EUGENICS AS A SOCIAL FORCE

Thoughtful men, once escaped from the blinding influences of traditional prejudice, will find in the lowly stock whence Man sprung the best evidence of the splendour of his capacities, and will discover in his long progress through the Past a reasonable ground of Faith in his attainment of a nobler Future.— T. H. HUXLEY.

I

Nor long ago a highly intelligent Suffragist-no one would dare to call her a Suffragette-inquired of the present writer the meaning of Eugenics' and whether the g was hard or soft. Her curiosity was natural enough, and is shared at this moment by many highly intelligent men who have no leisure to look into things' for themselves. For Eugenics, whatever may be the meaning of the word, is now decidedly in the air, and its study is proving more attractive to many than watching, through the medium of the daily press, the turns and twists of party politics.

Let me say at once that on this particular subject I do not pretend to any original research. All I can try to do is to drive home some of the facts which men of science have gathered in, to exhibit these facts in a popular form, and to leave those interested to draw from them their own conclusions.

I will begin by referring the reader to the Standard Dictionary (1899). Eugenics' (the g is usually pronounced soft as in Genesis) is there defined as the science relating to the development and improvement of the human race'; the term was invented by Mr. Francis Galton and first used by him in his Inquiries into Human Faculty.' 'Eugenic' as an adjective has already taken root in our language-'eugenic principles,'' eugenic questions,' and so forth being now familiar phrases. We have also the word 'Eugenist,' i.e. a person who assents to eugenic principles, and 'Eugenism,' which stands for an ideal state of society in which, if these principles should prevail universally, a new era would dawn upon mankind.

Published in 1883 and re-issued very recently by J. M. Dent & Co. as part of their Everyman's Library.'

Having now defined our subject, let us proceed to examine it a little closely.

Eugenics as a science is a branch of biology, since it embraces the investigation of racial qualities and their transmissibility from one generation to another. This is, indeed, its main, though not its whole, business. It seeks, in addition, to establish criteria of the fitness, or unfitness, of adult human beings for becoming instruments of reproduction-thus looking to the future as well as to the present and the past. On this account it is eminently a moral science, since it stimulates us to prefer the welfare of others-notably the unborn-to our own.

The cardinal article of the eugenic creed is a belief in the responsibility of parentage. By this I do not mean a sense of duty on the part of a father not to produce more children than he can, or has a reasonable prospect of being able to, maintain-a theme on which I have discoursed elsewhere 2-but the far deeper responsibility which both parents incur by calling a child into existence and transmitting to him, and possibly through him to those that come after, a portion of what they themselves are and what their ancestors have been before them. Individual effort may improve the characters so transmitted; so may the presence of favourable surroundings; but individual improvement is one thing, race improvement is another. The aim of Eugenics is race improvement, and there can be none higher or more comprehensive. We are constantly being reminded of the late Sir W. Harcourt's dictum, 'We are all Socialists now.' A fortiori should we be all'Eugenists.' That we are not is due to our ignorance, not to our lack of goodwill.

Of the various constituents of the Eugenic system the law of heredity is the chief. This is, indeed, its kernel and its essence, for if nothing were inherited there would be no continuity of development and therefore no materials for Eugenics to work upon. Now, though the experts differ somewhat as to the origin of heredity, on the fact of its existence they are all agreed. I propose, then, first to examine this law and to point out the limits of its operation.

And here let me remark that it is quite impossible in dealing with any scientific subject wholly to discard technical terms. Consider this simple case. Suppose a young person-shall we say a 'bright' American girl?—were to ask a mathematician to explain to her in untechnical language the Binomial Theorem. Would he not at once inquire, 'What do you already know? Do you know, for instance, what is meant by a co-efficient? Suppose she replied by another question, 'Has it anything to do with compound interest, because I have got that far in arithmetic? Or suppose he asks her, 'Do you know what is meant by raising a quantity to a given power?' and she answered, 'I am afraid not, unless it has something to do * Population and Progress. (Chapman & Hall, 1907.)

with the hydraulic press about which I have read in books on Elementary Mechanics.' Would not the mathematician be right in suggesting to her that before attempting to penetrate into the mysteries of algebra she had better acquaint herself with its language? And would he not have to send her away sorrowful notwithstanding her natural gifts? Well, hers is precisely the case of the inquirer into heredity who is wholly ignorant of biology.

An excellent short account of heredity is given by Dr. Arthur Thomson, Professor of Natural History in Aberdeen University, in his very recent and instructive work on that subject.3

Every living creature arises from a parent or from parents more or less like itself; this reproductive or genetic relation has a visible material basis in the germinal matter (usually egg-cell and sperm-cell) liberated from the parental body or bodies. By inheritance we mean all the qualities of characters which have their initial seat, their physical basis, in the fertilised egg-cell; the expression of this inheritance in development results in the organism.

In addition to the set of qualities indicated in this passage, animals generally, and especially man, may and do develop a second set, which Dr. Thomson refers to as follows:

While the inherited nature and its possibilities of action and reaction must be regarded as rigorously determined by the parental and ancestral contributions, the nurture-the environmental influences-must not be thought of as predetermined. In fact the surrounding influences are very variable, and the nature of the young organism may be profoundly changed by them. Thus, we soon find it possible to distinguish between the main features which are the normal realisations of the inheritance in a normal environment, and peculiarities which are due to peculiarities in nurture. The characters of a newly-hatched chick stepping out of the imprisoning egg-shell are in the main strictly hereditary, but they need not be altogether so, for during the three weeks before hatching there has been some opportunity for peculiarities in the environment to leave their mark on the developing creature. Still more is this the case with the typical mammalian embryo, which develops often for many months as a sort of internal parasite within the mother, in a complex and variable environment. And as life goes on, peculiarities due to nurture continue to be superimposed on the hereditary qualities.

