Parenthood and Race Culture: An Outline of Eugenics

by C. W. Saleeby

Some particular cases may be referred to.

The diseases known as Daltonism or colour-blindness, and hæmophilia or the “bleeding disease,” are certainly hereditary. The sufferers are usually male, but the disease is commonly transmitted by their daughters (who do not themselves suffer) to their male descendants. As regards colour-blindness, the defect is evidently insufficient to concern the eugenist, but hæmophilia is a serious disease, the transmission of which should not be excused. It may seem hard to assert that the daughter of a hæmophilic father should not become a mother, she herself being free from all disease. But it has to be remembered that the possibility of this hardship depends upon the fact that a hæmophilic man has become a father, as he should not have done.

This point, as to the amount of hardship involved in the observance of negative race-culture, has always to be kept in mind. If negative eugenics were generally enforced upon a given generation some persons would, of course, suffer in greater or less degree from the disabilities imposed upon them. But their number would depend upon the neglect of eugenics by previous generations, and thereafter the number of those upon whom our principles pressed hardly would be relatively minute.

Eugenics and tuberculosis.—It would not be correct to say that the old view of consumption regarded it as hereditary. In this and a hundred other matters, medical, astronomical, or what we please, if we go back to the Arabic students, or further, to the Greeks, we are lucky enough to find sound observation and reasoning. Many quotations might be made to show that the infectious nature of tuberculosis was recognised long ago, just as the revolution of the earth round the sun was recognised a millennium and a half before Copernicus. But the view of our more immediate fathers was that tuberculosis is a hereditary degeneration, and the medical profession proclaimed with no uncertain sound the hopeless and paralysing doctrine that an almost certain doom hung over the children of the consumptive. Then, in memorable succession, came Villemin, Pasteur, and lastly Koch, with his discovery of the bacillus in 1882. The doctrine was then altered in its statement. There was, of course, no choice in the matter, since it was easy to show that not one new-born baby in millions harbours a tubercle bacillus; so all-but-miraculous and, rightly considered, beautiful are the ante-natal defences. It was taught, then, that we inherit a predisposition from consumptive parents, that the bacillus is ubiquitous, and that variations in susceptibility determine the incidence of the disease in one and not in another. It was lightly assumed (simply through what may be called the inertia of belief) that these variations in susceptibility were hereditary; but we are wholly without evidence that the hereditary factor counts for anything substantial, even assuming that it appreciably exists at all. These differences, so far from being inherent, may be most palpably acquired. Under-feeding, alcohol, and influenza, let us say, will adequately prepare any human soil. Furthermore, we are learning that the bacillus is nothing like so ubiquitous as used to be supposed. Tuberculosis is now sometimes described as a dwelling disease. It might probably be described with still more accuracy as a bed-room disease, or a bed-room and public-house disease. It has been evident for many years past that the more we learnt about tuberculosis the less did we talk about heredity; and in one of the most recent authoritative pronouncements[48] upon the subject, the lecturer did not even allude to heredity at all. Many readers will be up in arms at once with apparently contrary instances; and much labour may be spent in the mathematical analysis of statistical data—as that of cases where a father and a child have tuberculosis. But suppose the father kissed the child? What have you proved regarding heredity? No mathematics can get more out of the data than is in them.

The statistics designed to measure the degree of inheritance in this disease labour under the cardinal fallacy of assuming that where father and son suffer, the case is one of inheritance, and then proceed to measure the average extent of this inheritance. These statistics are so much waste paper and ink—assuming what they claim to prove. They do not allow for the fact that the child is very frequently exposed in grave measure to infection by the parent; they ignore wholly, indeed, the entire question of exposure to infection, both as regards its extent in time and the virulence of the infection in question. At the present day, discussions as to the inheritance of consumption and tuberculosis in general are not fit for practical application: and a practical disservice is rendered by those who seek to divert public attention from the removable environmental causes upon which the disease mainly depends. We know, for instance, that the incidence of tuberculosis is directly proportional to over-crowding: this being universally true, we must work to abolish over-crowding and to provide fresh air for every one by day and by night. When that is done, alcoholism disposed of, and our milk-supply purified, we may turn to the question of heredity: but the incidence of the disease will then present merely trivial instead of the present appalling proportions.

It is not asserted that inherent variations in susceptibility to this disease are not existent. The case would be unique if it were so. But it is asserted that the more we learn of the disease the less importance we attach to this factor, and the more surely do we see that the three syllables constituting the word “infection” substantially suffice to dispose of all the confident dogmas with which we are too familiar. One is almost tempted to quote a forcible phrase of Mill's, and say that, given this point of view, “once questioned, they are doomed.” The only method of accurately studying the question of inherited predisposition would be by comparative study of the resistance of new-born infants as measured by their “opsonic index”—which may be (very roughly) described as the measure of the power of the white cells of the blood to eat up tubercle bacilli.[49] Nor will even this method be free from fallacy.

The present writer believes that eugenics is going to save the world; that there is no study of such urgent and practical importance as that of heredity; that if we get the right people born and the wrong people not born, forms of government and such questions will be left even without fools to contest regarding them. Thus he has every bias in favour of emphasising the hereditary factor in tuberculosis. The fact will at least not discredit the foregoing views, which are in absolute accord with those of Dr. Newsholme, our leading authority, in his recent work upon the subject.

Nothing need here be said about cancer, the best and most recent evidence tending to show that the disease is not hereditary.

The foregoing may briefly suffice to illustrate the general proposition that negative eugenics will seek to define the diseases and defects which are really hereditary, to name those the transmission of which is already certainly known to occur, and to raise the average of the race by interfering as far as may be with the parenthood of persons suffering from these transmissible disorders. Only thus can certain of the gravest evils of society, as, for instance, feeble-mindedness, insanity, and crime due to inherited degeneracy, be suppressed: and if race-culture were absolutely incapable of effecting anything whatever in the way of increasing the fertility of the worthiest classes and individuals, its services in the negative direction here briefly outlined would still be of incalculable value. No other proposal will save so much life, present and to come: and save so much gold in doing so—as one would insist if one were writing a eugenic primer for politicians. To this policy we shall most certainly come: but here, as in other cases, I trust far more in the influence of an educated public opinion than in legislation; though there are certain forms of transmissible disease, interfering in no way with the responsibility of the individual, the transmission of which should be visited with the utmost rigour of the law and regarded as utterly criminal no less than sheer murder.