Chapter XIII: The Racial Poisons: Alcohol55 (1)

In the first chapter of our second Part, which deals with the practice of eugenics, there were introduced, defined, and briefly illustrated, the terms _positive eugenics_ and _negative eugenics_. Of these the latter, as the more urgent and the more completely and immediately practicable, claims our special attention; though the present writer, notwithstanding that he has devoted to it the greater part of his eugenic work, is bound to protest that the positive increase of ability and worth is never to be regarded as of secondary importance. The two methods are, of course, complementary in practice, as they are one in principle--to select is to reject, to choose is to refuse. The preceding chapter, on selection (and rejection) through marriage, has dealt with the conditions under which both aims are to be pursued. In the following pages we must discuss a specially urgent and practicable and indisputable portion of negative eugenic practice: none the less urgent because of the contemporary emergence and future world-importance of sober nations, such as Japan and Turkey. The term _racial poisons_, introduced by the present writer in the year 1907, is self-explanatory. After dealing with the most important of these poisons, we shall proceed, in the next chapter, to discuss some others. The racial poisons constitute a special department of eugenics which has not hitherto been considered by the pioneers of this subject, but for which I press the claim of the utmost gravity and moment, and which I conceive to be certainly a part, and a most important part, of our manifold yet single subject.

* * * * *

The argument of this chapter is that parenthood must be forbidden to the dipsomaniac, the chronic inebriate or the drunkard, whether male or female; and this whether Lamarck or Galton and Weismann be right, or whether, as we may believe with Galton and Weismann themselves, the controversy between the two parties is wholly irrelevant to the question in hand. This conclusion, that on no grounds whatever, theoretical or practical, can we continue to permit parenthood on the part of the drunkard, is one temperance reform, perhaps the only one, on which disagreement is absolutely impossible. It is, further, the most radical that can be named within the sphere of practical politics, and it is conspicuously practicable. It has hitherto been lamentably neglected by workers and reformers of all schools. Indeed, at the time of writing, the London County Council, governing the greatest city in the world, is pursuing a course of action in this regard, which will be detailed later, and which, as will appear, is misguided and deplorable in the last degree.

=Alcohol and heredity.=--According to Dr. Archdall Reid, “alcohol, year after year, eliminates from the race a great number of people so constituted that intoxication affords them keen delight, leaving the perpetuation of the race in great measure to those on whom intoxication confers little or no delight.... Now since alcohol weeds out enormous numbers of people of a particular type, it is a stringent agent of selection--an agent of selection more stringent than any one disease.” The factor that really makes the drunkard “is certainly inborn, and therefore as certainly transmissible to offspring. The man who has it is cursed with the ‘alcohol diathesis,’ with the ‘predisposition to drunkenness.’ Thus most savages are keenly capable of enjoying drink, and their offspring inherit the capacity.” Féré has shown that “it is one of the characteristics of the degenerate that they are prone to have recourse to the poisons, like alcohol and morphia, which hasten their decadence and elimination.” Thus, as Dr. W. C. Sullivan points out, alcohol “might certainly be adjudged a salutary evil if its incidence were limited to individuals whose extreme inferiority of organisation renders them wholly undesirable and useless to the community. _But this is very far from being the case._”[56]

The whole crux of the question lies in this last sentence. Alcohol certainly destroys many degenerate stocks, and that is good, though it would be better to do what we shall do some day--hasten and ameliorate the process by forbidding parenthood to the degenerate. _But does alcohol also make degenerates; does it even make more degenerates than it destroys?_ A somewhat similar difficulty arises in the case of infant mortality. The causes of infant mortality destroy many children inherently unfit, diseased or weakly. But we are not justified in keeping up our infant mortality, if we find, as we do, that for every diseased child whom they destroy they kill many who were healthy at birth and damage for life many more.

A man is born sober--in most cases, but not always,[57] as we shall see--and any changes produced in his body by alcohol are “acquired.” Therefore, rejecting Lamarck, are we to reject the doctrine that the effects produced by alcohol on parents are transmitted to offspring?

The controversy between Lamarck and Weismann has _absolutely nothing to do with the question_. Let us consider what would be a case of Lamarckian transmission in the sense which the modern student of heredity denies. The birth of a child with a scar on its scalp, to a father who had acquired a similar scar before the child was conceived, would be such a case: and this does not happen. Or suppose that instead of a scar on the scalp the father has an inflammatory change, not so dissimilar to a scar, produced by alcohol in the membranes covering his brain. Then it would be a case of Lamarckian transmission if the membranes of his baby's brain were similarly affected; and this does not happen. Such is the kind of transmission of which exhaustive experiment and observation fail to find a conclusive instance anywhere.

But what has such a supposition to do with the theory, as definitely supported by observation and experiment as the other is not, that if a man saturates his body with alcohol carried by his blood, he injures all the tissues which are nourished by that blood, including the racial elements of his body with the rest: and therefore that his child may be degenerate?

What says Weismann himself? In _The Germ-Plasm_, p. 386, under the heading “The influence of temporary abnormal conditions of the parents on the child,” he writes as follows:--

“Although I do not consider that the cases which come under the
above heading have anything to do with heredity, I should not like to
leave them entirely on one side.

