Chapter XVII: The Promise of Race-Culture

“The best is yet to be.”

In its form of what we have called _negative_ eugenics, the practice of our principle would assuredly reduce to an incalculable extent the amount of human defect, mental and physical, which each generation now exhibits. This alone, as has been said, would be far more than sufficient to justify us. A world without hereditary disease of mind and body, and its grave social consequences, would alone warrant the hint of Ruskin that posterity may some day look back upon us with “incredulous disdain.” Yet, assuming that this could be accomplished, as it will be accomplished, what more is to be hoped for? Must race-culture cease merely when it has raised the average of the community by reducing to a minimum the proportion of those who are thus grossly defective in mind or body? Such disease apart, are we to be content, must we be content, with the present level of mediocrity in respect of intelligence and temper and moral sentiment? Can we anticipate a London in which the present ratio of musical comedy to great opera will be reversed, in which the works of Mr. George Meredith will sell in hundreds of thousands, whilst some of our popular novelists will have to find other means of earning a living? Can we make for a critical democracy which no political party can fool, and which will choose its best to govern it? Yet more, can we undertake, now or hereafter, to provide every generation with its own Shakespeare and Beethoven and Tintoretto and Newton? What, in a word, is the promise of _positive_ eugenics? It is to this aspect of the question that Mr. Galton has mainly directed himself. Indeed he was led to formulate the principles and ideals of the new science by his study of hereditary genius some four decades ago. Let us now attempt to answer some of these questions.

=The production of genius.=--And first as to the production of genius. It is this, perhaps, that has been the main butt of the jesters who pass for philosophers with some of us to-day. It may be said at once that neither Mr. Galton nor any other responsible person has ever asserted that we can produce genius at will. The difficulties in the way of such a project--at present--are almost innumerable. One or two may be cited.

In the first place, there is the cardinal--but by no means universal--difficulty that the genius is too commonly so occupied with the development and expansion of his own individuality that he has little time or energy for the purposes of the race. This, of course, is an example of Spencer's great generalisation as to the antagonism or inverse ratio between individuation and genesis.

Again, there is the generalisation of heredity formulated by Mr. Galton, and named by him the _law of regression towards mediocrity_. It asserts that the children of those who are above or below the mean of a race, tend to return towards that mean. The children of the born criminal will be probably somewhat less criminal in tendency than he, though more criminal than the average citizen. The children of the man of genius, if he has any, will probably be nearer mediocrity than he, though on the average possessing greater talent than the average citizen. It is thus not in the nature of sheer genius to reproduce on its own level. It is only the critics who are wholly ignorant of the elementary facts of heredity that attribute to the eugenist an expectation of which no one knows the absurdity so well as he does.

On the other hand, it is impossible to question that the hereditary transmission of genius or great talent does occur. One may cite at random such cases as that of the Bach family, Thomas and Matthew Arnold, James and John Stuart Mill: and the reader who is inclined to believe that there is no law or likelihood in this matter, must certainly make himself acquainted with Mr. Galton's _Hereditary Genius_, and with such a paper as that which he printed in _Sociological Papers_, 1904, furnishing an “index to achievements of near kinsfolk of some of the Fellows of the Royal Society.” There is, of course, the obvious fallacy involved in the possibility that not heredity but environment was really responsible for many of these cases. It must have been a great thing to have such a father as James Mill. But it would be equally idle to imagine that the evidence can be dismissed with this criticism. A Matthew Arnold, a John Stuart Mill, could not be manufactured out of any chance material by an ideal education continued for a thousand years.

=The transmission of genius.=--One single instance of the transmission of genius or great talent in a family may be cited. We shall take the family which produced Charles Darwin, the discoverer of the fundamental principle of eugenics, and his first cousin, Francis Galton. Darwin's grandfather was Erasmus Darwin, physician, poet and philosopher, and independent expounder of the doctrine of organic evolution. Darwin's father was a distinguished physician, described by his son as “the wisest man I ever knew.” Darwin's maternal grandfather was Josiah Wedgwood, the famous founder of the pottery works. Amongst his first cousins is Mr. Francis Galton. He has five living sons, each a man of great distinction, including Mr. Francis Darwin and Sir George Darwin, both of them original thinkers, honoured by the presidency of the British Association. No one will put such a case as this down to pure chance or to the influence of environment alone. This is evidently, like many others, a greatly distinguished stock. The worth of such families to a nation is wholly beyond any one's powers of estimation. What if Erasmus Darwin had never married!

