Dangers of Cradle Competition
Eugenics has been defined as "the study of agencies under social
control that may improve or impair the racial qualities of future
generations, either mentally or physically." While there is no
inherent conflict between Socialism and Eugenics, the latter is,
broadly, the antithesis of the former. In its propaganda, Socialism
emphasizes the evil effects of our industrial and economic system. It
insists upon the necessity of satisfying material needs, upon
sanitation, hygiene, and education to effect the transformation of
society. The Socialist insists that healthy humanity is impossible
without a radical improvement of the social—and therefore of the
economic and industrial—environment. The Eugenist points out that
heredity is the great determining factor in the lives of men and
women. Eugenics is the attempt to solve the problem from the
biological and evolutionary point of view. You may ring all the
changes possible on "Nurture" or environment, the Eugenist may say
to the Socialist, but comparatively little can be effected until you
control biological and hereditary elements of the problem. Eugenics
thus aims to seek out the root of our trouble, to study humanity as a
kinetic, dynamic, evolutionary organism, shifting and changing with
the successive generations, rising and falling, cleansing itself of
inherent defects, or under adverse and dysgenic influences, sinking
into degeneration and deterioration.
"Eugenics" was first defined by Sir Francis Galton in his "Human
Faculty" in 1884, and was subsequently developed into a science and
into an educational effort. Galton's ideal was the rational breeding
of human beings. The aim of Eugenics, as defined by its founder, is
to bring as many influences as can be reasonably employed, to cause
the useful classes of the community to contribute MORE than their
proportion to the next generation. Eugenics thus concerns itself with
all influences that improve the inborn qualities of a race; also with
those that develop them to the utmost advantage. It is, in short, the
attempt to bring reason and intelligence to bear upon HEREDITY. But
Galton, in spite of the immense value of this approach and his great
stimulation to criticism, was completely unable to formulate a
definite and practical working program. He hoped at length to
introduce Eugenics "into the national conscience like a new
religion....I see no impossibility in Eugenics becoming a religious
dogma among mankind, but its details must first be worked out
sedulously in the study. Over-zeal leading to hasty action, would do
harm by holding out expectations of a new golden age, which will
certainly be falsified and cause the science to be discredited. The
first and main point is to secure the general intellectual acceptance
of Eugenics as a hopeful and most important study. Then, let its
principles work into the heart of the nation, who will gradually give
practical effect to them in ways that we may not wholly foresee."[1]
Galton formulated a general law of inheritance which declared that an
individual receives one-half of his inheritance from his two parents,
one-fourth from his four grandparents, one-eighth from his great-grandparents, one-sixteenth from his great-great grandparents, and so
on by diminishing fractions to his primordial ancestors, the sum of
all these fractions added together contributing to the whole of the
inherited make-up. The trouble with this generalization, from the
modern Mendelian point of view, is that it fails to define what
"characters" one would get in the one-half that came from one's
parents, or the one-fourth from one's grandparents. The whole of our
inheritance is not composed of these indefinitely made up fractional
parts. We are interested rather in those more specific traits or
characters, mental or physical, which, in the Mendelian view, are
structural and functional units, making up a mosaic rather than a
blend. The laws of heredity are concerned with the precise behavior,
during a series of generations, of these specific unit characters.
This behavior, as the study of Genetics shows, may be determined in
lesser organisms by experiment. Once determined, they are subject to
prophecy.
The problem of human heredity is now seen to be infinitely more
complex than imagined by Galton and his followers, and the optimistic
hope of elevating Eugenics to the level of a religion is a futile one.
Most of the Eugenists, including Professor Karl Pearson and his
colleagues of the Eugenics Laboratory of the University of London and
of the biometric laboratory in University College, have retained the
age-old point of view of "Nature vs. Nurture" and have attempted to
show the predominating influence of Heredity AS OPPOSED TO
Environment. This may be true; but demonstrated and repeated in
investigation after investigation, it nevertheless remains fruitless
and unprofitable from the practical point of view.
We should not minimize the great outstanding service of Eugenics for
critical and diagnostic investigations. It demonstrates, not in terms
of glittering generalization but in statistical studies of
investigations reduced to measurement and number, that uncontrolled
fertility is universally correlated with disease, poverty,
overcrowding and the transmission of hereditable taints. Professor
Pearson and his associates show us that "if fertility be correlated
with anti-social hereditary characters, a population will inevitably
degenerate."
