RACE IMPROVEMENT OR EUGENICS
A Little Book on a Great Subject
BY
La Reine Helen Baker
NEW YORK DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY 1912
Copyright, 1912
By DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
Published, September, 1912
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTORY
The aim of this little volume is to interest the American public in an important and neglected subject. The writer has her own views on art, politics, religion and other topics which divide mankind, she does not intrude those opinions here, although conscious that "to see life steadily and see it whole" much more is wanted than a single branch of study, however vital. It is not possible, however, to remain silent and, at least passively, acquiescent when the interests of the race are in danger of neglect. Need for apology is not considered when great and influential journals, magazines and volumes dissipate their powers on all the feeble foolings of the hour. There are many honourable exceptions. There are organs of opinion in nearly all directions of intellectual speculation, education and philosophy and there are of course necessary volumes of information on cooking, travel, dress and amusement. Every material interest except the basic material interest of our human existence is represented in our periodical press. An expedition to the pole, a prodigious attempt to attract the attention of Martian observers whose very existence is denied by more than half our scientists, or a commission to inquire into the relative merits of various manurial nitrates, for these time and money, private enterprise and state aid are readily forthcoming. Professorial chairs are easily financed for lectures on every necessary and unnecessary subject other than that of direct race improvement. Churches, universities and other institutions have been endowed for the sake of schisms which have no direct bearing on any human need.
I deny that people do not care what becomes of the race. There never has been a time in the history of the world when parents would not rather have a healthy progeny than an unhealthy. The nation would always prefer to be able to boast of improvement instead of blushing for its deteriorating citizenship. As long as Mothers love their own young and as long as the average man sympathises with undeserved suffering there will be perpetual possibilities for rousing interest in the most promising of all sciences, Eugenics.
Eugenics is a word invented by Francis Galton to cover the philosophy, collection of facts, the science, whatever we can call it, which regards race improvement as a desirable and practicable process. Stirpiculture is an older word for a similar idea. New descriptive or misleading phrases will be invented from time to time, sometimes by friends, sometimes by enemies of the movement. It may be well from the first to clear away some misinterpretations. Accusations against new ideas commonly take the form of attempting to show that the new and possibly good idea is irretrievably committed to some other idea, generally an older and discredited one. It is the universal rule, particularly in Anglo-Saxon countries, to regard sex-relationships as so sacrosanct that merely to mention them is to outrage modesty and shock morality. Fortunately or otherwise we have had to overcome this silly secretiveness. The horrible white-slave traffic, the loathsome increase of venereal diseases, the frequent revelations such as the Thaw case forced on the public, the necessity for protecting children from outrage—all these and other things have made not only possible but obviously desirable that decency, wisdom and humanity should make their voice heard. The time has come when we will not tolerate the daily scandal of having our newspapers polluted with details of sexual abnormalities while we are refused the opportunity of educating the people in the direction of purity, health, and efficiency in the sexual relation. Eugenics is concerned primarily and materially with the normal sex relationship, which in modern civilised lands means the ordinary legal monogamic marriage. It is perfectly true that there have been pioneer reformers, to whom the world owes much who have linked their ideals of race improvement to an advocacy of freer sex relationships. Modern eugenists have no such divided council. They aim at encouraging the best births and discouraging the worst, and all details of their propaganda must be subordinate to this great aspiration. Seeing then that through monogamic marriage the Anglo-Saxon race must overwhelmingly flow now and in all the sighted future, we resolutely direct our attention to this institution as we find it. On the lines of which the race has approved we shall proceed for our reforms. The United States great in a thousand ways, although often the despair of the reformer, offers the most promising field of the whole world in the direction of Eugenics. Comprising within her catholic embrace many varieties of monogamic marriage she possesses contrasts, comparisons, examples and warnings, which will be of infinite use in the Eugenist's laboratory. Well may we be content to show from these differences how on the present basis of marriage a nobler race may be reared. It is of course only one aspect of marriage that interests Eugenists, but as according to the teaching of most Churches and the theory of most governments the origin, basis and reason of marriage is procreation, it will be seen that race improvement does not look on the least important side of marriage. In other words it is in its public and universal relations that marriage will be regarded by Eugenists. In