The Task of Social Hygiene

The whole course of zoological evolution reveals a constantly diminishing reproductive activity and a constantly increasing expenditure of care on the offspring thus diminished in number. 141 Fish spawn their ova by the million, and it is a happy chance if they become fertilized, a highly unlikely chance that more than a very small proportion will ever attain maturity. Among the mammals, however, the female may produce but half a dozen or fewer offspring at a time, but she lavishes so much care upon them that they have a very fair chance of all reaching maturity. In man, in so far as he refrains from returning to the beast and is true to the impulse which in him becomes a conscious process of civilization, the same movement is carried forward. He even seeks to decrease still further the number of his offspring by voluntary effort, and at the same time to increase their quality and magnify their importance. 142

When in human families, especially under civilized conditions, we see large families we are in the presence of a reversion to the tendencies that prevail among lower organisms. Such large families may probably be regarded, as Näcke suggests, as constituting a symptom of degeneration. It is noteworthy that they usually occur in the pathological and abnormal classes, among the insane, the feeble-minded, the criminal, the consumptive, the alcoholic, etc. 143

This tendency of the birth-rate to fall with the growth of social stability is thus a tendency which is of the very essence of civilization. It represents an impulse which, however deliberate it may be in the individual, may, in the community, be looked upon as an instinctive effort to gain more complete control of the conditions of life, and to grapple more efficiently with the problems of misery and disease and death. It is not only, as is sometimes supposed, during the past century that the phenomena may be studied. We have a remarkable example some centuries earlier, an example which very clearly illustrates the real nature of the phenomena. The city of Geneva, perhaps first of European cities, began to register its births, deaths, and marriages from the middle of the sixteenth century. This alone indicates a high degree of civilization; and at that time, and for some succeeding centuries, Geneva was undoubtedly a very highly civilized city. Its inhabitants really were the "elect," morally and intellectually, of French Protestantism. In many respects it was a model city, as Gray noted when he reached it in the course of his travels in the middle of the eighteenth century. These registers of Geneva show, in a most illuminating manner, how extreme fertility at the outset, gradually gave place, as civilization progressed, to a very low fertility, with fewer and later marriages, a very low death-rate, and a state of general well-being in which the births barely replaced the deaths.

After Protestant Geneva had lost her pioneering place in civilization, it was in France, the land which above all others may in modern times claim to represent the social aspects of civilization, that the same tendency most conspicuously appeared. But all Europe, as well as all the English-speaking lands outside Europe, is now following the lead of France. In a paper read before the Paris Society of Anthropology a few years ago, Emile Macquart showed clearly, by a series of ingenious diagrams, that whereas, fifty years ago, the condition of the birth-rate in France diverged widely from that prevailing in the other chief countries of Europe, the other countries are now rapidly following in the same road along which France has for a century been proceeding slowly, and are constantly coming closer to her, England closest of all. In the past, proposals have from time to time been made in France to interfere with the progress of this downward movement of the birth-rate—proposals that were sufficiently foolish, for neither in France nor elsewhere will the individual allow the statistician to interfere officiously in a matter which he regards as purely intimate and private. But the real character of this tendency of the birth-rate, as an essential phenomenon of civilization, with which neither moralist nor politician can successfully hope to interfere, is beginning to be realized in France. Azoulay, in summing up the discussion after Macquart's paper 144 had been read at the Society of Anthropology, pointed out that "nations must inevitably follow the same course as social classes, and the more the mass of these social classes becomes civilized, the more the nation's birth-rate falls; therefore there is nothing to be done legally and administratively." And another member added: "Except to applaud."