“It has often been supposed that drunkenness of the parents at the
time of conception may have a harmful effect on the nature of the
offspring. The child is said to be born in a weak bodily and mental
condition, and inclined to idiocy, or even to madness, etc., although
the parents may be quite normal both physically and mentally.

“Cases certainly exist in which drunken parents have given rise to
a completely normal child, although this is not a convincing proof
against the above-named view; and in spite of the fact that most, or
perhaps even all, the statements with regard to the injurious effects
on the offspring will not bear a very close criticism,[58] I am
unwilling to entirely deny the _possibility_ that a harmful influence
may be exerted in such cases. These, however, have nothing to do with
heredity, but are concerned with an _affection of the germ by means
of an external influence_.”

Weismann goes on to quote cases showing how germ-cells may be injured by various agents, and continues:--

“It does not appear to me impossible that an intermixture of alcohol
with the blood of the parents may produce similar effects on the ovum
and sperm cell. According to the relative quantity of alcohol either
an exciting or a depressing influence might be exerted, either of
which would lead to abnormal development....

“_New_ predispositions can certainly never arise owing to such
deviations from the normal course of development, and therefore
a modification of the process of heredity itself is out of the
question. It is, however, conceivable that more or less considerable
abnormalities may affect the course of development, and either
cause the death of the embryo, or else produce more or less marked
deformities. The question as to whether such deformities really
result in consequence of the drunken condition of the parents can
only be decided by observation.”[59]

This is all that Weismann has to say on the subject, since, not referring to functionally-produced modifications,[60] it does not concern his theory of heredity at all: yet it is upon this theory that the most palpable facts of the racial influence of alcohol are denied. Weismann's own remarks are quite open to criticism, as, for instance, where he denies that new predispositions can arise in the manner indicated. This is possibly only a question of words, and Weismann is perhaps merely denying that alcohol can produce progressive variations. Also his remarkably brief discussion of the subject seems to concern itself mainly with the influence of alcohol on the germ-cells _just before their union_. He has not a word to say regarding the influence on the germinal tissues of years of soaking in alcohol. It suffices, however, to make the point which is quite clearly made, that the Weismannians are going absurdly beyond their book in denying what, indeed, the book of Nature demonstrates.

Let us turn now to the experimental side of this question. An American botanist, Dr. T. D. MacDougal, read an address on “Heredity and Environic Forces” at the Chicago Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1907. His experiments require confirmation, but may be provisionally accepted. He has permanently modified the germ-plasm of plants under the influence of various chemicals. There is here a vast field for experiment with alcohol. I quote one paragraph indicating the remarkable results of these experiments. The reader will see their bearing on our present question, and will also see that they do not for a moment affect Weismann's denial of the doctrine that by cutting off rats' tails you can produce a race of tailless rats, or that by learning a language you can save your future children the trouble of doing so for themselves:--

“It was found that the injection of various solutions into ovaries
of Raimannia was followed by the production of seeds bearing
qualities not exhibited by the parent, wholly irreversible, and fully
transmissible in successive generations. One of the seeds produced
by a plant of _Œnothera biennis_ which had been treated with zinc
sulphate differed so widely from the parental form that it could be
distinguished from it by a novice. This new form has been tested to
the third generation, and transmits all its characteristics fully.”

=Alcohol a proved racial poison.=--But the reader will rightly desire some kind of experimental proof that alcohol itself can act as a cause of racial degeneration. We may first refer to the chapter on alcoholism and human degeneration in Dr. W. C. Sullivan's _Alcoholism, a Chapter in Social Pathology_,[61] for a recent _résumé_ of the subject. Without actually quoting Weismann, Dr. Sullivan begins by showing that, as we have seen, the doctrinal objection of Dr. Reid and others to the theory of alcoholic degeneration is quite irrelevant--“the effects attributed to parental alcoholism are not in the category of transmitted acquirements at all; they are the results, expressed in defect and deviation of development, of a deleterious influence exerted on the germ-cells, either directly through the alcohol circulating in the blood, or indirectly, through the deterioration of the parental organism in which these cells are lodged, and from which they draw their nutriment.” Later Dr. Sullivan points out that the racial effects of alcoholism in man are similar to those obtained by experimental intoxication in the lower animals. Combemale, for instance, found that pups begotten of a healthy bitch by an alcoholised dog were congenitally feeble and showed a marked degree of asymmetry of the brain. Recent experiments have shown the same thing as regards other poisons, and it is especially to be noted that in the experiments cited the mother was healthy. They prove that _paternal_ alcoholism alone (all questions of the nourishment of the growing child before birth, for instance, thus being excluded) can determine degeneration. Mr. Galton[62] himself long ago quoted the case “of a man who, after begetting several normal children, became a drunkard and had imbecile offspring”; and another case has been recorded “of a healthy woman who, when married to a drunken husband, had five sickly children, dying in infancy, but in subsequent union with a healthy man, bore normal and vigorous children.”

Other intoxications show similar results though they are not _yet_ of grave racial importance. For instance, “a man who had had two healthy children acquired the cocaine habit, and while suffering from the symptoms of chronic poisoning engendered two idiots.” Brouardel and others have observed that the expectant mother who is a morphinomaniac may give birth to a child who shows all the phenomena of the morphia habit.