comparatively socialised States like ours where education and a hundred other concerns of every child are the constant care of representative institutions it would be retrogression if we did not now begin to consider the child as having from its birth a public interest. Seeing the advance being made in our understanding of some of the laws of heredity it must not be considered wonderful that this public interest in the future citizen should begin even before birth. For this purpose it is not at all necessary, I hold it to be eminently undesirable, that the State or any outside authority should attempt the ridiculous task of organising who shall marry and mate, or dictate by law or force the conditions of marriages which satisfy the contracting parties. But this laisser faire doctrine obviously has no applicability to the much more disputable proposition that the State has no right to deal with the source of its future responsibilities, the root by which may arrive human wrecks for which the State must provide in the days to come. This brings me to a further protest. It has been suggested that Eugenists are anarchists, tearing up the roots of government, blindly striking at civilised institutions, putting a bomb to the foundations of Church, State, and Family. Let it be said here and now in such clear phrase as may be that Eugenics is the antithesis of anarchy. It means order. Eugenics opposes chaos in the interests of the race. It is the most profoundly patriotic proposition ever laid before the people of these United States. Its conception is for the national good. American Eugenists will never rest until our race becomes the fittest on earth. Other nations shall teach us if they can, we will better their instruction. Monarchical old world peoples, restrained by traditions, tied down by red tape, drugged by the dread of progress, may justify their own inertia, we cannot sink with them. We are leaders and pioneers. In the United States respect is still accorded to those who have new truths to teach for the benefit of the race. If "national efficiency" has to some extent failed in its appeal, if the answer has been an admission of unaccomplished desires, the reason must be ascribed to the limited scope of the inquiry. The nation has to take itself seriously in hand. We need to get beyond the citizen of to-day, we have to consider the citizen of to-morrow.
As to religion, I appeal both to those who love God and to those who love their fellow-man. It is futile at this time of day to quote against the living race the dictates of a dead age. It is monstrous also to slander the noble men and women who are at present engaged in the secular activities of our Churches by pretending to believe that they are not most keenly anxious to aid in any uplifting work for the regeneration of the world. Every institution which is teaching, feeding or otherwise helping children is a nucleus for Eugenic enterprise. The neglect of Eugenics in the last generation has clogged the wheels of progress in this generation. We cannot and must not forget the victims of our national neglect, but we can do greatest honour to our philanthropists and workers for the general uplift by seriously endeavouring to eliminate from the coming generation the hopelessly unfit and by encouraging the multiplication of the efficient.
There is no immorality in our proposals, as a glance at these pages will abundantly prove. The Family of the future is going to be sweeter, purer and nobler. It may even be more numerous, for while Eugenists resolutely set themselves to discourage the national burdening by debt, danger and decay which inevitably follow in the footsteps of a deteriorating race, we have nevertheless no opinions whatever as to whether a numerically large or small family is best. Race suicide is no worse than race murder. We cannot imagine a nobler sight than an enormous and increasing race of the vitally fit. A temporary and deliberate discouragement of certain unwelcome elements may be momentarily embarrassing, but this is only half the story. Our ports of entry are firmly closed in the face of undesirable aliens, not for the purpose of reducing our population, far from it. Our stability, our greatness, our very existence depend on the success with which we have attracted to our shores those immigrants whose children to-day are our boast and pride. Eugenics, it cannot be too often said, is no mere phase of Malthusianism. It is not a population question it is the population question. It dismisses Malthus as a spent force, as a prophet whose message was only half delivered, as a Jeremiah who would have deprived the world of its saviours as well as of its betrayers. Of Malthus it may truly be said that in forbidding those who would "wade through slaughter to a throne" he "shut the gates of mercy on mankind." No philosophy to-day can meet the needs of to-day if it indiscriminately decreases both. Both methods are evil. We must weigh as well as count. The Sphinx of civilisation sits waiting our answer to her riddle. We have mingled the seeds of evil with the seeds of good. Mere mechanical multiplication only accentuates the evil because weeds are always of quicker growth than the flower plants which they deprive of their due share of light and air. Patient division of the seeds, careful sorting, subtracting as far as possible the contaminating elements, and giving all the needful attention to the sturdy but perverse, encouraging those seeds which in various ways will one day grow into perfect trees so as to show flower; to bear fruit, give shade, make timber or in any other way serve the multifarious needs of the nation.
