hinted at? He 
 might have said, " Your bill, even if passed, will ac- 
 complish little, or relatively little, at great cost, be- 
 
THE RACIAL POISONS: ALCOHOL 271 
 
 cause you have no grasp of the principles of the sub- 
 ject. You have no idea of what drunkenness really 
 is. If your bill were worth a straw it would seek as 
 a primary principle to safeguard the race by arresting 
 the supply of potential drunkards. Your endless 
 financial clauses deal merely with the re-distribution 
 of money, but your bill has no clause that deals with 
 the only business of governments, the creation and 
 the economy of the only real wealth, which is human 
 life." That is what the ex-Premier did not say. He 
 had plenty of passion, plenty of party-feeling to give 
 fire to his words, but so far as knowledge is con- 
 cerned or any conception of what alone is the wealth 
 of nations, there was nothing to choose between Mr. 
 Balfour and Mr. Asquith. Passion you must have if 
 you are to do anything, but not party-passion : whereas 
 if you have passion for life and for children, not only 
 will it be effective, but notwithstanding all that 
 psychologists tell us as to the vitiation of judgment 
 by emotion, it will actually teach you the supreme and 
 eternal truths. 
 
 In this book hitherto little has been said as to formal 
 eugenic legislation. I believe with fitienne that it is 
 opinion which governs the world: legislation in front 
 of public opinion brings all law into contempt. But 
 in his first speech opposing the Licensing Bill of 1908, 
 Mr. Balfour, the author of the Licensing Bill of 1904, 
 decried legislation. " Intemperance," he said, " is a 
 vice:" and legislation can do practically nothing in 
 dealing with vice. Plainly Mr. Balfour is ignorant 
 of the nature of intemperance, which largely depends 
 upon transmitted and inherent brain defect. He 
 
272 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 therefore lost his opportunity of pointing out in what 
 fashion you can actually, notwithstanding the parrots, 
 make people sober by Act of Parliament viz., by 
 forbidding parenthood to those whose children would 
 almost certainly become drunkards. We who are not 
 politicians, much less ex-Premiers, must make our 
 own proposals then. Last year's criticism of the Lon- 
 don County Council began, I believe, to educate pub- 
 lic opinion to the necessary point. In the name of 
 race-culture and the New Patriotism, in the name of 
 morality and charity and science, we must demand, 
 obtain and carry into effect the most stringent and 
 comprehensive legislation, such as effectively to forbid 
 parenthood on the part of the chronic inebriate. Ere 
 long, the person who would have become a chronic 
 inebriate will be cared for and protected during child- 
 hood and thereafter with the same result. This 
 solution of the problem is denounced, says Dr. Arch- 
 dall Reid, 
 
 '*. . . as horrible, as Malthusian, as immoral, as imprac- 
 ticable. . . . The alternative is more horrible and more 
 immoral still. If by any means we save the inebriates of this 
 generation, but permit them to have offspring, future genera- 
 tions must deal with an increased number of inebriates. . . . 
 The experience of many centuries has rendered it sufficiently 
 plain, that while there is drink, there will be drunkards till the 
 race be purged of them. We have therefore no real choice 
 between Temperance Reform by the abolition of drink, and 
 Temperance Reform by the elimination of the drunkard. . . . 
 Which is the worse; that miserable drunkards shall bear 
 wretched children to a fate of starvation and neglect and 
 early death, or of subsequent drunkenness and crime, or that, 
 by our deliberate act, the procreation of children shall be for- 
 bidden them? We are on the horns of a dilemma from which 
 there is no escape. . . . But our time has seen the labors 
 
THE RACIAL POISONS: ALCOHOL 273 
 
 of Darwin. We know now the great secret. Science has given 
 us knowledge and with it power. We have learnt that if we 
 labor for the individual alone, we shall surely fail; but that 
 if we make our sacrifice greater, if we labor for the race as 
 well, we must succeed. Let us then by all means seek to save 
 the individual drunkard; with all our power let us endeavor 
 to make and keep him sober; but let us strive also to eradicate 
 the type; for, as I have said, if we do it not quickly and with 
 mercy, Nature will do it slowly and with infinite cruelty." 
 
 WOMEN AND CHILDREN FIRST. The noble cry on 
 a sinking ship is " women and children first." This 
 perhaps is a plea for the service of helplessness as 
 such, though it might be equally warranted as a de- 
 mand for the sacrifice of the present for the future. 
 And assuredly the cry for a sinking society must also 
 be " women and children first." It is well if the cry 
 be raised when the ship of state is not yet sinking, but 
 only water-logged or alcohol-logged. Temperance 
 legislation and the agitation for temperance reform 
 are themselves in need of reform. Their appalling 
 record of failure for it is such a record should 
 help even the fanatic, one thinks, to accept the intro- 
 duction of the eugenic idea as a new principle of life 
 for the temperance cause. In the present state of 
 custom and opinion, the teetotaler cannot force his 
 own wise habits upon the vast majority who do not 
 agree with him. If he has an infinite amount of en- 
 ergy and resources, let him spend as much of both as 
 he pleases upon the sort of propaganda with which we 
 are familiar: he will, by the hypothesis, still have an 
 infinite amount of both available for the cause to 
 which the principle of race-culture would direct him. 
 If, however, his energy and resources are finite if, 
 
274 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 indeed, they are by no means excessive in proportion 
 to the urgent task which the ideal of race-culture asks 
 of him, then let him not fritter away a moment or a 
 penny or a breath until he has achieved the process 
 of salvage or salvation which is expressed in the phrase 
 " women and children first." More accurately, per- 
 haps, our cry must be "parents and possible parents 
 first," and this for present practical purposes is equiv- 
 alent to " women and children first." It would have 
 been well if the temperance propaganda from the first, 
 say two generations ago in Great Britain, had adopted 
 this motto. But its adoption is far more urgent to- 
 day in consequence of the fact, unfortunately no longer 
 to be questioned, that drinking amongst women, the 
 mothers of the future, is, and has been for some time, 
 steadily increasing. Children yet unborn must be pro- 
 tected from the injury which may be inflicted upon 
 them by those who will be their mothers. Yet though 
 there is more need for action in this regard than ever 
 before, and though Mr. G. R. Sims in his books The 
 Cry of the Children and the The Black Stain has 
 lately drawn wide attention to the subject, we have 
 seen that the principle of women and children first, a 
 principle derived from the ideal of race-culture, and 
 directly serving that ideal, was almost wholly ignored 
 in the Licensing Bill of 1908. The motto " money 
 not motherhood " is a bad one for the framers of a 
 temperance measure. If ever we have a temperance 
 measure worthy the name the motto of its framers 
 will be " motherhood not money." Such a measure 
 will most certainly have to introduce the principle of 
 indeterminate sentences or rather indeterminate 
 
THE RACIAL POISONS: ALCOHOL 275 
 
 care in the treatment of the chronic inebriate. 
 There is no possibility of two opinions as to the urgent 
 and indispensable necessity of such treatment, nor 
 yet as to its scrupulous humanity both for the unfor- 
 tunate victim himself or herself and for the unborn. 
 
 The word " reformatory " had better be abolished 
 from official language, since it leads accredited people 
 to write to The Times such foolishness as " reform- 
 ation, not mere detention." 
 
 Further, the expense of dealing with the chronic 
 inebriate in this, the only humane and economical 
 way, had better fall entirely and directly upon the 
 state. It must not be possible again for a local au- 
 thority, even the London County Council, however ig- 
 norant or criminally careless, to commit a public in- 
 decency like that already recorded but the full 
 record of which none of us will live to see. 
 
 AN UNPUNISHED MAGISTRATE. Yet again, in 
 this measure there must be some means of compelling 
 such magistrates as cannot be educated. At present, 
 even when accommodation is provided, the unfortunate 
 creature of the Jane Cakebread type, when she is only 
 just beginning to enter into competition with that 
 horrible record, and when she is therefore most dan- 
 gerous as regards the possibility of motherhood, can 
 be detained only by the magistrate's order. Now it 
 is very much less trouble for all concerned to say 
 " five shillings or a week " than to make the necessary 
 inquiries in such cases. Further, in putting this meas- 
 ure of one's dreams upon the statute book, we shall 
 have to remember that the idea of protective care and 
 the eugenic idea are, to say the least, not native in 
 
276 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 the mind of every magistrate. In Dr. Welsh Branth- 
 waite's report for 1906, there is quoted a case where 
 a woman had been habitually drunken for at least 
 thirteen years previous to her committal to a reform- 
 atory. Her known sentences included 27 fines, and 
 138 terms of imprisonment. She was feeble-minded. 
 On the termination of her reformatory sentence the dis- 
 charge certificate described her as " quite unfit to con- 
 trol her own actions," and " certain to succumb to the 
 first temptation to drink." The woman was found 
 drunk a few hours after discharge. Said the magis- 
 trate, " this case clearly proves that it is almost use- 
 less trying to reform such women as this. ... I 
 think, after all, the old way is best and therefore I sen- 
 tence her to one month with hard labor." I refrain 
 from suggesting a suitable sentence for the magistrate ; 
 doubtless he got off scot-free. 
 
 Surely we might agree, as regards this racial poison, 
 that at least parenthood and the future must be kept 
 out of its clutches. It may be, it assuredly is, a de- 
 plorable thing that the woman of fifty, to take an 
 instance, should become alcoholic, but at the worst this 
 h only the fate of an individual in the main at any 
 rate. Such principles as these will some day be the 
 cardinal principles of legislation, and not only in re- 
 gard to alcohol. The time will and must come when 
 public opinion will urge, whether in the name of a 
 New Imperialism or of common morality or of self- 
 protection, that in our attempts to deal with alcohol, 
 we shall begin by removing its fingers from the throat 
 of the race : " Women and children first." 
 
 THE REPORT OF THE INEBRIATES COMMITTEE. In 
 
THE RACIAL POISONS: ALCOHOL 277 
 
 January, 1909, the Committee which was at last ap- 
 pointed to consider this matter made its Report. 1 I 
 have not the literary capacity to comment adequately 
 upon the political wisdom which brings in a Licensing 
 Bill, devotes vast labor and much time to it and has it 
 rejected by the House of Lords, while such a Com- 
 mittee as this is at work. The spirit of the poli- 
 tician who spoke of " those damned professors " 
 still reigns over us, and will certainly ruin us unless 
 speedily deposed. However, here is the Report, and 
 its recommendations are earnestly to be commended 
 to the study of all students. New legislation, as it 
 shows, is urgently required, and it is pre-eminently 
 the duty of every eugenist to hasten its coming. This 
 is not a party question, but merely a national one, and 
 will therefore be dealt with by politicians only under 
 external pressure, such as produced the Committee 
 itself. The finger of public opinion must apply that 
 pressure forthwith. 
 
 The recommendations of the Committee are so ad- 
 mirable and thorough and eugenic in effect as to tem- 
 per one's disappointment that the Report contains no 
 definite, overt recognition of the eugenic idea. I had 
 hoped that the evidence prepared and submitted to the 
 Committee for the Eugenics Education Society would 
 suffice to ensure the recognition of the eugenic idea in 
 the Report, for the first time, we may suppose, in of- 
 ficial history. For the present we may merely note 
 that the suggestions made in preceding pages are con- 
 firmed by the Committee's Report, and that the next 
 
 1 Cd. 4438. Price 4tf>d. Volume of evidence Cd. 4439. Price 
 as. 
 
278 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 legislation bearing on the question of temperance will 
 undoubtedly have to attack the subject in this radical 
 manner by what will be in effect the sterilization of 
 the habitual drinker of either sex and any social status. 
 The Committee do not recognize that that is what 
 their Report involves, much less that that gives it its 
 real value; but so it is, as the year 1950 will be late 
 enough to show. 
 
 Much time and trouble were spent in preparing for 
 the Eugenics Education Society answers to many of 
 the questions submitted to it by the Committee, and 
 the Society may fairly claim, I think, that its original 
 services to this matter were well-continued. The 
 present writer also prepared for the Society a Mem- 
 orandum (Minutes of Evidence, p. 189), which per- 
 haps fairly sums up, in the briefest possible space, the 
 indisputable relations between alcohol and parenthood, 
 and which may therefore be reprinted here. The 
 reader will notice an omission in that nothing is said 
 as to the effects of alcohol in injuring the germ-cells 
 of healthy stock of either sex. The omission was 
 made in order that nothing possibly disputable might 
 be included. It has already been argued that on 
 grounds both of fact and of theory there is every 
 reason to recognize in alcohol, as in syphilis and in 
 lead, a racial poison, originating racial degeneration 
 which, in accordance with generally recognized princi- 
 ples, shows itself in the latest, highest and therefore 
 most delicate portions of the organism. 
 
 The Memorandum is as follows : 
 
 " It may be pointed out that the children of the 
 
THE RACIAL POISONS: ALCOHOL 279 
 
 drunkard are on the average less capable of citizenship 
 on account of 
 
 (a) The inheritance of nervous defect inherent in 
 
 the parent. 
 
 (b) Intra-uterine alcoholic poisoning in cases where 
 
 the mother is an inebriate. 
 
 (c) Neglect, ill-feeding, accidents, blows, etc., 
 
 which are responsible on the one hand for 
 much infant mortality, and combined with 
 the possible causes before mentioned, for the 
 ultimate production of adults defective both 
 in body and mind. 
 
 " It would appear, then, that the drunkard, if not ef- 
 fectively restrained, conduces to the production of a 
 defective race, involving a grave financial burden upon 
 the sober portion of the community, to say nothing of 
 higher considerations. It therefore seems to the Eu- 
 genics Education Society of extreme importance that 
 some substantial effort should be made for the reform 
 of existing drunkards or the permanent control 
 of the irreformable. 
 
 " Scientific warrant for the foregoing propositions is 
 now to be found in no small abundance. Reference 
 may be made, for instance, to the chapter on " Alcohol- 
 ism and Human Degeneration," in Dr. W. C. Sulli- 
 van's recent work Alcoholism (Nisbet, 1906). Dr. 
 Sullivan quotes the results of more than a dozen ob- 
 servers in this and other countries, and special atten- 
 tion may be drawn to his own well-known study 
 of the history of 600 children born of 120 drunken 
 mothers. The works of Prof. Forel of Zurich are 
 
a8o PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 widely known in this connection, notably Die Sexuel 
 Frage, and The Hygiene of Nerves and Mind (Trans- 
 lation, Murray, 1907). Parental alcoholism as a 
 true cause of epilepsy in the offspring is now gener- 
 ally recognized. For numerous and detailed proofs 
 from many sources reference may be made to page 
 210 of the last work named. 
 
 " It is not necessary, however, to go over the ground 
 which has doubtless been covered by the Royal Com- 
 mission on the Care and Control of the Feeble-minded. 
 
 " The existing laws comply to only a very small and 
 almost negligible extent with the eugenic requirement. 
 They only deal with (a) the very minute proportion 
 of inebriates who can be induced to voluntarily sign 
 away their liberty, and (b) those who are also criminal 
 or all but hopeless and who have done harm already, 
 either as individuals or in becoming parents. The 
 third group of inebriates (c) not included in (a) or 
 (b) constitute the overwhelming majority of the 
 whole. They are absolutely untouched by the present 
 law, and further powers are urgently required to deal 
 with them. 
 
 " Such legislation would be by no means without 
 precedent, and may avail itself of the experience of 
 several of our own colonies and various foreign coun- 
 tries. Such methods as compulsory control on peti- 
 tion, guardianship and so forth are in employment, for 
 instance, in the Australian commonwealth and New 
 Zealand, California, Connecticut, Massachusetts, va- 
 rious cantons in Switzerland, Nova Scotia, etc. 
 
 " To sum up, the Society advocates the retention of 
 the present law so far as classes (a) and (b) are con- 
 
THE RACIAL POISONS: ALCOHOL 281 
 
 cerned, but would most strongly urge the addition 
 of powers to deal with that great majority of inebri- 
 ates whom the present law does not touch." 
 
 THE FRIENDS OF ALCOHOL. Those who defend the 
 alcoholic poisoning of the race may be easily classified. 
 Some few honestly stand for liberty. Like Arch- 
 bishop Magee, they would rather see England free than 
 England sober, not asking in what sense England 
 drunken could be called free. Some are merely irri- 
 tated by the temperance fanatic. Many fear that their 
 personal comfort may be interfered with. But prob- 
 ably the overwhelming majority are concerned with 
 their pockets. They live by this cannibal trade; by 
 selling death and the slaughter of babies, feeble-mind- 
 edness and insanity, consumption and worse diseases, 
 crime and pauperism, degradation of body and mind 
 in a thousand forms, to the present generation and 
 therefore to the future, the unconsulted party to the 
 bargain. Their motto is " your money and your life." 
 So powerful are they that most of them are frank. 
 They form associations for their defense, and hold 
 mass meetings at which they condemn any temperance 
 measure that is before the country, " whilst ready to 
 welcome any real temperance reform." They demand 
 adequate compensation: though, if they disgorged 
 every farthing they possess, and devoted themselves 
 body and soul for the rest of their lives to the human 
 cause, they could never compensate us who are alive, 
 let alone the dead or the unborn, for the human ruin 
 on which they build their success. They build their 
 palaces before our eyes; but where most see only fine 
 
282 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 stone, the student of infant mortality, the lover of chil- 
 dren, he who works and looks for the life of this world 
 to come, sees the bodies of the children of men and is 
 tempted to recall the curse of Joshua, " He shall lay 
 the foundation thereof in his first born, and in his 
 youngest son shall he set up the gates of it." 
 
 ALCOHOLIC IMPERIALISM. At least let the alco- 
 holic party refrain from calling themselves Imperial- 
 ists. Amongst them, for instance, is the " Imperial 
 bard," the " poet of empire," he who has appealed to 
 the " god of our fathers," and who warns us lest it 
 shall be said that " all our pomp of yesterday is one 
 with Nineveh and Tyre " : and appeals to deity 
 
 "Judge of the Nations, spare us yet, 
 Lest we forget, lest we forget ! " 
 
 This prophet of what some may think a blasphemous 
 Imperialism gives his name to the association which 
 frankly in this matter of alcohol stands for gold as 
 against life. We are to beware lest " drunk with sight 
 of power " we boast as do the " lesser breeds " to 
 whom the " awful Hand " of God has not granted 
 dominion : nor are we to put our trust in reeking tube 
 and iron shard. We may freely call ourselves Im- 
 perialists, however, even though we should be num- 
 bered amongst those whom Ruskin, himself the son of 
 a wine merchant, called the " vendors of death." One 
 wonders whether the " Lord God " exists that he can 
 withhold his " awful Hand " at such a spectacle as this. 
 If some amongst us are to win gold by the sale of this 
 racial poison, and if it must be so, let them at least be 
 consistent, and label themselves the very littlest of little 
 
THE RACIAL POISONS: ALCOHOL 283 
 
 Englanders, which they are. An alcoholic Imperial- 
 ism is of the kind which no Empire can long survive. 
 
 Those of us whom such things as these make sick 
 and who yet, with true poets like Wordsworth, are 
 proud of " the tongue that Shakespeare spake/' and 
 who with him declare: 
 
 " It is not to be thought of that the flood 
 Of British freedom, which to the open sea 
 Of the world's praise, from dark antiquity 
 Hath flowed, . . . 
 
 That this most famous stream, in bogs and sands 
 Shall perish; and to evil and to 'good 
 Be lost forever " 
 
 those of us who know that the foundations of any Em- 
 pire are living men and women, and that, to quote Mr. 
 Kipling, " when breeds are in the making everything is 
 worth while," may wonder what process has been afoot 
 that in three generations English poetry should pass 
 from the sonnets of Wordsworth to " Duke's son, cook's 
 son," etc. ; and may even at times, especially those of 
 us who know what alcohol costs in life, feel a momen- 
 tary recession of our faith that Great Britain need not 
 be writing the last page of her great history. Mean- 
 while, we read the controversy in Parliament and the 
 press concerning alcohol. We see the cannibal cause 
 of beer and spirits, which makes many widows and 
 orphans every day, 1 represented, with an effrontery to 
 
 1 A careful and detailed inquiry by the present writer, pub- 
 lished in the Westminster Gazette (Nov. 21, 1008), Daily Chron- 
 icle, and Manchester Guardian, and hitherto unchallenged, 
 showed that, on the most moderate reckoning, alcohol makes 
 124 widows and orphans in England and Wales every day, 
 or more than 45,000 per annum. 
 
284 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 which no parallel can ever be imagined, as the cause of 
 widows and children, and we recall the lines which 
 Wordsworth wrote rather more than a century ago : 
 
 "How piteous, then, that there should be such dearth 
 Of knowledge; that whole myriads should unite 
 To work against themselves such fell despite; 
 Should come in frenzy and in drunken mirth, 
 Impatient to put out the only light 
 Of liberty that yet remains on earth!" 
 
CHAPTER XIV 
 
 THE RACIAL POISONS : LEAD, NARCOTICS, SYPHILIS 
 
 THE term racial poisons teaches us to distinguish, 
 amongst substances known to be poisonous to the in- 
 dividual, those which injure the germ-plasm: and 
 amongst substances poisonous to the expectant mother 
 herself, we must distinguish those which may also 
 poison her unborn child. Alcohol is pre-eminently the 
 racial poison, thus defined, and I plead for its recogni- 
 tion as primarily a racial poison, this being immeasur- 
 ably the most important aspect of the whole alcohol 
 question. Readers of Professor Forel will not lightly 
 question this assertion. 
 
 The total number of racial poisons is, of course, very 
 large. Amongst them must theoretically be included 
 all abortifacient drugs. There are also various poi- 
 sons of disease to be included in this category. Later 
 pages must be devoted to what is by far the most 
 important of these. But we may observe in passing 
 that such a disease as rheumatic fever or acute rheuma- 
 tism has especial significance for the student of race- 
 culture since, as he knows, its poisons circulating in 
 the blood of an expectant mother may not only injure 
 her own heart for life but may pass through the pla- 
 centa and deform the valves of the child's heart with 
 the subsequent result loosely described as " congenital 
 
 285 
 
286 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 heart disease." The conditions giving rise to rheu- 
 matic fever, then, are conditions from which the ex- 
 pectant mother, even more than the ordinary individ- 
 ual, is entitled to be protected. But this is of minor 
 importance. We may here refer, however, to one or 
 two striking cases, especially since they bear in some 
 degree upon social and individual duty. 
 
 THE RACIAL INFLUENCE OF LEAD. In the first 
 place, it is necessary to draw attention to a really no- 
 table racial poison, viz., lead. 
 
 Says Sir Thomas Oliver, 1 " Lead destroys the re- 
 productive powers of both men and women, but its 
 special influence upon women during pregnancy is the 
 cause of a great destruction of human life." It may 
 be said that in a sense the production of miscarriages 
 and still-births, and also of infant mortality by lead, 
 does not concern the student of race-culture. Never- 
 theless some of these children survive. Says Sir 
 Thomas Oliver : " I have seen both cretinism and im- 
 becility in infants in whom, as there could have been 
 no possible influence of alcohol, and presumably none 
 of syphilis, the occupation of one or other parent as a 
 lead worker must have determined the imperfectly de- 
 veloped nervous system of the child." Later he says 
 (page 202) : " Salpetriere and Bicetre are large hos- 
 pitals in Paris set aside for the reception and treatment 
 of nervous diseases. The experience of the physi- 
 cians of these institutions is unrivaled. One of the 
 physicians, M. Roques, speaking of the degenerates 
 found in these hospitals, says that slowly induced lead 
 
 1 Diseases of Occupation by Sir Thomas Oliver. (The New 
 Library of Medicine, 1908.) 
 
LEAD, NARCOTICS, SYPHILIS 287 
 
 poisoning on the part of both parents or in one or other 
 of them is not only a cause of repeated abortions, high 
 percentage of still-birth and high death-rate of infants, 
 but is the cause of convulsions, imbecility, and idiocy 
 in many of the children who survive the first year of 
 existence. Of nineteen children born to parents who 
 were lead workers, Rennert found that one child was 
 still-born and that seventeen were macrocephalic. In 
 his studies upon hereditary degeneration and idiocy, 
 Bourneville places house-painters in the unenviable 
 first rank of the occupations followed by parents of 
 mentally weak children. Out of eighty-seven cases 
 relating to unhealthy trades, fifty-one were connected 
 with white lead in some form or another, while syphilis 
 was only responsible for nineteen." 
 
 This racial influence of lead is by no means gener- 
 ally recognized even by Royal Commissioners. Its 
 parallelism with the case of alcohol is striking. We 
 may note, for instance, that paternal lead-poisoning, 
 like paternal alcoholism, can cause degeneration in the 
 offspring, if not indeed death before or shortly after 
 birth. To quote Oliver again : " taking seven healthy 
 women who were married to lead workers, and in 
 whom there was a total of thirty-two pregnancies 
 Lewin tells us that the results were as follows : eleven 
 miscarriages, one still-birth, eight children died within 
 the first year after birth, four in the second year, five 
 in the third, and one subsequent to this, leaving only 
 two children out of thirty-two pregnancies, as likely to 
 live to manhood. In cases where women have a series 
 of miscarriages so long as their husbands worked in 
 lead, a change of industrial occupation on the part of 
 
288 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 the husband restores to the wives normal child-bear- 
 ing powers." According to the statistical inquiry of 
 Rennert, the malign influence of lead is exerted upon 
 the next generation, ninety-four times out of one hun- 
 dred when both parents have been working in lead, 
 ninety-two times when the mother alone is affected, and 
 sixty-three times when it is the father alone who has 
 worked in lead. Here, then, as in the case of alcohol, 
 the racial poison may act either through the father or 
 through the mother, but especially through the mother. 
 The importance of the demonstration as regards the 
 father in the case of both poisons is that it means a 
 poisoning of the paternal germ-cell. The facts may be 
 commended to those extremists, so much more Weis- 
 mannian than Weismann, who regard the germ-cells 
 as existing in a universe of their own, wholly unrelated 
 to the rest of existence. 
 
 Another extremely interesting parallel between these 
 two racial poisons may be noted. It is found, accord- 
 ing to Professor Oliver, that " While following a 
 healthy occupation these women, after having fre- 
 quently miscarried when working in lead factories, 
 would have two or three living healthy children, but 
 circumstances necessitating the return of these women 
 to town, and resumption of work in the lead factory, 
 they in each successive pregnancy again miscarried." 
 He then quotes the following most remarkable case : 
 " Mrs. K., aged thirty-four, had four children before 
 going into the factory and two children after. She 
 then had six miscarriages in succession, when she came 
 under my care in the Royal Infirmary, having become 
 the victim of plumbism and having lost the power in 
 
LEAD, NARCOTICS, SYPHILIS 289 
 
 her arms and legs. She made a slow but good re- 
 covery and did not return to the lead works. In her 
 next pregnancy she went to full term and gave birth to 
 a living child." 
 
 We see here that, as is also true in the case of alco- 
 holism, the germinal tissue itself may escape or at any 
 rate may recover from the effects of chronic poisoning 
 of the individual who is its host. The race is more re- 
 sistant than the individual. If, however, the poison- 
 ing continues whilst a new individual is being formed 
 that is to say, during pregnancy that new indi- 
 vidual succumbs, and indeed is far more gravely af- 
 fected than its mother. Such a pregnant woman pre- 
 sents three distinct living objects for our study. Her 
 own body is one: and this is already developed. It 
 has some measure of resistance to the poison but is 
 gravely affected. The embryo is the second; it is de- 
 veloping and because developing is susceptible. It is 
 usually killed before birth. The third is the germ- 
 plasm or the race, and this, as we have seen, may with- 
 stand the poison so well that when the poisoning is 
 discontinued healthy children may be produced from 
 it. Undoubtedly the case is the same as regards al- 
 cohol. The race or germ-plasm is most resistant, the 
 developing individual is least resistant, and the adult 
 individual that is to say, the mother occupies an 
 intermediate position in this respect. 
 