No student of human heredity can doubt that, however limited our immediate hopes, facts such as those alluded to furnish promise of great things for the future. But let us turn now from genius to what we usually call talent.

=The production of talent.=--There can be no question that amongst the promises of race-culture is the possibility of breeding such things as talent and the mental energy upon which talent so largely depends. In his _Inquiries into Human Faculty_, Mr. Galton shows the remarkable extent to which energy or the capacity for labour underlies intellectual achievement. He says, of energy--

“It is consistent with all the robust virtues, and makes a large
practice of them possible. It is the measure of fulness of life; the
more energy the more abundance of it; no energy at all is death;
idiots are feeble and listless. In the enquiries I made on the
antecedents of men of science no points came out more strongly than
that the leaders of scientific thought were generally gifted with
remarkable energy, and that they had inherited the gift of it from
their parents and grandparents. I have since found the same to be
the case in other careers.... It may be objected that if the race
were too healthy and energetic there would be insufficient call
for the exercise of the pitying and self-denying virtues, and the
character of men would grow harder in consequence. But it does not
seem reasonable to preserve sickly breeds for the sole purpose of
tending them, as the breed of foxes is preserved solely for sport
and its attendant advantages. There is little fear that misery will
ever cease from the land, or that the compassionate will fail to
find objects for their compassion; but at present the supply vastly
exceeds the demand: the land is over-stocked and over-burdened with
the listless and the incapable. In any scheme of eugenics, energy is
the most important quality to favour; it is, as we have seen, the
basis of living action, and it is eminently transmissible by descent.”

Need it be pointed out that any political system which ceases to favour or actively disfavours energy, making it as profitable to be lazy as to be active, is anti-eugenic, and must inevitably lead to disaster? That, however, by the way. Our present point is that eugenics can reasonably promise, when its principles are recognised, to multiply the human[84] and diminish the vegetable type in the community. In so doing, it will greatly further the production of talent, and therefore of that traditional or acquired progress which men of talent and genius create. Such a result will also further, though indirectly, the production of genius itself. For, as Mr. Galton points out, “men of an order of ability which is now very rare, would become more frequent, because the level out of which they rose would itself have risen.”

This is by no means the only fashion in which an effective and practicable race-culture would serve genius, and I shall not be blamed for considering this matter further by any reader who realises, however faintly, what the man of genius is worth to the world. If it were shown possible to establish such social conditions that genius could never flower in them, we should realise that their establishment would mean the putting of an end to progress and the blasting of all the highest hopes of the highest of all ages.

The immediate need of this age, as of all ages, is perhaps not so much the birth of babies capable of developing into men and women of genius, as the full exploitation of the possibilities of genius with which, as I fancy, every generation on the average is about as well endowed as any other. There is, of course, the popular doctrine that there are no mute inglorious Miltons, that “genius will out,” and that therefore if it does not appear, it is not there to appear. In expressing the compelling power of genius in many cases, this doctrine is not without truth. Yet history abounds in instances where genius has been destroyed by environment--and we can only guess how many more instances there are of which history has no record. To take the single case of musical genius, it is a lamentable thought that there may be those now living whose natural endowments, in a favourable environment, would have enabled them to write symphonies fit to place beside Beethoven's, but whom some environmental factors--conventional, economic, educational, or what not--have silenced; or worse, have persuaded to write such sterile nullities as need not here be instanced. There is surely no waste in all this wasteful world so lamentable as this waste of genius.

If, then, anyone could devise for us a means by which the genius, potentially existing at any time, were realised, he would have performed in effect a service equivalent to that of which eugenics repudiates the present possibility--the actual creation of genius. But if we consider what the conditions are which cause the waste of genius, we realise at once that they mainly inhere in the level of the human environment of the priceless potentiality in question. As we noted elsewhere, in an age like that of Pericles genius springs up on all hands. It is encouraged and welcomed because the average level of the human environment in which it finds itself is so high. But if eugenics can raise the average level of intelligence, in so doing not merely does it render more likely, as Mr. Galton points out, the production of men of the highest ability, but it provides those conditions in which men of genius, now swamped, can swim. We could not undertake to produce a Shakespeare, but we might reasonably hope to produce a generation which would not damage or destroy its Shakespeares. And even if men of genius still found it necessary, as men of genius have found it necessary, to “play to the gallery,” they would play, as Mr. Galton says of the demagogue in a eugenic age, “to a more sensible gallery than at present.”