CHAPTER II
HEREDITY AND ENVIRONMENT
Eugenics is not committed to the Darwinian doctrine of evolution, although it would probably never have reached the stage of practical politics but for the encouragement given to all systematic scientific studies by Darwin's magnificent generalisations. Eugenics takes its stand on the ascertained fact of heredity, and it owes an immense debt to the patience with which Lamarck, the Darwins, Weissman and others have piled instance upon instance to illustrate the fact that "the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children unto the third and fourth generation" and "the fathers have eaten sour grapes and the children's teeth are set on edge." The doctrine of heredity has never been more resonantly expressed than in these words although they show only one side and that not the better side of heredity. We are indeed "begotten not made." Nurture, or environment, has its place, and an important one, in race improvement, but the overwhelming fact remains that more than three-fourths of the elements which build up a human soul are in its nature, not its nurture. The formative factor of greatest importance in the making of human life and character is heredity.
Mankind has hitherto failed to grasp the full significance of this admission. Horticulturists have made it the starting point of their experiments until to-day the Luther Burbanks can almost create what they will in plant life. Cattle-breeders, dog-fanciers, and horse-farmers, are able to raise the value of their breeds to a wonderful degree. Ornithologists have been equally successful; from the original stock a hundred varieties come at the touch of the scientific magician's wand. In each case even where at first quantity was considered of no importance compared with quality, there has been a steady and unmistakable increase in the effective numbers side by side with a gigantic development of those elements of strength or beauty which have been arrived at. Race suicide is a metaphysical phrase not easily open to definition, but two things may be said about it at this stage. Race improvement is utterly inconsistent with any intelligent conception of race suicide. An increasing birthrate is not in itself a guarantee of progress and may indeed be the means of a nation's retrogression. Experience and logic lead to the confident conclusion that increased vitality means increased fecundity.
To acknowledge the law of heredity with its concomitant scientific implications, must inevitably change our mental outlook in many directions. Accordingly as we relatively place heredity or environment first, our views on social politics will be fundamentally sound or unsound. Taking a large view of society it must make an abysmal difference whether we think the race can or cannot be improved (not merely polished or even enlightened but really changed) by modifications of environment. We can no longer pursue the same and by the same means if we come to the conclusion that the individual is either born a potential asset to society or "damned into existence," a permanent drain on his fellows' comfort and wealth, even a possible miasma of infectious criminality.
I am a Eugenist because I believe that the nature we have received from hereditary sources transcends in effectiveness all the nurture which follows birth. Eugenics means seeking for facts and applying them to solve the greatest of all problems—looking for light by which the race may control its destiny. Heredity in the animal and vegetable world may be considered dispassionately enough. Geology and astronomy are only hereditary studies affecting the birth of worlds. But from human birth and sex, the mysteries of creation in their divinest form, from these branches of the study of heredity the flaming sword of prudery warns us away. The subject of human sex has been the play-ground of neglect, ignorance, bigotry, superstition, persecution and every other foe to inquiry. It has been the object of worship but not of explanation, of romance but not of science, of abuse, mutilation, misunderstanding, but not of study, reason and generalization. Eugenics of course aims at expressing the scientific side of the process of which love is the artistic. The rare handful of brave men and women who against unique opposition have forced this question to the front are not to be blamed if up to now Eugenics can hardly be said to exist as a systematised science. It is in the nature of things that as a philosophy Eugenics is hardly more than a guess, a probability, an hypothesis. Doubt, uncertainty and half-heartedness inevitably accompany a movement so undeservedly discredited as this has been. Without the means to collect the enormous body of facts required to justify national action the Eugenists have been content to rely upon personal experiences, isolated family histories and the normal and abnormal facts which newspapers, biographies and daily life presented to them. Eugenists have wrestled against difficulties like Hercules in the Augean stable or Paul in the Ephesian arena. In fact the stable and the arena throw more light on Eugenics than any at present available from the human animal. The existent biology of Eugenics means a study of non-human life. There is a sufficiently extensive literature and digest of experiments relating to animal and plant life to serve as the stock in trade of a fairly complete system of Eugenics—if only fuschias were men or men were mules. External observations of animal and plant life cannot universally apply to man even passively, while the active interference of the human botanist in the affairs of the unprotesting plants separates these from men by an unpassable chasm.
