Parenthood and Race Culture: An Outline of Eugenics

by C. W. Saleeby

The inebriate as parent.—Is it a mere supposition that these women become mothers? Amongst those committed as criminal inebriates (under the London County Council) in 1905–6, three hundred and sixty-five of those admitted to reformatories had two thousand two hundred children. These are the official figures. As to the quality of these children there is unfortunately no possibility of question.

We may quote from Dr. Sullivan a notable enquiry:—

“Even more striking results with regard to the several forms of degeneracy were obtained by Legrain, who investigated the question from a somewhat different point of view. Selecting from the material at his disposal all those cases in which ancestral intemperance had appeared to exercise a causal influence, and working out their family history, he collected 215 observations of heredo-alcoholism referring to one generation, 98 referring to two generations, and 7 referring to three generations. Of the children of the first generation, 508 in number, 196 were mentally degenerate, the affection of the brain being shown more particularly by moral and emotional abnormality, while intellectual defects were less pronounced; 106 were insane, 52 were epileptic, 16 suffered from hystero-epilepsy, and 3 from chorea; and 39 had convulsions in infancy. Amongst the children of the second generation, who numbered 294, the intellectual defects were more marked, idiocy, imbecility, or debility, being noted in the offspring of 54 out of the 98 families investigated. In 23 out of the 33 families in which the children of the second generation had reached adult age, one or more of them were insane. Epilepsy was found in 40 families, infantile convulsions in 42, and meningitis in 14. The third generation in 7 families was represented by 17 children, all of whom were weak-minded, imbecile, or idiotic; 2 suffered, moreover, from moral insanity, 2 from hysteria, and 2 from epilepsy; 3 were scrofulous, and 4 had convulsions in childhood. In the three generations taken together there were, in addition to the children referred to above, 174 infants who were dead-born or died shortly after birth.”

Therefore, the chronic inebriate must not become a parent. Let it be said that these people are wicked or have no self-control, drink for fun or love of degradation, then become drunkards, and prejudicially affect their children. The conclusion is the same. Have any theory of heredity you please—Lamarckianism, Darwin's pangenesis, Weismannism, Mendelism; it matters not a straw. Look at the thing from the uncharitable religious point of view, or from the charitable scientific view which realizes, in the case of these women, that to know all is to pardon all—the conclusion is still the same.

The present scandal of London's inebriates.—This, then, being so, abundance of official evidence having been gathered in addition to all the unofficial evidence, let us consider the shameful facts which are in process as I write, and are still so, on revision of these pages a year later. They are outlined in the reply of Mr. Herbert Gladstone, the Home Secretary, to a question in the House of Commons. The reply is printed in full in The Times, Feb. 19th, 1908. There was a paltry squabble between the Government and the London County Council as to the exact number of shillings that each was to contribute per week for the maintenance of inebriates. The London County Council was plainly in the wrong, its ignorance being sufficiently indicated by the letter to The Times, which I will quote. The result of the squabble is that, as Mr. G. R. Sims said, “We shall have something like five hundred women, all habitual drunkards, passing in and out of the prisons, a peril to publicans, a pest to the police, an evil example to the women with whom they mix, and free to bring children into the world, their little lives poisoned at the source.” We have therefore reverted to the shameful, brutal, and disastrous system sufficiently indicated by the history of Jane Cakebread, at whom, when one was a schoolboy as ignorant as those who now govern us, one used to laugh because she had been convicted so many hundreds of times.[69] As the present writer said in raising the matter at a meeting of the Eugenics Education Society, the future children of these women are not only doomed by the very nature of their germ-plasm, but they will actually be many times intoxicated not merely in their cradles but before their birth. There is no wealth but life, and this future wealth of England is to be fed on poisoned food and many times made drunken before it sees the light. The meeting of the Society passed a unanimous resolution—“That this society enters a protest against the present administration of the Inebriates Act, whereby through the closing of inebriate homes some hundreds of chronic inebriate women will be set adrift in London, with an inevitably deteriorating result to the race.”[70]