Demme has traced the appalling contrast between the offspring in ten sober families, and in ten families where one or both parents suffered from chronic alcoholism. Dr. Sullivan himself, realising the obviously greater importance of maternal alcoholism, since here we have the action of poisoned food--the maternal blood--upon the child before birth, made an enquiry of his own. He found that

“... of 600 children born of 120 drunken mothers 335 (55.8 per cent.)
died in infancy or were still-born, and that several of the survivors
were mentally defective, and as many as 4.1 per cent. were epileptic.
Many of these women had female relatives, sisters or daughters,
of sober habits and married to sober husbands; on comparing the
death-rate amongst the children of the sober mothers with that
amongst the children of the drunken women of the same stock, the
former was found to be 23.9 per cent., the latter 55.2 per cent., or
nearly two and a half times as much. It was further observed that in
the drunken families there was a progressive rise in the death-rate
from the earlier to the later born children.”

Dr. Sullivan cites as a typical alcoholic family one in which “the first three children were healthy, the fourth was of defective intelligence, the fifth was an epileptic idiot, the sixth was dead-born, and finally the productive career ended with an abortion.” Dr. Claye Shaw told the Interdepartmental Committee on Physical Deterioration, “we have inebriate mothers, and either abortions or degenerate children. The teleological[63] relationship between the two seems to be as certain as any other conditions of cause and effect.” The general rule is that any narcotic substance affects highly developed tissues sooner and more markedly than simpler tissues, and so it is in the case of alcohol and the infant. It is the developing nervous system that is most markedly affected. This leads, of course, to an increased child mortality, especially by way of convulsions. This was the cause of sixty per cent. of all the deaths that occurred amongst the six hundred children in Dr. Sullivan's series. But it has especially to be remembered that a large number of children whose nervous systems are injured for life by parental and more especially by maternal alcoholism do not die either as infants or children. Instead of dying of convulsions they live as epileptics. Of the children in Dr. Sullivan's series “219 lived beyond infancy, and of these 9, or 4.1 per cent., became epileptic, as compared with 0.1 per cent. of the whole population.” Other observers have found epilepsy in 12 per cent. and even 15 per cent. of the children of alcoholic parents. Of course these data, as such, do not demonstrate Dr. Sullivan's conclusion that “this action of alcoholism on the health and vitality of the stock is the most serious of the evils that intemperance brings on the community.”

Dr. Sullivan's enquiries show a very high rate of still-births and abortions amongst the children of drunken mothers--quite sufficient to prove that “the detrimental effect of maternal alcoholism must be in a large measure due to a direct influence on the germ-cells and on the developing embryo, and cannot be explained as merely a result of the neglect and malnutrition from which the children of a drunken mother are naturally apt to suffer.” The point is of some theoretical importance. Practically it matters little; _in either case the drunken woman must not become a mother_.

The same conclusion is reached even though we accord unlimited weight to the unquestionably valid argument that the drunkard is himself or herself usually degenerate from the first, and that the children are therefore degenerate, and would indeed be degenerate even if the parents had taken no alcohol. Let us, then, erroneously enough, but for the sake of the argument, assume that solely and always alcoholism is a symptom of degeneracy. It is, then, an indication of unfitness for parenthood no less, and the practical issue is the same: one radical cure for alcoholism, at any rate, is the prohibition of parenthood on the part of the alcoholic.[64]

=The most recent evidence.=--The most thorough and comprehensive enquiry into this matter yet made is also the most recent. We owe it to Dr. W. A. Potts, of the University of Birmingham, who did valuable work as Medical Investigator to the Royal Commission on the Care and Control of the Feeble-minded. His paper, entitled “The Relation of Alcohol to Feeble-mindedness,” is printed in the _British Journal of Inebriety_ for January, 1909, together with communications from many authorities. It is quite impossible to summarise here the enormous mass of evidence which Dr. Potts has accumulated from the literature of the subject, and to which he has added his own work. I believe that nothing could be more moderate and assured than the following conclusions, to which he commits himself after a study of the subject the quality and range of which can only be appreciated at first hand:--

“... the evidence is not clear that alcoholism, by itself, in
the father will produce amentia; but it is quite plain that in
combination with other bad factors it is a most unfavourable element,
while maternal drinking, and drinking continued through more than one
generation, are potent influences in mental degeneracy.”

It is impossible, within the scope of the present volume, to analyse in detail the Report of the Royal Commission on the Care and Control of the Feeble-minded. In this present outline of eugenics it is our business, however, to show main principles, and as the principle expressed in the phrase “racial poisons” is to my mind absolutely cardinal for eugenics, it is necessary here to comment, as I have already done in the _Journal_ above quoted, upon the following most unfortunate deliverance of the Commissioners: “That both on the grounds of fact and of theory, there is the highest degree of probability that feeble-mindedness is usually spontaneous in origin--that is, not due to influences acting on the parent....”

The word spontaneous has, of course, no meaning for science, or rather is a denial of the fundamental axiom of science that causation is universal. What the Commissioners mean when they say spontaneous is “sportaneous,” like the occasional production of a nectarine by a peach tree. Apart from this highly suspicious phraseology, there is the still more unfortunate fact that the Commissioners have lent their authority to the view that feeble-mindedness is not due to influences acting on the parent. The modern student of syphilis will be astonished at this pronouncement, and also the student of lead-poisoning, as we shall see in the following chapter.