 This parallelism, which has escaped previous ob- 
 servers, may be pointed out and its remarkable interest 
 and significance suggested as a definite advance upon 
 the absurd view that the germ-plasm is incapable of 
 being poisoned. On the contrary, we know that many 
 
290 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 poisons will kill it outright so that sterility results. But 
 its high degree of resistance is a fact of great interest. 
 Doubtless Dr. Archdall Reid's acute explanation of it 
 is correct: namely, that natural selection would tend 
 to evolve a resistless germ-plasm. Dr. Reid will, I 
 think, be interested to notice in these remarkable ob- 
 servations on lead-poisoning a conspicuous illustration 
 of this resistance. 
 
 Our business here, however, is with the practical is- 
 sue. This fortunately is plain, nor are there the same 
 difficulties of vested interests which arise in the case of 
 alcohol. Lead-poisoning must be ended in the inter- 
 ests of race-culture and the essential wealth of the na- 
 tion or, if it is to be continued, it must at least have its 
 clutches kept clear of parenthood. 
 
 THE POSSIBLE RACIAL INFLUENCE OF NARCOTICS. ' 
 
 Alcohol is of course a narcotic poison, or more pre- 
 cisely still, a narcotic-irritant poison, but here we may 
 briefly refer to the possible racial influence of certain 
 other poisons. There is, for instance, the case, noted 
 on p. 245, of the disastrous racial consequences of the 
 cocaine habit. The matter demands only a paragraph, 
 since for the present, at least, it is of small general im- 
 portance, and since we must beware of going beyond 
 the facts; but when once the idea of race-culture has 
 reached the popular and professional mind the latter 
 at present frequently feeding the pregnant woman 
 with alcohol, as we all know the whole question of 
 narcomania will have to be looked at from this aspect, 
 and the measure of danger in particular cases will then 
 be ascertained. It is probably safe to assume, how- 
 ever, that, on the whole, alcohol will be found to stand 
 
LEAD, NARCOTICS, SYPHILIS 291 
 
 somewhat apart from other narcotics, and for the rea- 
 son that it is not a pure narcotic but also an irritant. 
 Thus, to take the case of opium, it will probably be 
 very difficult and, one may hope, impossible to show 
 that, shall we say, opium smoking or eating has an 
 injurious racial influence where it is practiced. Here 
 we have a narcotic which is not an irritant. The in- 
 dividual may recover perfectly from its abuse, as he 
 may often fail to recover from the abuse of alcohol, 
 since this poison leaves permanent changes in the 
 brain, and elsewhere, dependent upon the fact that it 
 is not merely a narcotic but also a local irritant. The 
 action of a pure narcotic on the germ-plasm as com- 
 pared with the action of a narcotic which is also an 
 irritant may afford a parallel. The abuse of opium 
 by an expectant mother (see p. 245) is not of the 
 same order : it means simply dosing a very small baby 
 with opium. 
 
 TOBACCO AND THE RACE. The poisonous com- 
 pounds absorbed from tobacco smoke are of interest in 
 this connection. The question as to the proportion of 
 nicotine included amongst them is immaterial here. 
 It suffices to know, as we do, that certain substances, 
 doubtless including some proportion of nicotine, rap- 
 idly absorbed into the blood by the smoker, are poisons 
 to the individual body. The familiar fact of the ac- 
 quirement of immunity affects in no degree the state- 
 ment as to the toxic character of these substances. 
 
 No one but the fanatic would venture to say that 
 any racial degeneration can be traced to tobacco- 
 smoking. It would be hard to prove the existence of 
 any injury thus inflicted upon the children of the father 
 
292 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 who is a smoker, though the question of the acquire- 
 ment of immunity is not without relevance here. The 
 immunizing substances or anti-toxins which are doubt- 
 less produced in the smoker's blood may protect the 
 germ-plasm which he bears as well as his own body. 
 
 But in the case of the expectant mother there is more 
 warrant for offering an opinion even in the absence 
 hitherto of definite evidence. Apart from any opinion 
 as to the propriety of smoking by women in general, 
 there is a definite issue in the case of the expectant 
 mother. A very young child is now being exposed to 
 the poisons of tobacco smoke, and if we are right in 
 passing laws to prevent this poisoning in the case of 
 the urchin of eight years (who is really, of course, 
 eight years and nine months old) what shall we say re- 
 garding the unborn child who is only eight months 
 old? I have observed that the expectant mother may 
 have her liking for tobacco replaced by violent dislike 
 during pregnancy. 
 
 THE POISON OF SYPHILIS. Brief mention must 
 here be made of syphilis as a racial poison. Sooner or 
 later the eugenic campaign must and will face this 
 question, about which a murderous silence is now 
 maintained. No other disease can rival syphilis in its 
 hideous influence upon parenthood and the future. 
 But it is no crime for a man to marry, infect his in- 
 nocent bride and their children: no crime against the 
 laws of our little lawgivers, but a heinous outrage 
 against Nature's decrees. When, at last, our laws are 
 based on Nature's laws, criminal marriages of this 
 kind may be put an end to. 
 
 The lay reader should acquaint himself with the play 
 
LEAD, NARCOTICS, SYPHILIS 293 
 
 of Brieux, Les Avaries. The student may be referred 
 to Forel's Sexual Question, Dr. C. F. Marshall's Syphi- 
 lology and Venereal Diseases, and his article, " Alcohol 
 and Syphilis " in the British Journal of Inebriety, Jan- 
 uary, 1908. 
 
 This chapter and the last do not profess to do more 
 than indicate the field of eugenics which the term ra- 
 cial poisons suggests. Our business in the present vol- 
 ume is, if possible, to see eugenics whole: to treat of 
 this new science adequately is not for one author or 
 one generation. It is earnestly to be hoped that the 
 medical profession will speedily take up this question 
 of the racial poisons. Already the profession is be- 
 ginning to become the great instrument of individual 
 hygiene: and every year will enhance the importance 
 of this work as compared with the cure of disease. 
 Now negative engenics is substantially racial hygiene: 
 and the next great epoch in the evolution of medicine 
 and the medical profession will be the enrolment of its 
 knowledge and influence in the cause of racial hy- 
 giene. May this book do a little to hasten that day. 
 The two next chapters are destined to introduce that 
 aspect of our subject which may be called National 
 Eugenics, and especially with reference to decadence. 
 Here is a matter which appeals to minds of type and 
 training often very different from the typical medical 
 mind. But it is part of one's purpose to show, if pos- 
 sible, that the historian must become a eugenist, just as 
 the physician must, for eugenics needs and claims the 
 work and help of both. 
 
CHAPTER XV 
 
 NATIONAL EUGENICS I RACE-CULTURE AND HISTORY 1 
 
 THE reader will not expect to be insulted here with 
 any discussion of the garbage and gossip, records of 
 scoundrels, courts and courtesans, battles, murder and 
 theft, which we were taught at school, under the great 
 name of history. 2 If history be, as nearly all histo- 
 rians have conceived it, and as Gibbon defined it, " little 
 more than the register of the crimes, follies, and mis- 
 fortunes of mankind," it is an empty and contemptible 
 
 1 This chapter contains the substance of the author's Friday 
 evening discourse, entitled "Biology and History," delivered 
 before the Royal Institution of Great Britain and Ireland, Feb- 
 ruary 14, 1908. The substance of two lectures to the Royal 
 Institution, entitled " Biology and Progress," and delivered in 
 February, 1907, is also included in the present volume. 
 
 2 It is thus everywhere that foolish Rumor babbles not of 
 what was done, but of what was misdone or undone; and 
 foolish History (ever, more or less, the written epitomized 
 synopsis of Rumor) knows so little that were not as well un- 
 known. Attila invasions, Walter-the-Penniless Crusades, Sicilian 
 Vespers, Thirty- Years' Wars: mere sin and misery; not work, 
 but hindrance of work! For the Earth, all this while, was 
 yearly green and yellow with her kind harvests; the hand of 
 the craftsman, the mind of the thinker rested not: and so, 
 after all, and in spite of all, we have this so glorious high- 
 domed blossoming World ; concerning which, poor History may 
 well ask, with wonder, Whence it came? She knows so little 
 of it, knows so much of what obstructed it, what would have 
 rendered it impossible. Such, nevertheless, by necessity or fool- 
 ish choice, is her rule and practice; whereby that paradox, 
 4 Happy the people whose annals are vacant/ is not without 
 its true side." CARLYLE, French Revolution. 
 
 " In a little while it would come to be felt that the true history 
 of a nation was indeed not of its wars but of its households." 
 RUSKIN, Time and Tide. 
 
 294 
 
RAGE CULTURE AND HISTORY 295 
 
 study, save for the social pathologist. But if history 
 without by any means ignoring great men or underrat- 
 ing their influence, is, or should be, the record of the 
 past life of mankind, of progress and decadence, the 
 rise and fall of Empires and civilizations, and their 
 mutual reactions ; if it be the record of the intermittent 
 ascent of man, " sagging but pertinacious " ; if this 
 record be subject to the law of causation, and therefore 
 susceptible, in theory, at least, of explanation as well 
 as description; if its factors are at work to-day and 
 will shape the destiny of all the to-morrows; if it be 
 neither phantasmagoria nor panorama nor pageant nor 
 procession but process, in short, an organic drama, 
 then, indeed, it is more than worthy of all the study 
 and thought of all who ever study or ever think. Es- 
 pecially must it appeal to us, who boast a tradition 
 greater than the world has ever yet seen, and kinship 
 with men who represent the utmost of which the hu- 
 man spirit has yet shown itself capable, to us who 
 speak the tongue that Shakespeare spake, but to whom 
 the names of all our Imperial predecessors, from Baby- 
 lon to Spain, serve as a perpetual memento mori. 
 Our special question here is whether there are inherent 
 and necessary reasons why our predecessors' fate must 
 sooner or later be ours. Must races die? or, if we 
 are sceptical about races and more especially about the 
 so-called Anglo-Saxon race, must civilizations, states, 
 or nations die ? What comment does modern biology, 
 or the theory of organic evolution, make upon the fa- 
 miliar words of Byron in his address to the ocean : 
 
 "Thy shores are empires, changed in all save thee 
 Assyria, Greece, Rome, Carthage, what are they? 
 
296 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 Thy waters wasted them while they were free 
 And many a tyrant since : their shores obey 
 The stranger, slave, or savage." 
 
 And these, a few pages earlier in the same poem : 
 
 " There is the moral of all human tales ; 
 'Tis but the same rehearsal of the past, 
 First Freedom and then Glory when that fails, 
 Wealth, vice, corruption barbarism at last. 
 And History, with all her volumes vast, 
 Hath but one page" . . . 
 
 Nations, races, civilizations rise, we shall all agree, 
 because to inherent virtue of breed they add sound 
 customs and laws, acquirements of discipline and 
 knowledge. But, these acquirements made, power es- 
 tablished, and crescent from year to year why do 
 they then fall? If they can make a place for them- 
 selves, how much easier should it not be to maintain it ? 
 
 Two explanations, each falsely asserting itself to be 
 rooted in biological fact, have long been cited and are 
 still cited in order to account for these supreme trage- 
 dies of history. 
 
 THE FALLACY OF RACIAL SENILITY. The first may 
 claim Plato and Aristotle as its founders, and consists 
 of an argument from analogy. Races may be con- 
 ceived in similar terms to individuals. There are 
 many resemblances between a society a " social or- 
 ganism," to use Herbert Spencer's phrase and an 
 individual organism. Just then, as the individual is 
 mortal, so is the race. Each has its birth, its period of 
 youth and growth, its maturity, and, finally, its deca- 
 dence, senility and death. So runs the common argu- 
 ment. 
 
RACE CULTURE AND HISTORY 297 
 
 We must reply, however, that biology, so far from 
 confirming it, declares as the capital fact which con- 
 trasts the individual and the race that, whilst the indi- 
 vidual is doomed to die from inherent causes, the race 
 is naturally immortal. The tendency of life is not to 
 die but to live. If individuals die, that is doubtless 
 because, as I believe, more life and fuller is thus at- 
 tained than if life bodied itself in immortal forms : but 
 the germ-plasm is immortal; it has no inherent ten- 
 dency either to degenerate or to die. Species exist 
 and flourish now which are millions of years older than 
 mankind. " The individual withers, the race is more 
 and more." 
 
 It may be added that, in historical instances, civiliza- 
 tions have, on the one hand, persisted, and, on the 
 other, fallen, despite change, and even substitution, in 
 the races which created them : and, on the other hand, 
 the most conspicuously persistent of all races in the 
 historic epoch, the Jews, have survived one Empire 
 after another of their oppressors, but have never had 
 an Empire of their own. Thus, so far as the historian 
 is concerned, it is not races at all that die, but civiliza- 
 tions and Empires. Plato's argument from the indi- 
 vidual to the race is therefore irrelevant, as well as un- 
 true. The fatalistic conception to which it tempts us, 
 saying that races must die, just as individuals must, 
 and that therefore it is idle to repine or oppose, is ut- 
 terly unwarrantable and extremely unhealthy. To 
 take our own case, despite the talk about our own ra- 
 cial decadence, nearly all our babies still come into the 
 world fit and strong and healthy the racial poisons 
 apart. We kill them in scores of thousands every 
 
298 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 year, but this infant mortality is not a sign that the race 
 is dying, but a sign that even the most splendid living 
 material can be killed or damaged if you try hard 
 enough. The babies do not die because races are mor- 
 tal, but because individuals are and we kill them. The 
 babies drink poison, eat poison, and breathe poison, 
 and in due course die. The theory of racial senility, 
 inapplicable everywhere because untrue, is most of all 
 inapplicable here. If a race became sterile, Plato and 
 Aristotle would be right. There is no such instance in 
 history, apart from well-defined external, not inherent, 
 causes, as in the case of the Tasmanians. Dismissing 
 this analogy, we may also dismiss, as based upon noth- 
 ing better, the idea that the great tragedies of history 
 were necessary events at all. We must look elsewhere 
 than amongst the inherent and necessary factors of 
 racial life for the causes which determine these trage- 
 dies; and we shall be entitled to assume as conceivable 
 the proposition that, notwithstanding the consistent 
 fall of all our predecessors, the causes are not in- 
 evitable, but, being external and environmental, may 
 possibly be controlled : men being not only creature but 
 creator also. 
 
 THE LAMARCKIAN EXPLANATION OF DECADENCE. 
 
 The second of the two false interpretations of history 
 in terms of biology is still, and always has been, widely 
 credited. When historians have paid any attention to 
 the breed of a people as determining its destiny, they 
 have invariably added to the fallacy of racial senility 
 this no less fecund error. It is that, in consequence of 
 success, a people become idle, thoughtless, unenterpris- 
 ing, luxurious, and that these acquired characters are 
 
RACE CULTURE AND HISTORY 299 
 
 transmitted to succeeding generations so that, finally, 
 there is produced a degenerate people unable to bear 
 the burden of Empire and then the crash comes. 
 The historian usually introduces the idea already dis- 
 missed by saying that a " young and vigorous race " 
 invaded the Imperial territories and so forth. The 
 terms " young " and " old," applied to human races, 
 usually mean nothing at all. 
 
 The reader will recognize, of course, in this doctrine 
 of the transmission to children of characters acquired 
 by their parents, the explanation of organic evolution 
 advanced by Lamarck rather more than a century ago. 
 It is employed by historians for the explanation of 
 both the processes they record, progress and retrogres- 
 sion. Thus they suppose that for many generations a 
 race is disciplined, and so at last there is produced a 
 race with discipline in its very bone ; or for many gen- 
 erations a nation finds it necessary to make adventure 
 upon the sea, and so at last there is produced a genera- 
 tion of predestined sailors with blue water in its blood. 
 And in similar terms moral and physical retrogression 
 or degeneration are explained. 
 
 Let us consider the contrast between the interpreta- 
 tion which accepts the Lamarckian theory of the trans- 
 mission of acquired characters and that which does 
 not. Consider the babies of a new generation. Ac- 
 cording to Lamarck, these have in their blood and 
 brain the consequences of the habits of their ancestors. 
 If these have been idle and luxurious, the new babies 
 are predestined to be idle and luxurious too. This, in 
 short, is a " dying nation/' But, if acquired charac- 
 ters are not transmitted, the new generation is, on the 
 
300 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 whole, not much better, not much worse, than its 
 predecessors so far as this supposed factor of change 
 is concerned. Each generation makes a fresh start, 
 as we see in the babies of our slums to-day. It does 
 not begin where the last left off whether that means 
 beginning at a higher or at a lower level than that at 
 which the last started : but it makes a fresh start where 
 the last did. 
 
 Now, in general, we have seen that Lamarck's the- 
 ory is discredited. The view of Mr. Galton is ac- 
 cepted, that acquired characters are not transmitted, 
 either for good or for evil. If there are no other fac- 
 tors of racial degeneration or racial advance, then 
 races do not degenerate or advance, but make a fresh 
 start every generation : and Empires rise and fall with- 
 out any relation to the breed of the Imperial people - 
 an incredible proposition. 
 
 THE RACIAL POISONS AND DECADENCE. Certain ap- 
 parent, though not real, exceptions exist to the denial 
 of the Lamarckian theory of the transmission of ac- 
 quired characters. These exceptions are furnished by 
 what I have called the racial poisons. Alcohol, for in- 
 stance is a substance, certainly poisonous in all but 
 very small doses, if not in them, which is carried by the 
 blood to every part of the body and may and does in- 
 jure its racial elements. Thus a true racial degenera- 
 tion may be caused by its means : and the possibility of 
 this is not to be ignored. Other poisons, such as those 
 of certain diseases, act similarly. 
 
 We must therefore note in passing a biological fac- 
 tor of historical importance, though hitherto entirely 
 unrecognized by historians, and that is disease. Cer- 
 
RACE CULTURE AND HISTORY 301 
 
 tain of our diseases, and especially consumption or 
 tuberculosis, are at present making history by their 
 extermination of aboriginal races. Minute living 
 creatures, which we call microbes, are introduced into 
 the new and favorable environment constituted by the 
 blood and tissues of human races hitherto unacquainted 
 with them: and the consequences are known to all. 
 But further, it has lately been suggested as highly prob- 
 able, by Professor Ronald Ross, that the fall of Greece, 
 that incalculable disaster for mankind, was due to the 
 invasion not of human foes but of the humble living 
 species which are responsible for the disease miscalled 
 malaria. The evidence for this view is by no means 
 slight, and the most recent explanation of an event so 
 abrupt and so disastrous is in all likelihood the correct 
 one. Malaria, like alcohol, produces true racial de- 
 generation, its poisons affecting those racial elements 
 of which the individual body, biologically conceived, is 
 merely the ephemeral host: recalling the great line of 
 Lucretius, " et quasi cursores, vital lampada tradunt" 
 To lame the runner is not to injure the torch he bears 
 acquired characters are not transmitted ; but the ra- 
 cial poison makes dim the lamp ere he passes it on. 
 
 SELECTION AND RACIAL CHANGE. But, leaving 
 poisons out of the question, races of men and animals 
 do undergo change, progressive and retrogressive, in 
 consequence of the action of another factor than that 
 advanced by Lamarck : and this is the factor of " nat- 
 ural selection " so termed by Charles Darwin in 1858, 
 or " survival of the fittest," to use Herbert Spencer's 
 phrase. If, of any generation, individuals of a certain 
 kind are chosen by the environment for survival and 
 
302 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 parenthood, the character of the species will change ac- 
 cordingly. If what we call the best are chosen, their 
 goodness will be transmitted in some degree, and the 
 race will advance : if what we call the worst are chosen, 
 their badness will be transmitted in some degree, and 
 the race will degenerate 
 
 THE TWO KINDS OF PROGRESS. Now in the case 
 of all species other than man, the only possible prog- 
 ress is this racial or inherent progress, dependent upon 
 a choice or selection of parents, and comparable in 
 some measure, as Darwin showed, with the change 
 similarly produced in the selective breeding or " arti- 
 ficial selection " of the lower animals by man. But 
 in the case of man himself, there is a wholly different 
 kind of progress also attainable, which is not inherent 
 or racial progress at all, but yet is real progress: and 
 which has the most important relations to the inherent 
 or racial progress that might be achieved by the process 
 of natural selection, or the choice of parents. 
 
 It has been laid down that acquired characters are 
 not transmissible by heredity: but man has learnt 
 and it is well for him to circumvent the laws of 
 heredity by transmitting his spiritual acquirements 
 through language and art. Even before writing there 
 was tradition, passed on from mouth to mouth. As 
 long as man was without writing he advanced little 
 faster than other creatures, we may surmise : we know 
 that he has an undistinguished past of probably at least 
 six million years: but with speech and writing came 
 the transmission of acquirements in this special sense; 
 not that the past education of a mother will enlarge 
 
RACE CULTURE AND HISTORY 303 
 
 her baby's brain, but that she can teach her daughter 
 what she has learnt, and so the child can begin where 
 the parent left off, just as Lamarck wrongly imagined 
 to be the case with the young giraffe, that he supposed 
 to profit by the stretching of the parental necks. It is 
 this transmission of spiritual acquirements outside 
 the germ-plasm and in defiance of its laws that ex- 
 plains the amazing advance of man in the last ten or 
 twenty thousand years as compared with the almost 
 speechless ages before them. 
 
 This kind of progress is peculiar to man, 1 it is the 
 gift of intelligence, and we may call it traditional or 
 acquired progress. It is an utterly different thing 
 from inherent or racial progress, an improvement in 
 the breed dependent upon the happy choice of parents. 
 And it is surely evident, on a moment's consideration, 
 that acquired progress is compatible with inherent de- 
 cadence. To use Coleridge's image, a dwarf may see 
 further than a giant if he sits on the giant's shoulders : 
 yet he is a dwarf and the other a giant. Any school- 
 boy now knows more than Aristotle, and that is true 
 progress of a kind, but the schoolboy may well be a 
 dwarf compared with Aristotle, and may belong to a 
 race degenerate when compared with his; and that is 
 inherent or racial decadence subsisting with acquired or 
 traditional progress. 
 
 Now whilst the accumulation of knowledge and art 
 and power from age to age is real progress, it evidently 
 
 1 " Literature, taken in all its bearings, forms the grand line 
 of demarcation between the human and the animal kingdoms." 
 WM. GODWIN. 
 
3 o 4 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 depends for its stability and persistence upon the qual- 
 ity of the race. 1 If the race degenerates through, 
 say, the selection of the worst for parenthood 
 the time will come when its heritage is too much for it. 
 The pearls of the ancestral art are now cast before 
 swine, and are trampled on : statues, temples, books are 
 destroyed or burnt or lost. If an Empire has been 
 built, the degenerate race cannot sustain it. There is 
 no wealth but life: and if the quality of the life fails, 
 neither battleships nor libraries nor symphonies nor 
 anything else will save a nation. This we all know, 
 though no one who observed our legislation or read 
 our Parliamentary debates would suspect that it had 
 ever entered into our minds. Empires and civiliza- 
 tions, then, have fallen, despite the strength and mag- 
 nitude of the superstructure, because the foundations 
 decayed: and the bigger and heavier the superstruc- 
 ture the less could it survive their failure. If the Fiji 
 islanders degenerate, there is little consequence : if the 
 breed of Romans degenerate, all their vast mass of 
 acquired progress and power crushes them into dra- 
 matic ruin. This image, I believe, truly expresses 
 the relation between the two wholly distinct kinds of 
 progress, which we have yet to learn to distinguish. 
 Acquired progress will not compensate for racial or 
 inherent decadence. If the race is going down, it will 
 not compensate to add another colony to your Empire : 
 on the contrary, the bigger the Empire the stronger 
 must be the race: the bigger the superstructure the 
 stronger the foundations. Acquired progress is real 
 
 1 See the author's paper, " The Essential Factor of Progress," 
 published in the Monthly Review, April, 1906. 
 
RACE CULTURE AND HISTORY 305 
 
 progress but it is always dependent for its maintenance 
 upon racial or inherent progress or, at least, upon 
 racial maintenance. 
 
 NOTHING FAILS LIKE SUCCESS. I believe, then, 
 that civilizations and Empires have succumbed because 
 they represented only acquired or traditional educa- 
 tional progress and this availed not at all when the 
 races that built them up began to degenerate. Now the 
 only explanation of racial degeneration yet offered by 
 the historians apart from the foolish one of racial 
 senility is the Lamarckian one of the transmission 
 of habits of luxury and idleness from parent to child : 
 an explanation which the modern study of heredity 
 empowers us to repudiate. What theory of this al- 
 leged degeneration is there to offer in its place: and 
 especially what theory which explains racial degenera- 
 tion amongst not the conquered but the conquerors: 
 amongst the successful, the Imperial, the cultured, the 
 leisured, the well-catered for in all respects, bodily and 
 mental. Why is it that not enslaved but Imperial peo- 
 ples degenerate? Why is it that nothing fails like 
 success ? 
 
 What I believe to be the true and sufficient answer 
 has been given by no historian : but the key to it is only 
 fifty years old. The reason is that no race or species, 
 vegetable or animal or human, can maintain much 
 less raise its organic level unless its best be selected 
 for parenthood. It is true of a race as of an individ- 
 ual that it must work for its living so to speak 
 if it is not to degenerate. When the terms are too 
 easy, down you go. The tape-worm has given up 
 even digesting for its living, and we know its degen- 
 
3b6 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 eracy all hooks and mouth. Society works and 
 hands over its predigested food to such social parasites 
 amongst ourselves. You must struggle or you will 
 degenerate even if only with rhyme or counterpoint, 
 not necessarily for bread. " Effort is the law," as 
 Ruskin said: whether for a livelihood or for enjoy- 
 ment. Living things are the product of the struggle 
 for existence : we are thus evolved strugglers by con- 
 stitution : and directly we cease to struggle we forfeit 
 the possibilities of our birthright. " Thou, O God," 
 said Leonardo, " hast given all good things to man at 
 the price of labor." 
 
 The case is the same with races. Directly the con- 
 ditions become too easy, selection ceases, and it is as 
 successful to be incompetent or lazy or vicious as to be 
 worthy. The hard conditions that kept weeding out 
 the unworthy are now related and the fine race they 
 made goes back again. Finally there occurs the phe- 
 nomenon of reversed selection, when it is fitter to be 
 bad than good, cowardly than brave as when reli- 
 gious persecution murders all who are true to them- 
 selves and spares hypocrites and apostates: or when 
 healthy children are killed in factories whilst feeble- 
 minded children or deaf-mutes are carefully tended 
 until maturity and then sent into the world to repro- 
 duce their maladies. Under reversed selection such 
 results are obtained as a breeder of race-horses or 
 plants would obtain if he went to work on similar lines: 
 the race degenerates rapidly: and if it be an Imperial 
 race its Empire comes crashing down about its ears. 
 All Empires and civilizations hitherto have involved 
 the partial or complete arrest or reversal of the proc- 
 
RACE CULTURE AND HISTORY 307 
 
 ess of natural selection: and the racial degeneration 
 which necessarily ensued has been the cause of their 
 invariable doom. 
 
 When a primitive race is making its way by force, 
 selection is stringent. The weak, cowardly, diseased, 
 stupid are expunged from generation to generation. 
 As civilization advances, a higher ethical level is 
 reached: all true civilization tending to abrogate and 
 ameliorate the struggle for existence. The diseased 
 and weakly and feeble-minded are no longer left to pay 
 the penalty sternly exacted by Nature for unfitness: 
 they are allowed to survive and multiply. A success- 
 ful race can apparently afford to permit this, as a race 
 that is fighting for its existence cannot. But in reality 
 no race can afford this absolutely fatal process. 
 