For this particular scandal the London County Council was the more to blame. Let not the reader suppose that a Liberal Government, however, was likely to remedy the immoderate ignorance of a “Moderate” County Council on this matter. Mr. Gladstone's reply in Parliament was an exceptionally long one, but it did not contain a syllable to suggest that any question of the future is involved, or that a woman may become a mother. Further, the Licensing Bill introduced just when we were drawing public attention to this scandal contained nowhere any hint of the principle that you must attack drunkenness by attacking “the main source of drunkard supply—the drunkard himself.” These, the reader will remember, are the words of His Majesty's Inspector. There is no question of party-feeling, then, the reader will understand, in what has here been said. Whether labelled Liberal, Conservative, Progressive or Moderate, ignorance is still ignorance, and when in action is still what Goethe called it, the most dangerous thing in the world.

Pure ignorance, of course, is one of the things against which the advocate of race-culture must fight. The lack of imagination, however, is another. At present we have few homes for the feeble-minded, and many for what the feeble-minded become: few for prevention, which is possible and cheap, many for cure, which is impossible and dear. The average county councillor or politician, of course, is rather more short-sighted than the average man, simply because you cannot be far-sighted and a partisan. What his defect of vision requires is impossible, but it would be effective. It is that the consequences of unworthy parenthood should be immediate, instead of taking months or years to develop. Any one, even a politician, can see cause and effect when they are close enough together. It is the little interval that the political eye cannot pierce. Nevertheless, we shall one day learn to think of the next generation, and then there will be an end of the politician who thinks only of the next election.

Ignorance on its defence.—The state of what has no excuse for being uninformed opinion was only too well illustrated in a letter from the Chairman of the Public Control Committee of the London County Council which appeared in The Times for Feb. 27th, 1908. In defending the London County Council the writer used the following words: “Reformation, not mere detention, was its object when it instituted its reformatory under the Inebriates Acts.... The case of the Public Control Committee is that the removal and detention of the hopeless habituals is a matter for the police.” The explanation aggravates the offence. In the face of reiterated expert opinion, which has no dissentient, as to the practical impossibility of reformation—you cannot reform what has never been formed, viz., a normally developed brain—here we find a man in this responsible position, a man who has the power to put his ignorance into action, telling us that the London County Council aims at the impossible in this respect; whilst, in utter defiance of the future and of the useless brutality of the police-court method, he tells us that these “hopeless habituals” are a matter for the police. Then, by way of making the thing complete, he speaks of “mere detention.” What he calls “mere detention” is everything, for it saves the future by preventing parenthood on the part of members of the community who, more certainly than any others that can be named, are unworthy of it. The adjective “mere” is only too adequate a measure of the state of opinion which, by such retrograde courses as that under discussion, promises to destroy the British people ere long—and therefore, of course, the Empire of which that people is the living and necessary foundation.

It may be noted in passing that the word “reformatory,” employed in the Inebriates Act of 1898, is a highly unfortunate one. It suggests a practically impossible hope, and it ignores what, I submit, must and will ere long be regarded as the essential purpose, function and value of the detention of inebriates—the prohibition of parenthood on their part. In the case of women beyond the child-bearing age, the whole case is radically altered. If it amuses the legislature to cherish fantastic hopes, let it speak about the reformation of these women. If it prefers the futile and disgusting cruelty of the Jane Cakebread method for such women, when the plan for reformation is found to fail, that is no affair of ours in the present volume. Such women have been in effect sterilised by natural processes, and the advocate of race-culture can afford to ignore them, for they do not concern him. Let me note, however, that, of 294 female inebriates admitted to reformatories in the year 1906, 170 were under forty years of age, 92, of whom a considerable proportion would be possible mothers, were between forty and fifty, and only 32 of the total were over fifty years of age.[71] It may be said that the lives of these unhappy women tend to be terminated early. The only pity is that our present blindness and ignorance in dealing with them are not neutralised, so far as the future is concerned, by death at much earlier ages. If such a reflection strikes the reader as cruel, how much more cruel are those who are responsible for the present case of the women inebriates of London?