We may certainly agree with Mr. Havelock Ellis that sexual selection occurs in human society, and may welcome his volume as supporting that assertion. There follows the extremely interesting and indeed urgent necessity of ascertaining what the factors of this selection really are, what is their relative potency, and what is their capacity for modification. We may further enquire whether they tend to be eugenic. A contribution to this subject is furnished by Mr. Ellis when he shows that width of “hips” is a female character commonly admired by men. Since a wide pelvis is one which can accommodate and safely give birth to a large fœtal head, there is here, as a practically solitary case, a bearing on the eugenic issue: large heads mean, in general, large brains, and it would be ill for the white races if men admired hips as narrow as those of, for instance, the negress, whose pelvis could not find room for the average head of a purely white baby, and who suffers terribly in many cases where the father is white, especially if the child be a boy.
Meanwhile we must wait for studies of this great question from various points of view: notably for a study of the economics of sexual selection as it obtains in human society. Yet further, we require a detailed study of the influence of legislation, custom and public opinion upon sexual selection—on the lines of Mr. Galton's paper on “Restrictions in Marriage.” Mr. Havelock Ellis has more than adequately dealt with the nervous physiology of sexual selection; there remain the psychology and sociology of it—these latter comprehending, one may suppose, ninety-nine per cent. of the whole subject. In the preceding pages allusion has been made to one or two of the more salient aspects of this matter.
[CHAPTER XIII]
THE RACIAL POISONS: ALCOHOL[55]
In the first chapter of our second Part, which deals with the practice of eugenics, there were introduced, defined, and briefly illustrated, the terms positive eugenics and negative eugenics. Of these the latter, as the more urgent and the more completely and immediately practicable, claims our special attention; though the present writer, notwithstanding that he has devoted to it the greater part of his eugenic work, is bound to protest that the positive increase of ability and worth is never to be regarded as of secondary importance. The two methods are, of course, complementary in practice, as they are one in principle—to select is to reject, to choose is to refuse. The preceding chapter, on selection (and rejection) through marriage, has dealt with the conditions under which both aims are to be pursued. In the following pages we must discuss a specially urgent and practicable and indisputable portion of negative eugenic practice: none the less urgent because of the contemporary emergence and future world-importance of sober nations, such as Japan and Turkey. The term racial poisons, introduced by the present writer in the year 1907, is self-explanatory. After dealing with the most important of these poisons, we shall proceed, in the next chapter, to discuss some others. The racial poisons constitute a special department of eugenics which has not hitherto been considered by the pioneers of this subject, but for which I press the claim of the utmost gravity and moment, and which I conceive to be certainly a part, and a most important part, of our manifold yet single subject.
The argument of this chapter is that parenthood must be forbidden to the dipsomaniac, the chronic inebriate or the drunkard, whether male or female; and this whether Lamarck or Galton and Weismann be right, or whether, as we may believe with Galton and Weismann themselves, the controversy between the two parties is wholly irrelevant to the question in hand. This conclusion, that on no grounds whatever, theoretical or practical, can we continue to permit parenthood on the part of the drunkard, is one temperance reform, perhaps the only one, on which disagreement is absolutely impossible. It is, further, the most radical that can be named within the sphere of practical politics, and it is conspicuously practicable. It has hitherto been lamentably neglected by workers and reformers of all schools. Indeed, at the time of writing, the London County Council, governing the greatest city in the world, is pursuing a course of action in this regard, which will be detailed later, and which, as will appear, is misguided and deplorable in the last degree.
Alcohol and heredity.—According to Dr. Archdall Reid, “alcohol, year after year, eliminates from the race a great number of people so constituted that intoxication affords them keen delight, leaving the perpetuation of the race in great measure to those on whom intoxication confers little or no delight.... Now since alcohol weeds out enormous numbers of people of a particular type, it is a stringent agent of selection—an agent of selection more stringent than any one disease.” The factor that really makes the drunkard “is certainly inborn, and therefore as certainly transmissible to offspring. The man who has it is cursed with the ‘alcohol diathesis,’ with the ‘predisposition to drunkenness.’ Thus most savages are keenly capable of enjoying drink, and their offspring inherit the capacity.” Féré has shown that “it is one of the characteristics of the degenerate that they are prone to have recourse to the poisons, like alcohol and morphia, which hasten their decadence and elimination.” Thus, as Dr. W. C. Sullivan points out, alcohol “might certainly be adjudged a salutary evil if its incidence were limited to individuals whose extreme inferiority of organisation renders them wholly undesirable and useless to the community. But this is very far from being the case.”[56]
The whole crux of the question lies in this last sentence. Alcohol certainly destroys many degenerate stocks, and that is good, though it would be better to do what we shall do some day—hasten and ameliorate the process by forbidding parenthood to the degenerate. But does alcohol also make degenerates; does it even make more degenerates than it destroys? A somewhat similar difficulty arises in the case of infant mortality. The causes of infant mortality destroy many children inherently unfit, diseased or weakly. But we are not justified in keeping up our infant mortality, if we find, as we do, that for every diseased child whom they destroy they kill many who were healthy at birth and damage for life many more.