Every reader of Dr. Potts's admirable paper will realise that this conclusion of the Commissioners--“not due to influences acting on the parent”--is directly opposed to an extraordinary mass of evidence and to the opinion of, I suppose, every authority on the subject, British, Continental or American. The Commissioners' reference to “theory,” coupled with portions of the evidence given before them by witnesses who suppose that the alleged influence of alcohol as a cause of feeble-mindedness controverts the doctrine of the non-transmission of “acquired characters,” makes it necessary to point out for the hundredth time that, for lack of analysis and criticism of terms, the most prominent followers of Galton and Weismann persistently misunderstand their masters' teaching. The modern doctrine of the individual as the trustee of the germ-cells and of the non-transmission of acquired characters is Mr. Galton's. Mr. Galton himself does not question and never has questioned the possibility that alcohol may cause feeble-mindedness. There is no reason why he should. If we take the somewhat unusual course of consulting the words of the masters before we swear by them, we find--as has been shown--that Weismann, who subsequently stated and has so greatly supported Mr. Galton's view, has expressly repudiated the Commissioners' idea of his “theory.” The Galton-Weismann doctrine is a doctrine of heredity proper,--the organic relation of living generations. It does not assert that there are two unconnected universes--the one made of germ-plasm and the other of the rest of nature. The “grounds of theory,” or rather, our elementary physiological knowledge of the nutrition of the germ-plasm by the blood of its host, are in reality precisely the grounds which would lead us to expect those consequences of parental alcoholism which in fact we find.

=Alcoholism as a symptom of degeneracy.=--We have seen that alcohol may be a cause of degeneracy: we now have to recognize the converse relation. For an authoritative and radical discussion of the problem, the reader may be referred to the second Norman Kerr Memorial Lecture, delivered by Dr. Welsh Branthwaite, H.M. Inspector under the Inebriates' Act, in 1907.[65] He speaks as “the only man in close touch with all inebriates under legal detention in England.” He reaches most important conclusions which are generally accepted, as the discussion shows. He says, “the more I see of habitual drunkards, the more I am convinced that the real condition we have to study, the trouble we have to fight, and the source of all the mischief, is ... defect[66] in mental mechanism, generally congenital, sometimes more or less acquired.... In the absence of alcohol, the same persons, instead of meriting the term inebriate would have proved unreliable in many ways; they would have been called ne'er-do-weels, profligates, persons of lax morality, excitably or abnormally passionate individuals, persons of melancholic tendency or eccentric.... It seems to me exceedingly doubtful whether habitual inebriety ... is ever really acquired in the strictest sense of the word--_i.e._ in the absence of some measure of pre-existing defect.” Having studied 2,277 inebriates, committed under the Inebriates Acts, up to December 31st, 1906, Dr. Branthwaite _finds 62.6 per cent. of these mentally defective_. The remainder he regards as of average mental capacity, using, however, an exceedingly low standard of what that capacity is. He concludes that in a large majority of police-court cases, “mental disease was the condition for which they were repeatedly imprisoned--mental disease merely masked by alcoholic indulgence.... The majority of our insane inebriates have become alcoholic because of their tendency to insanity.... Certain peculiarities in cranial conformation, general physique, and conduct, have long been recognised as evidences of congenital defect. Nearly all the 1,375 cases included in the two defective sections of our table have given evidence of possessing some of these characteristic peculiarities, and _it is morally certain that the large majority of them started life handicapped by imperfect brain development_.”[67] The lecture is accompanied with many photographs clearly showing the physical marks of congenital defect, and Dr. Branthwaite remarks that “even the untrained eye should meet with no difficulty in recognising ‘something wrong’ with all of them.”

Of the proportion of mentally defective inebriates (62.6 per cent. of the whole) mentioned by Dr. Branthwaite, _all_ are “practically hopeless from a reformation standpoint.” This is a sufficient comment, if any were needed, upon repeated imprisonment for habitual drunkenness--which, as Dr. Branthwaite says, “is indefensible and inhumane.” He adds in closing that, in his judgment, habitual drunkenness, so far as women are concerned, has materially increased, during the last twenty-five years, “which I have spent entirely amongst drunkards and drunkenness.” The unfortunate people whom he studies “_are not in the least affected by orthodox temperance efforts; they continue to propagate drunkenness, and thereby nullify the good results of temperance energy. Their children, born of defective parents, and educated by their surroundings, grow up without a chance of decent life, and constitute the reserve from which the strength of our present army of habituals is maintained. Truly we have neglected in the past, and are still neglecting, the main source of drunkard supply--the drunkard himself; cripple that, and we should soon see some good result from our work._”

