To this we shall come. We may even recognise eugenic education as the most urgent need of the day, as the most radical and rational, perhaps even the most hopeful, of the methods by which the cleansing of the city, and much more, is to be achieved. We must create a eugenic aspect for the moral sense. We can associate this alike with individual and civic duty, and with those very ideals to which, as we all know, the young most readily respond. Thus I believe it shall be said of us in the after time that we have raised up the foundations of many generations.
And so, finally, the unselfish significance of marriage might conceivably be taught, alike to boys and girls, and especially in the case of undoubtedly good stocks might we inculcate, as Mr. Galton has pointed out, a rational pride in ancestry—that is to say, a rational pride in the quality of the germ-plasm which has been entrusted to us. And so may be cultivated a eugenic aspect of the moral sense—which is immeasurably more plastic than any but the student of moral ideas knows—and, thus endowed, the young man or woman will be prepared for the possibility of marriage. It is perfectly conceivable that in days to come the argument—in any case false—that affection never brooks control, may become wholly irrelevant, when there arises a generation in whose members there has been cultivated or created the eugenic sense. It is conceivable that, just as to-day the mere possibility of falling in love is arrested by any of a thousand trivial considerations, so misplaced affection may be incapable of arising because its possible object affronts the educated eugenic sense. The natural basis for such education already exists. But the natural eugenic sense still works mainly on the physical plane, and although we owe to it the maintenance of our present modest standard of physical beauty, we aim at higher ideals—and will one day thus attain them.
[CHAPTER IX]
THE SUPREMACY OF MOTHERHOOD
“The dregs of the human species—the blind, the deaf mute, the degenerate, the imbecile, the epileptic—are better protected than pregnant women.”—Bouchacourt.
“I hold that the two crowning and most accursed sins of the society of this present day are the carelessness with which it regards the betrayal of women, and the brutality with which it suffers the neglect of children.”—Ruskin.
A chapter must be included here concerning a question which can never safely be ignored in any consideration of race-culture, but the importance of which, as I think I see it, is recognised by no one who has concerned himself at all with this subject, from Mr. Francis Galton himself downwards. We must all be agreed, Mr. Galton declares, as to the propriety of breeding, if it be possible, for health, energy and ability, whatever else may be doubtful. To this I would add that, whether we are agreed or not, we must breed for motherhood, and that, even if we do not, we shall have to reckon with it. The general eugenic position, I fancy, is that the requirements which we should make of both sexes, the mothers of the future as well as the fathers, are essentially identical: but it seems to me that we have not yet reckoned with the vast importance of motherhood as a factor in the evolution of all the higher species of animals, and its absolute supremacy, inevitable and persistent whether recognised or ignored, in the case of man. Any system of eugenics or race-culture, any system of government, any proposal for social reform—as, for instance, the reduction of infant mortality—which fails to reckon with motherhood or falls short of adequately appraising it, is foredoomed to failure and will continue to fail so long as the basal facts of human nature and the development of the human individual retain even approximately their present character. Whatever proposals for eugenics or race-culture be made or carried out, the fact will remain that the race is made up of mortal individuals; that every one of these begins its visible life as a helpless baby, and that the system which does not permit the babies to survive, they will not permit to survive.
This is a general and universal proposition, admitting of no exceptions, past, present or to come. It applies equally to conscious systems of race-culture, to forms of marriage, to forms of government, to any other social institution or practice or character that can be named or conceived. Upon every one of these the babies pronounce a judgment from which there is no appeal. The baby may be a potential Newton, Shakespeare, Beethoven or Buddha, but it is at its birth the most helpless thing alive, the potentialities of which avail it not one whit. It is in more need of care, immediate and continuous, than a baby microbe or a baby cat, whatever the unpublished glories of which its brain contains the promise; and in the total absence of any apparatus, mechanical, legal, or scientific, which can provide the mother's breast and the mother's love, individual motherhood, in its exquisitely complementary aspects, physical and psychical, will remain the dominant factor of history so long as the final judgments upon every present and the final determinations for every future lie in the hands of helpless babyhood—which will be the case so long as man is mortal. When, if ever, science, having previously conquered disease, identifies the causes of natural death and removes them, then motherhood and babyhood may be thrown upon the rubbish heap; but until that hour they are enthroned by decree of Nature, and can be dethroned only at the cost of Her certain and annihilative vengeance.