Parenthood and Race Culture: An Outline of Eugenics

by C. W. Saleeby

At present we interfere with marriage on every imaginable ground, many utterly trivial, many worse. We encourage or discourage on economic grounds; we recognize many taboos, of caste, creed, colour. It is not for us, certainly, acting as we do, to be offended at the suggestion that we should use our influence to affect marriage on the highest conceivable ground—the life of mankind to come. What we really need is not so much the abolition of Mrs. Grundy as her conversion to the eugenic idea. It is the business of those who believe that eugenics is the greatest ideal in the world to make a eugenist of Mrs. Grundy, as we shall some day: and then it will be realised how potent for good public opinion may become, once it is rightly educated.

Says Mr. Galton, in his latest contribution to the subject:—

“The power of social opinion is apt to be rather under-rated than over-rated. Like the atmosphere which we breathe and by which we live, social opinion operates powerfully without our being conscious of its existence. Everyone knows that governments, manners, and beliefs which were thought to be right, decorous, and true at one period have been judged wrong, indecorous, and false at another; and that views which we have heard expressed by those in authority over us in our childhood and early manhood tend to become axiomatic and unchangeable in mature life.

“Speaking for myself only, I look forward to local eugenic action in numerous directions, including the accumulation of considerable funds to start young couples of ‘worthy’ qualities in their married life, and to assist them and their families at critical times. The gifts to those who are the reverse of ‘worthy’ are enormous in amount; it is stated that the charitable donations in the year 1907 amounted to £4,868,050. I am not prepared to say how much of this was judiciously spent, or in what ways, but merely quote the figures to justify the inference that many of the thousands of persons who are willing to give freely at the prompting of a sentiment based upon compassion, might be persuaded to give largely also in response to a more virile sentiment, based on the desire of promoting the natural gifts and the National Efficiency of future generations.

“In circumscribed communities especially, social approval and disapproval exert a potent force. Its presence is only too easily read by every one who is the object of either, in the countenances, bearing, and manner of those with whom they daily meet and converse. Is it then, I ask, too much to expect that when a public opinion in favour of Eugenics has once taken sure hold of such communities and has been accepted by them as a quasi-religion, the result will be manifested in sundry and very effective modes of action which are as yet untried and many of them even unforeseen?”

“Breach of promise” and race-culture.—It may be added that perhaps we shall have to learn to reconsider our ill-judged and stupid censoriousness, directed against young people who get engaged but then become tired of one another—as they accurately say, discover that they are not suited for one another. Not only is it obvious that we are fools in denouncing this discovery of impermanence in their attraction, happily made before marriage, whilst we ignore the disasters of its lamentably postmature discovery, after marriage: but also it should be obvious that the eugenic end is negatively served whenever what would have been an unfortunate union is broken off in time. Our imbecile standard of honour, and the law of breach of promise, which is outrageously abused, at present condemn the man, for instance, who finds that he has made a mistake, whilst passively applauding him who, finding his mistake, thinks it his duty to make it irreparable. Far better would it be that the man incapable of forming an attachment made of the non-material ties which last, should not marry at all. The man who cannot see, or seeing, cannot find it in his heart to love, the spiritual beauties of womanhood, is just the man who can be safely omitted in the eugenist's scheme for fatherhood.

The plea of insanity is, in English law, no protection against a claim for damages for breach of promise to marry, unless it be proved insanity at date of contract in the defendant. A valid contract once made, it is no excuse for non-performance that insanity has been discovered in the family of the other party. This wicked law must be altered.

The need for further study.—In his study of this subject the student will naturally turn to Mr. Havelock Ellis's volume entitled Sexual Selection in Man.[54] This, of course, has its own scientific value as a statement of facts, notwithstanding its intensely nauseating character. But anything less relevant to what most of us understand by psychology it would be difficult to imagine. The book considers seriatim, touch, smell, hearing, and vision as the bases of so-called love. It thus deals with “sensology,” not psychology. Indeed, to the best of one's recollection, after very close and careful reading, there is no allusion to the human mind in it anywhere. If men and women were simply animals, this book would doubtless cover the ground, and perhaps the word “psychology” would even be justified in connection with it. From end to end men and women are consistently treated as animals and no more. Since, however, the human species is possessed of psychical characters which distinguish it from the lower animals, it is not unreasonable to suppose that a volume which really dealt with sexual selection in man would, to say the least of it, recognise the existence of those characters—even if only to reject them as irrelevant to the subject under discussion.

The foregoing remarks do not imply that the purely anatomical and sensory factors are irrelevant to the selection of parents in any generation, and for methodological purposes it might be of value to abstract from the factors of sexual selection in human society such things as odour and contour. But it would be urgently necessary in the course of such a study, if it were to be other than extremely misleading, to observe that this selection of factors was made for purposes of convenience and that the relation of their importance to that of other factors was a matter for further and by no means casual consideration.