A foremost authority, Dr. F. W. Mott, F.R.S., has independently reached the same conclusion as Dr. Branthwaite--that the chronic inebriate comes as a rule of an inherently tainted stock. (Dr. Mott, however, reminds us that “if alcohol is a weed killer, preventing the perpetuation of poor types, it is probably even more effective as a weed producer.”) Professor David Ferrier, F.R.S., the great pioneer of brain localisation, in reference to these people, speaks of “the risk of propagation of a race of drunkards and imbeciles.” Dr. J. C. Dunlop, H.M. Inspector under the Inebriates Act, Scotland, states that his experience leads him to precisely the same conclusion as that of Dr. Branthwaite. Dr. A. R. Urquhart, an asylum authority, affirms that chronic inebriety “is largely an affair of heredity ... is a symptom of mental defect, disorder, or disease.” Dr. Fleck, another authority, says: “It is my strong conviction that a large percentage of our mentally defective children, including idiots, imbeciles and epileptics, are the descendants of drunkards.” Mr. McAdam Eccles, the distinguished surgeon, agrees; so does Dr. Langdon Down, Physician to the National Association for the Welfare of the Feeble-minded; so does Mr. Thomas Holmes, the Secretary of the Howard Association, who remarks that “our habitual criminals, equally with our mental inebriates, are not responsible beings, but victims of mental disease.” Finally Miss Kirby, Secretary of the National Association for the Feeble-minded, insists upon the obvious conclusion that these people must be detained permanently. She says, “When one case of a dissolute feeble-minded woman in America is quoted as the mother of nine feeble-minded children, we see the cause why inebriate homes, and also reformatories, penitentiaries, and workhouses are full to overflowing, and society taxed beyond bearing to keep them there. _Such institutions outnumber homes for the feeble-minded._”[68] Speaking of the 62.6 per cent. noted by Dr. Branthwaite, she says, “Would it not have been the more logical course to have dealt with them in earlier years?” Now what would that have accomplished? _It would have saved the future._

=The inebriate as parent.=--Is it a mere supposition that these women become mothers? Amongst those committed as criminal inebriates (under the London County Council) in 1905-6, three hundred and sixty-five of those admitted to reformatories had two thousand two hundred children. These are the official figures. As to the quality of these children there is unfortunately no possibility of question.

We may quote from Dr. Sullivan a notable enquiry:--

“Even more striking results with regard to the several forms of
degeneracy were obtained by Legrain, who investigated the question
from a somewhat different point of view. Selecting from the material
at his disposal all those cases in which ancestral intemperance had
appeared to exercise a causal influence, and working out their family
history, he collected 215 observations of heredo-alcoholism referring
to one generation, 98 referring to two generations, and 7 referring
to three generations. Of the children of the first generation, 508
in number, 196 were mentally degenerate, the affection of the brain
being shown more particularly by moral and emotional abnormality,
while intellectual defects were less pronounced; 106 were insane, 52
were epileptic, 16 suffered from hystero-epilepsy, and 3 from chorea;
and 39 had convulsions in infancy. Amongst the children of the second
generation, who numbered 294, the intellectual defects were more
marked, idiocy, imbecility, or debility, being noted in the offspring
of 54 out of the 98 families investigated. In 23 out of the 33
families in which the children of the second generation had reached
adult age, one or more of them were insane. Epilepsy was found in
40 families, infantile convulsions in 42, and meningitis in 14.
The third generation in 7 families was represented by 17 children,
all of whom were weak-minded, imbecile, or idiotic; 2 suffered,
moreover, from moral insanity, 2 from hysteria, and 2 from epilepsy;
3 were scrofulous, and 4 had convulsions in childhood. In the three
generations taken together there were, in addition to the children
referred to above, 174 infants who were dead-born or died shortly
after birth.”

Therefore, the chronic inebriate must not become a parent. Let it be said that these people are wicked or have no self-control, drink for fun or love of degradation, then become drunkards, and prejudicially affect their children. The conclusion is the same. Have any theory of heredity you please--Lamarckianism, Darwin's pangenesis, Weismannism, Mendelism; it matters not a straw. Look at the thing from the uncharitable religious point of view, or from the charitable scientific view which realizes, in the case of these women, that to know all is to pardon all--the conclusion is still the same.

=The present scandal of London's inebriates.=--This, then, being so, abundance of official evidence having been gathered in addition to all the unofficial evidence, let us consider the shameful facts which are in process as I write, and are still so, on revision of these pages a year later. They are outlined in the reply of Mr. Herbert Gladstone, the Home Secretary, to a question in the House of Commons. The reply is printed in full in _The Times_, Feb. 19th, 1908. There was a paltry squabble between the Government and the London County Council as to the exact number of shillings that each was to contribute per week for the maintenance of inebriates. The London County Council was plainly in the wrong, its ignorance being sufficiently indicated by the letter to _The Times_, which I will quote. The result of the squabble is that, as Mr. G. R. Sims said, “We shall have something like five hundred women, all habitual drunkards, passing in and out of the prisons, a peril to publicans, a pest to the police, an evil example to the women with whom they mix, and free to bring children into the world, their little lives poisoned at the source.” We have therefore reverted to the shameful, brutal, and disastrous system sufficiently indicated by the history of Jane Cakebread, at whom, when one was a schoolboy as ignorant as those who now govern us, one used to laugh because she had been convicted so many hundreds of times.[69] As the present writer said in raising the matter at a meeting of the Eugenics Education Society, the future children of these women are not only doomed by the very nature of their germ-plasm, but they will actually be many times intoxicated not merely in their cradles but before their birth. There is no wealth but life, and this future wealth of England is to be fed on poisoned food and many times made drunken before it sees the light. The meeting of the Society passed a unanimous resolution--“That this society enters a protest against the present administration of the Inebriates Act, whereby through the closing of inebriate homes some hundreds of chronic inebriate women will be set adrift in London, with an inevitably deteriorating result to the race.”[70]

