Parenthood and Race Culture: An Outline of Eugenics

by C. W. Saleeby

This sufficiently indicates the dangers run by the eugenic principle at the hands of those who see in it an instrument of protest and rebellion against established things. We dare not repudiate the sacred principles of protest and rebellion, which have been the conditions of all progress, but believing in motherhood as we must, believing it to be authorised by nature herself and not by any human conventions, we must deplore any tendencies such as the two last cited. For us in this country, however, a more immediate interest attaches to the views of a much admired and discussed writer who claims to be a social philosopher of the first order, and whose claims must now be examined.

The opinions of Mr. Bernard Shaw on the question of eugenics may be quoted from his contribution to the subject published in Sociological Papers 1904, pp. 74, 75, in discussion of Mr. Galton's great paper. Mr. Shaw begins by saying: “I agree with the paper and go so far as to say that there is now no reasonable excuse for refusing to face the fact that nothing but a eugenic religion can save our civilisation from the fate that has overtaken all previous civilisations.” And further:—

“I am afraid we must make up our minds either to face a considerable shock to vulgar opinion in this matter or to let eugenics alone.... What we must fight for is freedom to breed the race without being hampered by the mass of irrelevant conditions implied in the institution of marriage. If our morality is attacked, we can carry the war into the enemy's country by reminding the public that the real objection to breeding by marriage is that marriage places no restraint on debauchery, so long as it is monogamic.... What we need is freedom for people who have never seen each other before and never intend to see one another again, to produce children under certain definite public conditions, without loss of honour.”

The conception of individual fatherhood here stated involves a deliberate reversion to the order of the beast: it excludes individual fatherhood from any function in aiding motherhood or in serving the future. It involves, of course, the total abolition of the family. It denies and flouts the very best elements in human nature. It assumes that the best women will find motherhood worth while without the interest and sympathy and help and protection of the father. It does not, however, condemn or exclude the psychical functions of motherhood, since so far as this quotation goes it might be assumed that the mother would be permitted to live with her own child. On this point, however, Mr. Shaw offered us further guidance in his controversy with myself in the Pall Mall Gazette, in December, 1907. One or two of his dicta must here be quoted—they followed upon my remark, “Anything less like a mother than the State I find it hard to imagine”:—

“When the State left the children to the mothers, they got no schooling; they were sent out to work under inhuman conditions, under-ground and over-ground for atrociously long hours, as soon as they were able to walk; they died of typhus fever in heaps; they grew up to be as wicked to their own children as their parents had been to them. State socialism rescued them from the worst of that, and means to rescue them from all of it. I now publicly challenge Dr. Saleeby to propose, if he dares, to withdraw the hand of the State and abandon the children to their mothers as they fall.... All I need say is that before Dr. Saleeby can persuade me to sacrifice the future of human society to his maternalism, he will have to tackle me with harder weapons than the indignant enthusiasm of a young man's mother worship.”

Mr. Shaw's teaching constitutes a brutal and deliberate libel upon the highest aspects of womanhood. For his own purposes he attributes to the mothers all the abominations which, as every one knows, have lain and in some measure still lie, at the door of the State. The man who has this opinion of motherhood is complacently ignorant of the elements of the subject. His charge is denied by every one who has worked as doctor or nurse or visitor or missionary amongst the poorer classes, and knows that the mothers there met are of the very salt of the earth.

It is well to state plainly here that these utterly irresponsible dicta have absolutely no relation or resemblance whatever to the opinions or proposals of Mr. Francis Galton himself, who desires to effect race-culture through marriage, and whose whole propaganda is based upon this assumption. This we shall afterwards see. Meanwhile we may note Mr. Galton's own words: “The aim of eugenics is to bring as many influences as can be reasonably employed, to cause the useful classes in the community to contribute more than their proportion to the next generation.” Mr. Galton would be the first to assert that influences designed to supersede motherhood and to abolish everything but the physical aspect of fatherhood, would not be reasonable, but insane in the highest degree.

The ideal of race-culture without fatherhood or motherhood, except in the mere physiological sense, constitutes a denial of the greatest facts in evolution, as we have seen. It ignores everything that is known and daily witnessed regarding the development of the individual, and the formation of character, without which intelligence is a curse. There is not the slightest fear that any such reversion to the order of the beast is possible, absolutely forbidden as it is by the laws of human nature. There is, however, reasonable ground for apprehension, especially when the recent developments in Germany are remembered, that the public may obtain its notions of eugenics in a highly-garbled form.[43]

It must be asserted as fervently and plainly as possible that, if the idea of race-culture is even in the smallest degree to be realised, it must work through motherhood and fatherhood not less in their psychical than in their physical aspects. It is time to have done with the gross delusions of Nietzsche regarding the nature and course of organic evolution. Morality is not an invention of man but man the child of morality, and it is not by the abolition of motherhood, in which morality originated, nor of fatherhood, its first ally, that the super-man is to be evolved: but by the attainment of those lofty conceptions of the function, the responsibility and the privilege of parenthood which it is the first business of eugenics to inculcate.