 There is thus a real risk involved in the accumula- 
 tion of acquired, traditional or educational progress. 
 Not only does it tend to abrogate or even to reverse 
 selection, but it serves to disguise the consequences of 
 this abrogation. If a subhuman race degenerates the 
 fact is evident : but such a nation as our own may quite 
 well degenerate whilst the accumulation of acquired 
 progress, transmitted by education, almost completely 
 cloaks the fact for a time. We may be congratulating 
 ourselves upon our progress, upon our knowledge, our 
 science and art, our institutions, legal and charitable, 
 whilst all the time the breed is undergoing retrogres- 
 sion. 
 
 We see now, I think, the explanation of the truth 
 expressed by Gibbon, " all that is human must retro- 
 grade if it do not advance." Why should this be so? 
 Why should it not be possible merely to maintain a 
 
308 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 position gained? The answer is that the civilization 
 which merely maintains its position is one in which 
 selection has ceased: if selection had not ceased, the 
 position would be more than maintained, there would 
 be advance. But without selection the breed will cer- 
 tainly degenerate, the lower individuals multiplying 
 more rapidly than higher ones, in accordance with 
 Spencer's law that the higher type of the individual 
 the less rapidly does he multiply; and thus the race 
 which is not advancing is retrograding, as Gibbon 
 declared. 
 
 Natural selection is the sole factor of efficient and 
 permanent progress, but the traditional or acquired 
 progress which we call civilization tends to thwart or 
 abrogate or even invert this process. I thus believe 
 that the conditions necessary for the secure ascent of 
 any race, an ascent secured in its very blood, made 
 stable in its very bone, have not yet been achieved in 
 history; and I advance this as the reason why history 
 records no enduring Empire. 
 
 SOME HISTORICAL INSTANCES. In the face of cer- 
 tain facts of contemporary history I do not for a mo- 
 ment assert that there are no other causes of Imperial 
 failure than the arrest or reversal of selection. But 
 I do assert that if this is not the cause, then, in the 
 absence of the transmission of acquired characters, the 
 race has not degenerated, and is capable of reassert- 
 ing itself. Only by the arrest or reversal of selection 
 can a race degenerate apart from the racial poisons. 
 If, then, a civilization or Empire has fallen through 
 causes altogether non-biological through careless- 
 ness, or neglect of motherhood or alteration of ideals 
 
RACE CULTURE AND HISTORY 309 
 
 the changes in character so produced are not trans- 
 mitted to the children, and the race is not degenerate 
 but merely deteriorated in each generation. 
 
 For instance, we have been brought up to believe that 
 there is no possible future for Spain; it is a dying 
 nation, a senile individual, a people of degenerates; it 
 has had its day, which can never return. The histo- 
 rian explains this by the false analogy between a race 
 and an individual, and by the false Lamarckian theory 
 cf heredity. To these the biologist retorts with com- 
 ments upon their falsity, and with the conviction that 
 since Spain, even allowing for the anti-eugenic labors 
 of the Inquisition, has not been subjected to the only 
 process which can ensure real degeneration viz., 
 the consistent and stringent selection of the worst 
 she is yet capable of regeneration. Regeneration is 
 not really the word, because there has been little real 
 degeneration, but only the successive deterioration of 
 successive and undegenerate generations. 
 
 If we took an animal species that has degenerated, 
 such as the intestinal parasites, and endeavored to re- 
 generate them, we should begin to realize the magni- 
 tude of our task. That is not the task for Spain, the 
 biologist asserts. Merely the environment must be 
 altered, not the mountain ranges and the rivers, 
 Buckle notwithstanding, but the really potent factors 
 in the environment, the spiritual and psychical and so- 
 cial factors and the deterioration of each new genera- 
 tion, inherently undegenerate, will cease. I am using 
 these opposed terms with great care and of set pur- 
 pose. 
 
 And the biologist is right. The facts concerning 
 
3io PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 which so many historians have shaken their heads, and 
 upon which they have based so many moralizings and 
 theories of history, the facts which they have cited in 
 support of their false analogies and misconceptions of 
 heredity due, of course, to the errors of former 
 biology turn out to be not facts at all, or, at any 
 rate, only facts of the moment. The " dying nation," 
 as Lord Salisbury called it, has occasion to alter its 
 psychical environment. It introduces the practice of 
 education; it begins to shake off the yoke of ecclesias- 
 ticism ; and what are the consequences ? 
 
 The new generation is found to be potentially little 
 worse and little better than its predecessors of the six- 
 teenth century. There has been no national or racial 
 degeneration. The environment is modified for the 
 better, i.e., so as to choose the better, and Spain, as 
 they say in misleading phrase, " takes on a new lease 
 of life." The historian of the present day, knowing 
 as a historian what qualities of blood have been in the 
 Spanish people, and basing his theories upon sound 
 biology, must confidently assert that that blood, inca- 
 pable, as he knows, of degeneration by any Lamarck- 
 ian process, may still retain its ancient quality and 
 will yet make history. 
 
 But the historian might well write a volume upon 
 the same thesis as applied to China and Japan. We 
 know historically what were the immediate effects in 
 one generation of a total change of environment in 
 Japan. That change has not yet occurred in China, 
 but must inevitably occur. Consider for a moment 
 how the historian, made far-sighted and clear-sighted 
 by biology, must contemplate the history of this as- 
 
RACE CULTURE AND HISTORY 311 
 
 tounding people. The popular belief used to be that 
 China illustrated the so-called law of nations. It was 
 the decadent, though monstrous, relic of an ancient 
 civilization; it had had its day. Inevitable degenera- 
 tion, which must befall all peoples, had come upon it. 
 Behold it in the paralysis which precedes death ! 
 
 But in the light of the facts of Japan, the man in the 
 street and the historian alike have in this case found 
 modern biology superfluous in enabling them to arrive 
 at sound conclusions. They now believe what the 
 Darwinian has been compelled to believe for half a 
 century, and more strongly than ever during the latter 
 part of that period, when the doctrine of the transmis- 
 sion of modifications was finally discredited. A clever 
 writer invents the phrase " the yellow peril," and peo- 
 ple discard their old theories. The metaphor must be 
 changed. This is not paralysis, but merely slumber. 
 Doubtless, it is an unnatural slumber; doubtless, it is 
 not the slumber which brings renewed strength. It is 
 suspense or stupor, not recuperation; but assuredly it 
 is not paralysis. Who now would dare to say that 
 China has had its day, even if he still clings to the old 
 fictions about Spain ? 
 
 MOTHERHOOD AND HISTORY. Here, also, reference 
 must again be made to another factor of history to 
 which, as I think, the biologist must attach enormous 
 importance, but which no historian yet has adequately 
 reckoned with. Our prime assumption from begin- 
 ning to end is that " there is no wealth but life," or, if 
 one may venture to improve upon Ruskin, there is no 
 wealth but mind; and in the attempt to suggest inter- 
 
312 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 pretations of history based upon this truth, so little 
 recked of by the historian, we have considered the life 
 in question from the point of view of its determina- 
 tion by heredity, and its varying value according to 
 the inherent and transmissible characters selected in 
 each generation. But a word must be said as to the 
 other factor which, with heredity, determines the char- 
 acter of the individual >and that factor is the en- 
 vironment. I wish merely to note the most important 
 aspect of the environment of human beings, and to ob- 
 serve that historians hitherto have wholly ignored it; 
 yet its influence is incalculable. I refer to motherhood. 
 One might have the most perfect system of selection 
 of the finest and highest individuals for parenthood; 
 but the babies whose potentialities heredity gives 
 no more are so splendid, are always, will be always, 
 dependent upon motherhood. What was the state of 
 motherhood during the decline and fall of the Roman 
 Empire? This factor counts in history; and always 
 will count so long as, three times in every century, the 
 only wealth of nations is reduced to dust, and is raised 
 again from helpless infancy. As to Rome we know 
 little, whatever may be suspected: but we know that 
 here in the heart of the greatest Empire in history 
 and it is at the heart that Empires rot thousands of 
 mothers go out every day to tend dead machines, 
 whilst their own flesh and blood, with whom lies the 
 Imperial destiny, are tended anyhow or not at all. 
 It may be said by some enlightened historian of the 
 future that the living wealth of this people, in the 
 twentieth century, began to be eaten away by the cancer 
 which we call " married women's labor," and that, as 
 
RACE CULTURE AND HISTORY 
 
 will be evident to that historian's readers, its damna- 
 tion was sure. To-day our historians and politicians 
 think in terms of regiments and tariffs and " Dread- 
 naughts " : the time will come when they must think in 
 terms of babies and motherhood. We must think in 
 such terms too if we wish Great Britain to be much 
 longer great. Meanwhile some of us see the perennial 
 slaughter of babies in this land, and the deterioration of 
 many for every one killed outright, the waste of mothers' 
 travail and tears : and we recall Ruskin's words : 
 
 "Nevertheless, it is open, I repeat, to serious question, which 
 I leave to the reader's pondering, whether, among national 
 manufactures, that of Souls of a good quality may not at last 
 turn out a quite leadingly lucrative one? Nay, in some far- 
 away and yet undreamt-of hour, I can even imagine that Eng- 
 land may cast all thoughts of possessive wealth back to the 
 barbaric nations among whom they first arose; and that, while 
 the sands of the Indus and adamant of Golconda may yet 
 stiffen the housings of the charger, and flash from the turban 
 of the slave, she, as a Christian mother, may at last attain to 
 the virtues and the treasures of a Heathen one, and be able to 
 lead forth her Sons, saying : These are MY Jewels." 
 
 Had all Roman mothers been Cornelias, would Rome 
 have fallen ? * Consider the imitation mothers no 
 
 1 Gibbon does not enlighten us much on such vital matters : 
 but my attention has been called to the following passage, not 
 irrelevant here. It is from the Attic Nights of Aulus Gellius, 
 Book xii., chap, i., written about A.D. 150 a point worth noting. 
 I use the free translation of Mr. Quintin Waddington: 
 
 " Once when I was with the philosopher Favorinus, word was 
 brought to him that the wife of one of his disciples had just 
 given birth to a son. 
 
 "Let us go,' said he, 'To inquire after the mother, and to 
 congratulate the father/ The latter was a noble of Senatorial 
 rank. 
 
 "All of us who were present accompanied him to the 
 house and went in with him. Meeting the father in the hall, 
 he embraced and congratulated him, and, sitting down, inquired 
 how his wife had come through the ordeal. And when he 
 
314 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 longer mammalia to be found in certain classes to- 
 day mothers who should be ashamed to look 'any 
 tabby-cat in the face ; consider the ignorant and down- 
 heard that the young mother, overcome with fatigue, was now 
 sleeping, he began to speak more freely. 
 
 " ' Of course/ said he, ' she will suckle the child herself.' 
 And when the girl's mother said that her daughter must be 
 spared, and nurses obtained in order that the heavy strain of 
 nursing the child should not be added to what she had already 
 gone through, ' I beg of you, dear lady,' said he, ' to allow her 
 to be a whole mother to her child. Is it not against nature, 
 and being only half a mother, to give birth to a child, and 
 then at once to send him away? To have nourished with her 
 own blood and in her own body a something that she had 
 never seen, and then to refuse it her own milk, now that she 
 sees it living, a human being, demanding a mother's care? 
 Or are you one of those who think that nature gave a woman 
 breasts, not that she might feed her children, but as pretty little 
 hillocks to give her bust a pleasing contour? Many indeed of 
 our present-day ladies whom you are far from resembling 
 do try to dry up and repress that sacred fount of the body, 
 the nourisher of the human race, even at the risk they run 
 from turning back and corrupting their milk, lest it should 
 take off from the charm of their beauty. In doing this they 
 act with the same folly as those, who, by the use of drugs and 
 so forth, endeavor to destroy the very embryo in their bodies, 
 lest a furrow should mar the smoothness of their skin, and 
 they should spoil their figures in becoming mothers. If the 
 destruction of a human being in its first inception, whilst it is 
 being formed, whilst it is yet coming to life, and is still in the 
 hands of its artificer, Nature, be deserving of public detestation 
 and horror, is it not nearly as bad to deprive the child of his 
 proper and congenial ^nutriment to which he is accustomed, now 
 that he is perfected, is born into the world, is a child. 
 
 " But it makes no difference for as they say so long as 
 the child is nourished and lives, with whose milk it is done. 
 
 " Why does he who says this, since he is so dull in under- 
 standing nature, think it also of no consequence in whose womb, 
 and from whose blood the child is formed and fashioned? For 
 is there not now in the breasts the same blood whitened, it 
 is true by a'gration and heat which was before in the womb? 
 And is not the wisdom of Nature to be seen in this, that as 
 soon as the blood has done its work of forming the body down 
 below, and the time of birth has come, it betakes itself to the 
 upper parts of the body, and is ready to cherish the spark of 
 life and light by furnishing to the new-born babe his known 
 and accustomed food? And so it is not an idle belief, that, 
 just as the strength and character of the seed have their in- 
 fluence in determining the likeness of the body and mind, so 
 
RACE CULTURE AND HISTORY 315 
 
 ^rodden mothers amongst our lower classes; and ask 
 whether these things are not making history. 
 
 THE SURVIVAL OF THE JEWS. The principles the 
 discussion of which has here been attempted had all 
 been set down before it suddenly seemed clear that 
 
 do the nature and properties of the milk do their part in effect- 
 ing the same results. And this has been noticed, not in man 
 alone, but in cattle as well. For if kids are brought up on the 
 milk of ewes, or lambs on that of goats, it is agreed that the 
 latter have stiffer wool, the former softer hair. In the case 
 of timber and fruit trees, too, the qualities of the water and 
 soil from which they draw their nourishment have more in- 
 fluence in stunting or augmenting their growth than those of 
 the seed which is sewn, and often you may see a vigorous and 
 healthy tree when transplanted into another place perish owing 
 to the poverty of the soil. 
 
 " Is it then a reasonable thing to corrupt the fine qualities 
 of the new-born man, well endowed as to both body and mind 
 so far as parentage is concerned, with the unsuitable nourish- 
 ment of degenerate and foreign milk? Especially is this the 
 case, if she whom you get to supply the milk is a slave or of 
 servile estate, and as is very often the case of a foreign 
 and barbarous race, if she is dishonest, ugly, unchaste, or 
 addicted to drink. For generally any woman who happens to 
 have milk is called in, without further inquiry as to her suit- 
 ability in other respects. Shall we allow this babe of ours to 
 be tainted by pernicious contagion, and to draw life into his 
 body and mind from a body and mind debased? 
 
 " This is the reason why we are so often surprised that the 
 children of chaste mothers resemble their parents neither in 
 body nor character. 
 
 ". . . And besides these considerations, who can afford 
 to ignore or belittle the fact that those who desert their off- 
 spring and send them away from themselves, and make them 
 over to others to nurse, cut, or at least loosen and weaken that 
 chain and connection of mind and affection by which Nature 
 attaches children to their parents. For when the child, sent 
 elsewhere, is away from sight, the vigor of maternal solicitude, 
 little by little dies away, and the call of motherly instinct grows 
 silent, and forgetfulness of a child sent away to nurse is not 
 much less complete than that of one lost by death. 
 
 " A child's thoughts and the love he is ever ready to give, 
 are occupied, moreover, with her alone from whom he derives 
 his food, and soon he has neither feeling nor affection for the 
 mother who bore him. The foundations of the filial feelings 
 with which we are born being thus sapped and undermined, 
 whatever affection children thus brought up may seem to have 
 for father and mother, for the most part is not natural love, 
 but the result of social convention." 
 
3i6 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 they found their warrant and application in the un- 
 exampled riddle of the persistence and success, through- 
 out more than two thousand years and a thousand 
 vicissitudes, of the Jewish people. It is true that we 
 have here no exception to the apparent law that Em- 
 pires are mortal, for within this period there never was 
 a Jewish Empire: the Jews were never subject to the 
 risk involved for racial or inherent progress by the pos- 
 session of great acquired powers. But just as the fall 
 of Empires has often not been the fall of races va- 
 rious races having at various times carried on the same 
 Imperial tradition so the persistence of the Jews, as 
 contrasted with the impermanence of Empires, has 
 been the persistence of a race. I believe that the prin- 
 ciples already laid down offer us an adequate explana- 
 tion of this unique case: and further, that if we had 
 begun with the case of the Jews, endeavoring, by the 
 investigation of their case, to explain the contrasted 
 case of other races and of all Empires hitherto, we 
 should have arrived at the same principles. 
 
 It has been asserted that that race or people decays 
 in which selection ceases or is reversed; that in the 
 absence of selection of the worthy for parenthood, no 
 species, vegetable, animal or human, can prosper 
 much less progress. Now the Jews, the one human 
 race of which we know assuredly that it has persisted 
 unimpaired, have been the most continuously and strin- 
 gently selected of any race, I suppose, that can be 
 named. Every measure of persecution and repression 
 practiced against them by the people amongst whom 
 they have lived, has directly tended towards the very 
 end which those people least desired to comj 
 
RACE CULTURE AND HISTORY 317 
 
 Other peoples found themselves prosperous through 
 the efforts of their fathers; the struggle for existence 
 abated; it was, so to say, as fit to be unfit as to fit 
 with the inevitable result. But this has never been the 
 case of the Jews. They have always had to struggle 
 for life intensely: and their unexampled struggle has 
 been a great source of their unexampled strength. 
 The Jew who was a weakling or a fool had no chance 
 at all; the weaklings and the fools being weeded out, 
 intensity and strength of mind became the common 
 heritage of this amazing people. 
 
 Secondly, there was everything to favor mother- 
 hood. Here religious precept and ethical tradition 
 joined with stern necessity to the same end the end 
 which always meant a new and strong beginning for 
 the next generation. Even to-day all observers are 
 agreed that infant mortality is at a minimum amongst 
 the Jews; their children are superior in height and 
 weight and chest measurement to Gentile children 
 brought up amidst poverty far less intense in our own 
 great cities; in a better material environment, but a 
 far inferior maternal environment. The Jewish 
 mother is the mother of children innately superior, on 
 the average, since they are the fruit of such long 
 ages of stringent parental selection, and she makes 
 more of them because she fails to nurse them only in 
 the rarest cases, when she has no choice, and because in 
 every detail her maternal care is incomparably supe- 
 rior to that of her Gentile sister. Given a high stand- 
 ard of motherhood in a highly selected race, what other 
 result than that we daily witness and envy can we ex- 
 pect? 
 
3i8 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 Thirdly, the Jews do not abuse alcohol, and thus 
 avoid one of the few causes of true racial degeneration 
 apart from the selection of the worst for parenthood. 
 
 If these principles are valid, it is evident that our 
 redemption from the fate of all our predecessors is to 
 be found only in Eugenics the selection of the best 
 for parenthood. In his address to the Sociological 
 Society in 1904, in which he defined this term, Mr. Gal- 
 ton named as one of the duties before the Society, 
 " Historical inquiry into the rates with which the va- 
 rious classes of society (classified according to civic 
 usefulness) have contributed to the population at va- 
 rious times, in ancient and modern nations." " There 
 is strong reason for believing," he continued, " that 
 national rise and decline is closely connected with this 
 influence." 1 
 
 WHAT is A GOOD ENVIRONMENT? Using the 
 word environment in its widest sense, including, for 
 instance, public opinion and its use in any sense less 
 wide is always erroneous and misleading we may 
 say that it is our business to provide the environment 
 which selects the best for parenthood and discourages 
 the parenthood of the worst say the deaf and dumb, 
 the feeble-minded, the insane, the epileptic, the ine- 
 briate, those afflicted with hereditary disease of other 
 kinds, and so forth. Our principles should enable us, 
 also, I think to define what we mean by a good environ- 
 ment. Comprehensive and indiscriminate charity 
 means a good environment for many in a sense, but il 
 may also mean the selection of the worst for parent- 
 
 1 Cf . the similar dicta of Darwin and Pearson. 
 
RACE CULTURE AND HISTORY 319 
 
 hood e.g., the feeble-minded. This "good" en- 
 vironment then means the degeneration of the race. 
 We must therefore appraise environment in terms of 
 its selective action. A good environment is that which 
 selects the good, and the best environment is that which 
 selects the best; discovers them, makes the utmost of 
 them, and confers upon them the supreme privilege and 
 duty of parenthood. That and that alone is the best 
 environment, and all other moral judgments upon en- 
 vironment are fallacious and will be disastrous. 
 
 THE NECESSARY CONCLUSION. National Eugenics 
 teaches that the first duty of all governments and pa- 
 triots and good citizens is, to quote Ruskin again, 
 1 The production and recognition of human worth, the 
 detection and extinction of human unworthiness." 
 The idea is not new-fangled, but was clearly laid down 
 by Plato, and by Theognis two centuries before him. 
 
 Eugenics is a project of the most elevated and prov- 
 ident morality, aiming at no object less sublime than 
 the ennoblement of mankind; and if one may suggest 
 its motto it would be, The products of progress are not 
 mechanisms but men. It is based upon the principle 
 of the selection or choice of the superior for parent- 
 ood, which has been the essential factor of all prog- 
 
 ss in the world of life, but which all civilizations 
 have tended in some degree to abrogate or even to 
 reverse, as when the feeble-minded child is cared for 
 till maturity and sent out into the world to produce its 
 like, whilst healthy children are daily destroyed by ig- 
 norance and neglect. 
 
 " Through Nature only can we ascend " and the 
 
 ':: 
 
320 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 merit of the eugenic proposal is that it is built upon 
 " the solid ground of nature." 
 
 To the economist, it declares that the culture of the 
 racial life is the vital industry of any people. 
 
 It is to work through marriage, an institution more 
 ancient than mankind, and supremely valuable in its 
 services to childhood with which lies all human des- 
 tiny. 
 
 Eugenics appeals to the individual, asking for a little 
 imagination, which will make us realize that the future 
 will one day be the present and that to serve it is to 
 serve no fiction or phantom, but a reality as real as the 
 present generation. 
 
 It teaches the responsibility of the noblest and most 
 sacred of all professions, which is parenthood, and it 
 makes a sober and dignified claim to be regarded as a 
 constituent of the religion of the future. 
 
 It goes to the root of the matter; where the well- 
 meaning, but short-sighted, pin their faith on the hos- 
 pitals, the eugenist seeks to brand the transmission of 
 hereditary disease as a crime, and thus literally to ex- 
 tirpate it altogether. 
 
 That its methods are practicable is proven by the 
 fact that it is practiced as by the northern society 
 for the " Permanent care of the feeble-minded," which 
 serves the present and the future simultaneously and 
 reconciles the law of love with the earlier law of na- 
 ture which asserts that parenthood must be denied 
 to the unworthy without blame or malice, but with- 
 out exception. It suggests the principles of a New 
 Imperialism, and offers, I submit, our sole chance of 
 escape from the fate which has overtaken all previous 
 
RACE CULTURE AND HISTORY 321 
 
 civilizations. It honors men and women by declaring 
 that human parenthood is crowned with responsibility 
 to the unborn, and to all time coming, and that man, 
 the animal in body, is also a self-conscious being, 
 " looking before and after," who is human because he 
 is responsible, and to whom the laws of nature have 
 been revealed, not to satisfy an intellectual curiosity, 
 but for the highest end conceivable the elevation of 
 his race. 
 
 Let me quote a fine passage from Wordsworth's 
 " Prelude " : 
 
 "With settling judgments now of what would last 
 And what would disappear; prepared to find 
 Presumption, folly, madness, in the men 
 Who thrust themselves upon the passive world 
 As Rulers of the world; to see in these, 
 Even when the public welfare is their aim, 
 Plans without thought, or built on theories 
 Vague and unsound; and having brought the books 
 Of modern statists to their proper test, 
 Life, human life, with all its sacred claims 
 Of sex and age, and heaven-descended rights, 
 Mortal, or those beyond the reach of death; 
 And having thus discerned how dire a thing 
 Is worshipped in that idol proudly named 
 'The Wealth of Nations;' where alone that wealth 
 Is lodged, and how increased; and having gained 
 A more judicious knowledge of the worth 
 And dignity of individual man, 
 No composition of the brain, but man 
 Of whom we read, the man whom we behold 
 With our own eyes I could not but enquire 
 Not with less interest than heretofore, 
 But greater, though in spirit more subdued 
 Why is this glorious creature to be found 
 One only in ten thousand? What one is, 
 Why may not millions be? What bars are thrown 
 By Nature in the way of such a hope?" 
 
322 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 Consider how far we have come, the base degrees by 
 which we did ascend, and answer with Shakespeare, 
 " There are many events in the womb of time which 
 will be delivered." 
 
CHAPTER XVI 
 
 NATIONAL EUGENICS MR. BALFOUR ON DECADENCE 
 
 (1) "If the various checks specified in the two last para- 
 graphs, and perhaps others as yet unknown, do not prevent the 
 reckless, the vicious, and otherwise inferior members of society 
 from increasing at a quicker rate than the better class of men, 
 the nation will retrograde, as has too often occurred in the 
 history of the world. We must remember that progress is no 
 invariable rule. It is very difficult to say why one civilized 
 nation rises, becomes more powerful, and spreads more widely, 
 than another; or why the same nation progresses more 
 quickly at one time tfian at another. We can only say that it 
 depends on an increase in the actual number of the population, 
 on the number of the men endowed with high intellectual and 
 moral faculties, as well as on their standard of excellence. 
 Corporeal structure appears to have little influence, except so 
 far as vigor of body leads to vigor of mind." DARWIN, The 
 Descent of Man, 1871. 
 
 (2) Referring to "the rates with which the various classes 
 of society (classified according to civic usefulness) have con- 
 tributed to the population at various times, in ancient and 
 modern nations," Mr. Francis Galton said "there is strong 
 reason for believing that national rise and decline is closely 
 connected with this influence." GALTON, Sociological Papers, 
 1904, p. 47. 
 
 (3) " The inexplicable decline and fall of nations following 
 from no apparent external cause receives instant light from 
 the relative fertility of the fitter and unfitter elements com- 
 bined with what we now know of the laws of inheritance." * 
 PEARSON, 1904. 
 
 (4) To the question, what were the causes of the fall of 
 Rome, Mr. Balfour replies " I feel disposed to answer De- 
 cadence." 2 BALFOUR, 1908. 
 
 1 National Life from the Standpoint of Science, p. 99. 
 
 2 " Decadence," Henry Sidgwick Memorial Lecture, by the 
 
 323 
 
324 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 THE lecture of which the previous chapter is the writ- 
 ten form was prepared and delivered before I had an 
 opportunity of seeing Mr. A. J. Balfour's lecture on 
 " Decadence " delivered a few days before. That has 
 since been printed, and is well worthy of our attention. 
 In Mr. Balfour we have a representative political 
 thinker, an experimental statesman and, furthermore, 
 a former President of the British Association, deeply 
 interested in, and favorably disposed towards, scientific 
 inquiry and scientific method. Further, this lecture has 
 been widely noticed, though all the criticisms I have 
 seen seem to me to miss the point. No apology, then, 
 is necessary for a special discussion of this most sug- 
 gestive lecture in direct relation with the foregoing 
 theory of its subject. 
 
 Political and national decadence is Mr. Balfour's 
 theme, and we note first that here is a contemporary 
 thinker, not unread in recent biology, including the 
 work of Weismann, who is prepared to make use of 
 the idea that societies are inherently mortal, as indi- 
 viduals are. One wonders when we shall be rid of 
 this pernicious instance of the argument from analogy, 
 which is already much more than two thousand years 
 old. 
 
 Next it may be noticed that, though Mr. Balfour 
 has deliberately discussed the idea of natural selection, 
 he has been led wholly astray from its true relation to 
 the question under discussion by reason of falling into 
 the common error which Sir E. Ray Lankester has 
 recently exposed, as Huxley did many decades ago. 
 