For this particular scandal the London County Council was the more to blame. Let not the reader suppose that a Liberal Government, however, was likely to remedy the immoderate ignorance of a “Moderate” County Council on this matter. Mr. Gladstone's reply in Parliament was an exceptionally long one, but it did not contain a syllable to suggest that any question of the future is involved, or that a woman may become a mother. Further, the Licensing Bill introduced just when we were drawing public attention to this scandal contained nowhere any hint of the principle that you must attack drunkenness by attacking “the main source of drunkard supply--the drunkard himself.” These, the reader will remember, are the words of His Majesty's Inspector. There is no question of party-feeling, then, the reader will understand, in what has here been said. Whether labelled Liberal, Conservative, Progressive or Moderate, ignorance is still ignorance, and when in action is still what Goethe called it, the most dangerous thing in the world.

Pure ignorance, of course, is one of the things against which the advocate of race-culture must fight. The lack of imagination, however, is another. At present we have few homes for the feeble-minded, and many for what the feeble-minded become: few for prevention, which is possible and cheap, many for cure, which is impossible and dear. The average county councillor or politician, of course, is rather more short-sighted than the average man, simply because you cannot be far-sighted and a partisan. What his defect of vision requires is impossible, but it would be effective. It is that the consequences of unworthy parenthood should be immediate, instead of taking months or years to develop. Any one, even a politician, can see cause and effect when they are close enough together. It is the little interval that the political eye cannot pierce. Nevertheless, we shall one day learn to think of the next generation, and then there will be an end of the politician who thinks only of the next election.

=Ignorance on its defence.=--The state of what has no excuse for being uninformed opinion was only too well illustrated in a letter from the Chairman of the Public Control Committee of the London County Council which appeared in _The Times_ for Feb. 27th, 1908. In defending the London County Council the writer used the following words: “Reformation, not mere detention, was its object when it instituted its reformatory under the Inebriates Acts.... The case of the Public Control Committee is that the removal and detention of the hopeless habituals is a matter for the police.” The explanation aggravates the offence. In the face of reiterated expert opinion, which has no dissentient, as to the practical impossibility of reformation--you cannot _re_form what has never been formed, viz., a normally developed brain--here we find a man in this responsible position, a man who has the power to put his ignorance into action, telling us that the London County Council aims at the impossible in this respect; whilst, in utter defiance of the future and of the useless brutality of the police-court method, he tells us that these “hopeless habituals” are a matter for the police. Then, by way of making the thing complete, he speaks of “mere detention.” What he calls “mere detention” is everything, for it saves the future by preventing parenthood on the part of members of the community who, more certainly than any others that can be named, are unworthy of it. The adjective “mere” is only too adequate a measure of the state of opinion which, by such retrograde courses as that under discussion, promises to destroy the British people ere long--and therefore, of course, the Empire of which that people is the living and necessary foundation.

It may be noted in passing that the word “reformatory,” employed in the Inebriates Act of 1898, is a highly unfortunate one. It suggests a practically impossible hope, and it ignores what, I submit, must and will ere long be regarded as the essential purpose, function and value of the detention of inebriates--the prohibition of parenthood on their part. In the case of women beyond the child-bearing age, the whole case is radically altered. If it amuses the legislature to cherish fantastic hopes, let it speak about the reformation of these women. If it prefers the futile and disgusting cruelty of the Jane Cakebread method for such women, when the plan for reformation is found to fail, that is no affair of ours in the present volume. Such women have been in effect sterilised by natural processes, and the advocate of race-culture can afford to ignore them, for they do not concern him. Let me note, however, that, of 294 female inebriates admitted to reformatories in the year 1906, 170 were under forty years of age, 92, of whom a considerable proportion would be possible mothers, were between forty and fifty, and only 32 of the total were over fifty years of age.[71] It may be said that the lives of these unhappy women tend to be terminated early. The only pity is that our present blindness and ignorance in dealing with them are not neutralised, so far as the future is concerned, by death at much earlier ages. If such a reflection strikes the reader as cruel, how much more cruel are those who are responsible for the present case of the women inebriates of London?

The _Pall Mall Gazette_, on March 4th, 1908, gave the utmost prominence to an article of mine on this subject, entitled “An Urgent Public Scandal, The Case of London's Inebriates.” In this article I quoted _The Times_ letter referred to above, and levelled the most vigorous indictment I could against the authors of the outrage under discussion. None of them ventured to reply. In the _Referee_ for March 8th, 1908, however, a member of the Public Control Committee of the London County Council made an attempt to defend its action. The curious reader may refer to that letter as one more instance of that absolute blindness to the nature of the problem and to any question of the future which had already been indicated in _The Times_ letter from the Chairman of the Committee. Taking these two letters together, we may say that never has a public outrage committed by men in authority been more lamely or ignorantly defended.

