Parenthood and Race Culture: An Outline of Eugenics

by C. W. Saleeby

Two explanations, each falsely asserting itself to be rooted in biological fact, have long been cited and are still cited in order to account for these supreme tragedies of history.

The fallacy of racial senility.—The first may claim Plato and Aristotle as its founders, and consists of an argument from analogy. Races may be conceived in similar terms to individuals. There are many resemblances between a society—a “social organism,” to use Herbert Spencer's phrase—and an individual organism. Just, then, as the individual is mortal, so is the race. Each has its birth, its period of youth and growth, its maturity, and, finally, its decadence, senility and death. So runs the common argument.

We must reply, however, that biology, so far from confirming it, declares as the capital fact which contrasts the individual and the race that, whilst the individual is doomed to die from inherent causes, the race is naturally immortal. The tendency of life is not to die but to live. If individuals die, that is doubtless because, as I believe, more life and fuller is thus attained than if life bodied itself in immortal forms: but the germ-plasm is immortal; it has no inherent tendency either to degenerate or to die. Species exist and flourish now which are millions of years older than mankind. “The individual withers, the race is more and more.”

It may be added that, in historical instances, civilisations have, on the one hand, persisted, and, on the other, fallen, despite change, and even substitution, in the races which created them: and, on the other hand, the most conspicuously persistent of all races in the historic epoch, the Jews, have survived one Empire after another of their oppressors, but have never had an Empire of their own. Thus, so far as the historian is concerned, it is not races at all that die, but civilisations and Empires. Plato's argument from the individual to the race is therefore irrelevant, as well as untrue. The fatalistic conception to which it tempts us, saying that races must die, just as individuals must, and that therefore it is idle to repine or oppose, is utterly unwarrantable and extremely unhealthy. To take our own case, despite the talk about our own racial decadence, nearly all our babies still come into the world fit and strong and healthy—the racial poisons apart. We kill them in scores of thousands every year, but this infant mortality is not a sign that the race is dying, but a sign that even the most splendid living material can be killed or damaged if you try hard enough. The babies do not die because races are mortal, but because individuals are and we kill them. The babies drink poison, eat poison, and breathe poison, and in due course die. The theory of racial senility, inapplicable everywhere because untrue, is most of all inapplicable here. If a race became sterile, Plato and Aristotle would be right. There is no such instance in history, apart from well-defined external, not inherent, causes, as in the case of the Tasmanians. Dismissing this analogy, we may also dismiss, as based upon nothing better, the idea that the great tragedies of history were necessary events at all. We must look elsewhere than amongst the inherent and necessary factors of racial life for the causes which determine these tragedies; and we shall be entitled to assume as conceivable the proposition that, notwithstanding the consistent fall of all our predecessors, the causes are not inevitable, but, being external and environmental, may possibly be controlled: man being not only creature but creator also.

The Lamarckian explanation of decadence.—The second of the two false interpretations of history in terms of biology is still, and always has been, widely credited. When historians have paid any attention to the breed of a people as determining its destiny, they have invariably added to the fallacy of racial senility this no less fecund error. It is that, in consequence of success, a people become idle, thoughtless, unenterprising, luxurious, and that these acquired characters are transmitted to succeeding generations so that, finally, there is produced a degenerate people unable to bear the burden of Empire—and then the crash comes. The historian usually introduces the idea already dismissed by saying that a “young and vigorous race” invaded the Imperial territories—and so forth. The terms “young” and “old,” applied to human races, usually mean nothing at all.

The reader will recognise, of course, in this doctrine of the transmission to children of characters acquired by their parents, the explanation of organic evolution advanced by Lamarck rather more than a century ago. It is employed by historians for the explanation of both the processes they record, progress and retrogression. Thus they suppose that for many generations a race is disciplined, and so at last there is produced a race with discipline in its very bone; or for many generations a nation finds it necessary to make adventure upon the sea, and so at last there is produced a generation of predestined sailors with blue water in its blood. And in similar terms moral and physical retrogression or degeneration are explained.

Let us consider the contrast between the interpretation which accepts the Lamarckian theory of the transmission of acquired characters and that which does not. Consider the babies of a new generation. According to Lamarck, these have in their blood and brain the consequences of the habits of their ancestors. If these have been idle and luxurious, the new babies are predestined to be idle and luxurious too. This, in short, is a “dying nation.” But, if acquired characters are not transmitted, the new generation is, on the whole, not much better, not much worse, than its predecessors—so far as this supposed factor of change is concerned. Each generation makes a fresh start, as we see in the babies of our slums to-day. It does not begin where the last left off—whether that means beginning at a higher or at a lower level than that at which the last started: but it makes a fresh start where the last did.

Now, in general, we have seen that Lamarck's theory is discredited. The view of Mr. Galton is accepted, that acquired characters are not transmitted, either for good or for evil. If there are no other factors of racial degeneration or racial advance, then races do not degenerate or advance, but make a fresh start every generation: and Empires rise and fall without any relation to the breed of the Imperial people—an incredible proposition.

The racial poisons and decadence.—Certain apparent, though not real, exceptions exist to the denial of the Lamarckian theory of the transmission of acquired characters. These exceptions are furnished by what I have called the racial poisons. Alcohol, for instance, is a substance, certainly poisonous in all but very small doses, if not in them, which is carried by the blood to every part of the body and may and does injure its racial elements. Thus a true racial degeneration may be caused by its means: and the possibility of this is not to be ignored. Other poisons, such as those of certain diseases, act similarly.