 Rt. Hon. A. J. Balfour, M.P., delivered at Newnham College, 
 January 25, 1908. (Cambridge University Press.) 
 
MR. BALFOUR ON DECADENCE 325 
 
 Mr. Balfour conceives natural selection to issue from 
 the struggle for existence between species or societies. 
 It has already been pointed out that the all-important 
 natural selection is not between species or societies but 
 within them. The struggle for existence is fought out 
 mainly between the immature individuals of any spe- 
 cies or society. Its issue determines the survivors for 
 parenthood and the future. Mr. Balfour must have 
 read Professor Ray Lankester's recent Romanes Lec- 
 ture in which all this is so clearly shown, but he has 
 unfortunately retained the popular conception of nat- 
 ural selection as acting between species or societies, and 
 has in consequence failed, I will not say to find, but 
 even to discuss in any adequate measure, the theory of 
 racial and national decadence, defined in the preced- 
 ing chapter. He merely discusses " competition be- 
 tween groups of communities/' and rightly finds it in- 
 adequate to account for the great tragedies of history. 
 There follows a passage which may be heartily as- 
 sented to, on the very grounds on which the entire lec- 
 ture may be welcomed, namely, that it suggests the in- 
 adequacy of the common explanations of national de- 
 cadence advanced by historians. Says Mr. Balfour: 
 
 " It is in vain that historians enumerate the public calamities 
 which preceded, and no doubt contributed to, the final catas- 
 trophe. Civil dissensions, military disasters, pestilences, fam- 
 ines, tyrants, tax-gatherers, growing burdens, and waning 
 wealth the gloomy catalogue is unrolled before our eyes, yet 
 somehow it does not in all cases wholly satisfy us : we feel that 
 some of these diseases are of a kind which a vigorous body 
 politic should easily be able to survive, that others are sec- 
 ondary symptoms of some obscurer malady, and that in neither 
 case do they supply us with the full explanation of which we 
 are in search." 
 
326 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 One must heartily thank the author for the abundant 
 demonstration which follows, well-warranting our feel- 
 ing that these explanations do not suffice nor yet, in 
 the case of Rome, diminution of population, nor the 
 " brutalities of the gladiatorial shows," nor " the gratu- 
 itous distribution of bread to the urban mobs/' nor yet 
 slavery, lately declared, by Mr. W. R. Paterson, in his 
 Nemesis of Nations, to be the cause of the fall of em- 
 pires. As Mr. Balfour says, " Who can believe that 
 this immemorial custom could, in its decline, destroy 
 the civilization, which, in its vigor, it had helped to 
 create ? " It would have been more important, per- 
 haps, to consider, as Mr. Balfour does not, the latest 
 view, advanced by Professor Ronald Ross, that the in- 
 cursion of malaria may have had something to do with 
 the fall of Rome. 
 
 MR. BALFOUR'S THEORY DECADENCE THE CAUSE 
 OF DECADENCE. Mr. Balfour then falls back upon 
 " decadence " as the explanation, and to the critic of 
 this elegant hypothesis that decadence is due to de- 
 cadence, replies that it is something to recognize the 
 possibility of " subtle changes in the social tissues of 
 old communities." One regrets all the more that he 
 should not have considered anti-eugenic practices as 
 possibly accounting for these subtle changes. One 
 must however quote the excellent passage in which Mr. 
 Balfour supports his use of the word decadence, 
 though one utterly disagrees with the suggestion that 
 the term " old age " might be its equivalent. He says : 
 " The facile generalizations with which we so often 
 season the study of dry historic fact ; the habits of po- 
 litical discussion which induce us to catalogue for pur- 
 
MR. BALFOUR ON DECADENCE 327 
 
 poses of debate the outward signs that distinguish (as 
 we are prone to think) the standing from the falling 
 state, hide the obscurer, the more potent, forces which 
 silently prepare the fate of empires." 
 
 We may note with interest (and surely with surprise 
 when we consider Japan and Spain and the China of 
 to-morrow), Mr. Balfour's rejection of the doctrine 
 that " arrested progress, and even decadence, may be 
 but the prelude to a new period of vigorous growth. 
 So that even those races or nations which seem frozen 
 into eternal immobility may base upon experience their 
 hopes of an awakening spring." It is, I fancy, Mr. 
 Balfour's fondness for the Platonic idea of senility in 
 the race as in the individual, that leads him to question 
 what can surely be no longer denied. Thus a little 
 later we find him saying, " if civilization wear out, and 
 races become effete, why should we expect to progress 
 indefinitely, why for us alone is the doom of man to be 
 reversed ? " 
 
 Nowhere in this lecture is there any recognition of 
 what, I confess, seems to me to be an obvious and 
 necessary truth, the distinction between the two kinds 
 of progress racial progress due to the choice of the 
 best for parenthood, and acquired or traditional prog- 
 ress. It may be suggested that no one can usefully 
 discuss decadence or progress until he has seen and per- 
 ceived this absolutely cardinal distinction, suggested in 
 my Royal Institution lectures in February, 1907, as 
 one of the great lessons taught by the study of biology 
 to the student of progress. 
 
 Mr. Balfour does indeed avoid all those false solu- 
 tions which depend upon a Lamarckian belief in the 
 
328 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 transmission of acquired characters. This, however, 
 instead of leading him to insist upon the Darwinian 
 contribution to the study of decadence the idea of 
 selection causes him to regard the racial question as 
 unimportant. He notes one or two of the fashions 
 in which the quality of a race may be modified, thus in- 
 fluencing national character, and then dismisses this 
 question (wherein, as I cannot doubt, everything mate- 
 rial lies) with the remark, " but such changes are not 
 likely, I suppose, to be considerable, except perhaps 
 those due to the mixture of races and that only in 
 new countries." Reaching page 45, the reader finds 
 himself confident that now at length the writer has put 
 his finger on the crux of the problem. Yet that is how 
 he dismisses it; adding, indeed, to make it quite clear, 
 the following words : " The flexible element in any 
 society, that which is susceptible of progress or de- 
 cadence, must therefore be looked for rather in the 
 physical and psychical conditions affecting the life of 
 its component units, than in their inherited constitu- 
 tion." 
 
 Not a word as to the cessation of selection! This 
 omission, which is, indeed, the omission of the fact of 
 'decadence, mainly depends, one fancies, upon that er- 
 roneous conception of natural selection as acting be- 
 tween species and societies rather than within them, 
 which for so many decades the biologist has been at 
 pains to correct. One would indeed have thought that, 
 for a scholar and student like Mr. Balfour, Words- 
 worth's great sonnet would have sufficed to set up a 
 train of thought, which, fusing with ordinary biologi- 
 cal principles, would have led him to what I believe to 
 
MR. BALFOUR ON DECADENCE 329 
 
 be the truth. Let us for a moment turn to its consid- 
 eration : 
 
 " When I have borne in memory what has tamed 
 Great Nations, how ennobling thoughts depart 
 When men change swords for ledgers. . . ." 
 
 Should not this be enough to suggest to us the real 
 meaning of the consequence which has followed when 
 men changed swords for ledgers, and which even those 
 who hate war as a vile blasphemy against life, must 
 recognize? It is that, as we have seen, when a nation 
 is making its way there is selection of the fittest by the 
 stern arbitrament of war, in which the battle is to the 
 individually strong and fleet and brave and quick- 
 witted. Later, " when men change swords for led- 
 gers," selection ceases; and that is why nothing fails 
 like success. Yet later still, as France should know, 
 selection by war must take the form of reverse 
 selection, the flower of a nation's youth being immo- 
 lated on the battle-field, whilst its future is determined 
 by the weak and small and diseased, whom the recruit- 
 ing sergeant rejects. " You are not good enough to 
 be a soldier," he says ; " stay at home and be a father." 
 That was what Napoleon did for France. 
 
 But to return for the relations of war to eugenics 
 would really demand a volume it may be noted that, 
 though rejecting the Lamarckian theory the theory 
 on which nothing should succeed like success Mr. 
 Balfour nowhere emphasizes the amazing paradox of 
 history that nothing fails like success. If we consider 
 this fact with the idea of natural selection in our minds 
 (not between societies but within them), we cannot 
 
330 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 fail to perceive that success involves failure, because it 
 involves failure of selection, and therefore indiscrim- 
 inate survival ; or indeed, survival of the worst. 
 
 POLITICS AND DOMESTICS. It is, perhaps, a note- 
 worthy comment upon what may be called the political 
 state of mind, that even when the idea of natural se- 
 lection has entered it, the bias is towards associating it 
 with international and not with intra-national or do- 
 mestic politics. The time will come, however, when 
 the politician or shall we say the statesman ? re- 
 alizes that it is the domestic policy, it is the internal 
 struggle for survival within a society, that conditions 
 and fore-ordains all international politics. The his- 
 tory of nations is determined not on the battlefield but 
 in the nursery, and the battalions which give lasting 
 victory are battalions of babies. The politics of the 
 future will be domestics. 
 
 Having rejected so many solutions of his problem, 
 and having ignored the solution which is advanced in 
 this volume, Mr. Balfour is reduced to such desperate 
 resorts as phrases like this: "the point at which the 
 energy of advance is exhausted " a mere meaning- 
 less phrase; and even such an explanation as that 
 through " mere weariness of spirit the community re- 
 signs itself to ... stagnation." One is in- 
 clined to throw up one's hands and ask Do you, 
 then, who deny the Lamarckian theory, suppose that 
 the fresh children come into the world with this " mere 
 weariness of spirit " ? Has this been observed in chil- 
 dren ? Is there anything conceivable that has been less 
 observed in children, in all times and all places ? And 
 
 
MR. BALFOUR ON DECADENCE 331 
 
 if that be so what kind of explanation of decadence is 
 this? 
 
 SCIENCE AND INDUSTRY. Lastly, in a series of fine 
 passages, Mr. Balfour offers us some hope in the help 
 of science. Politics, says our ex-Premier, too often 
 means " the barren exchange of one set of tyrants or 
 jobbers, for another " ; a Daniel come to judgment. 
 We owe the modern spirit and modern progress, he 
 tells us, neither to politicians nor to political institu- 
 tions, nor to theologians nor to philosophers, but to 
 science, which, he well says, " is the great instrument 
 of social change, all the greater because its object is not 
 change but knowledge; and its silent appropriation of 
 this dominant function, amid the din of political and 
 religious strife, is the most vital of all the revolutions 
 which have marked the development of modern civili- 
 zation." 
 
 And our cause of hope is " a social force, new in 
 magnitude if not in kind ... the modern alliance 
 between pure science and industry." To this I answer 
 a thousand times yes, but I must define the kind of in- 
 dustry. It is the culture of the racial life which is the 
 vital industry of any nation, and which Mr. Balfour 
 has not even distantly alluded to. I agree that our 
 hope for the future is to be found in science: that, as 
 has been said already, perchance our acquired or tra- 
 ditional progress in knowledge has now reached the 
 point at which we have sufficient to reveal to us the 
 necessity of racial progress and the means by which that 
 may be effected. 
 
 " Science and industry/' yes, indeed ! . But the in- 
 
332 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 dustry is to be the making not of machines, but men. 
 The products of progress are not mechanisms but men, 
 and one may now ask, what is the industry whose 
 products can be named in the same breath with the men 
 and women who shall yet be produced by the supreme 
 industry of race-culture? 
 
CHAPTER XVII 
 
 THE PROMISE OF RACE CULTURE 
 
 " The best is yet to be " 
 
 IN its form of what we have called negative eugenics, 
 the practice of our principle would assuredly reduce 
 to an incalculable extent the amount of human defect, 
 mental and physical, which each generation now ex- 
 hibits. This alone, as has been said, would be far 
 more than sufficient to justify us. A world without 
 hereditary disease of mind and body would alone war- 
 rant the hint of Ruskin that posterity may some day 
 look back upon us with " incredulous disdain." Yet, 
 assuming that this could be accomplished, as it will be 
 accomplished, what more is to be hoped for? Must 
 race-culture cease merely when it has raised the aver- 
 age of the community by reducing to a minimum the 
 proportion of those who are thus grossly defective in 
 mind or body? Such disease apart, are we to be con- 
 tent, must we be content, with the present level of 
 mediocrity in respect of intelligence and temper and 
 moral sentiment? Can we anticipate a London in 
 which the present ratio of musical comedy to great 
 opera will be reversed, in which the works of Mr. 
 George Meredith will sell in hundreds of thousands, 
 whilst some of our popular novelists will have to find 
 other means of earning a living? Can we make for a 
 
 333 
 
334 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 critical democracy which no political party can fool, 
 and which will choose its best to govern it? Yet more, 
 can we undertake, now or hereafter, to provide every 
 generation with its own Shakespeare and Beethoven 
 and Tintoretto and Newton ? What, in a word, is the 
 promise of positive eugenics? It is to this aspect of 
 the question that Mr. Galton has mainly directed him- 
 self. Indeed he was led to formulate the principles 
 and ideals of the new science by his study of hereditary 
 genius some four decades ago. Let us now attempt to 
 answer some of these questions. 
 
 THE PRODUCTION OF GENIUS. And first as to the 
 production of genius. It is this, perhaps, that has been 
 the main butt of the jesters who pass for philosophers 
 with some of us to-day. It may be said at once that 
 neither Mr. Galton nor any other responsible person has 
 ever asserted that we can produce genius at will. The 
 difficulties in the way of such a project at present 
 are almost innumerable. One or two may be cited. 
 
 In the first place, there is the cardinal but by no 
 means universal difficulty that the genius is too com- 
 monly so occupied with the development and expansion 
 of his own individuality that he has little time or en- 
 ergy for the purposes of the race. This, of course, is 
 an example of Spencer's great generalization as to the 
 antagonism or inverse ratio between individuation and 
 genesis. 
 
 Again, there is the generalization of heredity formu- 
 lated by Mr. Galton, and named by him the law of 
 regression towards mediocrity. It asserts that the 
 children of those who are above or below the mean of 
 a race, tend to return towards that mean. The chil- 
 
THE PROMISE OF RACE CULTURE 335 
 
 dren of the born criminal will be probably somewhat 
 less criminal in tendency than he, though more crim- 
 inal than the average citizen. The children of the 
 man of genius, if he has any, will probably be nearer 
 mediocrity than he, though on the average possessing 
 greater talent than the average citizen. It is thus not 
 in the nature of sheer genius to reproduce on its own 
 level. It is only the critics who are totally ignorant 
 of the elementary facts of heredity that attribute to the 
 eugenist an expectation of which no one knows the 
 absurdity so well as he does. 
 
 On the other hand, it is impossible to question that 
 the hereditary transmission of genius or great talent 
 does occur. One may cite at random such cases as 
 that of the Bach family, Thomas and Matthew Arnold, 
 James and John Stuart Mill: and the reader who is 
 inclined to believe that there is no law or likelihood in 
 this matter, must certainly make himself acquainted 
 with Mr. Galton's Hereditary Genius, and with such a 
 paper as that which he printed in Sociological papers, 
 1904, furnishing an " index to achievements of near 
 kinsfolk of some of the Fellows of the Royal Society." 
 There is, of course, the obvious fallacy involved in the 
 possibility that not heredity but environment was really 
 responsible for many of these cases. It must have 
 been a great thing to have such a father as James Mill. 
 But it would be equally idle to imagine that the evi- 
 dence can be dismissed with this criticism. A Mat- 
 thew Arnold, a John Stuart Mill, could not be manu- 
 factured out of any chance material by an ideal educa- 
 tion continued for a thousand years. 
 
 THE TRANSMISSION OF GENIUS. One single in-? 
 
336 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 stance of the transmission of genius or great talent in 
 a family may be cited. We shall take the family 
 which produced Charles Darwin, the discoverer of the 
 fundamental principle of eugenics, and his first cousin, 
 Francis Galton. Darwin's grandfather was Erasmus 
 Darwin, physician, poet and philosopher, and inde- 
 pendent expounder of the doctrine of organic evolu- 
 tion. Darwin's father was a distinguished physician, 
 described by his son as " the wisest man I ever knew." 
 Darwin's maternal grandfather was Josiah Wedg- 
 wood, the famous founder of the pottery works. 
 Amongst his first cousins is Mr. Francis Galton. He 
 has five living sons, each a man of great distinction, 
 including Mr. Francis Darwin and Sir George Darwin, 
 both of them original thinkers, honored by the presi- 
 dency of the British Association. No one will put 
 such a case as this down to pure chance or to the influ- 
 ence of environment alone. This is evidently, like 
 many others, a greatly distinguished stock. The worth 
 of such families to a nation is wholly beyond any one's 
 powers of estimation. What if Erasmus Darwin had 
 never married! 
 
 No student of human heredity can doubt that, how- 
 ever limited our immediate hopes, facts such as those 
 alluded to furnish promise of great things for the 
 future. But let us turn now from genius to what we 
 usually call talent. 
 
 THE PRODUCTION OF TALENT. There can be no 
 question that amongst the promises of race-culture is 
 the possibility of breeding such things as talent and 
 the mental energy upon which talent so largely de- 
 pends. In his Inquiries into Human Faculty, Mr. 
 
THE PROMISE OF RACE CULTURE 337 
 
 Gallon shows the remarkable extent to which energy 
 or the capacity for labor underlies intellectual achieve- 
 ment. He says, of energy : 
 
 " It is consistent with all the robust virtues, and makes a 
 large practice of them possible. It is the measure of fullness 
 of life; the more energy the more abundance of it; no energy 
 at all is death; idiots are feeble and listless. In the enquiries 
 I made on the antecedents of men of science no points came 
 out more strongly than that the leaders of scientific thought 
 were generally gifted with remarkable energy, and that they 
 had inherited the gift of it from their parents and grandparents. 
 I have since found the same to be the case in other careers. 
 It may be objected that if the race were too healthy 
 and energetic there would be insufficient call for the exercise 
 of the pitying and self-denying virtues, and the character of 
 men would grow harder in consequence. But it does not seem 
 reasonable to preserve sickly breeds for the sole purpose of 
 tending them, as the breed of foxes is preserved solely for 
 sport and its attendant advantages. There is little fear that 
 misery will ever cease from the land, or that the compassionate 
 will fail to find objects for their compassion; but at present 
 the supply vastly exceeds the demand: the land is over-stocked 
 and over-burdened with the listless and the incapable. In any 
 scheme of eugenics, energy is the most important quality to 
 favor; it is, as we have seen, the basis of living action, and it 
 is eminently transmissible by descent." 
 
 Need it be pointed out that any political system 
 which ceases to favor or actively disfavors energy, 
 making it as profitable to be lazy as to be active, is anti- 
 eugenic, and must inevitably lead to disaster? That, 
 however, by the way. Our present point is that 
 eugenics can reasonably promise, when its principles 
 are recognized, to multiply the human 1 and diminish 
 the vegetable type in the community. In so doing, it 
 will greatly further the production of talent, and there- 
 
 1 " Restless activity proves the man," as Goethe says. 
 
338 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 fore of that traditional or acquired progress which men 
 of talent and genius create. Such a result will also 
 further, though indirectly, the production of genius it- 
 self. For, as Mr. Galton points out, " men of an order 
 of ability which is now very rare, would become more 
 frequent, because the level out of which they rose 
 would itself have risen." 
 
 This is by no means the only fashion in which an 
 effective and practicable race-culture would serve 
 genius, and I shall not be blamed for considering this 
 matter further by any reader who realizes, however 
 faintly, what the man of genius is worth to the world. 
 If it were shown possible to establish such social con- 
 ditions that genius could never flower in them, we 
 should realize that their establishment would mean the 
 putting of an end to progress and the blasting of all 
 the highest hopes of the highest of all ages. 
 
 The immediate need of this age, as of all ages, is 
 perhaps not so much the birth of babies capable of 
 developing into men and women of genius, as the full 
 exploitation of the possibilities of genius with which, 
 as I fancy, every generation on the average is about as 
 well endowed as any other. There is, of course, the 
 popular doctrine that there are no mute inglorious Mil- 
 tons, that " genius will out," and that therefore if it 
 does not appear, it is not there to appear. In ex- 
 pressing the compelling power of genius in many 
 cases, this doctrine is not without truth. Yet 
 history abounds in instances where genius has 
 been destroyed by environment and we can only 
 guess how many more instances there are of which 
 history has no record. To take the single case of 
 
THE PROMISE OF RACE CULTURE 339 
 
 musical genius, it is a lamentable thought that there 
 may be those now living whose natural endowments, 
 in a favorable environment, would have enabled them 
 to write symphonies fit to place beside Beethoven's, 
 but whom some environmental factors conventional, 
 economic, educational, or what not have silenced; 
 or worse, have persuaded to write such sterile nullities 
 as need not here be instanced. There is surely no 
 waste in all this wasteful world so lamentable as this 
 waste of genius. 
 
 If, then, any one could devise for us a means by 
 which the genius, potentially existing at any time, were 
 realized, he would have performed in effect a service 
 equivalent to that of which eugenics repudiates the 
 present possibility the actual creation of genius. 
 But if we consider what the conditions are which cause 
 the waste of genius, we realize at once that they mainly 
 inhere in the level of the human environment of the 
 priceless potentiality in question. As we noted else- 
 where, in an age like that of Pericles genius springs 
 up on all hands. It is encouraged and welcomed be- 
 cause the average level of the human environment in 
 which it finds itself is so high. But if eugenics can 
 raise the average level of intelligence, in so doing not 
 merely does it render more likely, as Mr. Galton points 
 out, the production of men of the highest ability, but 
 it provides those conditions in which men of genius, 
 now swamped, can swim. We could not undertake 
 to produce a Shakespeare, but we might reasonably 
 hope to produce a generation which would not destroy 
 its Shakespeares. And even if men of genius still found 
 it necessary, as men of genius have found it necessary, 
 
340 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 to "play to the gallery," they would play, as Mr. 
 Galton says of the demagogue in a eugenic age, " to a 
 more sensible gallery than at present." 
 
 Darwin somewhere points out that it is not the sci- 
 entific, but the unscientific man who denies future pos- 
 sibilities. Thus though an advocate of eugenics may 
 be applauded for his judgment if he declares that the 
 creation of genius will for ever be impossible, yet I 
 should not care to assert that the ultimate limitations 
 of eugenics can thus be defined. We have yet to hear 
 the last of Mendelism. 
 
 EUGENICS AND UNEMPLOYMENT. Let us look now 
 at another aspect of the promise of race-culture. When 
 the time comes that quality rather than quantity is the 
 ideal of those who concern themselves with the popu- 
 lation question, it is quite evident that not a few of the 
 social problems which we now find utterly insoluble 
 will disappear. In this brief outline, we can only 
 allude to one or two points. Take, for instance, the 
 question of unemployment. We know that some by 
 no means small proportion of the unemployed were 
 really destined to be unemployable from the first, as 
 for instance by reason of hereditary disease. It were 
 better for them and for us that they had never been 
 born. Many more of the unemployed have been made 
 unemployable by the influence of over-crowding, to 
 which they were subjected in their years of develop- 
 ment. Is there, can there be, any real and permanent 
 remedy for overcrowding, but the erection of parent- 
 hood into an act of personal and provident responsi- 
 bility? 
 
 EUGENICS AND WOMAN. Take, again, the woman 
 
THE PROMISE OF RACE CULTURE 341 
 
 question. No one will deny that in many of its gravest 
 forms, especially in its economic form, and the ques- 
 tion of the employment of women, wisely or horribly, 
 this depends (to a degree which few, I think, realize) 
 upon the fact that there are now, for instance, 1,300,- 
 ooo women in excess in this country. Is it then pro- 
 posed, the reader will say, by means of race-culture to 
 exterminate the superfluous woman? Indeed, no. 
 But is the reader aware that Nature is not responsible 
 for the existence of the superfluous woman? There 
 are more boys than girls born in the ratio of about 103 
 or 104 to 100: and Nature means them all to live, boys 
 and girls alike. If they did so live, we should have 
 merely the problem of the superfluous man, which 
 would not be an economic problem at all. But we de- 
 stroy hosts of all the children that are born, and since 
 male organisms are in general less resistant than fe- 
 male organisms, we destroy a disproportionate number 
 of boys, so that the natural balance of the sexes is in- 
 verted. Unlike ancient societies we largely practice 
 male infanticide. Can the reader believe that there is 
 any permanent and final means of arresting this wast- 
 age of child-life, with its singular and far-reaching 
 consequences, other than the elevation of parenthood, 
 on the principles which race-culture enjoins, even 
 wholly apart from the question of the selection of 
 parents ? We shall not succeed in keeping all the chil- 
 dren alive (with a trivial number of exceptions), 
 thereby abolishing the superfluous woman by keeping 
 alive the boy who should have grown up to be her part- 
 ner, until we greatly reduce the birth-rate; as it must 
 and will be reduced when the ideal of race-culture is 
 
342 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 realized, and no child comes into the world that is not 
 already loved and desired in anticipation. 
 
 EUGENICS AND CRUELTY TO CHILDREN. This ideal, 
 also, offers us in its realization the only complete rem- 
 edy for the present ghastly cruelty under which so 
 many children suffer even in Great Britain, even in the 
 twentieth century. Is the reader aware that the 
 National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to 
 Children inquired into the ill-treatment or cruel neg- 
 lect of 115,000 children in the year beginning April 
 ist, 1906? It has been reasonably and carefully esti- 
 mated that " over half a million children are involved 
 in the total of the wastage of child-life and the torture 
 and neglect of child-life in a single year." Surely Mr. 
 G. R. Sims, to whom I would offer a hearty tribute for 
 his recent services to childhood, is justified in saying, 
 " Against the guilt of race suicide our men of science 
 are everywhere preaching their sermons to-day. It is 
 against the guilt of race murder that the cry of the 
 children should ring through the land." As regards 
 race suicide and the men of science, I am not so sure 
 as to the assertion. But the truth of the second sen- 
 tence quoted is as indisputable as it is horrible. 
 
 Now no legislation conceivable will wholly cure this 
 evil nor avert its consequences. At bottom it depends 
 upon human nature, and you can cure it only by curing 
 the defect of human nature. This, in general, is of 
 course beyond the immediate powers of man, but evi- 
 dently we should gain the same end if only we could 
 confine the advent of children to those parents who 
 desired them that is to say, those in whom human 
 nature displayed the first, if not indeed almost the only, 
 
THE PROMISE OF RACE CULTURE 343 
 
 requisite for the happiness of childhood. To this most 
 beneficent and wholly moral end we shall come, not- 
 withstanding the blind and pitiable guidance of most of 
 our accredited moral teachers to-day. By no other 
 means than the realization of the ideal defined, that 
 every new baby shall be loved and desired in anticipa- 
 tion an ideal which is perfectly practicable can 
 the black stain of child murder and child torture and 
 child neglect be removed from our civilization. 
 
 RUSKIN AND RACE-CULTURE. The name of Rus- 
 kin, perhaps, would not occur to the reader as likely to 
 afford support to the fair hopes of the eugenist. Con- 
 sider then, these words from Time and Tide: 
 
 " You leave your marriages to be settled by supply and de- 
 mand, instead of wholesome law. And thus, among your 
 youths and maidens, the improvident, incontinent, selfish, and 
 foolish ones marry, whether you will or not; and beget families 
 of children necessarily inheritors in a great degree of these 
 parental dispositions; and for whom, supposing they had the 
 best dispositions in the world, you have thus provided, by 
 way of educators, the foolishest fathers and mothers you could 
 find; (the only rational sentence in their letters, usually, is 
 the invariable one, in which they declare themselves 'incapable 
 of providing for their children's education'). On the other 
 hand, whosoever is wise, patient, unselfish, and pure among 
 your youth, you keep maid or bachelor; wasting their best days 
 of natural life in painful sacrifice, forbidding them their best 
 help and best reward, and carefully excluding their prudence 
 and tenderness from any offices of parental duty. Is not this 
 a beatific and beautifully sagacious system for a Celestial Em- 
 pire, such as that of these British Isles?" 
 