It is probably too much to hope that so sagacious a view will at once be universally adopted. The United States and the great English colonies, for instance, find it difficult to realize that they are not really new countries, but branches of old countries, and already nearing maturity when they began their separate lives. They are not at the beginning of two thousand years of slow development, such as we have passed through, but at the end of it, with us, and sometimes even a little ahead of us. It is therefore natural and inevitable that, in a matter in which we are moving rapidly, Massachusetts and Ontario and New South Wales and New Zealand should have moved still more rapidly, so rapidly indeed, that they have themselves failed to perceive that their real natural increase and the manner in which it is attained place them in this matter at the van of civilization. These things are, however, only learnt slowly. We may be sure that the fundamental and complex character of the phenomena will never be obvious to our fussy little politicians, so apt to advocate panaceas which have effects quite opposite to those they desire. But, whatever politicians may wish to do or to leave undone, it is well to remember that, of the various ideals the world holds, there are some that lie on the path of our social progress, and others that do not there lie. We may properly exercise such wisdom as we possess by utilizing the ideals which are before us, serenely neglecting many others which however precious they may once have seemed, no longer form part of the stage of civilization we are now moving towards.

IV

What are the ideals of the stage of civilization we of the Western world are now moving towards? We have here pushed as far as need be the analysis of that declining birth-rate which has caused so much anxiety to those amongst us who can only see narrowly and see superficially. We have found that, properly understood, there is nothing in it to evoke our pessimism. On the contrary, we have seen that, in the opinion of the most distinguished authorities, the energy with which we move in our present direction, through the exercise of an ever finer economy in life, may be regarded as a "measure of civilization" in the important sphere of vital statistics. As we now leave the question, some may ask themselves whether this concomitant decline in birth-rates and death-rates may not possibly have a still wider and more fundamental meaning as a measure of civilization.

We have long been accustomed to regard the East as a spiritual world in which the finer ends of living were counted supreme, and the merely materialistic aspects of life, dissociated from the aims of religion and of art, were trodden under foot. Our own Western world we have humbly regarded as mainly absorbed in a feverish race for the attainment, by industry and war, of the satisfaction of the impulses of reproduction and nutrition, and the crudely material aggrandizement of which those impulses are the symbol. A certain outward idleness, a semi-idleness, as Nietzsche said, is the necessary condition for a real religious life, for a real æsthetic life, for any life on the spiritual plane. The noisy, laborious, pushing, "progressive" life we traditionally associate with the West is essentially alien to the higher ends of living, as has been intuitively recognized and acted on by all those among us who have sought to pursue the higher ends of living. It was so that the nineteenth-century philosophers of Europe, of whom Schopenhauer was in this matter the extreme type, viewed the matter. But when we seek to measure the tendency of the chief countries of the West, led by France, England, and Germany, and the countries of the East led by Japan, in the light of this strictly measurable test of vital statistics, may we not, perhaps, trace the approach of a revolutionary transposition? Japan, entering on the road we have nearly passed through, in which the perpetual clash of a high birth-rate and a high death-rate involves social disorder and misery, has flung to the winds the loftier ideals it once pursued so successfully and has lost its fine æsthetic perceptions, its insight into the most delicate secrets of the soul. 145 And while Japan, certainly to-day voicing the aspirations of the East, is concerned to become a great military and industrial power, we in the West are growing weary of war, and are coming to look upon commerce as a necessary routine no longer adequate to satisfy the best energies of human beings. We are here moving towards the fine quiescence involved by a delicate equipoise of life and of death; and this economy sets free an energy we are seeking to expend in a juster social organization, and in the realization of ideals which until now have seemed but the imagination of idle dreamers. Asia, as an anonymous writer has recently put it, is growing crude, vulgar, and materialistic; Europe, on the other hand, is growing to loathe its own past grossness. "London may yet be the spiritual capital of the world, while Asia—rich in all that gold can buy and guns can give, lord of lands and bodies, builder of railways and promulgator of police regulations, glorious in all material glories—postures, complacent and obtuse, before a Europe content in the possession of all that matters," 146 Certainly, we are not there yet, but the old Earth has seen many stranger and more revolutionary changes than this. England, as this writer reminds us, was once a tropical forest.