Darwin somewhere points out that it is not the scientific, but the unscientific man who denies future possibilities. Thus though an advocate of eugenics may be applauded for his judgment if he declares that the creation of genius will for ever be impossible, yet I should not care to assert that the ultimate limitations of eugenics can thus be defined. We have yet to hear the last of Mendelism.

=Eugenics and unemployment.=--Let us look now at another aspect of the promise of race-culture. When the time comes that quality rather than quantity is the ideal of those who concern themselves with the population question, it is quite evident that not a few of the social problems which we now find utterly insoluble will disappear. In this brief outline, we can only allude to one or two points. Take, for instance, the question of unemployment. We know that some by no means small proportion of the unemployed were really destined to be unemployable from the first, as for instance by reason of hereditary disease. It were better for them and for us had they never been born. Many more of the unemployed have been made unemployable by the influence of over-crowding, to which they were subjected in their years of development. Is there, can there be, any real and permanent remedy for over-crowding, but the erection of parenthood into an act of personal and provident responsibility?

=Eugenics and woman.=--Take, again, the woman question. No one will deny that in many of its gravest forms, especially in its economic form, and the question of the employment of women, wisely or horribly, this depends (to a degree which few, I think, realise) upon the fact that there are now, for instance, 1,300,000 women in excess in this country. Is it then proposed, the reader will say, by means of race-culture to exterminate the superfluous woman? Indeed, no. But is the reader aware that Nature is not responsible for the existence of the superfluous woman? There are more boys than girls born in the ratio of about 103 or 104 to 100: and Nature means them all to live, boys and girls alike. If they did so live, we should have merely the problem of the superfluous man, which would not be an economic problem at all. But we destroy hosts of all the children that are born, and since male organisms are in general less resistant than female organisms, we destroy a disproportionate number of boys, so that the natural balance of the sexes is inverted. Unlike ancient societies, we largely practise _male_ infanticide. Can the reader believe that there is any permanent and final means of arresting this wastage of child-life, with its singular and far-reaching consequences,--other than the elevation of parenthood, on the principles which race-culture enjoins, even wholly apart from the question of the selection of parents? We shall not succeed in keeping all the children alive (with a trivial number of exceptions), thereby abolishing the superfluous woman by keeping alive the boy who should have grown up to be her partner, until we greatly reduce the birth-rate; as it must and will be reduced when the ideal of race-culture is realised, and no child comes into the world that is not already loved and desired in anticipation.

=Eugenics and cruelty to children.=--This ideal, also, offers us in its realisation the only complete remedy for the present ghastly cruelty under which so many children suffer even in Great Britain, even in the twentieth century. Is the reader aware that the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children enquired into the ill-treatment or cruel neglect of 115,000 children in the year beginning April 1st, 1906? It has been reasonably and carefully estimated that “over half a million children are involved in the total of the wastage of child-life and the torture and neglect of child-life in a single year.” Surely Mr. G. R. Sims, to whom I would offer a hearty tribute for his recent services to childhood, is justified in saying, “Against the guilt of race-suicide our men of science are everywhere preaching their sermons to-day. It is against the guilt of race-murder that the cry of the children should ring through the land.” As regards race suicide and the men of science, I am not so sure as to the assertion. But the truth of the second sentence quoted is as indisputable as it is horrible.

Now no legislation conceivable will wholly cure this evil nor avert its consequences. At bottom it depends upon human nature, and you can cure it only by curing the defect of human nature. This, in general, is of course beyond the immediate powers of man, but evidently we should gain the same end if only we could confine the advent of children to those parents who desired them--that is to say, those in whom human nature displayed the first, if not indeed almost the only, requisite for the happiness of childhood. To this most beneficent and wholly moral end we shall come, notwithstanding the blind and pitiable guidance of most of our accredited moral teachers to-day. By no other means than the realisation of the ideal defined, that every new baby shall be loved and desired in anticipation--an ideal which is perfectly practicable--can the black stain of child murder and child torture and child neglect be removed from our civilisation.