 Apart from the point as to wholesome law rather 
 than the education of opinion as the eugenic means, the 
 foregoing passage must win the assent and respect of 
 every eugenist. It indicates the promise of race-cul- 
 
344 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 ture as it appeared to John Ruskin. The passage has 
 been quoted in full, not for the benefit of the ordinary 
 thoughtful reader but for that of the professional 
 literary man who, in this remarkable age, so far as I 
 can judge, reads nothing but what he writes, and thus 
 qualifies himself for dismissing Spencer or Darwin 
 or Galton in any casual phrase. 1 
 
 RACE-CULTURE AND HUMAN VARIETY. Now let 
 us turn to another question. Let it be asserted most 
 emphatically that, if there is anything in the world 
 which eugenics or race-culture does not promise or 
 desire, it is the production of a uniform type of man. 
 This delusion, for which there has never been any war- 
 rant at all, possesses many of the critics of eugenics, 
 and they have made pretty play with it, just as they do 
 with their other delusions. Let us note one or two 
 facts which bear upon this most undesirable ideal. 
 
 In the first place, it is unattainable because of the 
 existence of what we call variation. No apparatus 
 conceivable would suffice to eliminate from every gen- 
 eration those who varied from the accepted type. 
 
 In the second place, this uniformity is supremely 
 undesirable from the purely evolutionary point of view, 
 because its attainment would mean the arrest of all 
 progress. All organic evolution, as we know, depends 
 upon the struggle between creatures possessing various 
 variations and the consequent selection of those varia- 
 tions which constitute their possessors best adapted or 
 fitted to the particular environment. If there is no 
 variation there can be no evolution. To aim at the 
 suppression of variation, therefore, on supposed eu- 
 genic grounds (which would be involved in aiming 
 
 1 Meanwhile condemning Ruskin, whom he professes to adore. 
 
THE PROMISE OF RACE CULTURE 345 
 
 at any uniform type of mankind) would be to aim at 
 destroying the necessary condition of all racial prog- 
 ress. The mere fact that all the critics of race- 
 culture attribute to evolutionists, of all people, the 
 desire to suppress variation, is a pathognomonic symp- 
 tom of their critical quality. 
 
 And, of course, quite independently of the evolu- 
 tionary function of variation though this is cardi- 
 nal and must never be forgotten by the politician of 
 any school, since what we call individuality is variation 
 on the human plane the value of variation in ordi- 
 nary life is wholly incalculable. It is not merely that,, 
 as Mr. Galton says, " There are a vast number of con- 
 flicting ideals, of alternative characters, of incompati- 
 ble civilizations; but they are wanted to give fullness 
 and interest to life. Society would be very dull if 
 every man resembled the highly estimable Marcus 
 Aurelius or Adam Bede." The question is not merely 
 as to the interest of life. Much more important is the 
 fact that it takes all sorts to make a world. What is 
 the development of society but the result of the psych- 
 ological division of labor in the social organism ? And 
 how could such division of labor be carried out if we 
 had not various types of laborers? What would be 
 the good of science if there were no poetry or music to 
 live for? How would poetry and music help us if we 
 had not men of science to protect our shores from 
 plague? Obviously the existence of men of most vari- 
 ous types is a necessity for any highly organized so- 
 ciety. Even if eugenics were capable as it is not 
 of producing a complete and balanced type, fit up 
 to a point to turn out a satisfactory poem, a satisfac- 
 
346 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 tory symphony or a satisfactory sofa, the utmost could 
 not be expected of such a man in any of these direc- 
 tions. In a word, as long as their activities are not 
 anti-social, men cannot be of too various types. We 
 require mystic and mathematician, poet and patholo- 
 gist. Only, we want good specimens of each. " The 
 aim of eugenics," says Mr. Galton, " is to represent 
 each class or sect by its best specimens; that done, to 
 leave them to work out their common civilization in 
 their own way. . . . Special aptitudes would be 
 assessed highly by those who possessed them, as the 
 artistic faculties by artists, fearlessness of inquiry and 
 veracity by scientists, religious absorption by mystics, 
 and so on. There would be self-sacrificers, self- tor- 
 mentors, and other exceptional idealists." But at 
 least it is better to have good rather than bad speci- 
 mens of any kind, whatever that kind may be. Mr. 
 Galton thinks that all except cranks would agree as 
 to including health, energy, ability, manliness and 
 courteous disposition amongst qualities uniformly de- 
 sirable alike in poet and pathologist. We should 
 desire also uniformity as to the absence of the anti- 
 social proclivities of the born criminal. So much uni- 
 formity being granted, let us have with it the utmost 
 conceivable variety, more, indeed, than most of us 
 can conceive. 
 
 This point, of course, is cardinal from the point of 
 view of practice. No progress could be made with 
 eugenics, it would be impossible even to form a Eu- 
 genics Education Society, if each of us were to regard 
 the particular type he belongs to as the ideal, and were 
 to seek merely to obtain the best specimens of that 
 
THE PROMISE OF RACE CULTURE 347 
 
 type. The doctrine that it takes all sorts to make a 
 world a doctrine very hard for youth to learn, yet 
 unconsciously learnt by all who are capable of learn- 
 ing at all must be regarded as cardinal truth for the 
 eugenist. All he asks for, all he is wise in seeking, is 
 good specimens rather than bad. Poets certainly, but 
 not poetasters; jesters certainly, but not clever fools. 1 
 
 TIME AND ITS TREASURE. Taking the modern 
 estimates of the physicists, we are assured that the 
 total period of past human existence is very brief com- 
 pared with what may reasonably be predicted. 
 Granted, then, practically unlimited time, what inher- 
 ent limits are there to the upward development of man 
 as a moral and intellectual being? Shall we answer 
 this question by a study of the nature of matter? 
 Plainly not. Shall we answer it by a study of the 
 nature of mind ? Surely not, for the study of existing 
 mind cannot inform us as to what mind might be. 
 One source of guidance alone we have, and this is the 
 amazing contrast which exists between the mind of 
 man at its highest, and mind in its humblest animal 
 forms: or shall we say even between the highest and 
 lowest manifestations of mind within the human 
 species ? The measureless height of the ascent thus in- 
 dicated offers us no warrant for the conclusion that, as 
 we stand on the heights of our life, our " glimpse of a 
 height that is higher " is only an hallucination. On 
 -the contrary. 
 
 There is no warrant whatever for supposing that the 
 forces which have brought us thus far are yet ex- 
 hausted: they have their origin in the inexhaustible. 
 Who, gazing on the earth of a hundred million years 
 
 1 Who stand Truth on her head, and then make street-boy 
 gestures at her. 
 
348 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 ago, could have predicted life could have recognized, 
 in the forces then at work and the matter in which 
 they were displayed, the promise and potency of all 
 terrestrial life? Who, contemplating life at a much 
 later stage, even later mammalian, could have seen in 
 the simian the prophecy of man? Who, examining 
 the earliest nervous ganglia, could have foreseen the 
 human cerebrum? The fact that we can imagine 
 nothing higher than ourselves, that we make even our 
 gods in our own image, offers no warrant for suppos- 
 ing that nothing higher will ever be. What ape could 
 have predicted man, what reptile the bird, what amoeba 
 the bee ? " There are many events in the womb of 
 time which will be delivered " and the fairest of her 
 sons and daughters are yet to be. 
 
 But even grant, for the sake of the argument, that the 
 intelligence of a Newton, the musical faculty of a Bach, 
 the moral nature of any good mother anywhere, repre- 
 sent the utmost limits of which the evolution of the 
 psychical is capable. There is every reason to deny 
 this, but let us for the moment assume it true. There 
 still remains the thought of Wordsworth, " What one 
 is, why may not millions be ? " a thought to which 
 Spencer has also given utterance. What is shown 
 possible for human nature here and there, he says, is 
 conceivable for human nature at large. It is possible 
 for a human being, whilst still remaining human, to be 
 a Shakespeare or a St. Francis: these things are thus 
 demonstrably within the possibilities of human nature. 
 It is therefore at the least conceivable that, in the 
 course of almost infinite time (even assuming, say, 
 that intelligence must ever be limited, as even New- 
 
THE PROMISE OF RACE CULTURE 349 
 
 ton's intelligence was limited), some such capacities 
 as his may be common property amongst men of the 
 scientific type; and so with other types. We may an- 
 swer Wordsworth that there is no bar thrown by Na- 
 ture in the way of such a hope. 
 
 WHAT is POSSIBLE. This, of course, is specula- 
 tion and of no immediate value. I would merely re- 
 mind the reader that the doctrine of optimism, as 
 regards the future of mankind, which the principles of 
 race-culture assume and which they desire to justify, 
 was definitely shared by the great pioneers to whom 
 we owe our understanding of those principles. Not- 
 withstanding grave nervous disorder, such as makes 
 pessimists of most men, both Darwin and Spencer were 
 compelled by their study of Nature to this rational 
 optimism as regards man's future. The doctrine of 
 organic evolution, and of the age-long ascent of man 
 through the selection of the fittest (who have, on the 
 whole, been the best) for parenthood, is one not of 
 despair but of hope. Exactly half a century ago it 
 struck horror into the minds of our predecessors. 
 Man, then, is only an erected ape, they thought as 
 if any historical doctrine, however true, could shorten 
 the dizzy distance to which man has climbed since he 
 was simian: and man being an ape, they thought his 
 high dreams palpably vain. But the measure of the 
 accomplished hints at the measure of the possible, and 
 the value of the historical facts lies not in themselves, 
 all facts as such being as dead as are the individual 
 atoms of the living body, but in the principles which 
 grow out of them. It is of no importance as such that 
 man has simian ancestors; it is of immeasurable im- 
 
350 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 portance that he should learn by what processes he has 
 become human, and by what indeed, they became 
 simian which would have been a proud adjective for 
 its own day. The principles of organic progress mat- 
 ter for us because they are the principles of race-cul- 
 ture, the only sure means of human progress. Our 
 looking backwards does not turn us into pillars of salt, 
 but teaches us that the best is yet to be, and how alone 
 it is to be attained. 
 
 Elsewhere the optimistic argument of Wordsworth 
 is quoted. Hear also John Ruskin : 
 
 "There is as yet no ascertained limit to the nobleness of 
 person and mind which the human creature may attain, by 
 persevering observance of the laws of God respecting its birth 
 and training." 1 
 
 and Herbert Spencer: 
 
 "What now characterizes the exceptionally high may be 
 expected eventually to characterize all. For that which the 
 best human nature is capable of, is within the reach of human 
 nature at large." 2 
 
 and Francis Galton : 
 
 "There is nothing either in the history of domestic animals 
 or in that of evolution to make us doubt that a race of sane 
 men may be formed, who shall be as much superior, mentally 
 and morally, to the modern European, as the modern European 
 is to the lowest of the Negro races. 
 
 " It is earnestly to be hoped that inquiries will be increasingly 
 directed into historical facts, with the view of estimating the 
 possible effects of reasonable political action in the future, in 
 gradually raising the present miserably low standard of the 
 
 1 Munera Pulveris, par. 6. 
 
 2 The Data of Ethics, par. 97. 
 
THE PROMISE OF RACE CULTURE 351 
 
 human race to one in which the Utopias in the dreamland of 
 philanthropists may become practical possibilities." 1 
 
 CONCLUSION EUGENICS AND RELIGION. In an 
 early chapter it was attempted to show that eugenics is 
 not merely moral, but is of the very heart of morality. 
 We saw that it involves taking no life, that, rather 
 it desires to make philanthropy more philanthropic, 
 that, at any rate so far as this eugenist is con- 
 cerned, it recognizes and bows to the supreme law 
 of love : and claims to serve that law, and the ideal of 
 social morality, which is the making of human worth. 
 Eugenics may or may not be practicable, it may or 
 may not be based upon natural truth, but it is assuredly 
 moral : though I, for one, would proclaim eternal war 
 between this real morality and the damnable sham 
 which approves the unbridled transmission of the most 
 hideous diseases, rotting body and soul, in the interests 
 of good. 
 
 And if religion, whatever its origin and the more 
 questionable chapters in its past, be now " morality 
 touched with emotion," I claim that eugenics is reli- 
 gious, is and will ever be a religion. Elsewhere 2 I 
 have attempted to show that religion has survived and 
 will survive because of its survival-value its services 
 to the life of the societies wherein it flourishes. The 
 religion of the future, it was sought to argue, will be 
 that which " best serves Nature's unswerving desire 
 fullness of life." The Founder of the Christian reli- 
 gion said, " I am come that ye might have life, and 
 that ye might have it more abundantly." It is higher 
 
 1 Hereditary Genius, Prefatory Chapter to Edition of 1902, 
 pp. x. and xxvii. 
 
 2 " The Survival-Value of Religion," Fortnightly Review, April, 
 
352 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 and more abundant life that is the eugenic ideal. 
 Progress I define as the emergence and increasing 
 dominance of mind. Of progress, thus conceived, 
 man is the highest fruit hitherto. He is also its ap- 
 pointed agent and eugenics is his instrument. 
 
 To this end he must use all the powers which have 
 blossomed in him from the dust. He must claim Art : 
 and indeed in Wagner's great music-drama, at the 
 moment when the prophetic Briinnhilde tells Sieglinde 
 who has just lost her mate that she, the expectant 
 mother, may look for the resurrection of the dead and 
 the life of the world to come in the child Siegfried; 
 and when the heroic theme is pronounced for the first 
 time and followed by that which signifies redemption 
 by love: then, I think, the eugenist may thrill not 
 merely to the music, nor the humanity of the story, 
 but to the spiritual and scientific truth which it sym- 
 bolizes. 
 
 If the struggle towards individual perfection be re- 
 ligious, so, assuredly, is the struggle, less egoistic in- 
 deed, towards racial perfection. If the historic mean- 
 ing and purport of religion are as I conceive them, and 
 if its future evolution may thence be inferred, there 
 can be no doubt in the prophecy that in ages to come 
 those high aspirations and spiritual visions which 
 astronomy has dishoused from amongst the stars, and 
 which, at their best, were ever selfish, will find a place 
 on this human earth of ours. If we have transferred 
 our hopes from heaven to earth and from ourselves to 
 our children, they are not less religious. And they 
 that shall be of us shall build up the old waste places; 
 for we shall raise up the foundations of many gen- 
 erations. 
 
 We feel the high tradition of the world 3 
 
 And leave our spirits on our children's Breasts. 
 
APPENDIX A 
 
 CONCERNING BOOKS TO READ 
 
 THE preceding pages are of course only tentative, pre- 
 liminary and introductory. I have merely tried to 
 make a beginning. No better purpose can be achieved 
 than that the reader should proceed to study the sub- 
 ject for himself. A few pages may therefore be de- 
 voted to the names of some of the books which will be 
 found useful. This is in no sense a complete bibliog- 
 raphy, nor even a tithe of such a bibliography. But 
 the reader who makes a beginning with the books here 
 named, or even with a well-chosen half dozen of them, 
 will hereafter need no one to tell him that the culture 
 of the human race on scientific principles will be the 
 supreme science of all the future, the supreme goal of 
 all statesmen, the object and the final judge of all leg- 
 islation. 
 
 Where it is thought that useful remarks can be made 
 they will be made, but neither their presence nor ab- 
 sence nor their length is to be taken as any index to 
 the writer's opinion of the relative value of the works 
 in question. 
 
 Heredity. (The Progressive Science Series, John 
 Murray, 1908.) By PROFESSOR J. A. THOMSON, 
 M.A. 
 
 This is the most recent and most valuable for gen- 
 
 353 
 
i/ 
 
 354 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 eral purposes of all books on the subject of heredity. 
 No layman should express opinions on heredity or 
 eugenics until he has read it, for it is extremely im- 
 probable that they will be valuable. Professor Thom- 
 son covers the whole ground with extreme lucidity and 
 care and impartiality. The book is readable, nay 
 more, fascinating from end to end, and it is liberally 
 and usefully illustrated. It is the first general trea- 
 tise on heredity which leads consciously, yet as of 
 necessity, towards eugenics as the crown and goal to 
 the whole study, and in this respect it undoubtedly 
 marks an epoch. 
 
 The Methods and Scope of Genetics. (Cambridge 
 University Press, 1908.) By W. BATESON, M.A., 
 F.R.S. 
 
 This is the inaugural lecture, destined, I have little 
 doubt, to become historic, which was delivered by 
 Professor Bateson on his appointment to the new Dar- 
 win Chair of Biology at Cambridge. It is purposely 
 included here for very good reasons. The reader who 
 begins his serious study of heredity with Professor 
 Thomson's work, must be informed that though the 
 author gives an interesting account of Mendelism, he 
 is not a Mendelian, and neither his account of Men- 
 delism nor his estimate of it is at all adequate for the 
 present day. In truth there is the study of heredity 
 before Mendelism and after, and though eugenics owes 
 its modern origin to the founder of the school of bio- 
 metrics, and though among his followers there are to 
 be found many who decry and oppose the Mendelians, 
 it is for the eugenist of single purpose to take the truth 
 wherever it is to be found. It is now idle to deny 
 
APPENDIX 355 
 
 either the general truth or the stupendous promise of 
 Mendelism. Many vital phenomena besides hered- 
 ity are studied by the statistical method, and are put 
 down by it to heredity. The Mendelians take seeds 
 of known origin, and plant them and note the result. 
 They carry out experimental breeding not only 
 amongst plants but amongst the higher animals, in- 
 cluding mammals who, in all essentials of structure 
 and function, are one with ourselves. It is not possi- 
 ble, I believe, to over-estimate the supreme importance 
 of Mendelian inquiry for eugenics. Eugenics is 
 founded upon heredity, and Genetics, which is Pro- 
 fessor Bateson's name for the physiology of heredity 
 and variation, is now working at the very heart of 
 those natural phenomena upon which eugenics depends. 
 This lecture of Professor Bateson's is by far the best 
 introduction to Mendelism that exists, besides being 
 the most recent and the most authoritative possible. 
 With the lucidity of the born teacher (whose faculty, 
 I have no doubt, is a Mendelian unit, not always in- 
 herited by the born observer) the author explains the 
 essence of Mendelism. The usual expositor has not 
 proceeded far upon his way before he is encumbering 
 himself and the learner with the phenomena of domi- 
 nance and recessiveness, which are not cardinal and 
 are highly involved. Professor Bateson makes no 
 allusion to them. But he gives an account of Mendel- 
 ism which it is impossible to put down without finish- 
 ing, and which is elementary in the highest sense of 
 the word. In the latter pages the author preaches 
 eugenics with a vigor and conviction not unworthy of 
 notice as coming from the leader of a school which is 
 
356 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 utterly opposed in principle and in methods, if not in 
 results, to the school of biometrics founded by the 
 founder of eugenics. I insist upon this because there 
 is a half-instructed ignorance abroad which has heard 
 the name of Mendel, and seeks thereby to discredit 
 Darwin and natural selection, Mr. Galton and eugenics. 
 Hear Professor Bateson : 
 
 " If there are societies which refuse to apply the new 
 knowledge, the fault will not lie with Genetics. I think 
 it needs but little observation of the newer civilizations 
 to foresee that they will apply every scrap of scientific 
 knowledge which will help them, or seems to help them 
 in the struggle, and I am good enough selectionist to 
 know that in that day the fate of the recalcitrant com- 
 munities is sealed." 
 
 Hereditary Genius, An Inquiry into its Laws and 
 Consequences. (Second Edition. Macmillan, 1892. 
 Out of print. ) By FRANCIS GALTON. 
 
 This is the classical and pioneer inquiry, far beyond 
 my praise or appraisement. The main text is not long, 
 is easily read and is extremely interesting. The reader 
 should acquaint himself also with Mr. Constable's re- 
 cent criticism, Poverty and Hereditary Genius. 
 
 A Study of British Genius. (Hurst & Blackett, 
 1904.) By HAVELOCK ELLIS. 
 
 This is an extremely interesting book, which should 
 be read in association with the foregoing, to which it 
 is a criticism and supplement. The greater part of 
 the volume is concerned with the study of genius from 
 the point of view of heredity in terms of nationality 
 and race, and of individual parentage. Very great 
 
APPENDIX 357 
 
 labor and scholarship have been expended to very high 
 purpose in this work. 
 
 Inquiries into Human Faculty. (Macmillan, 1883. 
 Out of print.) By FRANCIS GALTON. 
 
 This is the next in order of Mr. Galton's works, 
 Hereditary Genius dating from 1869. It has recently 
 been reprinted in Dent's " Everyman's Library," and 
 can thus be purchased for one shilling. 
 
 Natural Inheritance. (Macmillan, 1889.) By 
 FRANCIS GALTON. (Out of print.) 
 
 Memories of my Life. (Methuen & Co., 1908.) 
 By FRANCIS GALTON. 
 
 This is Mr. Galton's latest book, and apart from its 
 personal fascination must be read by the serious 
 eugenist if only on account of its last five chapters, 
 and especially the last two, which deal with Heredity 
 and Race Improvement. What could be more inter- 
 esting and significant, for instance, than to find Mr. 
 Galton in 1908 saying of himself in 1865, "I was 
 too much disposed to think of marriage under some 
 regulation, and not enough of the effects of self-inter- 
 est and of social and religious sentiment." Mr. Galton 
 comments on the wrong headedness of objectors to 
 eugenics. I fancy, however, that the familiar misrep- 
 resentations will soon cease to be possible. The whole 
 of this brief last chapter must be carefully read and 
 studied. At least I must quote the following para- 
 graph : 
 
 " What I desire is that the importance of eugenic 
 marriages should be reckoned at its just value, neither 
 too high nor too low, and that eugenics should form 
 
\ 
 
 358 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 one of the many considerations by which marriages 
 are promoted or hindered, as they are by social posi- 
 tion, adequate fortune, and similarity of creed. I can 
 believe hereafter that it will be felt as derogatory to a 
 person of exceptionally good stock to marry into an 
 . inferior one as it is for a person of high Austrian rank 
 to marry one who has not sixteen heraldic quarterings. 
 I also hope that social recognition of an appropriate 
 kind will be given to healthy, capable, and large fami- 
 lies, and that social influence will be exerted towards 
 the encouragement of eugenic marriages." 
 
 This volume, a model for all future autobiographers, 
 ends with the following splendid statement of the 
 eugenic creed : 
 
 " A true philanthropist concerns himself not only 
 with society as a whole, but also with as many of the 
 individuals who compose it as the range of his affec- 
 tions can include. If a man devotes himself solely to 
 the good of the nation as a whole, his tastes must be 
 impersonal and his conclusions so far heartless, deserv- 
 ing the ill title of ' dismal ' with which Carlyle labeled 
 statistics. If, on the other hand, he attends only to 
 certain individuals in whom he happens to take an 
 interest, he becomes guided by favoritism and is ob- 
 livious of the rights of others and of the futurity of 
 the race. Charity refers to the individual; States- 
 manship to the nation ; Eugenics cares for both. 
 
 "It is known that a considerable part of the huge 
 stream of British charity furthers by indirect and un- 
 suspected ways the production of the Unfit ; it is most 
 desirable that money and other attention bestowed on 
 harmful forms of charity should be diverted to the 
 
APPENDIX 359 
 
 production and well-being of the Fit. For clearness 
 of explanation we may divide newly married couples 
 into three classes, with respect to the probable civic 
 worth of their offspring. There would be a small class 
 of ' desirables/ a large class of ' passables,' of whom 
 nothing more will be said here, and a small class of 
 ' undesirables.' It would clearly be advantageous to 
 the country if social and moral support as well as 
 timely material help were extended to the desirables, 
 and not monopolized as it is now apt to be by the 
 undesirables. 
 
 " I take eugenics very seriously, feeling that its prin- 
 ciples ought to become one of the dominant motives in 
 a civilized nation, much as if they were one of its reli- 
 gious tenets. I have often expressed myself in this 
 sense, and will conclude this book by briefly reiterating 
 my views. 
 
 " Individuals appear to me as partial detachments 
 from an infinite ocean of Being, and this world as a 
 stage on which Evolution takes place, principally hith- 
 erto by means of Natural Selection, which achieves 
 the good of the whole with scant regard to that of the 
 individual. 
 
 " Man is gifted with pity and other kindly feelings ; 
 he has also the power of preventing many kinds of 
 suffering. I conceive it to fall well within his province 
 to replace Natural Selection by other processes that are 
 more merciful and not less effective. 
 
 " This is precisely the aim of eugenics. Its first ob- 
 ject is to check the birth-rate of the Unfit, instead of 
 allowing them to come into being, though doomed in 
 large numbers to perish prematurely. The second 
 
360 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 object is the improvement of the race by furthering 
 the productivity of the Fit by early marriages and 
 healthful rearing of their children. Natural Selection 
 rests upon excessive production and wholesale destruc- 
 tion; Eugenics on bringing no more individuals into 
 the world than can be properly cared for, and those 
 only of the best stock." 
 
 Heredity and Selection in Sociology. (A. & C. 
 Black, 1907.) By GEORGE CHATTERTON-HILL. 
 
 This is a useful and interesting work, the nature of 
 which is well indicated by its title. It contains many 
 purely eugenic chapters, and cannot be ignored by the 
 student. 
 
 The Germ-plasm, A Theory of Heredity. (The 
 Contemporary Science Series, Walter Scott, 1893.) 
 By AUGUST WEISMANN. 
 
 This is Weismann's great work. It should be 
 studied by politicians and others who still interpret all 
 social phenomena in terms of Lamarckian theory, and 
 also by modern writers who are so much more Weis- 
 mannian than Weismann. 
 
 The Evolution Theory. (Two volumes. London, 
 1904. Translated by J. Arthur Thomson and M. R. 
 Thomson.) By AUGUST WEISMANN. 
 
 The Principles of Heredity. (Chapman & Hall, 
 1905.) By G. ARCHDALL REID. 
 
 This is a very interesting and extremely Weismann- 
 ian book which contains the most recent statement of 
 the author's remarkable inquiries into the influence of 
 disease as a factor of human selection. 
 
 Variation in Animals and Plants. (The Interna- 
 
APPENDIX 361 
 
 tional Scientific Series, Kegan Paul, 1903.) By H. 
 M. VERNON. 
 
 Variation, Heredity and Evolution. (Murray, 
 1906.) By R. H. LOCK. 
 
 The Origin of Species. (Murray, 1869. Last 
 (sixth) edition. Reprinted 1901.) By CHARLES 
 DARWIN. 
 
 The Descent of Man. (Murray, 1871. Second 
 edition, 1874. Reprinted 1906.) By CHARLES DAR- 
 WIN. 
 
 These classics now cost only half-a-crown apiece. 
 
 The beginner should read The Descent of Man first, 
 I think. Some of the earlier chapters are of the ut- 
 most eugenic value, and would be found immensely 
 interesting by modern lecturers on decadence, and the 
 like. 
 
 Darwinism To-day. (London, George Bell; New 
 York, Henry Holt, 1907.) By VERNON L. KELLOGG. 
 
 An interesting and scholarly recent criticism, con- 
 taining much matter strictly relevant to eugenics. / > 
 
 The Evolution of Sex. (The .Contemporary y 
 Science Series, Walter Scott. Revised edition, 1901. 
 Originally published in 1899,) By PATRICK GEDDES 
 and J. ARTHUR THOMSON. 
 
 A famous book, yet to be discovered by most " au- 
 thorities " on the Woman Question. 
 
 A History of Matrimonial Institutions. (Univer- 
 sity of Chicago Press & Fisher Unwin, 1904.) By 
 G. E. HOWARD. 
 