The first need then for Eugenic study is some systematic collection of the ascertainable facts as far as they relate to human beings. This implies sufficient scientific interest in the phenomena of parentage to encourage widespread earnest patient desire to exchange information and to steadily accumulate enough knowledge to justify experiment in positive and negative Eugenics. No sane Eugenist advocates universal State action based on the existent records, but it would be against all good precedent if the absence of sufficient knowledge on a vital subject were allowed to stultify the efforts of those who seek for fuller information. Nothing but good will ensue if positive experiments are boldly labelled as such, instead of pretending that our twilight of investigation is the full light of perfect knowledge. Experiments in positive Eugenics will take various forms. They began with the most ordinary baby-shows; they proceeded through municipal prizes for the healthiest offsprings. An important stage arose when premiums in some cities began to be offered to all parents whose babies survived the critical first year of life. These were elementary experiments, based on the right motive but ignoring the element of heredity. The experiments of the future must be on a surer foundation. The current criteria of judgment are sound enough as far as they go, they encourage careful nurture, but the limitations of the experiments are those of an unscientific age. Obviously the next step in the same direction is to discriminate. The haphazard chance that of fifty children properly nourished one may be distinguished by its superior physique does not materially help us to solve our problem if we stop at this phase. Having found our healthiest child we might at least try to discover the hereditary history of its progenitors and take steps to encourage further offsprings from so promising a source. Imagine a scientific cattle-breeder possessing a perfect bull, contented that one of its offsprings should take a single prize! Not to unduly strain the analogy we might with all decorum and wisdom circulate what knowledge we can glean of those facts which have made perfection possible. Are we to be everlastingly contented with news of the romantic, sensational, abnormal and criminal phenomena of sex while our newspapers and official records are silent concerning ordinary and desirable experiences, their causes and their results? Heredity as the basis of legislation is never dreamt of, while our statute books are crowded with laws passed in a panic, laws which bear no ratio to essential facts, and laws which look at the elementary passions of mankind through the refractory media of prejudice, ignorance and well-meaning misconception. It rarely if ever occurs to legislators that a scientific system of society demands an acquaintance with the recently accepted conclusions of our greatest thinkers. We are suffering to-day from a pre-Darwinian government in almost all our States. "Authorities" of all kinds are quoted in support of and against any given proposal, but the "authorities" are seldom the fittest. In earlier days latin tags were considered a worthy conclusion to a speech in Senate or Legislature. Nowadays poetry or literature is called into requisition. Darwin, Spencer and Galton should at least have taught us to take trouble to learn all about the subject in hand and what bearing the scientific discoveries of our generation have upon particular problems. It is a disease of the age that we are conscious of our national short-comings in only the vaguest possible way. We are ignorant of the full extent of our misfortunes and we do not apply to them the time, trouble and money which are a preliminary necessity to discovering a remedy, and we forget the dynamic difference which must be made in our treatment of race problems as soon as we accept heredity as the controlling factor. But the preliminaries must be insisted on. Investigation, collation, classification, generalisation, and legislation, must be taken in their right order.
The difficulties in the way of investigating the laws which govern heredity have as usual led to shirking the issue altogether. Even when we look the difficulty straight in the face, we pass it by. We have made a god of environment. Our best social efforts hitherto in legislation, social conventions, conduct and educational ideals (and in modern times even our religions), have come to consider environment as of paramount importance. But take environment at its highest it can only be the best soil for the best seed. That is a Eugenic ideal also but it cannot convert a disease germ into a desirable citizen. Over-emphasis of reform dependent on improved environment implies that a deadly upas tree, if transplanted and properly watered and "given a better chance," will reward society with a plentiful harvest of edible nourishing fruit. The heartless school which on principles hates all reform derives its chief support from the fact that the reform which regards only environment too often descends to veneering vice with respectability or dissipates itself in futilities of a grandmotherly kind. The reformer of the future must study causes as well as phenomena. The skilled physician regards symptoms as of importance only to the extent that they assist the diagnosis of disease. Accurate analysis must consider hereditary causes as well as local symptoms.
