Parenthood and Race Culture: An Outline of Eugenics

by C. W. Saleeby

It is quite evident that, if the Lamarckian theory were true, education would be a completely adequate instrument of race-culture, incomparable in its rapidity and certainty. It would not reform the world in a single generation because, as we have seen, its results would be limited by the inherent nature of its material; but since those results would involve the vast amelioration of the material upon which it worked in the second generation, mankind would be little lower than the angels in a century. The good habits acquired by one generation would be innate in the next. If the father learnt one language in addition to his own, the child would start with the knowledge of two, waiting only for opportunity, and could accumulate more and hand them on to its child. “My father's environment would be my heredity.” If we desired muscular strength we could in two generations produce a race amongst whom Sandow would be a puny weakling. We should not need to discuss any question of selection for parenthood. Without any such process we could answer Browning's prayer and “elevate the race at once”—physically, mentally and morally.

But the Lamarckian theory does not correspond with facts. The results of education, physical, mental, or moral, are limited to the individuals educated. The children do not begin where the parents left off, but they make a fresh start where the parents did. Thus even though we had and employed an ideal method of education, we should make no permanent improvement by its means alone in the breed of mankind, any more than the breeder of race-horses could attain his end by the same means. In each generation the same problem, the same difficulties, the same limitations inherent in the nature of the new material, would have to be faced. We must learn from the horse-breeder, who knows that the blood of a single horse, Eclipse, runs in the veins of the great majority of winners since his time.

It is exceedingly difficult to dispossess the popular mind of the Lamarckian idea, the more especially as members of the medical profession, who are regarded as authorities on heredity, contentedly accept this idea themselves. Yet the advocates of eugenics or race-culture have to recognise that, so long as the Lamarckian idea obtains, their crusade will fail to find a hearing. We believe that nothing can really be accomplished in the way of race-culture until public opinion—that “chaos of prejudices,” as Huxley called it—is marshalled on our side. But the popular notion of heredity is a most formidable obstacle. The Lamarckian idea seems to provide a method for the improvement of a species which cannot be surpassed for simplicity, rapidity and certainty. It even excludes the possibility of mistakes. You cannot go wrong if you simply educate every one to the utmost. Doubtless some persons are more suited for parenthood than others, but only let education be wise and universal, and any question of selection by marriage or otherwise will be superfluous. A thousand difficulties offered by public sentiment, by convention, by the churches, by the large measure of uncertainty which attends the working of heredity, could be ignored, if race-culture were simply a matter of education.

Nevertheless, these difficulties have to be faced by the eugenist. The popular misconception of heredity—instanced by Sir James Simpson's belief, not inexcusable sixty years ago, that the education of a future mother will enlarge her child's brain—must be removed. It can scarcely be doubted that the sway of the Lamarckian idea will soon be diminished, and then, at last, those who are interested in the future will discover that only by the process of selection for parenthood, which has brought mankind thus far, can further progress be assured.

Real functions of education for race-culture.—Nevertheless education has a true function for race-culture in addition to the obvious fact of its necessity in order to realise the inherent potentialities of the individual. One of its functions is to provide a level of public opinion and public taste such that the finer specimens of each generation shall receive their due reward and shall not be crushed out of existence or perverted. There is a passage in Goethe which suggests the true function of education, and makes us suspect that, so far as many kinds of genius and talent are concerned, our immediate business is perhaps less to endeavour to produce them by breeding—if that be possible—than to make the most of them when they are vouchsafed us. Says Goethe:—

“We admire the Tragedies of the ancient Greeks; but to take a correct view of the case, we ought to admire the period and the nation in which their production was possible rather than the individual authors; for though these pieces differ in some points from each other, and though one of these poets appears somewhat greater and more finished than the other, still, taking all things together, only one decided character runs through the whole.

“This is the character of grandeur, fitness, soundness, human perfection, elevated wisdom, sublime thought, pure, strong intuition, and whatever other qualities one might enumerate. But when we find all these qualities, not only in the dramatic works which have come down to us, but also in lyrical and epic works—in the philosophers, orators, and historians, and in an equally high degree in the works of plastic art that have come down to us—we must feel convinced that such qualities did not merely belong to individuals, but were the current property of the nation and the whole period.”

Education as to the principle of selection.—Further, the hope may be warranted that, though education, as such, will not achieve the ideal of true race-culture, and though it has never hitherto averted the ultimate failure of all civilisations, yet the case may be different to-day, in that our acquired or traditional progress, transmitted by the process of education accumulating from age to age—not in our blood and bone and brain, but mainly in books, whereby the non-transmission of the results of education is circumvented in a sense—has reached the point at which the laws of racial or inherent progress have been revealed to us, as to none of our predecessors.[38] Having the knowledge of these laws it is possible that we may avert our predecessors' fate by putting them into force. If we do not, we must ultimately become “one with Nineveh and Tyre.” Fifty years have now elapsed since the principle of natural selection was demonstrated for all time by the genius of Darwin. We must not be guilty of starting to tell the story of organic evolution and leaving out the point. So long as we supposed that man was created as he is, the idea of racial progress was an absurdity. It is the correct thing now-a-days to decry the possibility of human perfection. This possibility is rightly to be decried if it be assumed that ideal education of the present material or anything like it would realise perfection. We have seen that it would not. It is the principle of selection, in which Darwin has educated us, that must be taught to all mankind, and thus education may indeed become the factor of an effective race-culture.

The power of individual opinion.—Since ultimately opinion rules the world, it is for us to create sound opinion. That is the purpose of this book. But every individual may be a centre of eugenic opinion, and the time has assuredly come for attempting to realise this ideal, though a thousand years should pass before the facts of heredity are completely ascertained and understood. The main principles are of the simplest character, and can be readily imparted to a child. Especially does the responsibility fall upon parents and those who are in charge of childhood.