OCR Rendition - approximate

6o Spencer to coin those two most unfortunate terms, Evolution and the Survival of the Fittest. The implication is that the best reproduces and survives. Now really it is the better that survives, and not the best. The real fact of the case is that in the all-round result the inferior usually perish, and the average of the species rises, but not that any exceptionally favourable variations get together and reproduce. I believe that now and always the conscious selection of the best for reproduction will be impossible, that to propose it is to display a fundamental misunderstanding of what individuality implies. The way of Nature has always been to slay the hindmost, and there is still no other way, unless we can prevent those who would become the hindmost being born. It is in the sterilisation of failures, and not in the selection of successes for breeding, that the possibility of an improvement of the human stock lies. MRS. DR. DRYSDALE VICKERY SAID The speech which has interested me most is that of Dr. Hutchison. Lnpo[tant as is the quality of hereditary stock, yet at the present juncture I would say that of still greater importance is this-that we have such a vast number of our population growing up under bad conditions. The result is an artificial, a merely economic multiplication of inferior stocks. The question I wish to raise is this : Are we producing in this country, and in all civilised countries, a greater proportion of new individuals than can be favourably absorbed? In a country like Russia, the surplus of births over deaths amounts to two millions in the year; in Germany, the surplus is a million; in Britain, not quite half a million. Can we in an old state of society absorb that amount of new individuals and give them fair conditions of existence ? I think not. Dr. Warner spoke of the importance of our teaching of girls. I hold very strongly that the question of heredity, as we study it at present, is very much a question of masculine heredity only, and that heredity in its feminine aspects is very much left out of account. Mr. Galton told us that a certain number of burgesses' names had absolutely disappeared, but what about the names of their wives, and how would that consideration affect his conclusions ? In the future the question of population will, I hope, be considered very much from the feminine point of view, and if we wish to produce a well-developed race we must treat our womenkind a little better than we do at present. We must give them something more like the natural position which they should hold in society. Women's specialised powers must be utilised for the intellectual advancement of the race. MR. BENJAMIN KIDD SAID It is, I am sure, a peculiar satisfaction to have from Mr. Galton this important and interesting paper. No man of science in England has done more to encourage the study of human faculty by exact methods, and I hope the ITS DEFINITION, SCOPE AND AIMS 6r Sociological Society will endeavour to follow the example he has set us. The only item of criticism I would offer, would be to say that we must not, perhaps, be sanguine in expecting too much at present from Eugenics founded on statistical and actuarial methods in the study of Society. We must have a real science of Society before the science of Eugenics can hope to gain authority. The point of Mr. Galton's Paper is, I think, that however we may differ as to other standards, we are, at all events, all agreed as to what constitutes the fittest and most perfect individual. I am not quite convinced of this. Much obscurity at present exists in sociological studies from confusing two entirely different things, namely, individual efficiency and social efficiency. Mr. Galton's fable of the animals will help me to make my meaning clear. It will be observed that he has considered the animals as individuals. If, however, we took a social type like the social insects, a contradiction, which I think possibly underlies his example, might be visible. For instance, it is well known that all the qualities of the bees are devoted to attaining the highest possible efficiency of their societies. Yet these qualities are by no means the qualities which we would consider as contributing to a perfect individual. If the bees at some earlier stage of evolution understood Eugenics, as we now understand the subject, what peculiar condemnation, for instance, would they have visited on the queen bee, who devotes her life solely to breeding. I am afraid, too, that the interesting habits of the drones would have received special condemnation from the unctuous rectitude of the time. What would have been thought even of the workers as perfect individuals with their undeveloped bodies and aborted instincts? And yet all these things have contributed in a high degree to social efficiency, and have undoubtedly made the type a winning one in evolution. The example will apply to human society. Statistical and actuarial methods alone in the study of individual faculty often carry us to very incomplete conclusions, if not corrected by larger and more scientific conceptions of the social good. I remember our chairman, in his earlier social essays, once depicted an ideally perfect state of society. I have a distinct recollection of my own sense of relief that my birth had occurred in the earlier ages of comparative barbarism. For Mr. Pearson, I think, proposed to give the kind of people who now scribble on our railway carriages no more than a short shrift and the nearest lamp-post. I hope we shall not seriously carry this spirit into Eugenics. It might renew, in the name of science, tyrannies that it took long ages of social evolution to emerge from. Judging from what one sometimes reads, many of our ardent reformers would often be willing to put us into lethal chambers if our minds and bodies did not conform to certain standards. We are apt to forget in these matters that that sense of responsibility to life which distinguishes the higher societies is itself an asset painfully acquired by the race, a social asset of such importance that the more immediate gain aimed at would count by the side of it as no more than dust in the balance. Our methods of knowledge are as yet admittedly very imperfect. Mr. Galton himself, I remember, as the result of his earlier researches into human faculty, put the intellectual calibre of what are called the lower races EUGENICS CIibPDF - www.fastio.com