 This is a three-volume treatise, extremely compre- 
 hensive, and especially valuable as a guide to the lit- 
 
\ 
 
 362 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 erature of the subject. Only the professional student 
 can be expected to read it from cover to cover, but it 
 is valuable for purposes of reference. 
 
 The History of Human Marriage. (Macmillan.) 
 By E. WESTERMARCK. 
 
 This rightly celebrated and epoch-making work 
 demonstrates in especial the survival-value of monog- 
 amy, and its historical dominance as a marriage form. 
 \ The Evolution of Marriage. (The Contemporary 
 Science Series, Walter Scott.) By PROFESSOR LE- 
 
 TOURNEAU. 
 
 The Principles of Population. By T. R. MALTHUS. 
 
 The substance of this may be conveniently read in 
 the extracts published in the Economic Classics by 
 Macmillan (1905). 
 
 The Principles of Biology. By HERBERT SPENCER. 
 
 The last section " The Laws of Multiplication " 
 must be read as the expression of the missing half of 
 the truth discovered by Malthus. It is tiresome, 
 nearly half a century after Spencer's enunciation of 
 his law, to have to read the remarks of some modern 
 writers who continue to assume that Malthus ex- 
 pressed the whole truth. 
 
 The Republic of Plato. 
 
 Apart from the lines of Theognis quoted by Darwin 
 in The Descent of Man, which are some two cen- 
 turies older than Plato, the fifth book of the Republic 
 is the earliest discussion in literature of the idea of 
 eugenics, and utterly wild though we may consider 
 most of the proposals of Plato or Socrates to be, 
 these early thinkers are yet more modern and more 
 scientific and more fundamental than all their succes- 
 
APPENDIX 363 
 
 sors, even including our modern Utopia makers who 
 have come after Darwin, in recognizing that it is the 
 quality of the citizen which will make a Utopia pos- 
 sible. The following quotation will suffice to show 
 that after more than two thousand years we can still 
 learn from the fundamental idea of Plato's fifth chap- 
 ter: 
 
 " It is plain, then, that after this we must make marriages as 
 much as possible sacred ; but the most advantageous should be 
 most sacred. By all means. How then shall they be most ad- 
 vantageous? Tell me that, Glauco, for I see in your houses 
 dogs of chase, and a great many excellent birds. Have you 
 then indeed ever attended at all, in any respect, to their mar- 
 riages, and the propagation of their species? How? said he. 
 First of all, that among these, although they be excellent 
 themselves, are there not some who are most excellent? There 
 are. Whether then do you breed from all of them alike? or 
 are you careful to breed chiefly from the best? From the best. 
 But how? From the youngest or from the oldest, or from 
 those who are most in their prime? From those in their prime. 
 And if the breed be not of this kind, you reckon that the race 
 of birds and dogs greatly degenerates. I reckon so, replied he. 
 And what think you as to horses, said I, and other animals? 
 is the case any otherwise with respect to these? That, said 
 he, were absurd." 
 
 * 
 
 Plato proposed to destroy the family, and to " prac- 
 tice every art that no mother should know her own 
 child." He also approved of infanticide. Neverthe- 
 less, this fifth book of the Republic is interesting and 
 valuable reading, and it is especially well to note that 
 this pioneer of Utopianism and Socialism possessed 
 the idea which almost all living Socialists, except Dr. 
 A. R. Wallace and Professors Forel and Pearson, lack, 
 that we must first make the Utopian, and Utopia will 
 follow. 
 
 The Family. (G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1906.) By 
 ELSIE CLEWS PARSONS. 
 
364 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 This recent, scholarly and lucid book, of which any 
 living man might well be proud, may follow the read- 
 ing of the utterly unconcerned and taken- for-granted 
 fashion in which Socrates and Plato proposed to de- 
 stroy the family. Lecture VIIL, on " Sexual Choice," 
 is brief, but the references following it are extremely 
 valuable and complete. It is evident that one of the 
 books which will have to be written on eugenics in the 
 near future must deal with the whole question of mar- 
 riage and human selection in its historical and contem- 
 porary aspects. 
 
 " The Possible Improvement of the Human Breed 
 under Existing Conditions of Law and Sentiment." 
 Nature, 1901, p. 659; Smithsonian Report, Washing- 
 ton, 1901, p. 523. By FRANCIS GALTON. 
 
 This was the Huxley Lecture of the Anthropologi- 
 cal Institute in 1901, and the contemporary interest in 
 eugenics may be said to date from it. 
 
 " Eugenics, its Definition, Scope and Aims. (So- 
 ciological Papers, Macmillan, 1904.) By FRANCIS 
 GALTON. 
 
 This remarkable lecture constituted a further intro- 
 duction of the subject, and it is somewhat of the nature 
 of an impertinence for the professional jester, who is 
 not acquainted with a line of it, to dismiss eugenics 
 with a phrase as if this lecture had never been written 
 or were unobtainable. Mr. Galton there defined eu- 
 genics as " the science which deals with all influences 
 that improve the inborn qualities of a race. . . ." 
 The definition given in the Century Dictionary is 
 unauthoritative, incorrect, and misses the entire 
 point. 
 
APPENDIX 365 
 
 An extremely valuable discussion follows this lec- 
 ture, and it is absolutely necessary for the student to 
 acquaint himself with the whole of these pages (45- 
 
 99)- 
 
 Restrictions in Marriages: Studies in National Eu- 
 genics: Eugenics as a Factor in Religion. By FRAN- 
 CIS GALTON. 
 
 These memoirs communicated to the Sociological 
 Society in 1905, and published together with the sub- 
 sequent discussions in Sociological Papers (1905). 
 The three memoirs are also published separately under 
 one cover, and I believe the few remaining copies can 
 be obtained from the Secretary of the Eugenics Edu- 
 cation Society. 
 
 Probability, the Foundation of Eugenics. The 
 Herbert Spencer Lecture of 1907. By FRANCIS GAL- 
 TON. 
 
 This lecture is published by the University of Ox- 
 ford. It contains a very brief historical outline of the 
 recent progress of eugenic inquiry and a simple dis- 
 cussion of the mathematical method of studying he- 
 redity. It must, of course, be read by every serious 
 student. 
 
 National Life from the Standpoint of Science. (A. 
 & C. Black, 1905.) By KARL PEARSON. 
 
 This is a reprint of a lecture delivered by Professor 
 Pearson in 1900, together with some other valuable 
 contributions of his to the subject. There is scarcely 
 a better introduction to eugenics. 
 
 The Scope and Importance to the State of the Sci- 
 ence of National Eugenics, The Robert Boyle Lee- 
 
366 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 ture 1907. (Dulau & Co., Second Edition, 1809.) 
 By KARL PEARSON. 
 
 This fine lecture should be carefully read. It gives 
 some index to the quantity and quality of the work 
 done by Prof. Pearson and his followers since the 
 Francis Galton Eugenics Laboratory was founded. 
 
 Population and Progress. (Chapman & Hall, 
 1907.) By MONTAGUE CRACKANTHORPE, K.C. 
 
 Though only published recently, part of this book 
 goes back far. The first chapter is indeed a reprint 
 of a eugenic article published in the Fortnightly Re- 
 view as far back as 1872. Some of us may perhaps 
 be inclined to forget that more than a generation ago 
 Mr. Crackanthorpe had grasped the great truths which 
 we are now trying to spread, and had courageously 
 expressed them in the face of ignorance and prejudice 
 even greater than to-day. This is unquestionably a 
 book which every student must read but the press gen- 
 erally, with some notable exceptions, have fought 
 rather shy of it. It was sent to the present writer at 
 his request from a leading morning paper which trusts 
 him, and he wrote a column on it, most careful in dic- 
 tion and moderate in opinion, which was, nevertheless, 
 not printed. One of the leading medical papers de- 
 voted a long article to the book, written on the gen- 
 eral principle that it is right for a medical paper to 
 differ from any non-medical person who approaches 
 the closed neighborhood of medical inquiry. Another 
 leading medical paper considered Mr. Crackanthorpe's 
 " ideal " to be " beyond present accomplishment," and 
 feared it must have "many generations of probation 
 before it could hope to enter the sphere of practical 
 
APPENDIX 367 
 
 politics." We venture to say that Population and 
 Progress, dealing, as it does, with a subject that really 
 matters, contains more fundamental practical politics 
 in the true sense of that word than has been 
 discussed in most of our current newspapers since they 
 were first established. 
 
 Race-Culture or Race Suicide. (Walter Scott, 
 1906.) By R. R. RENTOUL. 
 
 This is a second and enlarged edition of a remark- 
 able pamphlet published by Dr. Rentoul in 1903 under 
 the title Proposed Sterilisation of Certain Mental and 
 Physical Degenerates. An Appeal to Asylum Mana- 
 gers and Others. Dr. Rentoul's own description of 
 this pamphlet is as follows : " In it I called attention 
 to the large and increasing number of the insane in the 
 United Kingdom; to our disgraceful system of child- 
 marriages ; to the growing suicide rate ; to our disgust- 
 ing system of inducing certain mentally and physically 
 diseased persons to marry; and to a slight operation 
 which I was the first to propose as a means of checking 
 the increase in the number of the insane, and in pre- 
 venting innocent offspring from being cursed by some 
 parental blemish." 
 
 Education. (Originally published in 1861 ; half- 
 crown edition with the author's latest corrections, Wil- 
 liams & Norgate, 1906.) By HERBERT SPENCER. 
 
 This is the classic which marks an epoch in the per- 
 sonal development in every one who reads it, and 
 which made an epoch in the history of education: the 
 book was probably of more service to woman, owing 
 to its liberation of girlhood, than any other of its cen- 
 tury. 
 
368 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 The Study of Sociology. (International Scientific 
 Series. Originally published in 1873. Twentieth 
 edition, 1903, Kegan Paul.) By HERBERT SPENCER. 
 
 This is, of course, the introduction to sociology, 
 written for that purpose by a master, and in every re- 
 spect a masterpiece. It contains many eugenic refer- 
 ences and arguments. As far as the eugenic education 
 of the adult is concerned, this is rightly the prelim- 
 inary work. 
 
 Besides The Evolution of Sex and Mrs. Parson's 
 book on The Family, there are many others relevant 
 to the question of woman and Eugenics, of which one 
 or two may be noted here. 
 
 f Sex and Society, Studies in the Social Psychology 
 of Sex. (University of Chicago Press and T. Fisher 
 Unwin, 1907.) By W. I. THOMAS. 
 
 This is a very readable and recent work, and for 
 the general reader much the most suitable of any that 
 I know. 
 
 Man and Woman. (Contemporary Science Series, 
 Walter Scott. Second Edition.) By HAVELOCK 
 ELLIS. 
 
 This is a very clear and readable book. 
 
 Youth its Education, Regimen and Hygiet 
 (Sydney Appleton, 1907.) By STANLEY HALL. 
 
 This is a new and abbreviated version of Professor 
 Stanley Hall's two well-known volumes on Adoles- 
 cence, published in 1904. For the general reader this 
 much smaller work is very suitable, and especial atten- 
 tion may be directed to Chapter XI. " The Education 
 of Girls." 
 
APPENDIX 369 
 
 It would have been presumptuous and absurd to 
 attempt, in the course of a merely introductory volume, 
 to deal, by anything more than allusion to its existence, 
 with the great question of human parenthood in re- 
 lation to race. Most urgently this question, of course, 
 concerns the negro problem in America. The student 
 who has to trust entirely to second-hand knowledge 
 had best be silent. Lest, however, the reader 
 should imagine that the older doctrines of race can 
 be accepted without reserve, he will do well to study 
 very carefully the latter part of Dr. Archdall Reid's 
 book, already referred to, and, with extreme caution, 
 the following : 
 
 Race Prejudice. (Constable, 1906.) By JEAN 
 FINOT. 
 
 This book most of us must believe to be extreme, 
 but it should be read : it bears on what may be called 
 international eugenics, and the whole question of in- 
 ter-racial marriage. 
 
 On matters of transmissible disease and racial poi- 
 sons there is much literature. Only one or two books 
 can be referred to here. 
 
 The Disease of Society: The Vice and Crime Prob- 
 lem. (Lippincott, 1904.) By G. F. LYDSTON. 
 
 This, of course, is not a pleasant book, and it is open 
 to much criticism in many respects, but it is well worth 
 reading, especially in association with Dr. Rentoul's 
 work. 
 
 Malaria A Neglected Factor in the History of 
 Greece and Rome. (Macmillan, 1907.) By W. H'. 
 S. JONES, with an introduction by RONALD Ross. 
 
\ 
 
 370 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 This is a recent historical study and may be a 
 substantial contribution to the study of Decadence. 
 
 Alcoholism. (Nisbet, 1906.) By W. C. SULLI- 
 VAN. 
 
 This little book of Dr. Sullivan's contains a useful 
 and scrupulously moderate chapter on the relation of 
 alcohol to human degeneration. 
 
 The Drink Problem. (Methuen, 1907.) By 
 Fourteen Medical Authorities. 
 
 The Children of the Nation. (Methuen, 1906.) 
 By SIR JOHN GORST. 
 
 Infant Mortality. (Methuen, 1906.) By GEORGE 
 NEWMAN. 
 
 The Hygiene of Mind. (Methuen, 1906.) By T. 
 S. CLOUSTON. 
 
 Diseases of Occupation. (Methuen, 1908.) By 
 SIR T. OLIVER. 
 
 The Prevention of Tuberculosis. (Methuen, 1908.) 
 [By A. NEWSHOLME. 
 
 These volumes, in my New Library of Medicine, 
 all deal in part with questions of racial poisoning and 
 racial hygiene. 
 
 Alcoholism A Study in Heredity. (Fisher Un- 
 win, 1901.) By ARCHDALL REID. 
 
 Alcohol and the Human Body. (Macmillan, 1907.) 
 By SIR VICTOR HORSLEY and MARY D. STURGE. 
 
 Hygiene of Nerves and Mind. (The Progressive 
 Science Series, John Murray, 1907.) By AUGUST 
 FOREL. 
 
 Inebriety Its Causation and Control. (The sec- 
 ond Norman Kerr Memorial Lecture, published' in the 
 
APPENDIX 37i 
 
 British Journal of Inebriety, January, 1908.) By R. / 
 WELSH BRANTHWAITE. / 
 
 Reports of the Inspector under the Inebriates Acts. 
 Especially those for the years 1904, 1905, 1906. 
 
 The Cry of the Children: The Black Stain. (Jar- / 
 rold, 1907.) By G. R. SIMS. 
 
 The above are especially recommended to politi- 
 cians. Sooner or later, as never yet, knowledge will 
 have to be applied to the drink question as it bears 
 upon the quality of the race. The knowledge exists, 
 and is not difficult to acquire or understand. The 
 references given are quite sufficient to enable any one 
 of mediocre intelligence to frame a bill dealing with al- 
 cohol which would be worth all its predecessors put 
 together, and would arouse far less opposition than any 
 one of them. 
 
 Reports of the National Conference on Infantile 
 Mortality, 1906 and 1908 (P. S. King & Co.). 
 
 In the 1906 report note especially Dr. Ballantyne's 
 paper on the unborn infant, and in the 1908 report, 
 Miss Alice Ravenhill's paper on the education of girls. 
 
 It must be repeated that the foregoing names are 
 merely noted as including, perhaps, the greater num- 
 ber of the books with which the serious beginner would 
 do well to make a start. That is all. It would be 
 both unfair and unwise, however, to omit any mention 
 of at least three wonderful little books of John Rus- 
 kin's : Unto this Last, Munera Pulveris, and Time and 
 Tide, which add to their great qualities of soul and 
 style some of the most forcible and wisest things that 
 have ever been written on race-culture and its abso- 
 
372 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 lutely fundamental relation to morality, patriotism and 
 true economics. 
 
 If the reader desires the name of only one book, that 
 is certainly The Sexual Question (Rebman, 1908), by 
 Professor AUGUST FOREL. This has no rival any- 
 where, and cannot be overpraised. 
 
APPENDIX B 
 
 THE .EUGENICS EDUCATION SOCIETY 
 
 THERE has lately been founded a society, the effective 
 activity of which has been alluded to in preceding 
 pages. One of the purposes of the present volume is 
 to gain adherents for this Society and perhaps, even 
 better still, to encourage readers in great provincial 
 centers, for instance, to form eugenic bodies for them- 
 selves. Sir James Crichton-Browne accepted the pres- 
 idency of the Society for its first year, and the cause of 
 the helpless inebriate and the future is much indebted 
 to him for his help in that matter. 1 Lately, Mr. Fran- 
 cis Galton consented to become our Honorary Pres- 
 ident, and while we have the advice and help and 
 direction of the august founder of eugenics, it may 
 fairly be assumed that for responsible and authorita- 
 tive statement and action, it will be well to consult the 
 Eugenics Education Society rather than the amateur 
 and irresponsible eugenist whom this new cause, like 
 other new causes, will doubtless call into being. 
 
 The following is reprinted from the Society's 
 papers : 
 
 The Eugenics Education Society proposes, so far as its means 
 allow : 
 
 i. To arrange for Lectures on the facts and laws of hered- 
 ity, on the circumstances attending the rise and decline of ruling 
 races and families, on the good and bad racial effects of va- 
 rious laws and usages, and on other kindred subjects. 
 
 1 Mr. Montague Crackenthorpe, K.C., is the President for 1909. 
 
 373 
 
374 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 2. To popularize the results of researches, such as are being 
 pursued at the Francis Galton Eugenics Laboratory of the 
 University of London and elsewhere. 
 
 3. To ensure that the young shall be made acquainted with 
 the principles of Eugenics, since a knowledge of them may be 
 expected to supply an important aid towards the formation of 
 character. 
 
 4. To intervene whenever a proposed administrative act ap- 
 pears likely to impair the racial qualities of the nation, and to 
 advocate such measures as would improve these qualities. 
 
 5. To form an appropriate Library, and to issue publications. 
 Offices and Library 6, York Buildings H Adelphi, W.C. 
 Hours ii a.m. to i p.m., and by appointment. 
 
 For further information and for programs of lectures and 
 meetings apply to the Hon. Secretary at above address. 
 
 The Honorary President of the Society has lately 
 written for it the following statement which is pref- 
 aced by his revised definition of eugenics as fol- 
 lows : 
 
 "Eugenics is the study of agencies under social control that 
 may improve or impair the racial qualities of future generations 
 either physically or mentally." 
 
 The fact that the laws of heredity apply to man equally with 
 the lower animals and plants, and that the mental functions are 
 subject to the same laws of heredity as the physical ones, has 
 yet to be taken to heart by the public. 
 
 The salutary effects of natural selection in preventing the 
 degeneracy of a race are so largely interfered with, and some- 
 times even inverted, by civilization, that another form of pre- 
 vention is peremptorily demanded. 
 
 If we apply the general word degenerate to the insane, to the 
 imbecile, to the habitual criminal, and to those who are naturally 
 liable to some of the more serious diseases, it is found that a 
 "degenerate" is no less fertile than a normal person, appar- 
 ently a little more so, and that such persons frequently marry. 
 
 Each married degenerate produces on the average one child 
 who is as degenerate as himself or herself, and others in whom 
 the taint is latent, but liable to appear in a succeeding generation. 
 The taint of degeneracy in our population is now alarmingly 
 
APPENDIX 375 
 
 great and threatens to increase indefinitely under the present 
 conditions. 
 
 Probably one of the first efforts in practical Eugenics will be 
 to restrict the propagation of children by the notoriously Unfit, 
 whose marriages are now unhindered, if not sometimes fos- 
 tered by mistaken kindliness. 
 
 Efforts have also to be made in the opposite direction, namely, 
 in creating social agencies that shall promote the propagation 
 of the Fit, as for instance by facilitating employment to mar- 
 ried persons of good stock, and providing their families when 
 poor with better housing and nurture than they could other- 
 wise obtain. 
 
 The power of public opinion being enormously great, we may 
 rest assured that after the importance of Eugenics shall have 
 become generally recognized, many social influences will be 
 brought to bear, and numerous customs will establish them- 
 selves that shall further Eugenic conduct with a gentle yet al- 
 most irresistible force. 
 
 We ask for your name and your help in the most radical and 
 hopeful of campaigns one which appeals alike to the patriot 
 and the moralist, the man of science and the lover of children. 
 The Society has already done practical work in drawing effective 
 attention to the need for rational and humane treatment of 
 inebriety, with reference to the Eugenic ideal; but this is only 
 one of a thousand multifarious needs. Every new member 
 adds strength and support to our cause the cause of the fu- 
 ture. 
 
 The Eugenics Review comprises, amongst other things: 
 
 I. Articles by responsible writers. 
 
 2. Editorial Notes upon such of the topics of the day as 
 illustrate Eugenic teaching, and demand Eugenic comment. 
 
 3. Notices of recent Books which bear upon Eugenics. 
 
 4. Official records of the Work of the Society. 
 
 The aim of the Review is to make known the results of all 
 seriously conducted Eugenic investigation without bias in favor 
 of any particular school. Its range includes 
 
 Biology in so far as it is concerned with Heredity and 
 Selection. 
 
 Anthropology in so far as it throws light on questions 
 of race and the institution of Marriage. 
 
 Politics in so far as it bears on Parenthood in its relation 
 to Civic Worth. 
 
376 PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE 
 
 Ethics in so far as it promotes ideals that lead to the im- 
 provement of racial quality. 
 
 Religion in so far as it strengthens and sanctifies the sense 
 of Eugenic duty. 
 
 A Copy of the Review is sent post free to all Life Mem- 
 bers of the Society, and to all Annual Subscribers of One 
 Guinea. For other persons, the Subscription is 45. 6d. a year. 
 Single Copies may be purchased at is net, or post free, 
 is. 2d. 
 
 The Review is published at the Offices of the Society, 6, 
 York Buildings, Adelphi, London, and may be ordered of any 
 Bookseller. 
 
 FRANCIS GALTON. 
 
 The Eugenics Education Society exists to uphold 
 the ideal of Parenthood as the highest and most re- 
 sponsible of human powers ; to proclaim that the racial 
 instinct is therefore supremely sacred, and its exercise, 
 through marriage, for the service of the future, the 
 loftiest of all privileges. It stands " for a transfigured 
 sentiment of parenthood which regards with solicitude 
 not child and grandchild only, but the generations to 
 come hereafter fathers of the future creating and 
 providing for the remote children." That which too 
 many schools of thought and practice have derided or 
 defiled it seeks to elevate and ennoble. Parenthood 
 on the part of the diseased, the insane, the alcoholic - 
 where these conditions promise to be transmitted 
 must be denounced as a crime against the future. In 
 these directions the Society stands for active legisla- 
 tion, and for the formation of that public opinion which 
 legislation, if it is to be effective, must express. Par- 
 enthood on the part of the worthy must be buttressed, 
 guided, and extolled. The Society stands for the edu- 
 cation of the young regarding the responsibility and 
 holiness of the racial function of parenthood. 
 
 THE END 
 
INDEX OF SUBJECTS 
 
 Ability, inheritance of 130 
 
 " Acquired characters," denned 
 
 127 
 
 Acquired characters, Lamarck- 
 ian theory of the transmis- 
 sion of 299, 325 
 
 progress 302 
 
 , dangers of 305 
 
 versus natural selec- 
 tion 306 
 
 Acquirements, transmission of, 
 by the art of writing 300 
 
 -versus inborn characters 
 
 US 
 
 Acromegaly 7 
 
 "Adam Bede " 345 
 
 " Adolescence," by Prof. Stan- 
 ley Hall 368 
 
 Alcohol, a racial poison... 237-284 
 , an agent of selection.... 237 
 
 and eugenics 237 
 
 and heredity 238 
 
 and human degeneration. 278 
 
 and parenthood 277 
 
 , effects of, on the racial 
 
 organs .... 239-241 (note) 
 
 , elimination by 237 
 
 , the friends of.. 279 
 
 trade, the, and widows and 
 
 orphans 281 
 
 " Alcohol and Infancy," by Dr. 
 Saleeby 246 
 
 " Alcohol and the Human 
 Body," by Sir Victor Hors- 
 ley and Mary D. Sturge. .. .'370 
 
 Alcoholic Imperialism 282 
 
 Alcoholism and the London 
 County Council 237 
 
 , both a cause and a symp- 
 tom of degeneracy 249 
 
 , parental, its influence on 
 
 the offspring 243 
 
 " Alcoholism, a Chapter in So- 
 cial Pathology," by Dr. W. 
 C. Sullivan 243, 278, 369 
 
 " Alcoholism, a Study in Hered- 
 ity," by G. Archdall Reid... 371 
 
 Ancestral inheritance, the law 
 of xii 
 
 Ancestry of men of genius.... 174 
 
 , paternal and maternal, of 
 
 equal importance 174 
 
 Animal life and monogamy 187 
 
 marriage 186 
 
 Animals and promiscuity 187 
 
 , the higher, and monog- 
 amy * 187 
 
 Army, inferior intelligence of 
 
 the, to that of the Navy.... 112 
 
 "Atavism," defined 127 
 
 " Attic Nights, The," of Aulus 
 
 Gellius 3I3-3IS 
 
 Australia, control of drunkards 
 
 in 278 
 
 " Autobiography" of Herbert 
 
 Spencer 66, 174 
 
 " Avaries, Les," by Brieux.. 293 
 
 Bacteria, domination of 107 
 
 , rate of increase of 183 
 
 Bibliography^ of eugenics 353 
 
 of racial poisons 371 
 
 of transmissible diseases.. 371 
 
 Biography, as a guide to hered- 
 ity 174 
 
 , neglect of ancestral data 
 
 in 174 
 
 "Biology and History," by Dr. 
 Saleeby 294 (note) 
 
 " Biology, The Principles of," 
 by Herbert Spencer 362 
 
 Biometrics, the study of xi 
 
 Birth-rate, falling, eugenic as- 
 pect of the 12 
 
 in China 88 
 
 Birth-rate in Japan 88 
 
 of man 81-84 
 
 .statistics of 83-85 
 
 Births, ratio of, of the sexes. . 337 
 " Black Stain, The," by G. R. 
 
 Sims 274,371 
 
 Body, the necessity of the 61 
 
 , relation of, to the mind.. 60 
 
 Brains, breeding for 62 
 
 Breeding for brains 62 
 
 for energy 75 
 
 for intelligence. . .169, 171-174 
 
 for motherhood 
 
 167, 168 
 
 Celibacy, non-eugenic results of 132 
 
 Census, the uselessness of the 
 8. 108 
 
 " Century Dictionary, The," on 
 eugenics 364 
 
 Characters, inborn, versus ac- 
 quirements ii 3-1 i S 
 
 Child-birth, superstition about 
 118 
 
 Children, eugenics and cruelty 
 to 342 
 
 , Society for the Preven- 
 tion of Cruelty to 342 
 
 377 
 
378 
 
 INDEX 
 
 " Children of the Nation, The," 
 by Sir John Gorst .......... 370 
 
 China, the birth-rate in ....... 88 
 
 - , racial state of .......... 310 
 
 Church, non-eugenic action of 
 
 -.te ..... .................. 132 
 
 Civic worth ................ 77 
 
 Civilization, ideal ............ 133 
 
 Civilisations, the decay of, 294, 295 
 Cocaine, the racial influence of 290 
 " Collectivism, Individualism 
 
 and," by Dr. Saleeby 115 (note) 
 Colour-blindness, see Daltonism 
 Conception, attitude of eugenics 
 
 before and after ........... 34 
 
 "Congenital" defined ....117-127 
 
 " Conscientiousness " ........ 133 
 
 Crime, eugenics and ...... 205-206 
 
 - , theories of ........ 205-206 
 
 , treatment of ........... 206 
 
 Criminality and civic worth... 77 
 "Cry of the Children, The," 
 
 by G. R. Sims .......... 274, 371 
 
 Daltonism and heredity ....... 207 
 
 " Dark ages," caused by the 
 
 celibacy of the fittest ....... 132 
 
 " Darwinism To-day," by Ver- 
 
 non L. Kellogg ............ 361 
 
 " Data of Ethics, The," by 
 
 Spencer .......... 350 (note) 
 
 Deaf-mutism, and heredity.... 201 
 
 Death-rate, a low, the cause of 
 
 the multiplication of man ... 82 
 
 - , influence of density of 
 population on the ........... 84 
 
 - .limitation of the ........ 87 
 
 - , statistics of the ........ 83 
 
 Decadence, National ..... 323-329 
 
 " Decadence," by A. J. Bal- 
 
 four ...................... 329 
 
 " Degeneration," defined 28 (note) 
 Degeneration, human, and alco- 
 
 hol ................... 251,278 
 
 - racial .................. 57 
 
 " Descent of Man, The," by 
 
 Charles Darwin ............. 
 