VI

EUGENICS AND LOVE

Eugenics and the Decline of the Birth-rate—Quantity and Quality in the Production of Children—Eugenic Sexual Selection—The Value of Pedigrees—Their Scientific Significance—The Systematic Record of Personal Data—The Proposal for Eugenic Certificates—St. Valentine's Day and Sexual Selection—Love and Reason—Love Ruled by Natural Law—Eugenic Selection not opposed to Love—No Need for Legal Compulsion—Medicine in Relation to Marriage

I

During recent years the question of the future of the human race has been brought before us in a way it has never been brought before. The great expansive movement in civilized countries is over. Whereas, fifty years ago, France seemed to present a striking contrast to other countries in her low and gradually falling birth-rate, to-day, though she has herself now almost reached a stationary position, France is seen merely to have been the leader in a movement which is common to all the more highly civilized nations. They are all now moving rapidly in the direction in which she moved slowly. It was inevitable that this movement, world-wide as it is, should call forth energetic protests, for there is no condition of things so bad but it finds some to advocate its perpetuation. There has, therefore, been much vigorous preaching against "race suicide" by people who were deaf to the small voice of reason, who failed to understand that this matter could not be settled by mere consideration of the crude birth-rates, and that, even if it could, we should have still to realize that, as an economist remarks, it is to the decline of the birth-rate only that we probably owe it that the modern civilized world has been saved from economic disaster. 147

But whatever the causes of the declining birth-rate it is certain that even when they are within our control they are of far too intimate a character for the public moralist to be permitted to touch them, even though we consider them to be in a disastrous state. It has to be recognized that we are here in the presence, not of a merely local or temporary tendency which might be shaken off with an effort, but of a great fundamental law of civilization; and the fact that we encounter it in our own race merely means that we are reaching a fairly high stage of civilization. It is far from the first time, in the history of the world, that the same phenomenon has been witnessed. It was seen in Imperial Rome; it was seen, again, in the "Protestant Rome," Geneva. Wherever are gathered together an exceedingly fine race of people, the flower of the race, individuals of the highest mental and moral distinction, there the birth-rate falls steadily. Vice or virtue alike avails nothing in this field; with high civilization fertility inevitably diminishes.

II

Under these circumstances it was to be expected that a new ideal should begin to flash before men's eyes. If the ideal of quantity is lost to us, why not seek the ideal of quality? We know that the old rule: "Increase and multiply" meant a vast amount of infant mortality, of starvation, of chronic disease, of widespread misery. In abandoning that rule, as we have been forced to do, are we not left free to seek that our children, though few, should be at all events fit, the finest, alike in physical and psychical constitution, that the world has seen?

Thus has come about the recent expansion of that conception of Eugenics, or the science and art of Good Breeding in the human race, which a group of workers, pioneered by Francis Galton 148—at first in England and later in America, Germany and elsewhere—have been developing for some years past. Eugenics is beginning to be felt to possess a living actuality which it failed to possess before. Instead of being a benevolent scientific fad it begins to present itself as the goal to which we are inevitably moving.

The cause of Eugenics has sometimes been prejudiced in the public mind by a comparison with the artificial breeding of domestic animals. In reality the two things are altogether different. In breeding animals a higher race of beings manipulates a lower race with the object of securing definite points that are of no use whatever to the animals themselves, but of considerable value to the breeders. In our own race, on the other hand, the problem of breeding is presented in an entirely different shape. There is as yet no race of super-men who are prepared to breed man for their own special ends. As things are, even if we had the ability and the power, we should surely hesitate before we bred men and women as we breed dogs or fowls. We may, therefore, quite put aside all discussion of eugenics as a sort of higher cattle-breeding. It would be undesirable, even if it were not impracticable.

