OCR Rendition - approximate

72 Slum life and the other evil influences of civilisation, including bad and insufficient food, vitiated air, and zymotic diseases, injure the individual. They make him acquire a bad set of traits. But they do not injure the hereditary tendencies of the race. Had they done so civilisation would have been impossible. Civilised man would have become extinct. On the contrary, by weeding out the unfittest, they make the race strong against those influences. If, then, we wish to raise the standard of our race, we must do it in two ways. In the first place we must improve the conditions under which the individual develops, and so make him a finer animal. In the second place, we must endeavour to restrict, as much as possible, the marriage of the physically and mentally unfit. In other words, we must attend both to the acquired characters and to inborn characters. By merely improving the conditions under which people live we shall improve the individual, but not the race. The same measures will not achieve both objects. Medical men have done a good deal for the improvement of the acquired characters of the individual by improving sanitation. They have attempted nothing towards the second object, the improvement of the inborn traits of the race. Nor will they attempt anything until they have acquired a precise knowledge of heredity from biologists. On the other hand, before biologists are able to influence medical men they must bring to bear their exact methods of thought on the great changes produced in various races by their experience, during thousands of years, of disease. I am sure our knowledge of heredity will gain in precision and breadth by a consideration of these tremendous, long - continued, and drastic experiments conducted by nature. No experiments conducted by man can compare with them in magnitude and completeness. And as I have already intimated, the precise statistical information on which our conclusions may be based is already collected and tabulated. I am quite sure it is good neither for medicine nor biology that medical men and biologists should live as it were in separate and closed compartments, each body ignoring the splendid mass of data collected by the other. Much of medicine should be a part of biology, and much of biology a part of medicine. FROM Ma. J. M. ROBERTSON. s. A difficulty at once arises on the proposition that "The aim of Eugenics is that each class or sect should be represented by its best specimens." What does this mean ? Apparently (judging from the context), that the average of each recognisable type should be raised, that those who are now " best" should be the standard for the future averages. If that be the idea, the formula had better run simply: "The aim of Eugenics is to promote such calculation or choice in marriage as shall maximise the number of efficient individuals." There will always be some "best," and it is a contradiction in terms to say that they "repre sent their class." 73 2. It seems, again, an oversight to make a multiplication of "large and thriving families" the ostensible ideal. If all families were "large," they certainly could not all be "thriving." A great increase of population would make thriving a harder matter : the struggle would be intensified on new lines. Further, "thriving" is often a matter of the possession of unsocial or anti-social qualities -unscrupulousness and acquisitiveness-and a vulgar idea of achievement. Given a family of morally and intellectually superior types, all contented with simple conditions, and averse to commercial struggle, are they to be classed as ill-born, or failures ? If, finally, it should be shown that a common condition of thriving for large or other families is the possession of capital for a start in business, we are brought to no conclusion in Eugenics, but set asking for one in terms of politics. 3. It is indeed highly important to set up such common standards as shall preclude replication of morbid stocks, including in these those seen to tend to insanity, dumbness, suicide, dipsomania, erotism, violence, etc. Mr. Galton's past work has done much to bring the importance of heredity home to thinking people. But there is a danger of seeming to ask too much. For one thing, we must not overlook the fact that mere high physical stamina is not necessarily, or even very probably, a condition of high brain power. Merely " delicate " people, therefore, are not to be warned off marriage. Many great men (e.g., Newton and Voltaire) were extremely fragile in infancy. Some (e.g., Calvin, Pope, Spencer, Heine, Stevenson) were chronic invalids. For another thing, though it seems clear that high capacity in one parent is often neutralised by the lack of it in the other, it is vain to think to eliminate the factor of love or instinctive preference in marriage. 4. It seems impossible, finally, to separate Eugenics from Politics, inasmuch as the bad physical and moral conditions set up by poverty-i.e., illfeeding, ill-housing, ill-clothing,and earlyprolificacyon the one hand, and ignorance in child-rearing and begetting on the other-are the great forces of "Kakogenics." Mr. Gallon says "There is strong reason for believing that the rise and decline of nations is closely connected with" the rate of reproduction in the "upper" or other classes. I respectfully suggest that an effect is here put for a cause. The true causation of the rise and decline of nations, surely, is proximately a general economic process, depending primarily on physical environment (that is, natural resources) and secondarily on political direction, which is conditioned by political environment. That is to say, Rome did not rise through the fecundity or fall through the infecundity of her ruling or other classes. In the early period they were normally fecund. In the period of empire they appear to have become infecund, as a result of the bad relation to life set up by their imperialistic economics. But mere fecundity on their part would not have made that economics healthy, or rectified their relation to life. Saracen society has often presented fecund aristocracies, without any arrest of social decline. The depopulation of imperial Italy and of post-Alexandrian Greece, on the other hand, was not a physiological but an economic process. 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