 .... 197, 221, 224, 228, 323, 361 
 " Deterioration," defined 29 (note) 
 Diminution of offspring, the 
 
 eugenic value of ........... 174 
 
 Disease, latency of ........ ^. . . 123 
 
 Diseases, transmissible, bibliog- 
 
 raphy of .................. 370 
 
 " Diseases of Occupation," by 
 
 Sir Thomas Oliver 247 (note), 370 
 " Diseases of Society: The Vice 
 
 and Crime Problem," by 
 
 G. K. Lydston ............ 368 
 
 Domestics, the politics of the 
 
 future ................. 38, 330 
 
 " Drink Problem, The," by 
 
 Fourteen Medical Authorities 370 
 " Drink Problem, The," by Mrs. 
 
 Scharlieb ................. 248 
 
 Drunkard, influence of the, on 
 
 the race ................. 279 
 
 , marriage and parentage 
 
 Of the . .............. 254, 272 
 
 Drunkard, the habitual, control 
 of, in various countries 280 
 
 , , treatment of, by the 
 
 London County Council 
 
 43 (note), 254-274 
 
 Drunkenness, habitual, impris- 
 onment as a treatment for.. 252 
 
 , increase of 252 
 
 Early Notification of Births 
 Act 36 
 
 " Economic Classics " 361 
 
 Education, age at which to 
 begin 143 
 
 and heredity 147 
 
 and inequality 150 
 
 and race culture. . . . 137-165 
 
 , eugenic 150 
 
 for parenthood 158 
 
 , higher, of woman, non- 
 eugenic effects of 106 
 
 in the principle of selec- 
 tion 157 
 
 , modern, the destruction 
 
 of mind 137 
 
 , sexual, of children 159 
 
 T~V f Kir l s 362 
 
 , the limits of 141 
 
 -, the provision of an en- 
 vironment 13, 143 
 
 , the real functions of.... 156 
 
 " Education," by Herbert Spen- 
 cer 367 
 
 Elephant, birth-rate of the. . . 
 
 82 (note) 
 
 Emigration, the eugenic evils 
 
 of ix 
 
 , a remedy for over-pop- 
 ulation 94 
 
 Energetic cost of reproduction, 
 
 the 99 
 
 Energy, breeding for 75 
 
 , eugenic value of... 337-339 
 
 Environment, education the pro- 
 vision of 13,143 
 
 , effects of 116, 117 
 
 , good, defined 348 
 
 and heredity 144 
 
 , of motherhood, the. . 321, 322 
 
 Epilepsy, eugenics and 204 
 
 Erect attitude, the 62 
 
 " Essential Factor of Progress, 
 
 The," by Dr. Saleeby 304 
 
 Eugenic sense, the creation of 
 
 a 166, 167 
 
 Eugenics and haemophilia 207 
 
 and insanity 203 
 
 and alcohol ^ 237-284 
 
 and conception 33 
 
 and crime ^ 205 
 
 and cruelty^ to children . . 342 
 
 and Daltonism 207 
 
 bibliography of 353 
 
 defined vi, 356, 357 
 
 epilepsy and 204 
 
 feeble-minded, the, and.. 202 
 higher education of 
 
 woman, and ior 
 
 in Germany 177. 178 
 
INDEX 
 
 379 
 
 Eugenics, infant mortality, and 23 
 
 , international ix 
 
 , present influence of, on 
 
 marriage 214 
 
 , Nietzscheanism and .... 31 
 
 , politics and 135 
 
 , positive and negative.... 200 
 
 , religion and 351 
 
 , the aims of, summarised 
 
 319, 359 
 
 , the classes of society and 136 
 
 , the length of marriage 
 
 engagements and 227-230 
 
 , the morality of 351 
 
 , tuberculosis and 206 
 
 , unemployment and 340 
 
 woman and 341 
 
 Eugenics Education Society, the 
 
 257, 265,. 266, 346 
 
 , the history 
 
 and objects of 159 
 
 ; , the Inebriates 
 
 Committee, and 278 
 
 , the reform of 
 
 drunkards and 279 
 
 " Eugenics as a Factor in Re- 
 ligion," by F. Galton 357 
 
 ' Eugenics, Its Definition, 
 
 Scope, and Aims," by F. 
 
 Galton 356 
 
 " Eugenics, National, Studies 
 
 in, by F. Galton 357 
 
 " Eugenics, National, The 
 
 Scope and Importance to the 
 
 State of the Science of," by 
 
 Karl Pearson 358 
 
 " Elugenics, Probability the 
 
 Foundation of," by F. Galton 357 
 " Eugenics, The Obstacles to," 
 
 by Dr. Saleeby 203 (note) 
 
 Evolution and progress 54 
 
 , introduction of the term. 
 
 54 (note) 
 
 "Evolution of Marriage, The," 
 
 by Prof. Letourneau 353 
 
 "Evolution of Sex, The," by 
 
 Patrick Geddes and J. Arthur 
 
 Thomson 353 
 
 " Evolution, the Master Key," 
 
 by Dr. Saleeby 169 
 
 " Evolution Theory, The," by 
 
 August Weismann 352 
 
 Examinations, mental emetics.. 138 
 
 " Family, The," by Mrs. Elsie 
 Clews Parsons a 355 
 
 Fatherhood, eugenic, importance 
 
 of .-:..%: I77 
 
 , individual ,. 179 
 
 Feeble-minded, eugenics and 
 the 202 
 
 , the London County Coun- 
 cil and the 265 
 
 , the Royal Commission on 
 
 the 249, 280 
 
 * Fittest," defined 48-49 
 
 France, effect of Napoleonic 
 wars on 329 
 
 , increase of population in 86 
 
 Francis Galton Eugenics Lab- 
 oratory, the 357 
 
 " French Revolution, The," by 
 Carlyle 294 (note) 
 
 Fulmar petrel, the multiplica- 
 tion of the 83 (note) 
 
 Generation, the independence of 
 
 every 3 
 
 Genesis, individuation and.... 99 
 " Genetics, The Methods and 
 Scope of," by Prof. W. 
 
 Bateson 354 
 
 Genius, infertility of 99, 104 
 
 , the production of 334 
 
 , the transmission of 335 
 
 , the value of, to the 
 
 world 336 
 
 " Genius, British, A Study of," 
 
 by Havelock Ellis 356 
 
 " Genius, Hereditary," by F. 
 Galton, see Hereditary Genius 
 
 Germany, eugenics in 181 
 
 , increase of population 
 
 in 86-88 
 
 " Germinal " denned 126 
 
 Germ-plasm, immortality of the ,295 
 " Germ-plasm, A Theory of 
 Heredity, The," by August 
 
 ^Weismann 241, 360 
 
 Girls, the sexual education of 368 
 Great Britain, increase of pop- 
 ulation in 85 
 
 Greece, the fall of 301 
 
 Gymnasium versus playing 
 fields 71 
 
 Haemophilia and heredity 207 
 
 Hampstead, birth-rate of, the 
 
 lowest in London 88 
 
 "Health, Strength and Hap- 
 piness," by Dr. Saleeby 
 
 136 (note) 
 
 " Hereditary Genius," by F. 
 Galton 123, 130, 335, 351, 356-357 
 
 Heredity, alcohol and 239 
 
 , biography a guide to.... 174 
 
 -, Daltonism and 207 
 
 , deaf -mutism and 201 
 
 , education and 147 
 
 , environment and... 144, 310 
 
 , haemophilia and . . . . v . . 207 
 
 , obscured by acquired 
 
 characters 114 
 
 , race culture and 114 
 
 , tuberculosis and 208 
 
 " Heredity," by Prof. J. A. 
 
 Thomson 113, 353 
 
 "Heredity a\id, Enviromc 
 Forces," Dr. T. D. MacDou- 
 
 gal on 243 
 
 " Heredity and Selection in So- 
 ciology," by George Chatter- 
 
 ton-Hill 360 
 
 "Heredity, Alcoholism, A 
 Study in," by G. Archdall 
 
 Reid 370 
 
 " Heredity, The Germ-Plasm, 
 A Theory of," by August 
 Weismann 360 
 
INDEX 
 
 "Heredity, The Principles of," 
 
 By G. Archdall Reid 360 
 
 "History," defined 294 
 
 "History of Human -Marriage, 
 
 The," by E. Westermarck. . 362 
 " History of Matrimonial Insti- 
 tutions, A," by G. E. How- 
 ard 361 
 
 "Human Breed, The Possible 
 Improvement of the, etc.," 
 
 by F. Galton 364 
 
 " Human Faculty, Inq-uiries 
 
 into," by F. Galton 357 
 
 Humanitarianism, indiscriminate 31 
 Hygiene, individual and racial 29* 
 
 , school 74 
 
 " Hygiene of Mind, The," by 
 
 T. S. Clouston 370 
 
 " Hygiene of Nerves and 
 Mind," by August Forel 279, 370 
 
 Imperialism, alcoholic 282 
 
 , the old and the new 37-38 
 
 India as a wheat-producing 
 
 country 91 
 
 Individual versus race 296 
 
 " Individualism and Collectiv- 
 ism," by Dr. Saleeby .115 (.note) 
 
 Individuation and genesis 101 
 
 Inebriates, see Drunkards 
 
 Act, the 259-262, 266 
 
 , reports of the in- 
 spector under 371 
 
 Committee, the Report of 
 
 the 276 
 
 Inebriety, see Drunkenness 
 " Inebriety, Its Causation and 
 Control," by R. Welsh 
 
 Branthwaite 370 
 
 Infancy, helplessness of 3, 169-172 
 
 , the mind of 142 
 
 , the, of slum children 116 
 
 " Infancy, Alcohol and," by 
 
 Dr. Saleeby 248 
 
 Infant mortality 
 
 23, no, 118, 172, 239, 297, 342 
 
 , the 1908 conference 
 
 on 359 
 
 ports of 370 
 
 Infant mortality e in the east.. 85 
 
 , eugenics and 23, 31, 35 
 
 , first public mention 
 
 of 37 
 
 among the Jews.... 316 
 
 , polygamy and 190 
 
 the war against. ... 25 
 
 " Infant Mortality," by Dr. 
 
 George Newman 98, 370 
 
 "Inherent," defined 125 
 
 Inheritance, pecuniary, non-eu- 
 genic influence of 116 
 
 , see Heredity 
 
 " Inquiries into Human Fac- 
 ulty," by F. Galton 
 
 .105, 146, 336, 357 
 
 Inquisition, anti-eugenic effects 
 of the 309 
 
 Insanity, " breach of prom- 
 ise " and 233 
 
 , eugenics and 203 
 
 , increase of 204 
 
 Instinct, plasticity of 169-171 
 
 Intelligence, breeding for 
 
 169, 172. 175 
 
 , the creation of 171 
 
 , nature and 45 
 
 "Intensity of Life," the 103 
 
 " Janus in Modern Life," by 
 
 Prof. Flinders Petrie 25 
 
 Japan, birth-rate in 88 
 
 , the racial development of 311 
 
 Jews, the, alcohol and 318 
 
 motherhood and 317 
 
 . the survival of 315 
 
 " Kingdom of Man, The," by 
 Sir E. Ray Lankester 46 (note) 
 
 Lamarckian theory, of heredity, 
 
 the 154-156, 240,327 
 
 of racial degeneration 
 
 298, 307 
 
 Lead, a racial poison 286 
 
 " Leviathan," by Hobbes 121 (note) 
 Licensing Bill of 1908, the 
 
 . 2 58i 270-272 
 
 Life, the continuity of 2 
 
 London County Council, the, 
 
 alcoholism and 238 
 
 feeble-minded 
 
 children, and 263 
 
 , the treatment 
 
 of inebriates by 
 
 44 (note), 251-273 
 
 Hospital, gift to... 12 (note) 
 
 Longevity, marriage and 221 
 
 Love, eugenic value of 79 
 
 , motherhood and 172-175 
 
 , survival value of 57 
 
 , the two stages of 214 
 
 " Making of Character, The," 
 
 by Prof. MacCunn : 142 
 
 Malaria, a racial poison 301 
 
 " Malaria, A Neglected Factor 
 in the History of Greece and 
 Rome," by W. H. S. Jones 
 
 301, 324, 370 
 
 Man, the denudation and de- 
 
 fencelessness of 66 
 
 , the foundation of Empire 304 
 
 , the future of 347 
 
 , the latest product of evo- 
 lution 62 
 
 , the multiplication of.... 80 
 
 " Man and Woman," by Have- 
 lock Ellis a 368 
 
 Marriage, animal 186 
 
 , average age at 103 
 
 , breach of promise of, and 
 
 race culture 233 
 
 f f t he law of... 234 
 
 , childless 192 
 
INDEX 
 
 38i 
 
 Marriage, contemporary, eu- 
 genic value of 230 
 
 , control of 213, 215 
 
 , defined . . 195 
 
 , engagement of, eugenics 
 
 and the length of 229 
 
 , eugenic 355 
 
 , , preparation for ... 164 
 
 , , utility of. 187-189, 192 
 
 , happiness in, extent of. . 225 
 
 , human 187 
 
 , inter-racial ix 
 
 , longevity and 221 
 
 , " mixed " games and 227-228 
 
 , of cousins x, 192 
 
 , of the deaf and dumb.. 201 
 
 , present influence of, on 
 
 eugenics 217 
 
 , procreati9n, the para- 
 mount function of 181 
 
 , selection for 217, 218 
 
 , .by woman 224 
 
 , socialism and 230 
 
 .survival-value of 187 
 
 systems, English and 
 
 French 230 
 
 , the ball-room and... 226227 
 
 , the field of choice in... 226 
 
 , the Income Tax and.... 200 
 
 , the, of inebriates 272 
 
 , unselfish . . 164 
 
 " Marriage, Human, The His- 
 tory of," by E. Westermarck, 362 
 " Marriage, Restrictions in," by 
 
 F. Gallon 214, 236, 365 
 
 " Marriage, The Evolution of," 
 
 by Prof. Letourneau 362 
 
 Married women's labour 312 
 
 "Mass versus mind" 109 
 
 Maternal care, development of, 172 
 
 impressions 129 
 
 Maternalism, the principle of.. 194 
 Maternity, see Motherhood 
 " Matrimonial Institutions, A 
 History of," by G. E. How- 
 ard 361 
 
 " Memories of my Life," by F. 
 
 Galton v, 357 
 
 Mendelism 124, 134,340 
 
 " Methods and Scope of Genet- 
 ics, The," by Prof. W. Bate- 
 son . 354 
 
 Mind, selection of 59 
 
 , the ascent of. 348 
 
 , the determinator o f 
 
 leadership 66, 67 
 
 , the master in war no 
 
 , the relation of, to the 
 
 body 59 
 
 versus mass 1 09 
 
 muscle 74 
 
 "Mind, The Hygiene of," by 
 
 T. S. Clouston 370 
 
 " Mind, Hygiene of Nerves 
 
 and," by August Forel 370 
 
 Monogamy, eugenic value of. . 
 
 188, 195 
 
 , survival- value of 190 
 
 the ideal condition 172 
 
 Monogamy, the rule among 
 
 higher animals 186 
 
 Morality, survival-value of.... 58 
 
 Morphinomania, parental, its in- 
 fluence on the offspring 245 
 
 Motherhood 194 
 
 and love 174 
 
 , breeding for 166, 167 
 
 carried on by unskilled 
 
 labour 173 
 
 during the decline of 
 
 Rome 312, 313 (note) 
 
 , education for 173 
 
 , history and 311 
 
 Motherhood, Jewish 317 
 
 , psychical 172, 173 
 
 , the elevation of 36 
 
 , the environment provided 
 
 by 312 
 
 , the evolution of 171 
 
 , the safeguarding of 174 
 
 , the subsidisation of 173 
 
 Mothers, school for 173 
 
 Multiplication of man, a low 
 
 death-rate the cause of 82 
 
 , the laws of 98 
 
 , the rate of........ 102 
 
 of the unfit 218, 324 
 
 " Munera Pulveris," by John 
 
 Ruskin . .. 350 (note), 371 
 
 Muscle, right training of 70 
 
 , the cult of 68 
 
 versus Mind 74 
 
 Muscles, useless 69 
 
 Narcotics, possible racial in- 
 fluence of 290 
 
 , irritant and non-irritant. 291 
 
 "National Life from the 
 Standpoint of Science," by 
 
 Karl Pearson 323, 365 
 
 " Natural Inheritance," by F. 
 
 Galton 357 
 
 Natural selection 39 et seq. 
 
 and racial degenera- 
 tion 301 
 
 versus acquired prog- 
 ress 308 
 
 Nature, the cruelty of 41 
 
 "Nature," defined '125 
 
 " Nature of Man, The," by 
 
 Metchnikoff 103 
 
 Navy, superior intelligence of 
 
 the, to that of the Army.... 112 
 " Nemesis of Nations, The," by 
 
 W. R. Paterson 326 
 
 New Zealand, control of drunk- 
 ards in 280 
 
 Nicotine, racial influence of... 291 
 Nietzscheanism, eugenics and.. 31 
 
 Nitrogen, the fixation of 92 
 
 " Noteworthy Families," 130 (note) 
 "Nurture," defined 125 
 
 " Obstacles to Eugenics, The," 
 
 by Dr. Saleeby 203 (note) 
 
 Opinion, individual, power of . . 158 
 
 , public, the education of 
 
 16, 17 
 
 
382 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Opinion, the creation of 158 
 
 Opium, possible racial influence 
 
 of 291 
 
 " Ordeal of Richard Feverel, 
 
 The," by George Meredith 
 
 128 (note) 
 
 "Origin of Species, The," by 
 
 Charles Darwin v (note) 82, 361 
 "Origin of Vertebrates, The," 
 
 by Dr. W. H. .Gaskell. 57 (note) 
 
 Overcrowding 1 23, 24 
 
 and tuberculosis 209 
 
 and unemployment 340 
 
 Parenthood 376 
 
 , alcohol and 278, 279 
 
 , classification of society 
 
 for 119 (note) 
 
 , education for x, 158 
 
 , eugenic power of... 230, 231 
 
 of inebriates 255 
 
 , selection for v, vi 
 
 , the elevation of 340-342 
 
 , the link of life 4 
 
 , the most desirable 104 
 
 , the rise of 184 
 
 , the sanctity of 158 
 
 Parents, selection of 5 
 
 , proportion of, to popula- 
 tion 5 
 
 Paris, hospitals in 286 
 
 Physique, eugenic importance of 79 
 Playing fields -versus gymnasia 69 
 
 Politics, defined 331 
 
 , domestics the future.. 37, 330 
 
 , eugenics and 134 
 
 "Politics," Aristotle's 191 
 
 Polygamy and infant mortality 190 
 
 , significance of 189 
 
 Population, density of, influence 
 
 of the, on the death rate 85 
 
 , increase of, and the food 
 
 supply 89 
 
 , , safe extent of.... 107 
 
 , , emigration a rem- 
 edy for 94 
 
 , , statistics of 85, 86 
 
 , quantity v. quality of.... 106 
 
 , starvation a controller of 95 
 
 , statistics of, as data for 
 
 prophecy 107, 108 
 
 , survival-value of.... 103-105 
 
 , the f test of no 
 
 " Population and Progress," by 
 
 Montague Crackanthorpe . . . 366 
 " Population, rru - T>~~~-I~* 
 
 ^f K, T 
 
 The Principles 
 
 of," by T. R. Malthus 93-95, 362 
 " Possible Improvement of the 
 
 Human Breed, etc.," by F. 
 
 Galton 364 
 
 Posterity, our duty to 1 1 
 
 "Poverty and .Hereditary 
 
 Genius," by Constable 356 
 
 Prevention of Crimes Act, The 
 
 206 (note) 
 
 " Prevention of Tuberculosis 
 
 The," by Dr. A. Newsholme 370 
 " Principles of Biology, The," 
 
 by Herbert Spencer 98. 362 
 
 " Principles of Heredity, The," 
 by G. Archdall Reid 360 
 
 " Principles o f Population, 
 The," by T. R. Malthus, see 
 Population, Principles of 
 
 " Probability, the Foundation of 
 Eugenics, by F. Galton.... 365 
 
 Progress, acquired, see Ac- 
 quired progress 
 
 defined 56, 351 
 
 , evolution and 54 
 
 of achievement, and of 
 
 the race 4 
 
 , racial and acc,*uired 302 
 
 " Progress, Popjulation and," 
 
 by Montague Crackanthorpe. 366 
 Promiscuity among animals.... 186 
 Public opinion, education of 16, 17 
 
 Quality versus quantity 340 
 
 Race, immortality of 296 
 
 versus individual 296 
 
 Race-culture and human variety 344 
 
 , education and 137 
 
 , socialism and 152 
 
 , the promise of 333 
 
 " Race-Culture or Race Sui- 
 cide," by R. R. Rentoul... 36' 
 
 " Race Prejudice," by Jean 
 
 Finot 369 
 
 Racial degeneration and natural 
 
 selection 301 
 
 , cause of 304 
 
 , the Lamarckian 
 
 theory of 298,304 
 
 instinct, education of the x 
 
 poisons, the viii, 285 
 
 , and decadence.... 300 
 
 , bibliography of 369, 370 
 
 " Racial poisons," introduction 
 
 of the term 237 
 
 " Racial Hygiene or Negative 
 
 Eugenics," by Dr. Saleeby. . 237 
 Racial senility, the fallacy of.. 296 
 "Reformatory," the word.... 273 
 Regression towards mediocrity, 
 
 the law of. 334 
 
 Religion, eugenics and 315 
 
 , the survival-value of.... 315 
 
 " Religion, Eugenics as a Fac- 
 tor in," by F. Galton 363 
 
 Religious persecution, non-eu- 
 genic results of 132, 305 
 
 Reproduction, the cost of, in 
 
 energy 99 
 
 " Republic, The," of Plato 191, 362 
 " Restrictions in Marriage," by 
 
 F. Galton 214, 236, 365 
 
 Reversed selection 306 
 
 , the final cause of 
 
 racial decay 305, 308 
 
 , war a cause of.... 329 
 
 "Reversion," defined 127 
 
 Rome, the decline of 323 
 
 , motherhood during the 
 
 decline of 31 1 
 
 Russia, increase of population 
 in 86 
 
 as a wheat producing 
 
 country 90, 91 
 
INDEX 
 
 383 
 
 " School hygiene " 74 
 
 " Scope and Importance to the 
 State of the Science of Na- 
 tional Eugenics, The," by 
 Karl Pearson 365 
 
 Selection, alcohol an agent in. 239 
 
 and racial change 301 
 
 by marriage 219 
 
 for parentage v, vi 
 
 , natural, see Natural Selec- 
 tion 
 
 of mind 59 
 
 of woman, for marriage.. 219 
 
 1, reversed, see Reversed Se- 
 lection 
 
 , sexual .....77, 220, 227, 234 
 
 , the principle of, educa- 
 tion in 157 
 
 " Sex and Society," by W. I. 
 Thomas 368 
 
 *' Sex, The Evolution of," by 
 Patrick Geddes and J. Arthur 
 Thomson 361 
 
 Sexual education of children.. 
 1 60, 162 
 
 selection ... 77, 2215, 227, 234 
 
 " Sexual Selection in Man," by 
 
 Havelock Ellis 234 
 
 "Sexual Frage, Die" (The 
 
 Sexual Question), by August 
 
 Forel 149, 279, 283, 372 
 
 Siegfried, the story of 352 
 
 " Social Psychology," by Dr. 
 
 McDougall 134 
 
 Socialism and education... 151-154 
 
 and marriage 229-230 
 
 and race-culture 152 
 
 and selection for marriage 225 
 
 Society, classification of, and 
 
 eugenics 135 
 
 , , for parenthood 
 
 119 (note) 
 
 "Society, The Diseases of," by 
 
 G. F. Lydston 369 
 
 " Society, Sex and," by W. I. 
 
 Thomas 368 
 
 " Sociological Papers " 
 
 45. 
 
 (note), 
 
 214 (note), 323, 335, 364, 365 
 
 sociological Society, The 318 
 
 " Sociology, Hereditary and 
 Selection in," by G. Chatter- 
 ton-Hill 360 
 
 " Sociology, The Study of," by 
 Herbert Spencer 368 
 
 Soldiers, mistaken muscular 
 training of 69 
 
 Spain, the racial condition of 
 
 309, 3io 
 
 Spontaneous, denned 249 
 
 Starvation as a controller of 
 
 population 95 
 
 I , extent of, in England 93, 94 
 
 Stepney, birth-rate of, the high- 
 est in London 88 
 
 Sterilization of mental and 
 physical degenerates 367 
 
 Strength versus skill 70 
 
 " Struggle for existence," the 
 
 t ; 46, 94, 323 
 
 Studies in National Euge- 
 nics," by F. Galton 365 
 
 " Studies in the Psychology of 
 Sex " 234 
 
 " Study of British Genius, A," 
 by Havelock Ellis 356 
 
 " Study of Sociology, The," by 
 Herbert Spencer .. 10, 222, 368 
 
 " Survival of the fittest," the 48, 55 
 
 Survival-value 51 
 
 of monogamy 57 
 
 of love 57 
 
 of population 102, 103 
 
 of religion 351 
 
 of the tape-worm 52 
 
 , physical versus psychical 56 
 
 " Survival- Value of Religion, 
 
 The," by Dr. Saleeby 351 
 
 Syphilis, a racial poison 292 
 
 " Syphiology and Venereal Dis- 
 eases," by Dr. C. F. Mar- 
 shall 293 
 
 Talent, the production of 336 
 
 Tape-worm, survival value of 
 the 52 
 
 Tasmanians, racial disappear- 
 ance of the 298 
 
 Taubach, the Driftmen of 67 
 
 Temperance legislation, the fail- 
 ure of 273 
 
 " Time, and Tide," by John 
 
 Ruskin 
 
 ...109, 150, 294 (note), 343, 371 
 
 Tobacco, influence of, on 
 pregnancy 292 
 
 and the race. 297, 298 
 
 Tuberculosis, eugenics and.... 208 
 
 , heredity and 209 
 
 , overcrowding and 210 
 
 , racial extermination by.. 
 