The two sets of qualities above described are distinguished as original or innate' on the one hand, and adventitious or acquired' on the other. A very remarkable difference between them is that the first set are transmissible, whilst the second are not. The origin of this difference is thus explained by Weismann and is widely accepted by biologists. In the development of each individual a portion of the specific germ-plasm which the fertilised ovum contains is not used up in the formation of the offspring, but is reserved unchanged for the formation of the germinal cells of the following generation.' The germ-plasm itself is found in those chromosomes [more correctly chromatosomes] which are conceived of as containing Heredity, by J. Arthur Thomson. (John Murray, 1908.)

Thus, as Mr.

as old as the

the primary constituents of a complete organism. Galton has remarked, the child may be said to be parent,' for 'when the parent's body is developed from the fertilised ovum, a residue of unaltered germinal material is kept apart to form the future reproductive cells, one of which may become the starting point of a child.' Dr. Thomson puts the same point very neatly when he says 'the child is "a chip of the old block" in an entirely new sense, for the parent is rather the trustee of the germ-plasm than the producer of the child.' It is with this unaltered germinal material that the innate qualities are supposed to be associated. All this sounds very mysterious, but is not really more so than that the filaments called nerves should act as conductors to the brain.

When it is said that innate qualities are transmissible, it must not be understood that their characteristics are not subject to variation, or that they always reappear in the immediate progeny. They do vary from time to time, else would the race be fearfully monotonous; they often, too, skip a generation. It is common enough to find a child exhibiting the peculiarities of its grandfather when these peculiarities were not traceable in either of its parents. The same thing is observable in the lower animals. On crossing distinct varieties of pigeons, Darwin found that there was frequently a return to the original rock-dove type. Other naturalists have produced corresponding deviations from the normal on crossing fowls, mice, and even butterflies. The double phenomenon of the expression of characteristics in one generation and the total suppression of similar characteristics in the generation immediately succeeding was observed by Mendel (Abbot of Brün) some fifty years ago in both the vegetable and the lower animal worlds. Characteristics of which the appearance and disappearance alternate from generation to generation are said by the Mendelians to be 'dominant' and 'recessive' in turnan antithesis which, as Mr. Galton has remarked, is better indicated if for recessive' we substitute the word 'recedent.'

Attempts to trace this alternation in man are now being made, and are exciting much interest among sociologists.

II

Limits of space prevent my dwelling at greater length on the scientific side of Eugenics; I therefore now pass on to consider its practical side and the application of its principles to some of the pressing problems of our time.

The first effect produced by a study of this new science and of the biology that underlies it upon minds not hidebound by the traditional prejudices' which Mr. Huxley refers to in the sentence at the head of this paper is a sense of moral and intellectual expansion. The twice-told pentateuchal tale of the creation of man; of 3 S

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the formation of woman from a rib taken from man; of the sentence pronounced upon every woman for a single act of disobedience on the part of one of her sex-'I will greatly multiply thy sorrow in thy conception; in sorrow shalt thou bring forth children '-these and the other incidents of the fall' take their proper place under Eugenics as interesting examples of archaic beliefs, the literal acceptance of which at the present day must, wherever found, prove a serious hindrance to progress.

The second effect produced by this same study is a sense of the solidarity of our race, of the debt we owe to it in the past, and of the duty we owe to it in the future. With this comes the conviction that on the score of mere numbers we have nothing to fear from the 'yellow peril,' for that the Western nations contain within themselves the seeds of their own regeneration and are not, therefore, 'decadent,' Max Nordau, Lombroso, and other pessimists notwithstanding.

Eugenics and Alcoholism.-The question which has of late most agitated our politicians has been the reduction of the number of our public-houses. Throughout the long debates in the House of Commons no mention was made of that form of intemperance which is due to inheritance, or to occupational or other special environment, because any discussion on these causes would have been irrelevant to the particular measure then before Parliament. It is, however, these same causes alone that have any interest for the Eugenist. A few words must, therefore, be here said regarding them.

It is a little unfortunate that the word 'drink' is so misused among us. Suppose a man in the course of a long summer walk dips his glass once or twice into a stream, adding each time a little whisky; the total abstainer would probably denounce him as a slave of that pernicious and insidious vice known as moderate drinking.' But, in fact, he is not a drinker at all in the proper sense of the word, since he drinks to quench his natural thirst and not for the sake of the alcohol, which he only adds to make the water more palatable. Again, suppose a connoisseur in wine, desirous of testing a particular vintage, drinks a glass of claret or burgundy; he is no more a drinker' than the first man, for although he may gratify his palate, he does not in the least impair his power of judgment, on the continued acuteness of which his enjoyment of the liquor depends. The real drinker' is he (or she) who drinks to excite the brain, or to escape from mental worry. When such a practice has grown, or is growing, into a habit, then arises immediately the eugenic question, What will be its effect if he, or she, marries or is already married on the possible child or children? Is there any risk of a predisposition to drink being communicated to the next generation ? The answer is, There is such risk, and the risk is proportional to the degree in which the alcohol has become an indispensable