Environment when properly subordinated to and illuminated by heredity does not cease to be important. Environment may provide wings to fly with and an atmosphere capable of sustaining weight, even when it cannot provide the will to fly. To return to our agricultural symbolism: environment cannot make or change the nature of the seed, it is the soil, the sunshine and the succulence, but it has to take the seed as it is. Heredity is inside the seed and goes behind the seed to the mother plant. Heredity is what our ancestors meant when they said predestination, necessity, destiny.
Philosophers of pre-Darwin days have lured mankind into the pleasant but dangerously untrue belief that human nature is essentially and universally good. This crude generalisation of Rousseau's gospel does some injustice to that great man's philosophy which represented a necessary revolt from the soul-destroying perversion of heredity which described man as uniformly "born in sin and shaped in iniquity." Experience has revolted against both extremes. The Heavenly father is no longer a Fiend who destines "one to heav'n and ten to hell," and the Earthly Parent emerges from his ancient unimportance. Man is in neither case fortuitous, his nature, potentiality and destiny are writ large in the study of his heredity. We are all, like poets, born not made; as we are: we remain: we develop on lines long ago laid down for us by other forces than those environment can control and it is still impossible to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. This consideration puts into proper perspective the things which matter, and warns us to cease vain expenditure on unscientific philanthropy. The efforts wasted on watering weeds might have made the garden smile with fragrant flowers. Environment means opportunity. We shall understand better how and why environments need reconstruction when we recognise the superior importance of heredity. We shall begin to realise the uselessness of forcing qualities into the human organism, and become all the more anxious to afford opportunity for developing whatever utilisable qualities are already there existent. We shall learn to educate, in the old sense of the word. We shall bring out the maximum of the good within. We will no longer tolerate the cruelties and crudities of abortive attempts to instil properties and qualities of character which not being inherent can never be successfully inoculated.
CHAPTER III
THE CHILD AND ITS HERITAGE
The previous chapter suggests that unless due regard is given to heredity an increased population will merely aggravate the existing social problems. It is necessary also to emphasise the importance of watching our death statistics as well as our birth returns. Obviously a nation with a low percentage of births compared with its population may be increasing the latter much more largely as well as more healthily than a nation with a much larger percentage of births. The pulse of each hand must be felt. Infant mortality is as easily ascertainable and is of at least equal importance. Infant efficiency is unfortunately less easily ascertainable statistically. Subject to these qualifications the Eugenics school welcomes Mr. Roosevelt's protests against Race Suicide, and gladly identifies itself with any religious, political or social effort to bring to our citizens a sense of what we owe to the commonwealth. It is not a matter to be dismissed with a speech or a magazine article when we see almost every career in the world glorified, and parentage alone sneered at. Believers in Eugenics regard with a horror based on a certainty of evil consequence when they contemplate a State in which the noble task of motherhood is left to the poor while the rich evade their duties. It is stupid as well as abominable to reproach heroic but uninstructed mothers of the less wealthy classes. Year after year they think they are fulfilling their destined purpose in life by adding to their families a burden difficult to bear. In the long run, after Nature has exercised a cruel elimination, this burden of the individual becomes the glory of the race, the very bloom and blossom of the future. Neither can reproach be given to the parents in the slums. Nature here seems to be prodigal indeed. The children come, only the doctors know the terrible tale of them. To the registrar they are but a name, to the statistician a number, but to the City and the State they mean cemeteries, hospitals, prisons, asylums, as well as barracks. But I am not dealing here with the whole problem of poverty. Eugenics aims at breeding the fittest from the fittest and it sees
Even in the most unpromising surroundings one sees noble sparks of life not to be quenched by poverty or any other vital enemy. The Christ continues to be born in a stable.