This degeneration has already begun. Eugenists demonstrate that two-thirds of our manhood of military age are physically too unfit to
shoulder a rifle; that the feeble-minded, the syphilitic, the
irresponsible and the defective breed unhindered; that women are
driven into factories and shops on day-shift and night-shift; that
children, frail carriers of the torch of life, are put to work at an
early age; that society at large is breeding an ever-increasing army
of under-sized, stunted and dehumanized slaves; that the vicious
circle of mental and physical defect, delinquency and beggary is
encouraged, by the unseeing and unthinking sentimentality of our age,
to populate asylum, hospital and prison.
All these things the Eugenists sees and points out with a courage
entirely admirable. But as a positive program of redemption, orthodox
Eugenics can offer nothing more "constructive" than a renewed
"cradle competition" between the "fit" and the "unfit." It sees
that the most responsible and most intelligent members of society are
the less fertile; that the feeble-minded are the more fertile. Herein
lies the unbalance, the great biological menace to the future of
civilization. Are we heading to biological destruction, toward the
gradual but certain attack upon the stocks of intelligence and racial
health by the sinister forces of the hordes of irresponsibility and
imbecility? This is not such a remote danger as the optimistic
Eugenist might suppose. The mating of the moron with a person of
sound stock may, as Dr. Tredgold points out, gradually disseminate
this trait far and wide until it undermines the vigor and efficiency
of an entire nation and an entire race. This is no idle fancy. We
must take it into account if we wish to escape the fate that has
befallen so many civilizations in the past.
"It is, indeed, more than likely that the presence of this impairment
in a mitigated form is responsible for no little of the defective
character, the diminution of mental and moral fiber at the present
day," states Dr. Tredgold.[2] Such populations, this distinguished
authority might have added, form the veritable "cultures" not only
for contagious physical diseases but for mental instability and
irresponsibility also. They are susceptible, exploitable, hysterical,
non-resistant to external suggestion. Devoid of stamina, such folk
become mere units in a mob. "The habit of crowd-making is daily
becoming a more serious menace to civilization," writes Everett Dean
Martin. "Our society is becoming a veritable babel of gibbering
crowds."[3] It would be only the incorrigible optimist who refused to
see the integral relation between this phenomenon and the
indiscriminate breeding by which we recruit our large populations.
The danger of recruiting our numbers from the most "fertile stocks"
is further emphasized when we recall that in a democracy like that of
the United States every man and woman is permitted a vote in the
government, and that it is the representatives of this grade of
intelligence who may destroy our liberties, and who may thus be the
most far-reaching peril to the future of civilization.
"It is a pathological worship of mere number," writes Alleyne
Ireland, "which has inspired all the efforts—the primary, the direct
election of Senators, the initiative, the recall and the referendum—
to cure the evils of mob rule by increasing the size of the mob and
extending its powers."[4]
Equality of political power has thus been bestowed upon the lowest
elements of our population. We must not be surprised, therefore, at
the spectacle of political scandal and graft, of the notorious and
universally ridiculed low level of intelligence and flagrant stupidity
exhibited by our legislative bodies. The Congressional Record mirrors
our political imbecility.
All of these dangers and menaces are acutely realized by the
Eugenists; it is to them that we are most indebted for the proof that
reckless spawning carries with it the seeds of destruction. But
whereas the Galtonians reveal themselves as unflinching in their
investigation and in their exhibition of fact and diagnoses of
symptoms, they do not on the other hand show much power in suggesting
practical and feasible remedies.
On its scientific side, Eugenics suggests the reestabilishment of the
balance between the fertility of the "fit" and the "unfit." The
birth-rate among the normal and healthier and finer stocks of
humanity, is to be increased by awakening among the "fit" the
realization of the dangers of a lessened birth-rate in proportion to
the reckless breeding among the "unfit." By education, by
persuasion, by appeals to racial ethics and religious motives, the
ardent Eugenist hopes to increase the fertility of the "fit."
Professor Pearson thinks that it is especially necessary to awaken the
hardiest stocks to this duty. These stocks, he says, are to be found
chiefly among the skilled artisan class, the intelligent working
class. Here is a fine combination of health and hardy vigor, of sound
body and sound mind.
Professor Pearson and his school of biometrics here ignore or at least
fail to record one of those significant "correlations" which form
the basis of his method. The publications of the Eugenics Laboratory
all tend to show that a high rate of fertility is correlated with
extreme poverty, recklessness, deficiency and delinquency; similarly,
that among the more intelligent, this rate of fertility decreases. But
the scientific Eugenists fail to recognize that this restraint of
fecundity is due to a deliberate foresight and is a conscious effort
to elevate standards of living for the family and the children of the
responsible—and possibly more selfish—sections of the community.