=Ignorance in action--the present facts.=--Since the beginning of January, 1908, the brutal course decreed by the London County Council has been pursued. The wretched and deeply-to-be-pitied women have been and are being discharged at the rate of some twenty to twenty-five per month as their terms expire. The wiser sort of magistrates and the police-court missionaries are at their wits' ends, and no wonder. This country offers these women at the moment no refuge whatever; nothing but the degrading and destructive round--police-court, prison, public-house, pavement; _da capo_. Writing to _The Times_ in relation to the correspondence there published (April 18th, 1908) between the London County Council and the Eugenics Education Society, Sir Alfred Reynolds, Chairman of the State Inebriate Reformatory Visiting Board and a Visiting Justice of Holloway Prison, said (April 21st, 1908):--

“The correspondence published in _The Times_ of April 18, between the
London County Council and the President of the Eugenics Education
Society convinces me more than ever that the dispute between the
London County Council and the Treasury is a scandal and folly of the
worst description. For the sake of 6d. per case per day, the London
County Council (the same body which receives half a million sterling
from the sale of intoxicating liquor) has made it impossible for
the metropolitan magistrates to carry out the Act of 1898, and the
result is that 500 of the worst female inebriates are alternately on
the streets or in prison again, and the former scenes of horror and
drunken violence reappear. Holloway Prison will soon fill up again,
and all the good which has been done during the last few years will
be lost.... I will not trouble you further, except by emphasising
what I have said by adding that since January last year 1,500 women
have been notified to Scotland Yard as always in and out of prison
from the County of London, are qualified for inebriate homes, and
at the present moment there are over 50 of this number in Holloway
Prison serving absolutely useless short terms of imprisonment.”

=The London County Council performs a service for philosophy.=--As we have seen, there exists or seems to exist a radical antagonism in certain groups of cases between the interests of the individual and the interests of the race. You may preserve the quality of the race, as the Spartans did, by exposing defective infants; you may be kind to feeble-minded children, as we are, but you will injure the race in the long run. Darwin saw this more than a generation ago, but instead of suggesting the prohibition of parenthood to the unfit, he said that we must bear the ill effects of their multiplication rather than sacrifice the law of love. Huxley similarly said that moral evolution consisted in opposing natural evolution. Now it has for some time been evident that this antagonism need not be radical if, whilst devoting hospitals and charity and medical science to the care of the unfit, we deny them the privilege of parenthood. On the other hand, the London County Council by its present action has performed a service to biological philosophy by showing that _it is possible to combine the maximum of brutality to the individual and to the present with the maximum of injury to the race and to the future_. In his report for 1906 Dr. Branthwaite cites the history of a girl who, at the age of fifteen years and nine months, was convicted in 1881 for being drunk and disorderly. During the next quarter of a century she was sentenced 115 times, and in January, 1906, was sent to a reformatory. She has twice attempted to commit suicide. Her case is, of course, now hopeless, and Dr. Branthwaite predicts that her life will end by suicide. Let any one read Dr. Branthwaite's Report or Dr. Robert Jones's account of Jane Cakebread, or let him acquaint himself with instances as they are to be daily seen, and he will agree that the maximum of brutality is no excessive phrase to describe the policy of shame at present pursued in London: if, indeed, seeing that we now have knowledge, it should not be described as something still worse.

As for the injury to the future, we already know what the present policy effects. We may grant, then, to the London County Council that it has performed a service for philosophy in showing that it is possible to combine both kinds of evil in one harmonious policy. Nor let the reader suppose that any partisan feeling infects this protest. The Government is also to blame. Even had the L.C.C. declined to contribute anything at all to the cost of the proper policy, no really educated and honourable Government had any choice but to undertake all the cost itself--even at the cost of office! Better were--in Mr. Balfour's words, the wisest he ever uttered--“the barren exchange of one set of tyrants, or jobbers, for another,” than the horrible birth of thousands of feeble-minded babies.

=The argument from economy.=--It would be easy to show that the present policy is not economical even as regards the cost of these women themselves, and even if it be assumed that gold is wealth. But consider the remoter cost. During the period when the present writer was making public protests very nearly every day on this matter without any immediate effect, and only one month after the London County Council had attempted to defend itself on the ground of economy when challenged by the Eugenics Education Society, there was formally opened, with a flourish of trumpets, the eighty-seventh school for feeble-minded children established by the London County Council. It accommodates sixty such children (besides sixty physically defective). This school cost £6,000 to build alone. The sixty feeble-minded children whom it accommodates are not a very large proportion of the 7,000 admittedly feeble-minded school children in London--a number which is probably not more than a third or a fourth of the real number. It has been exhaustively proved that feeble-minded children are mainly, at any given time, the progeny of feeble-minded persons such as constitute the majority of chronic inebriates. Ignorance is again in action. On the one hand, the London County Council, quarrelling over pence, effectively suspends the working of the Inebriates Acts, and thus ensures that the supply of feeble-minded children shall be kept up. On the other hand, it takes these children, cares for them until they are capable of becoming parents, and then turns them upon the world. The Chairman at the opening ceremony of the school referred to said that “at the special schools work was being done which would advance the intelligence of the pupils, and thus benefit the entire race.” It would be difficult to concentrate more ignorance in fewer words or in ten times as many.

