CHAPTER XI

NEGATIVE EUGENICS

N'abandonnons pas l'avenir de notre race à la fatalité d'Allah; créons-le nous-mêmes.--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 anyone 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 civilised 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 everyone to the last moment.... Thus the weak members of civilised 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.

Hitherto we have mainly concerned ourselves with broad aspects of theory, endeavouring to prove that conscious race-culture is a necessity for any civilisation 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 essential: we find intolerable the idea of the human stud-farm; we are very dubious as to the help of surgery; 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 are 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 parenthood of the unworthy. Positive eugenics is the original eugenics, but, as the writer endeavoured to show at the time, negative eugenics is one with it in principle. The two are complementary, and are both practised by Nature: natural selection is one with natural 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 people who have no love of children: we have to consider 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 desirable members of the community, especially of the more prudent sort.

For instance, it was recently pointed out by a correspondent of the _Morning Post_ that in Great Britain, despite the alarm caused by the decreasing marriage-rate, no one has protested against--

“... the tax which the propertied middle classes have to pay on marriage.... To take a few instances. Two persons 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 contend, a man and his wife should be counted as two people, not one, should not children also be counted in any scheme of graduated taxation, and an income be divided by the number of persons 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 have fewer children than the wage-earners, and I think there can be no doubt that the special burthens 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 accomplish most at this stage, and in so doing can steadily educate public opinion, the professional jesters notwithstanding. 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 utterly 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,[45] “In every institution examples may be found of deaf-mute children who have one or two deaf parents or grand-parents, 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 conclusion 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 institutes for the deaf during the period of adolescence, is eminently fitted to encourage union between the congenitally 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 meeting 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 William Earnshaw, 59, a St. Pancras saddler, it was stated that the relatives 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--her fate otherwise is often too deplorable for definition--and the interests of the future be not compromised. These 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[46] 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 liberty and self-development possible for them. The interests 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 modern 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 proportion 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 incarceration 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 environment we might welcome the children of some of those, highly and perhaps uniquely gifted in brain, who, under the stress of the ordinary environment of modern life, have broken down for shorter or longer periods. On the other hand, there are forms of insanity which, beyond all dispute, should utterly preclude their victims from parenthood. As a result of recent controversies it seems on the whole probable, if not certain, that the apparent persistent increase in the proportion of the insane in civilised countries generally during 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 proportion of the insane, who will question that no time should be lost in ascertaining the extent--undoubtedly 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 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 remains the vast majority of cases in which epilepsy and epileptic insanity are unquestionably germinal in origin, 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 tell us that the idea of crime is a purely conventional one, that the criminal is the product of circumstances 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.

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 cannot 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, practised or imaginable, would eliminate. Present-day psychology and medicine, 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 insufficient, 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 reformatory, the labour colony, indeterminate sentences, and such other methods as aim, successfully or unsuccessfully, 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. Heredity 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 criminal environment. In Great Britain we are no longer to manufacture criminals in hundreds by sending children to prison. It remains to be seen, after the practical disappearance of the made criminal, what proportion of crime is really due to the born criminal. He, when found, must certainly be dealt with on the lines indicated by our principles.[47]

=Other cases.=--So far we have considered exclusively diseases and disorders of the brain, the question of alcoholism being deferred to a special chapter. When we come to other forms of defect or disease we find a long gradation 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 eugenist is bound to lay down the most emphatic propositions, 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 colour-blindness, and hæmophilia or the “bleeding disease,” are certainly hereditary. The sufferers are usually male, but the disease is commonly transmitted by their daughters (who do not themselves suffer) to their male descendants. As regards colour-blindness, the defect is evidently insufficient to concern the eugenist, but hæmophilia is a serious disease, the transmission of which should not be excused. It may seem hard to assert that the daughter of a hæmophilic father should not become a mother, she herself being free from all disease. But it has to be remembered that the possibility of this hardship depends upon the fact that a hæmophilic 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 generally 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 regarded 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 observation and reasoning. Many quotations might be made to show that the infectious nature of tuberculosis was recognised long ago, just as the revolution of the earth round the sun was recognised a millennium and a half before Copernicus. But the view of our more immediate fathers was that tuberculosis is a hereditary degeneration, and the medical profession proclaimed with no uncertain sound the hopeless and paralysing doctrine that an almost certain doom hung over the children of the consumptive. Then, in memorable succession, came Villemin, Pasteur, and lastly Koch, with his discovery of the bacillus in 1882. The doctrine 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 harbours a tubercle bacillus; so all-but-miraculous and, rightly considered, beautiful are the ante-natal defences. It was taught, then, that we inherit a predisposition from consumptive parents, that the bacillus is ubiquitous, and that variations in susceptibility determine the incidence 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 susceptibility were hereditary; but we are wholly without evidence 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 soil. Furthermore, we are learning that the bacillus is nothing like so ubiquitous as used to be supposed. 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 evident for many years past that the more we learnt about tuberculosis the less did we talk about heredity; and in one of the most recent authoritative pronouncements[48] upon the subject, the lecturer did not even allude to heredity at all. Many readers will be up in arms at once with apparently contrary instances; and much labour 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 father kissed the child? What have you proved regarding heredity? No mathematics can get more out of the data than is in them.

The statistics designed to measure the degree of inheritance in this disease labour under the cardinal fallacy of assuming that where father and son suffer, the case is one of inheritance, and then proceed to measure the average extent of this inheritance. These statistics 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, discussions as to the inheritance of consumption and tuberculosis 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 environmental causes upon which the disease mainly depends. 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 disease will then present merely trivial instead of the present appalling proportions.

It is not asserted that inherent variations in susceptibility 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 attach 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 dogmas 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 studying 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 measure of the power of the white cells of the blood to eat up tubercle bacilli.[49] 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 favour of emphasising the hereditary factor in tuberculosis. The fact will at least not discredit the foregoing views, which are in absolute accord with those of Dr. Newsholme, our leading authority, in his recent work upon the subject.

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 hereditary, 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-mindedness, insanity, and crime due to inherited degeneracy, be suppressed: and if race-culture were absolutely incapable 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 legislation; 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 rigour of the law and regarded as utterly criminal no less than sheer murder.

In the next chapter, recognising marriage as the human mode of selection, we must consider it in its relation to eugenics, both positive and negative.