The appeal to enter again into competitive child-bearing, for the
benefit of the nation or the race, or any other abstraction, will fall
on deaf ears.
Pearson has done invaluable work in pointing out the fallacies and the
false conclusions of the ordinary statisticians. But when he attempts
to show by the methods of biometrics that not only the first child but
also the second, are especially liable to suffer from transmissible
pathological defects, such as insanity, criminality and tuberculosis,
he fails to recognize that this tendency is counterbalanced by the
high mortality rate among later children. If first and second
children reveal a greater percentage of heritable defect, it is
because the later born children are less liable to survive the
conditions produced by a large family.
In passing, we should here recognize the difficulties presented by the
idea of "fit" and "unfit." Who is to decide this question? The
grosser, the more obvious, the undeniably feeble-minded should,
indeed, not only be discouraged but prevented from propagating their
kind. But among the writings of the representative Eugenists one
cannot ignore the distinct middle-class bias that prevails. As that
penetrating critic, F. W. Stella Browne, has said in another
connection, "The Eugenics Education Society has among its numbers
many most open-minded and truly progressive individuals but the
official policy it has pursued for years has been inspired by class-bias and sex bias. The society laments with increasing vehemence the
multiplication of the less fortunate classes at a more rapid rate than
the possessors of leisure and opportunity. (I do not think it relevant
here to discuss whether the innate superiority of endowment in the
governing class really is so overwhelming as to justify the Eugenics
Education Society's peculiar use of the terms `fit' and `unfit'!) Yet
it has persistently refused to give any help toward extending the
knowledge of contraceptives to the exploited classes. Similarly,
though the Eugenics Review, the organ of the society, frequently
laments the `selfishness' of the refusal of maternity by healthy and
educated women of the professional classes, I have yet to learn that
it has made any official pronouncement on the English illegitimacy
laws or any organized effort toward defending the unmarried mother."
This peculiarly Victorian reticence may be inherited from the founder
of Eugenics. Galton declared that the "Bohemian" element in the
Anglo-Saxon race is destined to perish, and "the sooner it goes, the
happier for mankind." The trouble with any effort of trying to
divide humanity into the "fit" and the "unfit," is that we do not
want, as H. G. Wells recently pointed out,[5] to breed for uniformity
but for variety. "We want statesmen and poets and musicians and
philosophers and strong men and delicate men and brave men. The
qualities of one would be the weaknesses of the other." We want,
most of all, genius.
Proscription on Galtonian lines would tend to eliminate many of the
great geniuses of the world who were not only "Bohemian," but
actually and pathologically abnormal—men like Rousseau, Dostoevsky,
Chopin, Poe, Schumann, Nietzsche, Comte, Guy de Maupassant,—and how
many others? But such considerations should not lead us into error of
concluding that such men were geniuses merely because they were
pathological specimens, and that the only way to produce a genius is
to breed disease and defect. It only emphasizes the dangers of
external standards of "fit" and "unfit."
These limitations are more strikingly shown in the types of so-called
"eugenic" legislation passed or proposed by certain enthusiasts.
Regulation, compulsion and prohibitions affected and enacted by
political bodies are the surest methods of driving the whole problem
under-ground. As Havelock Ellis has pointed out, the absurdity and
even hopelessness of effecting Eugenic improvement by placing on the
statute books prohibitions of legal matrimony to certain classes of
people, reveal the weakness of those Eugenists who minimize or
undervalue the importance of environment as a determining factor.
They affirm that heredity is everything and environment nothing, yet
forget that it is precisely those who are most universally subject to
bad environment who procreate most copiously, most recklessly and most
disastrously. Such marriage laws are based for the most part on the
infantile assumption that procreation is absolutely dependent upon the
marriage ceremony, an assumption usually coupled with the
complementary one that the only purpose in marriage is procreation.
Yet it is a fact so obvious that it is hardly worth stating that the
most fertile classes who indulge in the most dysgenic type of
procreating—the feeble-minded—are almost totally unaffected by
marriage laws and marriage-ceremonies.
