[PART II—THE PRACTICE OF EUGENICS]
[CHAPTER XI]
NEGATIVE EUGENICS
N'abandonnons pas l'avenir de notre race à la fatalité d'Allah; créons-le nous-mêmes.—Forel.
“It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but except in the case of man himself, hardly anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.
“With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated, and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilised men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maim and the sick; we institute poor laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of everyone to the last moment.... Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man.”—Darwin, The Descent of Man, 1871. Pt. i., chap. v.
Hitherto we have mainly concerned ourselves with broad aspects of theory, endeavouring to prove that conscious race-culture is a necessity for any civilisation which is to endure, and to show how alone it can be effected. But evidently for a great many of the practical proposals that might be, and for not a few that have been, based upon these views, public opinion is not ripe. We may be thankful to believe that for some it will never be ripe: it would be rotten first. Marriage, for instance, we hold sacred and essential: we find intolerable the idea of the human stud-farm; we are very dubious as to the help of surgery; we are much more than dubious as to the lethal chamber. It is necessary to be reasonable, and, in seeking the superman, to remain at least human. Now if we are to achieve any immediate success we must clearly divide our proposals, as the present writer did some years ago, with Mr. Galton's approval, into two classes: positive eugenics and negative eugenics. The one would seek to encourage the parenthood of the worthy, the other to discourage the parenthood of the unworthy. Positive eugenics is the original eugenics, but, as the writer endeavoured to show at the time, negative eugenics is one with it in principle. The two are complementary, and are both practised by Nature: natural selection is one with natural rejection. To choose is to refuse.
In regard to positive eugenics I, for one, must ever make the criticism that I cannot believe in the propriety of attempting to bribe into parenthood people who have no love of children: we have to consider the parental environment of the children we desire, as well as their innate quality. Thus, positive eugenics must largely take the form, at present, of removing such disabilities as now weigh upon the desirable members of the community, especially of the more prudent sort.
For instance, it was recently pointed out by a correspondent of the Morning Post that in Great Britain, despite the alarm caused by the decreasing marriage-rate, no one has protested against—