 302, 303 
 
 "Tuberculosis, The Prevention 
 of," by A. Newsholme 370 
 
 Unemployment, eugenics and. . 340 
 
 , overcrowding and 340 
 
 United States, control of 
 drunkards in the 280 
 
 , higher education of 
 
 woman in the 101 
 
 , increase of popula- 
 tion in the 86 
 
 , the, a wheat pro- 
 ducing country 91, 92 
 
 " Unto this Last," by John 
 Ruskin 37,1 
 
 Variation 344 
 
 " Variation, Heredity and Evo- 
 lutipn," by R. H. Lock 361 
 
 " Variations in Animals and 
 Plants." by H. M. Vernon.. 360 
 
 Vertebrates, evolution of the. . 63 
 
 Vital economy, the principle of 
 
 ,.,,..,. 19, 22 
 
384 
 
 INDEX 
 
 War, a cause of reversed se- 
 lection 329 
 
 , mind the master in no, in 
 
 Wealth, Ruskin's definition of. ig 
 " Westminster Gazette, The," 
 on the population and the 
 
 food supply . 89 
 
 Wheat, improvement in 93 
 
 problem, the 89 
 
 "Wheat Problem, The," by 
 
 Sir William Crookes 90 
 
 Wheat, Prof. Biff en's 124 
 
 Whiskey, defined 268, 269 
 
 "Widows and Orphans," and 
 the alcohol trade 283 
 
 Woman and eugenics 224, 340 
 
 , employment of 340-341 
 
 , the higher education of, 
 
 non-eugenic effects of 101 
 
 Women, married, and labour.. 312 
 
 , secret drinking by 268 
 
 , selection for marriage by 223 
 
 Work, the eugenic necessity of 305 
 Writing, the art of, as a means 
 
 of transmission 302 
 
 "Yellow Peril," the 88, 311 
 
 " Youth, its Education, Regi- 
 men and Hygiene," by Stan- 
 ley Hall 1 368 
 
 INDEX OF NAMES 
 
 Aristotle .................... 303 
 
 - on motherhood ......... 191 
 
 - on racial decay ..... 296, 297 
 
 - , "Politics," by ......... 191 
 
 Arnold, Matthew ........... 335 
 
 - , Thomas ............... 335 
 
 Asquith, H. H ............... 271 
 
 Bach ....................... 348 
 
 - family, the ............. 335 
 
 Bacon on the command of 
 
 Nature .... ......... 15, 29, 4tf 
 
 Balfour, A. J ............... 264 
 
 - , - , on decadence .... 
 .................. 271, 323-324 
 
 - , - , on intemperance.. 271 
 
 - , - , on legislation .... 270 
 
 - , - , on Licensing Bill 
 
 if 1908 ................... 270 
 
 - , - , on politics ... 330-331 
 Ballantyne, Dr., on the unborn 
 
 infant .................... 371 
 
 Barker, Ernest, on the de- 
 
 struction of marriage ....... 191 
 
 Bateson, Prof. W., "Methods 
 
 and Scope of Genetics," by 354 
 Bateson, Prof. W., on educa- 
 
 tion ...................... 137 
 
 - , - , on Mendelism .... 354 
 
 Beethoven ...... 145, 1.67, 334, 339 
 
 Bertillon, M., on marital lon- 
 
 gevity ................... . 222 
 
 Biffen, Prof., and his experi- 
 ments on wheat ............. 124 
 
 Booth, the Rt. Hon. Charles, 
 on the extent of starvation.. 93 
 
 Bouchacourt, on the care of 
 motherhood ............... 166 
 
 Bourneville, on lead poisoning 287 
 
 Branthwaite, Dr. R. Welsh 264, 278 
 
 - , - , " Inebriety, Its 
 Causation and Control/' by 
 
 71 (M 
 
 ............. s-v-.v 371 
 
 , - , on alcoholism as a 
 symptom of degeneracy ..... 251 
 
 Brieux, " Les A varies " 293 
 
 Brooks, Graham, on the Negro 
 
 race ix 
 
 Brouardel on parental morphino- 
 
 mania 245 
 
 Browning, Robert 154 
 
 Buckle 309 
 
 Buddha 167 
 
 Bulstrode, Dr., on tuberculosis 
 
 209 (note) 
 
 Burchell 59 
 
 Burns, the Rt. Hon. John, on 
 
 motherhood 37 
 
 Byron on the decay of nations 295 
 
 Cakebread, Jane, the case of. . 
 
 257, 260, 264, 275 
 
 Carlyle, Thomas 355 
 
 , , on history, 294 (.note) 
 
 "The French Revo- 
 
 lution," by 294 (note) 
 
 Chatterton-Hill, George, 
 
 " Heredity and Selection in 
 
 Sociology," by 360 
 
 Chesterton, G. K., on eugenics 
 
 181 (note) 
 
 Clouston, T. S., " The Hygiene 
 
 of Mind," by 370 
 
 Cobden, Richard , . . . 9 
 
 Cohn on the multiplication of 
 
 bacteria 183 
 
 Coleridge 303 
 
 Combemale, experiments of, in 
 
 alcoholism i . . . 244 
 
 Constable, "Poverty and 
 
 Hereditary Genius," by 356 
 
 Copernicus 208 
 
 Cottrell, Mr., on the population 
 
 of London 86 
 
 Crackanthorpe, Mr. Montague, 
 
 and the Eugenics Education 
 
 Society 366 
 
 , , on the birth rate.. 109 
 
 , , " Population and 
 
 Progress," by ..,,..,...,.. 340 
 
INDEX 
 
 385 
 
 Crichton-Browne, Sir James, 
 and the Eugenics Education 
 
 Society 372 
 
 , , on education 143 
 
 Crookes, Sir William 96 
 
 , , on the wheat sup- 
 ply 90 
 
 , , " The Wheat Prob- " 
 
 lem," by 90 
 
 Darwin, Charles 47, 273, 349, 356 
 
 , : , and the effect of 
 
 music on plants 145 
 
 , , centenary of the 
 
 birth of v 
 
 , , his talented ances- 
 try and kindred 336 
 
 , , on degeneration . . 197 
 
 , , on national rise 
 
 and decline 318 (note) 
 
 , , on natural selection 
 
 94, 157, 30i, 302 
 
 , , on sexual selection 
 
 76,221 
 
 , , on the elephant 
 
 82 (.note) 
 
 , , on the future 345 
 
 , , on the multiplica- 
 tion of the unfit 263 
 
 , , on the queen bee . . 48 
 
 , , on vitality and mus- 
 cularity 76 (note) 
 
 , , Ruskin on 109 
 
 , , " The Descent of 
 
 Man," by 197, 221, 323, 361 
 
 , , " The Origin of 
 
 Species," by 48, 82 (note), 361 
 
 Darwin, Erasmus, the grand- 
 father of Charles Darwin.. 
 
 -. 336, 337 
 
 , Francis 336 
 
 , Sir George 336 
 
 Demme and parental alcoholism 245 
 
 Disraeli on circumstances 171 
 
 Down, Dr. Langdon, on drunk- 
 enness and the feeble-minded 254 
 Dunlop, Dr. A. R., on habitual 
 drunkenness 254 
 
 Eccles, McAdam, on alcohol 
 
 and the racial organs 242 
 
 , f on drunkenness... 254 
 
 Ellis, Havelock, "A Study of * 
 British Genius," by 356 
 
 , , " Man and Wom- 
 an," by 368 
 
 , , on drunkenness . . 253 
 
 , , on sexual selection 
 
 : 234-236 
 
 , , on socialism and 
 
 education 151 
 
 , , " Sexual Selection 
 
 in Man," by 234 
 
 Emerson on mass versus mind 109 
 
 on the morality of the 
 
 universe 41 
 
 Epictetus on fools 149 
 
 Etienne on opinion as ruler... 271 
 
 Fere on alcohol 239 
 
 Ferrier, Prof. David, on habit- 
 ual drunkenness 253 
 
 Finot, Jean, on the Negro 
 race ix 
 
 , , " Race Prejudice," 
 
 by 369 
 
 Fleck, Dr., on drunkenness and 
 the feeble-minded 254 
 
 Forel, Prof. August.. 19, 157, 363 
 
 , , "Die Sexuel 
 
 Frage," by... 149, 279, 293, 372 
 
 , , " Hygiene of Nerves 
 
 and Mind," by 279, 370 
 
 , . .on alcohol as a 
 
 racial poison - 285 
 
 , , on alcoholism and 
 
 heredity 279 
 
 , , on education.. 148-150 
 
 , , on our duty to pos- 
 terity 39 
 
 , , on the future of 
 
 the race 198 
 
 , , on the nervous sys- 
 tem 60 
 
 , , on the sexual edu- 
 cation of children 159 
 
 Galton, Francis .... 125, 238, 345 
 
 , and acquired char- 
 acters, the non-transmission 
 of 130 (note), 251, 300 
 
 , , and biometrics .... xi 
 
 -, , and eugenics, posi- 
 tive and negative 199 
 
 , , and G. B. Shaw. . . 178 
 
 , , and the Eugenics 
 
 Education Society 371 
 
 , , and the law of re- 
 gression towards mediocrity. 334 
 
 , , " Eugenics as a 
 
 Factor in Religion," 4 by 358 
 
 , , "Eugenics, its 
 
 Definition, Scope, and 
 Aims," by 364 
 
 , , "Hereditary Gen- 
 ius," by 
 
 i*3 130, .335,. 35i (note), 356 
 
 , , his kinship to Dar- 
 win 336 
 
 , , " Inquiries into 
 
 Human Faculty," by 
 
 ;.; 105, 146, 337, 357 
 
 , , Memories of my 
 
 Life," by v, 357 
 
 , , "Natural Inherit- 
 ance," by 357 
 
 , , on ancestry, a ra- 
 tional pride in 160 
 
 , , on breeding for 
 
 ability 175 
 
 , , ne , r ?y" 76, 175 
 
 , , health .. 101, 175 
 
 , , on civic worth.... 78 
 
 , , on civilisation .... 132 
 
 , , on energy 
 
 223 (.note), 336 
 
386 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Galton, Francis, on eugenics, 
 the meaning and the aims of 
 180, 346 
 
 , , on functionally pro- 
 duced modifications, the non- 
 inheritance of 248 
 
 , , on genius, hered- 
 itary 123, 130 
 
 , , , the quality 
 
 of 130 (note) 
 
 , , on human intelli- 
 gence 45 
 
 , , on human variety. 345 
 
 Galton, Francis, on marriage, 
 eugenic 192 
 
 , , , late .... 105 
 
 , , -, the subsidisa- 
 tion of 232 
 
 , , on motherhood, the 
 
 subsidisation of 172 
 
 , , on national- eugen- 
 ics . . . 132 
 
 , , on national rise 
 
 and decline . .... 318 
 
 , , on public opinion, 
 
 the formation of 17 
 
 , : , o n society, the 
 
 eugenic value of the various 
 classes of 118 
 
 , , on sociology, the 
 
 duties of 318, 319 
 
 , , on the desirable 
 
 qualities 342 
 
 , , on the future of 
 
 man 346 
 
 , , on the production 
 
 of genius 335 
 
 , , on the production 
 
 of talent 340 
 
 , , " Probability the 
 
 Foundation of Eugenics," by 365 
 
 , , " Restrictions i n 
 
 Marriage," by .... 214, 236, 365 
 
 - -, , " Studies i n Na- 
 tional Eugenics," by 365 
 
 , , " The Possible Im- 
 provement of the Human 
 Breed, under existing Condi- 
 tions of Law and Senti- 
 ment," by 364 
 
 Gaskell, Dr. W. H., "The 
 Origin of Vertebrates," by 
 57 (note) 
 
 Geddes, Prof. Patrick, on 
 Government 139 
 
 -, , " The Evolution of 
 
 Sex," by, and Prof. J. A. 
 Thomson 361 
 
 Gibbon 313 (note) 
 
 on history 294 
 
 on the necessity^ for ad- 
 vance or retrogression 307 
 
 Gladstone, Herbert, and the 
 treatment of chronic in- 
 ebriates by the London 
 County Council 256, 257 
 
 Godwin, William, on litera- 
 ture 303 (note) 
 
 Goethe on activity 337 (note) 
 
 Goethe on fate and chance 14 
 
 on ignorance 258 
 
 on marriage 193 
 
 011 the education of race 156 
 
 Gorst, Sir John, "The Chil- " 
 
 dren of the Nation," by... 370 
 
 Hall, Prof. Stanley, "Adoles- 
 cence," by 368 
 
 > , " Youth, its Educa- 
 tion, Regimen and Hygiene," 
 by 368 
 
 Helvetius on the influence of 
 education 147 
 
 Hobbes, Thomas, on " Words," 121 
 
 , , " Leviathan," by. . 
 
 121 (note) 
 
 Holmes, Mr. Thomas, on ha- 
 bitual drunkenness 254 
 
 Horsley, Sir Victor, and Mary 
 D. Sturge, " Alcohol and the 
 Human Body," by 370 
 
 Howard, G. E., " A History of 
 Matrimonial Institutions," by 361 
 
 Huxley _ 33, 45, 66, 324 
 
 , " Evolution and Ethics," 
 
 by 30 
 
 on cosmic nature 
 
 28, 40, 44 (note) 
 
 on Pasteur 109 
 
 , on public opinion 155 
 
 on the multiplication of 
 
 the unfit 263 
 
 Im Thurn, Mr., on marriage 
 customs of Guiana.., 213 
 
 Jones, Dr. Robert, on the case 
 of Jane Cakebread 264 
 
 Jones, W. H. S., "Malaria: a 
 Neglected Factor in the His- 
 tory of Greece and Rome," 
 by 369 
 
 Joubert 20 
 
 Kant 4, 99 
 
 on the influence of edu- 
 cation 147 
 
 Keats 52 
 
 Kellogg, Vernon L., " Dar- 
 winism To-day," by 361 
 
 Kelvin, Lord, his services to 
 life 108 
 
 Kipling, Rudyard, and imperial- 
 ism 282, 283 
 
 , , on breeds in the 
 
 making ^ 283 
 
 ; , , on emigration .... 10 
 
 Kirby, Miss, on the feeble- 
 minded 254 
 
 Kirkup, Thomas, on Malthu- 
 sianism 95 
 
 Koch and tuberculosis 208 
 
 Lamarck 41 
 
 on inheritance of acquired 
 
 characters ^ 153, 299-301, 303 
 
 versus Weismann . . . 240, 242 
 
INDEX 
 
 387 
 
 Lankester, Sir E. Ray, on 
 man, the controller of 
 nature 46 
 
 , , on the multiplica- 
 tion of man 10, 30, 81 
 
 , , on the struggle for 
 
 existence 47, 324 
 
 , , " The Kingdom of 
 
 Man," by 46 (.note) 
 
 Leonaf do da Vinci 306 
 
 Letourneau, Prof., " The Evo- 
 lution of Marriage," by.... 362 
 
 Le\\in on lead poisoning 287 
 
 Lister, Lord, his services to 
 life 108 
 
 Livingstone, Dr., on African 
 marriage customs 213 
 
 Lock, R. H., "Variation, 
 Heredity and Evolution," by 361 
 
 Lombroso, criminological work 
 of 205 
 
 London, Bishop of, on the fall- 
 ing birth-rate 112 
 
 Love, Dr., on deaf -mutism. ... 201 
 
 Lowell, J. R., on human 
 suffering 149 
 
 Lydston, G. F., " The Diseases 
 of Society: the Vice and 
 Crime Problem," by 369 
 
 MacCunn, Prof., on the in- 
 fant mind 142 
 
 , , " The Making of 
 
 Character," by 142 
 
 MacDougal, Dr. T. D., on 
 " Heredity and Environic 
 Forces," 243 
 
 McDougall, Dr. W., on infant 
 mortality 26 
 
 , , o n transmissible 
 
 characters 134 
 
 , , " Social Psychol- 
 ogy," by 134 
 
 Magee, Archbishop 281 
 
 Malthus, T. R., 19, 362 
 
 his theory . 
 ignorance as 
 
 , his theory 90, 94 
 
 s to his 
 
 essay 
 
 -, importance of his 
 
 95 
 
 doctrine to-day 95 
 
 , , " The Principles of 
 
 Population/' by .... 94, 96, 302 
 
 Marcus Aurelius 345 
 
 Marshall, Dr. C. F., on alcohol 
 
 and syphilis 293 
 
 , , " Syphilology,"^ by 293 
 
 Maudsley, Dr., on eugenics.. 217 
 Mendel, the theory of 124, 354, 353 
 
 Meredith, George 47, 267, 333 
 
 , , " The Ordeal o f 
 
 Richard Feverel," by. 128 (note) 
 Metchnikoff, on age at mar- 
 riage 103 
 
 , "The Nature of Man," 
 
 by 103 
 
 Mill, Tames 335 
 
 , John Stuart 211, 335 
 
 , , on nature 42 
 
 Milton 338 
 
 Morgan, Prof. Lloyd, " Sur- 
 vival Value," 51 
 
 Mott, Dr. F. W., on habitual 
 drunkenness 253 
 
 Mozart 145 
 
 Napoleon, the wars of, cause 
 of reversed selection in 
 France 329 
 
 Newman, Dr. George, on the 
 falling birth-rate 98 (note) 
 
 , , " Infant Mortality," 
 
 by 98, 370 
 
 Newshqlme, Dr. A., on tuber- 
 culosis 211 
 
 , , "The Prevention 
 
 of Tuberculosis," by 370 
 
 Newton, Sir Isaac 7, 167, 334, 348 
 
 Nietzsche and the Darwinian 
 theory 57 
 
 and the super-man theory 28 
 
 and " transvaluation " . . . 115 
 
 on organic evolution 181 
 
 Oliver, Sir Thomas, on lead 
 poisoning 286-287, 288 
 
 , , " Diseases of Oc- 
 cupation," by ....286 (note), 370 
 
 Palestrina 145 
 
 Palmerston, Lord 150 
 
 Parsons, Dr. Elsie Clews, on 
 
 diminution of offspring 186 
 
 , , on parentage. 185, 186 
 
 , , " The Family," by 363 
 
 Pascal 59 
 
 Pasteur and tuberculosis 208 
 
 , his value to the French 
 
 nation 107 
 
 on the abolition of dis- 
 ease 82 
 
 Paterson, W. R., on slavery, 
 the cause of the fall of 
 empires 326 
 
 , , " The Nemesis of 
 
 Nations," by 326 
 
 Pearson, Prof. Karl 363 
 
 , , and biometrics ... xi 
 
 , , " National Life 
 
 from the Standpoint of 
 Science," by 3^3, 365 
 
 , , on national rise and 
 
 decline 318 (note), 323 
 
 , , on the multiplica- 
 tion of the yellow races.... 89 
 
 , , "The Scope and 
 
 Importance to the State of 
 the Science of National Eu- 
 genics," by 365, 366 
 
 Pericles 339 
 
 Petrie, Prof. Flinders, " Janus 
 in Modern Life," by 25 
 
 , , on infantile mor- 
 tality 25 
 
 Plato and motherhood 190 
 
 and the destruction of 
 
 the family 193, 364 
 
388 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Plato on the duty of Govern- 
 ments 320 
 
 on racial decay. . . . 296-298 
 
 on the sanctity of mar- 
 riage 363 
 
 on the State as mother. 364 
 
 , " The Republic," of 362, 363 
 
 Pope, on genius and insanity 204 
 Potts, Dr. W. A., on " The Re- 
 lation of Alcohol to Feeble- 
 mindedness" 248, 250 
 
 Ranke, Prof., on the mind of 
 man O7 
 
 Ravenhill, Miss Alice, on 
 " Education for Motherhood " 
 37 
 
 , on the education of 
 
 girls ; 37i 
 
 Reid, Dr. Archdall, on alcohol 239 
 , , on humanitarianism 
 
 and deterioration 28 
 
 , , on the marriage of 
 
 drunkards 27,2 
 
 , , on the resistance of 
 
 the germ-plasm 290 
 
 , , " Alcoholism, A 
 
 Study in Heredity," by 370 
 
 , , " The Principles of 
 
 Heredity," by 360 
 
 Rembrandt 4 
 
 Rennert on lead poisoning 287, 288 
 Rentoul, Dr. R. R., on the 
 
 sterilization of mental and 
 
 physical degenerates 37 
 
 , , "Race Culture or 
 
 Race Suicide," by 367 
 
 Reynolds, Sir Alfred, on the 
 
 treatment of inebriates. 262, 266 
 Roche, Sir Boyle, on posterity 13 
 
 Roques on lead poisoning 286 
 
 Ross, Prof. Ronald, " Malaria, 
 
 A Neglected Factor in the 
 
 History of Greece and 
 
 Rome," introduced by 369 
 
 , , on malaria as a 
 
 cause of national decay. 301, 320 
 Rowntree, B. Seebohm, on the 
 
 extent of starvation 93 
 
 Ruskin, John, " Munera Pul- 
 
 veris," by 35<> (note), 371 
 
 , "Time and Tide," by.. 
 
 150, 343, 371 
 
 , "Unto this Last," by... 371 
 
 on Darwin _ 109 
 
 on education and in- 
 
 on life the only wealth.. 
 
 ig, 152,306 
 
 on marriage 343 
 
 on mass versus mind.... 115 
 
 on posterity 333 
 
 on the duty of Govern- 
 ments 20, 320 
 
 on the future of man . . 349 
 
 on the manufacture of 
 
 souls 313 
 
 on the neglect of children 166 
 
 on the neglect of woman 166 
 
 - on work 305 
 
 St. Francis 348 
 
 Saleeby, Dr., "Alcohol and In- 
 fancy," by 247-48 
 
 r , , and G. B. Shaw, 
 
 his controversy on marriage 
 with 181 
 
 , , on biology and 
 
 history 294 (.note) 
 
 , " Evolution, the Master 
 
 Key," by 168 
 
 , , " Health, Strength 
 
 and Happiness," by . 136 (note) 
 
 , , " Individualism and 
 
 Collectivism," by .... 115 (note) 
 
 , , " Obstacles to Eu- 
 genics," by 203 (note) 
 
 , , on London's in- 
 ebriates, the case of 262 
 
 , , on progress 328 
 
 , , on the survival- 
 value of religion 351 
 
 , , on widows and or- 
 phans made by alcohol 283 
 
 , , "The Essential 
 
 Factor of Progress," by... 304 
 
 Salisbury, Lord, his attack on 
 evolution 50 
 
 Salisbury, Lord, on Spain a 
 dying nation 310 
 
 Sandow IS4 
 
 and the development of 
 
 physique 72 
 
 Scharlieb, Mrs., on maternal 
 alcoholism 248 (note) 
 
 , , The Drink Prob- 
 lem," by 248 (note) 
 
 Schopenhauer on love in- 
 trigue 228 (note) 
 
 Schubert 52,. 56 
 
 Seton, Ernest Thompson, on ani- 
 mal marriage 186 
 
 Shakespeare 
 
 7, 145, 167, 283, 295, 334, 339i 
 348 
 
 , ancestry of 122, 126 
 
 , quoted x, 66 (note), no, 322 
 
 Shaw, Dr. Claye, on maternal 
 alcoholism 246 
 
 , George Bernard .... 96, 193 
 
 , , on eugenics . 178, 179 
 
 , , on heredity f . 117 
 
 , , on marriage, his 
 
 controversy with Dr. Saleeby 181 
 
 , , on motherhood .... 190 
 
 , , on the State as 
 
 mother 180 
 
 Shelley 180 
 
 Sii.ipson, Sir James, on the in- 
 heritance of acquired char- 
 acters 155 
 
 Sims, G. R., on children, the 
 protection of 274 
 
 , , on habitual drunk- 
 ards, the treatment of 257 
 
 , , on "the cry of the 
 
 children" 342 
 
 , , " The Black Stain," 
 
 by 274, 37i 
 
INDEX 
 
 389 
 
 Sims, G. R., " The Cry of the 
 
 Children," by 274. 371 
 
 Smith, Adam 19 
 
 Socrates 362, 363 
 
 Sombart, Dr., on the popula- 
 tion of Germany 87 
 
 Sophocles, quoted 59 
 
 Spencer, Herbert 4, 10, 94, 344, 348 
 , absence of early educa- 
 tion of 147 
 
 and evolution 48, 54 
 
 and functionally produced 
 
 modifications 127 
 
 and Huxley 29 
 
 and his reply to Lord 
 
 Salisbury's attack on evolu- 
 tion 50 
 
 and " social organisms". 296 
 
 on the cosmic process.... 28 
 
 on the defencelessness of 
 
 man 66 
 
 on education 149 
 
 on education for parent- 
 hood 167 
 
 - on human fertility. . .100-105 
 
 on individuation and 
 
 genesis 334 
 
 on marital longevity 221-223 
 
 on marriage 186 
 
 on natural selection 39 
 
 on parenthood 99 
 
 on the future of man 349-350 
 
 on the laws of multipli- 
 cation 96, 97 
 
 on woman and selection 
 
 for marriage 222 
 
 , the ancestry of 174 
 
 , the " Autobiography " of 
 
 39, 66, 73, 174 
 
 , " The Data of Ethics," 
 
 by 350 (.note) 
 
 , " the survival of the fit- 
 test "...26 (note), 47, 48, 95, 3oi 
 
 , " Education," by 367 
 
 Spencer Herbert, "The Study 
 
 of Sociology," by .... 222, 368 
 , " The Principles of Bi- 
 ology," by 98, 362 
 
 Spinoza 52, 56 
 
 Stark, Dr., on marital longevity 222 
 Sturge, Mary D., and Sir Vic- 
 tor Horsley, " Alcohol and 
 
 the Human Body," by 370 
 
 Sullivan, Dr. W. C, "Alcohol- 
 ism," by 244, 279, 370 
 
 , , o n alcohol and 
 
 alcoholism ... 239, 245-248, 255 
 Sutherland on parental care. . 186 
 
 Theognis on pecuniary inherit- 
 ance 115 
 
 on the duty of Govern- 
 ments 320 
 
 Thomas. W. I., " Sex and So- 
 ciety, by 368 
 
 Thompson, Francis 147 
 
 Thomson, Prof. J. A., "Hered- 
 ity," by 113, 353 
 
 Thomson, Prof. J. A., on "in- 
 heritance," 126 (.note) 
 
 , , on race culture... 113 
 
 , , on reversion 127 
 
 , , " The Evolution of 
 
 Sex," by, and Patrick Ged- 
 
 des 361 
 
 , , translator of Weis- 
 
 mann 360 
 
 , M. R., translator of 
 
 Weismann . . . . 360 
 
 Thoreau, quoted 201 
 
 Tille on man the wealth of 
 
 nations 19 
 
 Tintoretto 334 
 
 Turner, Sir William, ou the 
 human foot 69 
 
 Ur^uhart, Dr. A. R., on ha- 
 bitual drunkenness 254 
 
 Veraon, H. M., " Variations 
 in Animals and Plants," 
 by 360, 361 
 
 Villemin and tuberculosis 208 
 
 Waddington, Mr. Quintin, his 
 translation of Aulus Gellius 
 
 313 (note) 
 
 Wagner, " Siegfried " 352 
 
 Wallace, Alfred Russel 363 
 
 , , o n matrimonial 
 
 choice by women 224-227 
 
 , , on natural selec- 
 tion 94 
 
 Watson, William, the patriot- 
 ism of viii 
 
 Watts, G. F. 4 
 
 Wedgwood, Josiah, maternal 
 grandfather of Charles Dar- 
 win ; 336 
 
 Weismann, August. . 238, 244, 250 
 
 , his controversy with 
 
 Lamarck 240 
 
 , on paternal alcoholism . . 
 
 240-242 
 
 , " The Germ-Plasm : a 
 
 Theory of Heredity," by... 
 
 241, 360 
 
 -, " The Evolution The- 
 ory," by 360 
 
 Wellington, Duke of 147 
 
 Wells, H. G., on the multi- 
 plication of the unfit IS 
 
 on Spencer's terminol- 
 ogy 48, 49 55 
 
 Westermarck, Dr. E., on mar- 
 riage 152, 186 
 
 , , on the control of 
 
 marriage 213 
 
 , , "The History of 
 
 Human Marriage," by 362 
 
 Wordsworth .... 4, 283, 348, 350 
 
 , absence of early educa- 
 tion of 137 
 
 on the decay of nations. 328 
 
 , quoted 39, 320 
 
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