As for the sterilization of habitual criminals, not merely must we
know more of heredity and genetics in general, but also acquire more
certainty of the justice of our laws and the honesty of their
administration before we can make rulings of fitness or unfitness
merely upon the basis of a respect for law. On this point the eminent
William Bateson writes:[6] "Criminals are often feeble-minded, but as
regards those that are not, the fact that a man is for the purposes of
Society classified as a criminal, tells me little as to his value,
still less as to the possible value of his offspring. It is a fault
inherent in criminal jurisprudence, based on non-biological data, that
the law must needs take the nature of the offenses rather than that of
the offenders as the basis of classification. A change in the right
direction has begun, but the problem is difficult and progress will be
very slow....We all know of persons convicted, perhaps even
habitually, whom the world could ill spare. Therefore I hesitate to
proscribe the criminal. Proscription...is a weapon with a very nasty
recoil. Might not some with equal cogency proscribe army contractors
and their accomplices, the newspaper patriots? The crimes of the
prison population are petty offenses by comparison, and the
significance we attach to them is a survival of other days. Felonies
may be great events, locally, but they do not induce catastrophies.
The proclivities of the war-makers are infinitely more dangerous than
those of the aberrant beings whom from time to time the law may dub as
criminal. Consistent and potentous selfishness, combined with dulness
of imagination is probably just as transmissible as want of self-control, though destitute of the amiable qualities not rarely
associated with the genetic composition of persons of unstable mind."
In this connection, we should note another type of "respectable"
criminality noted by Havelock Ellis: "If those persons who raise the
cry of `race-suicide' in face of the decline of the birth-rate really
had the knowledge and the intelligence to realize the manifold evils
which they are invoking, they would deserve to be treated as
criminals."
Our debt to the science of Eugenics is great in that it directs our
attention to the biological nature of humanity. Yet there is too
great a tendency among the thinkers of this school, to restrict their
ideas of sex to its expression as a purely procreative function.
Compulsory legislation which would make the inevitably futile attempt
to prohibit one of the most beneficent and necessary of human
expressions, or regulate it into the channels of preconceived
philosophies, would reduce us to the unpleasant days predicted by
William Blake, when
"Priests in black gowns will be walking their rounds And binding
with briars our joys and desires."
Eugenics is chiefly valuable in its negative aspects. It is
"negative Eugenics" that has studied the histories of such families
as the Jukeses and the Kallikaks, that has pointed out the network of
imbecility and feeble-mindedness that has been sedulously spread
through all strata of society. On its so-called positive or
constructive side, it fails to awaken any permanent interest.
"Constructive" Eugenics aims to arouse the enthusiasm or the
interest of the people in the welfare of the world fifteen or twenty
generations in the future. On its negative side it shows us that we
are paying for and even submitting to the dictates of an ever
increasing, unceasingly spawning class of human beings who never
should have been born at all—that the wealth of individuals and of
states is being diverted from the development and the progress of
human expression and civilization.
While it is necessary to point out the importance of "heredity" as a
determining factor in human life, it is fatal to elevate it to the
position of an absolute. As with environment, the concept of heredity
derives its value and its meaning only in so far as it is embodied and
made concrete in generations of living organisms. Environment and
heredity are not antagonistic. Our problem is not that of "Nature
vs. Nurture," but rather of Nature x Nurture, of heredity multiplied
by environment, if we may express it thus. The Eugenist who overlooks
the importance of environment as a determining factor in human life,
is as short-sighted as the Socialist who neglects the biological
nature of man. We cannot disentangle these two forces, except in
theory. To the child in the womb, said Samuel Butler, the mother is
"environment." She is, of course, likewise "heredity." The age-old discussion of "Nature vs. Nurture" has been threshed out time
after time, usually fruitlessly, because of a failure to recognize the
indivisibility of these biological factors. The opposition or
antagonism between them is an artificial and academic one, having no
basis in the living organism.
The great principle of Birth Control offers the means whereby the
individual may adapt himself to and even control the forces of
environment and heredity. Entirely apart from its Malthusian aspect
or that of the population question, Birth Control must be recognized,
as the Neo-Malthusians pointed out long ago, not "merely as the key
of the social position," and the only possible and practical method
of human generation, but as the very pivot of civilization. Birth
Control which has been criticized as negative and destructive, is
really the greatest and most truly eugenic method, and its adoption as
part of the program of Eugenics would immediately give a concrete and
realistic power to that science. As a matter of fact, Birth Control
has been accepted by the most clear thinking and far seeing of the
Eugenists themselves as the most constructive and necessary of the
means to racial health.[7]
