OCR Rendition - approximate

82 it is precisely the most intelligent and conscientious parents of our time who think so much of the happiness of the coming generation that they will not improvidently bring children into the world. They would hotly resent Mr. Roosevelt's implication that unwillingness to have large families is a kind of race treason. The real traitors to race are those who would degrade and weaken it by so diminishing the opportunities of a swarming population that discontent and a fiercer struggle for existence will bring the bestial qualities uppermost. What has been called the "apologetic attitude" of the modem father in the presence of his child goes well with the more serious weighing of the responsibilities of parenthood. It is really a wholesome, not an alarming, thing if people are thinking with deeper intentness about the desirable restrictions on marriage and about the laws of health and happiness as related to the bearing and rearing of children. To give one well-born and correctly brought-up son to the commonwealth is to serve it better than by burdening it with a half-dozen ill-conditioned boys. What the ultimate destiny of the human race may be we do not know ; but the duty which lies next at hand for this generation is to study and disseminate the laws of heredity, and to so act upon the knowledge of them, with a due regard to the environment in which children are to be placed, that the level of health, intelligence, and morality shall be at least a little raised. DR. C. W. SALEEBY (in THE WORLD'S WORK of December, 19o4), writing under the title, "EUGENICS: THE NEW SCIENTIFIC PATRIOT ISM' said Like his immortal first cousin, Charles Darwin, Mr. Francis Galton "does not advertise." The public therefore knows this octogenarian leader of science only as the student of finger-prints. It is not aware of the great advances in biology which we owe to Mr. Galtori s application of mathematics to that science, founding the new study called biometry ; it is hardly aware of his great work on the inheritance of genius ; nor is it acquainted with "Galton's law" in heredity. Lately, however, Mr. Galton did advertise, in a sense. That is to say, the University of London is seeking applicants for the post of Francis Galton Research Scholar in National Eugenics. Mr. Galton has given £1,500 for this purpose by way of a beginning. Now, what is all this about? Many years ago Mr. Galton invented the word stirpiculture, which many of us have heard, but latterly he has substituted for it the word eugenics-good reproduction. His argument is that (I) heredity is a fact; (2) some people are fitter than others to be the parents of posterit ; (3) education can only repress or develop hereditary potentialities ; (4) well to begin at the beginning. As ever one knows, Mr. Galton's illustrious kinsman propounded the theory which usually goes by Herbert Spencer's phrase, the survival o f the fittest, to account for the evolution of higher from lower living things. We recognise that, on the whole, "natural selection "-to use Darwin s own term-is a beneficent process. The fittest are the happiest ; the unfit mercifully die out, leaving no progeny, or but few. Thus-other factors PRESS COMMENTS 83 doubtless aiding-has been so far accomplished what Tennyson called the making of man. This process, I have no doubt, is still tending slowly to elevate the average of our race-but how slowly l Now Mr. Galton steps in with some such argument as this: Here is a great beneficent principle which has been at work, by land and sea, in the animal and the vegetable world, for tens of hundreds of millions of years. It is indisputably one of the laws of that "Power, not ourselves, which makes for righteousness." By its agency there has been developed, in its latest product-Man-an intelligence to which its working has been revealed. Is it not, then, the duty of the human intelligence, having discovered this law, to utilise, aid and abet it? Eugenics, then, is the science which deals with the conditions by which the human race may be physically, mentally and morally improved. But the reader need not fancy that Mr. Galton's eighty years in any way interfere with his active prosecution and development of his own idea. He has lately sent to every member of the Royal Society a request for. precise and specified information as to mental achievement on the part of relatives ; and the result is to prove that talented families do indisputably exist whose brains are a precious asset to humanity, and whose stock is beyond price. Mr. Galton himself, of course, is a case in point. He is first cousin to Charles Darwin, whose grandfather was the famous Erasmus Darwin, poet and physician, one of the forerunners of the doctrine of organic evolution. In Charles Darwin's veins flowed some of the blood of Josiah Wedgwood. Three of Darwin's sons are now Fellows of the Royal Society, and one of them is the President-Elect of the British Association. It is plain that any circumstances interfering with the marriage of Erasmus Darwin's father would have robbed the world of much which the bankers cannot estimate. Generally speaking, then, the facts of heredity are facts, despite the hopelessly inaccurate popular conception of them-a conception derived in the main from the novels of Zola. It is true, that, according to the Galtonian law of "regression towards mediocrity," the children of the genius, whilst above the average, tend to descend to it, whilst the children of the criminal, though morally inferior, are yet not quite as black sheep as their parents. But still it is well worth society's while that the genius and the saint, the athlete and the artist, should provide posterity, rather than the idiot, the criminal, the weakling, and the Philistine. If now the reader asks how this consummation so devoutly to be wished may' be reached without any loss or injury to those institutions which society has evolved through much effort, and which are not carelessly to be let go, Mr. Galton will answer him. First, I am sure-and I may note that this article is written entirely on my own responsibility-Mr. Galton would observe that, having only lately discerned a goal, he can hardly be expected already to have paved a smooth highway thereto. If there were nothing more to learn, Mr. Galton would not be spending his money in the high and generous fashion lately noticed. But this is not to say that he has no ideas on the subject. Already, unless I am much mistaken, he has the cardinal idea, and it is this : Sneer at it as you or I may, in the last analysis it is public opinion that determines the doings of human society. A serious magazine is entitled to call itself an engine of progress, precisely because of its influence on the factor which determines all progress. What, then, if Eugenics, as Mr. Galton suggests, were incorporated-as who can doubt it will be-in EUGENICS CIibPDF - www.fastio.com