=Ruskin and race-culture.=--The name of Ruskin, perhaps, would not occur to the reader as likely to afford support to the fair hopes of the eugenist. Consider then, these words from _Time and Tide_:--

“You leave your marriages to be settled by supply and demand,
instead of wholesome law. And thus, among your youths and maidens,
the improvident, incontinent, selfish, and foolish ones marry,
whether you will or not; and beget families of children necessarily
inheritors in a great degree of these parental dispositions; and
for whom, supposing they had the best dispositions in the world,
you have thus provided, by way of educators, the foolishest fathers
and mothers you could find; (the only rational sentence in their
letters, usually, is the invariable one, in which they declare
themselves ‘incapable of providing for their children's education’).
On the other hand, whosoever is wise, patient, unselfish, and pure
among your youth, you keep maid or bachelor; wasting their best days
of natural life in painful sacrifice, forbidding them their best
help and best reward, and carefully excluding their prudence and
tenderness from any offices of parental duty. Is not this a beatific
and beautifully sagacious system for a Celestial Empire, such as that
of these British Isles?”

Apart from the point as to wholesome law rather than the education of opinion as the eugenic means, the foregoing passage must win the assent and respect of every eugenist. It indicates the promise of race-culture as it appeared to John Ruskin. The passage has been quoted in full not for the benefit of the ordinary thoughtful reader but for that of the professional literary man who, in this remarkable age, so far as I can judge, reads nothing but what he writes, and thus qualifies himself for dismissing Spencer or Darwin or Galton in any casual phrase--meanwhile condemning Ruskin, whom he probably professes to adore.

=Race-culture and human variety.=--Now let us turn to another question. Let it be asserted most emphatically that, if there is anything in the world which eugenics or race-culture does _not_ promise or desire, it is the production of a uniform type of man. This delusion, for which there has never been any warrant at all, possesses many of the critics of eugenics, and they have made pretty play with it, just as they do with their other delusions. Let us note one or two facts which bear upon this most undesirable ideal.

In the first place, it is unattainable because of the existence of what we call variation. No apparatus conceivable would suffice to eliminate from every generation those who varied from the accepted type.

In the second place, this uniformity is supremely undesirable from the purely evolutionary point of view, because its attainment would mean the arrest of all progress. All organic evolution, as we know, depends upon the struggle between creatures possessing variations and the consequent selection of those variations which constitute their possessors best adapted or fitted to the particular environment. If there is no variation there can be no evolution. To aim at the suppression of variation, therefore, on supposed eugenic grounds (which would be involved in aiming at any uniform type of mankind) would be to aim at destroying the necessary condition of all racial progress. The mere fact that the critics of race-culture attribute to evolutionists, of all people, the desire to suppress variation, is a pathognomic symptom of their critical quality.

And, of course, quite independently of the evolutionary function of variation--though this is cardinal and must never be forgotten by the politician of any school, since what we call individuality is variation on the human plane--the value of variation in ordinary life is wholly incalculable. It is not merely that, as Mr. Galton says, “There are a vast number of conflicting ideals, of alternative characters, of incompatible civilisations; but they are wanted to give fulness and interest to life. Society would be very dull if every man resembled the highly estimable Marcus Aurelius or Adam Bede.” The question is not merely as to the interest of life. Much more important is the fact that it takes all sorts to make a world. What is the development of society but the result of the psychological division of labour in the social organism? And how could such division of labour be carried out if we had not various types of labourers? What would be the good of science if there were no poetry or music to live for? How would poetry and music help us if we had not men of science to protect our shores from plague?