=A Home Office Committee appointed.=--The almost continuous protest of two months did, however, bear fruit, the Home Secretary appointing a Committee to consider the question of the amendment of the Inebriates Acts. But the legal brutalities described are still being perpetrated, and the future is being compromised. The London County Council may be advised to make arrangements for building a few score more schools for defective children in anticipation of the growing need which it is assuring.

Never again, when it is past, must we permit the present abominable policy. It is for public opinion to effect this, and public opinion has only to be directed to the case in order to realise its nature. If the reader pleases he may discount altogether the eugenic argument, though I believe that in the long run that is more important than any other. But if he confines his attention solely to the cruelties perpetrated upon these helpless women, infinitely more sinned against than sinning, and especially if he considers the testimony of Sir Alfred Reynolds above quoted, he will surely lend his aid to put an end to a state of affairs which is a disgrace to our civilisation. We talk of progress, and we are indeed incalculably indebted to our ancestors, but let any one consider the case of the poor child, now a wrecked woman, quoted above, and let him consider what it may be to be an heir of all the ages in the greatest city of the world to-day.

It will be sufficiently evident that if any warrant were needed for the formation of the Eugenics Education Society or for the publication of the present volume, it would be found only too abundantly in the outrage upon decency and morality and science and the future which is at present in perpetration. Further, if any warrant were required for the incessant reiteration of the principle that there is no wealth but life, it would be found in the fact that this outrage is being committed in the name of economy. Yet even if the sane and sober London ratepayer were saved a few shillings now, as he will not be, his children will have to pay pounds in the future for the support of these women's children. Economy, forsooth, when the rates of London benefited to the extent of £559,000 out of the sale of intoxicating liquors in 1905, and spent £8,000 in the maintenance of committed inebriates! Need one apologise for declaring again, that we require a new political economy which teaches that gold is for the purchase of life, and not life for the purchase of gold. For the public outrage under discussion, whereby an untold measure of life, present and to come, “breathing and to be,” is to be destroyed and defiled for a squabble over shillings, one can adequately quote only the words of Romeo to the apothecary: “There is thy gold; worse poison to men's souls, doing more murders in this loathsome world, than those poor compounds that thou may'st not sell.”

=The last touches of art.=--If this protest hurts any one's feelings, that cannot be helped. When the production of thousands of feeble-minded children is involved, the self-esteem of what Mr. George Meredith calls the “accepted imbecile” does not matter. The question is, How soon do we propose to rectify our present course in this respect?--a course which is a shame and a disgrace to our age and nation, and which shall in any case be placed on record in printed words, as well as in young children stamped with degeneracy--in order to point for future ages the question “_An nescis, mi fili, quantilla prudentia regitur orbis?_” “With how little wisdom”--and, whilst perpetrating this shame, ignoring the _one_ indisputable means by which legislation can and must check drunkenness, nearly all other measures having failed since Babylon was an Empire, they were quarrelling about a temperance measure, so-called, which regarded the question of transference of money from one pocket to another as vital, and ignored the one vital question, which is the question of life: a measure showing scarcely a sign, either in its text or in the words of its supporters or in the words of its opponents, that the question of the future race had ever entered into the head of a public man; a measure which left the protection of children from the public-house to the discretion of local magistrates; a measure which certainly, whatever else it might effect, could not have been more carefully drawn if its object were to promote that secret drinking amongst women[72] which means the poisoning of the racial life even before it sees the light. This, then, “_mi fili_,” was what was called practical statesmanship in the year 1908 of the Christian Era: and in order that no last touch might be wanted from the hand of ignorance and the blasphemous idolatry which worships gold to the neglect of the only true god, which is life, they announced just at this time the issue of a Royal Commission to enquire and report upon the manufacture and variations in the composition of whiskey. It has been a public joke for years past that no one can answer the question, “What is whiskey?” Well, then, I will answer the question, and we may save the labour of such commissions hereafter. Whiskey is a _racial poison_, and there is nothing else to know about it worth knowing _for the future_. Those who will never become, or can no longer become, fathers or mothers, may do as they please about whiskey, so far as the ideal of eugenics or race-culture is concerned. They may say, if they like, that their personal habits are their affair and concern no one else. Under the influence of whiskey they may, perhaps, even believe this. But for those who are to be the fathers and mothers of the future, such a plea is idle. The question is not solely their affair; it is the affair of the unborn, and we who champion the unborn are bound to say so.

The time will come when it is recognised that there are two classes of active mind in society: those who worship and uphold the past, and will always sacrifice the living to the dead, nay more, the unborn to the dead. The ultimate fate of these is the fate of her who looked backwards to the shame and destruction from which she had escaped. She was turned into a pillar of salt. And there are those who worship and work for the future, who will, without hesitation, sacrifice the interests of the dead (who are no longer interested) to those of the living and the coming race--nay, more, who will even sacrifice the interests of a few worthless living to those of many yet unborn, _that they may be worthy_. Let the dead bury their dead; let the worshippers of the dead and the dying ask themselves whether the life that is and the life that is to be do not demand their homage and service. Not until some such principles as these are recognised shall we rightly deal with the drink problem, amongst many others, and bring to it the mental and moral enlightenment which makes for life on the higher plane, just as surely and just as indispensably as the light of the sun creates all life whatsoever.