But there is another aspect of Eugenics. Human eugenics need not be, and is not likely to be, a cold-blooded selection of partners by some outside scientific authority. But it may be, and is very likely to be, a slowly growing conviction—first among the more intelligent members of the community and then by imitation and fashion among the less intelligent members—that our children, the future race, the torch-bearers of civilization for succeeding ages, are not the mere result of chance or Providence, but that, in a very real sense, it is within our power to mould them, that the salvation or damnation of many future generations lies in our hands since it depends on our wise and sane choice of a mate. The results of the breeding of those persons who ought never to be parents is well known; the notorious case of the Jukes family is but one among many instances. We could scarcely expect in any community that individuals like the Jukes would take the initiative in movements for the eugenic development of the race, but it makes much difference whether such families exist in an environment like our own which is indifferent to the future of the race, or whether they are surrounded by influences of a more wholesome character which can scarcely fail to some extent to affect, and even to control, the reckless and anti-social elements in the community.

In considering this question, therefore, we are justified in putting aside not only any kind of human breeding resembling the artificial breeding of animals, but also, at all events for the present, every compulsory prohibition on marriage or procreation. We must be content to concern ourselves with ideals, and with the endeavour to exert our personal influence in the realization of these ideals.

III

Such ideals cannot, however, be left in the air; if they depend on individual caprice nothing but fruitless confusion can come of them. They must be firmly grounded on a scientific basis of ascertained fact. This was always emphasized by Galton. He not only initiated schemes for obtaining, but actually to some extent obtained, a large amount of scientific knowledge concerning the special characteristics and aptitudes of families, and his efforts in this direction have since been largely extended and elaborated. 149 The feverish activities of modern life, and the constant vicissitudes and accidents that overtake families to-day, have led to an extraordinary indifference to family history and tradition. Our forefathers, from generation to generation, carefully entered births, baptisms, marriages, and deaths in the fly-leaf of the Family Bible. It is largely owing to these precious entries that many are able to carry their family history several centuries further back than they otherwise could. But nowadays the Family Bible has for the most part ceased to exist, and nothing else has taken its place. If a man wishes to know what sort of stocks he has come from, unless he is himself an antiquarian, or in a position to employ an antiquarian to assist him, he can learn little, and in the most favourable position he is helpless without clues; though with such clues he might often learn much that would be of the greatest interest to him. The entries in the Family Bible, however, whatever their value as clues and even as actual data, do not furnish adequate information to serve as a guide to the different qualities of stocks; we need far more detailed and varied information in order to realize the respective values of families from the point of view of eugenics. Here, again, Galton had already realized the need for supplying a great defect in our knowledge, and his Life-history Albums showed how the necessary information may be conveniently registered.

The accumulated histories of individual families, it is evident, will in time furnish a foundation on which to base scientific generalizations, and eventually, perhaps, to justify practical action. Moreover, a vast amount of valuable information on which it is possible to build up a knowledge of the correlated characteristics of families, already lies at present unused in the great insurance offices and elsewhere. When it is possible to obtain a large collection of accurate pedigrees for scientific purposes, and to throw them into a properly tabulated form, we shall certainly be in a position to know more of the qualities of stocks, of their good and bad characteristics, and of the degree in which they are correlated. 150

In this way we shall, in time, be able to obtain a clear picture of the probable results on the offspring of unions between any kind of people. From personal and ancestral data we shall be able to reckon the probable quality of the offspring of a married couple. Given a man and woman of known personal qualities and of known ancestors, what are likely to be the personal qualities, physical, mental and moral, of the children? That is a question of immense importance both for the beings themselves whom we bring into the world, for the community generally, and for the future race.