Obviously the existence of men of most various types is a necessity for any highly organised society. Even if eugenics were capable--as it is not--of producing a complete and balanced type, fit up to a point to turn out a satisfactory poem, a satisfactory symphony or a satisfactory sofa, the utmost could not be expected of such a man in any of these directions. In a word, as long as their activities are not anti-social, men cannot be of too various types. We require mystic and mathematician, poet and pathologist. Only, we want good specimens of each. “The aim of eugenics,” says Mr. Galton, “is to represent each class or sect by its best specimens; that done, to leave them to work out their common civilisation in their own way.... Special aptitudes would be assessed highly by those who possessed them, as the artistic faculties by artists, fearlessness of enquiry and veracity by scientists, religious absorption by mystics, and so on. There would be self-sacrificers, self-tormentors, and other exceptional idealists.” But at least it is better to have good rather than bad specimens of any kind, whatever that kind may be. Mr. Galton thinks that all except cranks would agree as to including health, energy, ability, manliness and courteous disposition amongst qualities uniformly desirable--alike in poet and pathologist. We should desire also uniformity as to the absence of the anti-social proclivities of the born criminal. So much uniformity being granted, let us have with it the utmost conceivable variety,--more, indeed, than most of us can conceive.

This point, of course, is cardinal from the point of view of practice. No progress could be made with eugenics, it would be impossible even to form a Eugenics Education Society, if each of us were to regard the particular type he belongs to as the ideal, and were to seek merely to obtain the best specimens of that type. The doctrine that it takes all sorts to make a world--a doctrine very hard for youth to learn, yet unconsciously learnt by all who are capable of learning at all--must be regarded as a cardinal truth for the eugenist. But he wisely seeks good specimens rather than bad. Poets certainly, but not poetasters; jesters certainly, but not clever fools, who stand Truth on her head and then make street-boy gestures at her.

=Time and its treasure.=--Taking the modern estimates of the physicists, we are assured that the total period of past human existence is very brief compared with what may reasonably be predicted. Granted, then, practically unlimited time, what inherent limits are there to the upward development of man as a moral and intellectual being? Shall we answer this question by a study of the nature of matter? Plainly not. Shall we answer it by a study of the nature of mind? Surely not, for the study of existing mind cannot inform us as to what mind might be. One source of guidance alone we have, and this is the amazing contrast which exists between the mind of man at its highest, and mind in its humblest animal forms: or shall we say even between the highest and lowest manifestations of mind within the human species? The measureless height of the ascent thus indicated offers us no warrant for the conclusion that, as we stand on the heights of our life, our “glimpse of a height that is higher” is only an hallucination. On the contrary.

There is no warrant whatever for supposing that the forces which have brought us thus far are yet exhausted: they have their origin in the inexhaustible. Who, gazing on the earth of a hundred million years ago, could have predicted life--could have recognised, in the forces then at work and the matter in which they were displayed, the promise and potency of all terrestrial life? Who, contemplating life at a much later stage, even later mammalian, could have seen in the simian the prophecy of man? Who, examining the earliest nervous ganglia, could have foreseen the human cerebrum? The fact that we can imagine nothing higher than ourselves, that we make even our gods in our own image, offers no warrant for supposing that nothing higher will ever be, What ape could have predicted man, what reptile the bird, what amœba the bee? “There are many events in the womb of time which will be delivered,” and the fairest of her sons and daughters are yet to be.

But even grant, for the sake of the argument, that the intelligence of a Newton, the musical faculty of a Bach, the moral nature of any good mother anywhere, represent the utmost limits of which the evolution of the psychical is capable. There is every reason to deny this, but let us for the moment assume it true. There still remains the thought of Wordsworth, “What one is, why may not millions be?”--a thought to which Spencer has also given utterance. What is shown possible for human nature here and there, he says, is conceivable for human nature at large. It is possible for a human being, whilst still remaining human, to be a Shakespeare or a St. Francis: these things are thus demonstrably within the possibilities of human nature. It is therefore at the least conceivable that, in the course of almost infinite time (even assuming, say, that intelligence must ever be limited, as even Newton's intelligence was limited), some such capacities as his may be common property amongst men of the scientific type; and so with other types. We may answer Wordsworth that there is no bar thrown by Nature in the way of such a hope.

=What is possible?=--This, of course, is speculation and of no immediate value. I would merely remind the reader that the doctrine of optimism, as regards the future of mankind, which the principles of race-culture assume and which they desire to justify, was definitely shared by the great pioneers to whom we owe our understanding of those principles. Notwithstanding grave nervous disorder, such as makes pessimists of most men, both Darwin and Spencer were compelled by their study of Nature to this rational optimism as regards man's future. The doctrine of organic evolution, and of the age-long ascent of man through the selection of the fittest (who have, _on the whole_, been the _best_) for parenthood, is one not of despair but of hope. Exactly half a century ago it struck horror into the minds of our predecessors. Man, then, is only an erected ape, they thought--as if any historical doctrine, however true, could shorten the dizzy distance to which man has climbed since he was simian: and man being an ape, they thought his high dreams palpably vain. But the measure of the accomplished hints at the measure of the possible, and the value of the historical facts lies not in themselves, all facts as such being as dead as are the individual atoms of the living body, but in the principles which grow out of them. It is of no importance as such that man has simian ancestors; it is of immeasurable importance that he should learn by what processes he has become human, and by what, indeed, they became simian--which would have been a proud adjective for its own day. The principles of organic progress matter for us because they are the principles of race-culture, the only sure means of human progress. Our looking backwards does not turn us into pillars of salt, but teaches us that the best is yet to be, and how alone it is to be attained.

Elsewhere the optimistic argument of Wordsworth is quoted. Hear also John Ruskin:--

“There is as yet no ascertained limit to the nobleness of person and
mind which the human creature may attain, by persevering observance
of the laws of God respecting its birth and training.”[85]

and Herbert Spencer:--

“What now characterises the exceptionally high may be expected
eventually to characterise all. For that which the best human nature
is capable of, is within the reach of human nature at large.”[86]

and Francis Galton:--

“There is nothing either in the history of domestic animals or in
that of evolution to make us doubt that a race of sane men may be
formed, who shall be as much superior, mentally and morally, to the
modern European, as the modern European is to the lowest of the Negro
races.

“It is earnestly to be hoped that enquiries will be increasingly
directed into historical facts, with the view of estimating the
possible effects of reasonable political action in the future, in
gradually raising the present miserably low standard of the human
race to one in which the Utopias in the dreamland of philanthropists
may become practical possibilities.”[87]

=Conclusion--Eugenics and Religion.=--In an early chapter it was attempted to show that eugenics is not merely moral, but is of the very heart of morality. We saw that it involves taking no life, that, rather, it desires to make philanthropy more philanthropic, that, at any rate so far as this eugenist is concerned, it recognises and bows to the supreme law of love: and claims to serve that law, and the ideal of social morality, which is the making of human worth. Eugenics may or may not be practicable, it may or may not be based upon natural truth, but it is assuredly moral: though I, for one, would proclaim eternal war between this real morality and the damnable sham which approves the unbridled transmission of the most hideous diseases, rotting body and soul, in the interests of good.

And if religion, whatever its origin and the more questionable chapters in its past, be now “morality touched with emotion,” I claim that eugenics is religious, is and will ever be a religion. Elsewhere[88] I have attempted to show that religion has survived and will survive because of its survival-value--its services to the life of the societies wherein it flourishes. The religion of the future, it was sought to argue, will be that which “best serves Nature's unswerving desire--fulness of life.” The Founder of the Christian religion said, “I am come that ye might have life, and that ye might have it more abundantly.” It is higher and more abundant life that is the eugenic ideal. Progress I define as the emergence and increasing dominance of mind. Of progress, thus conceived, man is the highest fruit hitherto. He is also its appointed agent, and eugenics is his instrument.

To this end he must use all the powers which have blossomed in him from the dust. He must claim Art: and indeed in Wagner's great music-drama, at the moment when the prophetic Brünnhilde tells Sieglinde who has just lost her mate that she, the expectant mother, may look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come in the child Siegfried; and when the heroic theme is pronounced for the first time and followed by that which signifies redemption by love--then, I think, the eugenist may thrill not merely to the music, or to the humanity of the story, but to the spiritual and scientific truth which it symbolises.

If the struggle towards individual perfection be religious, so, assuredly, is the struggle, less egoistic, indeed, towards racial perfection. If the historic meaning and purport of religion are as I conceive them, and if its future evolution may thence be inferred, there can be no doubt in the prophecy that in ages to come those high aspirations and spiritual visions which astronomy has dishoused from amongst the stars, and which, at their best, were ever selfish, will find a place on this human earth of ours. If we have transferred our hopes from heaven to earth and from ourselves to our children, they are not less religious. And they that shall be of us shall build the old waste places; for we shall raise up the foundations of many generations:

“We feed the high tradition of the world,
And leave our spirits in our children's breasts.”