Eventually, it seems evident, a general system, whether private or public, whereby all personal facts, biological and mental, normal and morbid, are duly and systematically registered, must become inevitable if we are to have a real guide as to those persons who are most fit, or most unfit, to carry on the race. 151 Unless they are full and frank such records are useless. But it is obvious that for a long time to come such a system of registration must be private. According to the belief which is still deeply rooted in most of us, we regard as most private those facts of our lives which are most intimately connected with the life of the race, and most fateful for the future of humanity. The feeling is no doubt inevitable; it has a certain rightness and justification. As, however, our knowledge increases we shall learn that we are, on the one hand, a little more responsible for future generations than we are accustomed to think, and, on the other hand, a little less responsible for our own good or bad qualities. Our fiat makes the future man, but, in the same way, we are ourselves made by a choice and a will not our own. A man may indeed, within limits, mould himself, but the materials he can alone use were handed on to him by his parents, and whether he becomes a man of genius, a criminal, a drunkard, an epileptic, or an ordinarily healthy, well-conducted, and intelligent citizen, must depend at least as much on his parents as on his own effort or lack of effort, since even the aptitude for effective effort is largely inborn. As we learn to look on the facts from the only sound standpoint of heredity, our anger or contempt for a failing and erring individual has to give way to the kindly but firm control of a weakling. If the children's teeth have been set on edge it is because the parents have eaten sour grapes.

If, however, we certainly cannot bring legal or even moral force to compel everyone to maintain such detailed registers of himself, his ancestral stocks, and his offspring—to say nothing of inducing him to make them public—there is something that we can do. We can make it to his interest to keep such a record. 152If it became an advantage in life to a man to possess good ancestors, and to be himself a good specimen of humanity in mind, character, and physique, we may be sure that those who are above the average in these matters will be glad to make use of that superiority. Insurance offices already make an inquisition into these matters, to which no one objects, because a man only submits to it for his own advantage; while for military and some other services similar inquiries are compulsory. Eugenic certificates, according to Galton's proposal, would be issued by a suitably constituted authority to those candidates who chose to apply for them and were able to pass the necessary tests. Such certificates would imply an inquiry and examination into the ancestry of the candidate as well as into his own constitution, health, intelligence and character; and the possession of such a certificate would involve a superiority to the average in all these respects. No one would be compelled to offer himself for such examination, just as no one is compelled to seek a university degree. But its possession would often be an advantage. There is nothing to prevent the establishment of a board of examiners of this kind to-morrow, and we may be sure that, once established, many candidates would hasten to present themselves. 153 There are obviously many positions in life wherein a certificate of this kind of superiority would be helpful. But its chief distinction would be that its possession would be a kind of patent of natural nobility; the man or woman who held it would be one of Nature's aristocrats, to whom the future of the race might be safely left without further question.

IV

By happy inspiration, or by chance, Galton made public his programme of eugenic research, in a paper read before the Sociological Society, on February 14, the festival of St. Valentine. Although the ancient observances of that day have now died out, St. Valentine was for many centuries the patron saint of sexual selection, more especially in England. It can scarcely be said that any credit in this matter belongs to the venerable saint himself; it was by an accident that he achieved his conspicuous position in the world. He was simply a pious Christian who was beheaded for his faith in Rome under Claudius. But it so happened that his festival fell at that period in early spring when birds were believed to pair, and when youths and maidens were accustomed to select partners for themselves or for others. This custom—which has been studied together with many allied primitive practices by Mannhard 154—was not always carried out on February 14, sometimes it took place a little later. In England, where it was strictly associated with St. Valentine's Day, the custom was referred to by Lydgate, and by Charles of Orleans in the rondeaus and ballades he wrote during his long imprisonment in England. The name Valentins or Valentines was also introduced into France (where the custom had long existed) to designate the young couples thus constituted. This method of sexual selection, half playful, half serious, flourished especially in the region between England, the Moselle, and the Tyrol. The essential part of the custom lay in the public choice of a fitting mate for marriageable girls. Sometimes the question of fitness resolved itself into one of good looks; occasionally the matter was settled by lot. There was no compulsion about these unions; they were often little more than a game, though at times they involved a degree of immorality which caused the authorities to oppose them. But very frequently the sexual selection thus exerted led to weddings, and these playful Valentine unions were held to be a specially favourable prelude to a happy marriage.