Parenthood and Race Culture: An Outline of Eugenics

by C. W. Saleeby

We must therefore note in passing a biological factor of historical importance, though hitherto entirely unrecognised by historians, and that is disease. Certain of our diseases, and especially consumption or tuberculosis, are at present making history by their extermination of aboriginal races. Minute living creatures, which we call microbes, are introduced into the new and favourable environment constituted by the blood and tissues of human races hitherto unacquainted with them: and the consequences are known to all. But further, it has lately been suggested as highly probable, by Professor Ross and others, that the fall of Greece, that incalculable disaster for mankind, was due to the invasion not of human foes but of the humble living species which are responsible for the disease miscalled malaria. The evidence for this view is by no means slight, and the most recent explanation of an event so abrupt and so disastrous is in all likelihood the correct one. Malaria, like alcohol, produces true racial degeneration, its poisons affecting those racial elements of which the individual body, biologically conceived, is merely the ephemeral host: recalling the great line of Lucretius, “et quasi cursores, vitaï lampada tradunt.” To lame the runner is not to injure the torch he bears—acquired characters are not transmitted; but the racial poison makes dim the lamp ere the runner passes it on.

Selection and racial change.—But, leaving poisons out of the question, races of men and animals do undergo change, progressive and retrogressive, in consequence of the action of another factor than that advanced by Lamarck: and this is the factor of “natural selection” or “survival of the fittest.” If, of any generation, individuals of a certain kind are chosen by the environment for survival and parenthood, the character of the species will change accordingly. If what we call the best are chosen, their goodness will be transmitted in some degree, and the race will advance: if what we call the worst are chosen, their badness will be transmitted in some degree, and the race will degenerate.

The two kinds of progress.—Now in the case of all species other than man, the only possible progress is this racial or inherent progress, dependent upon a choice or selection of parents, and comparable in some measure, as Darwin showed, with the change similarly produced in the selective breeding or “artificial selection” of the lower animals by man. But in the case of man himself, there is a wholly different kind of progress also attainable, which is not inherent or racial progress at all, but yet is real progress: and which has the most important relations to the inherent or racial progress that might be achieved by the process of natural selection, or the choice of parents.

It has been laid down that acquired characters are not transmissible by heredity: but man has learnt—and it is well for him—to circumvent the laws of heredity by transmitting his spiritual acquirements through language and art. Even before writing there was tradition, passed on from mouth to mouth. As long as man was without writing he advanced little faster than other creatures, we may surmise: we know that he has an undistinguished past of probably at least six million years: but with speech and writing came the transmission of acquirements in this special sense; not that the past education of a mother will enlarge her baby's brain, but that she can teach her daughter what she has learnt, and so the child can begin where the parent left off, just as Lamarck wrongly imagined to be the case with the young giraffe, that he supposed to profit by the stretching of the parental necks. It is this transmission of spiritual acquirements—outside the germ-plasm and in defiance of its laws—that explains the amazing advance of man in the last ten or twenty thousand years as compared with the almost speechless ages before them.

This kind of progress is peculiar to man,[78] it is the gift of intelligence, and we may call it traditional or acquired progress. It is an utterly different thing from inherent or racial progress, an improvement in the breed dependent upon the happy choice of parents. And it is surely evident, on a moment's consideration, that acquired progress is compatible with inherent decadence. To use Coleridge's image, a dwarf may see further than a giant if he sits on the giant's shoulders: yet he is a dwarf and the other a giant. Any schoolboy now knows more than Aristotle, and that is true progress of a kind, but the schoolboy may well be a dwarf compared with Aristotle, and may belong to a race degenerate when compared with his; and that is inherent or racial decadence subsisting with acquired or traditional progress.

Now whilst the accumulation of knowledge and art and power from age to age is real progress, it evidently depends for its stability and persistence upon the quality of the race.[79] If the race degenerates—through, say, the selection of the worst for parenthood—the time will come when its heritage is too much for it. The pearls of the ancestral art are now cast before swine, and are trampled on: statues, temples, books are destroyed or burnt or lost. If an Empire has been built, the degenerate race cannot sustain it. There is no wealth but life: and if the quality of the life fails, neither battleships nor libraries nor symphonies nor anything else will save a nation. This we all know, though no one who observed our legislation or read our Parliamentary debates would suspect that it had ever entered into our minds. Empires and civilisations, then, have fallen, despite the strength and magnitude of the superstructure, because the foundations decayed: and the bigger and heavier the superstructure the less could it survive their failure. If the Fiji islanders degenerate, there is little consequence: if the breed of Romans degenerate, all their vast mass of acquired progress and power crushes them into dramatic ruin. This image, I believe, truly expresses the relation between the two wholly distinct kinds of progress, which we have yet to learn to distinguish. Acquired progress will not compensate for racial or inherent decadence. If the race is going down, it will not compensate to add another colony to your Empire: on the contrary, the bigger the Empire the stronger must be the race: the bigger the superstructure the stronger the foundations. Acquired progress is real progress, but it is always dependent for its maintenance upon racial or inherent progress—or, at least, upon racial maintenance.

Nothing fails like success.—I believe, then, that civilisations and Empires have succumbed because they represented only acquired or traditional or educational progress and this availed not at all when the races that built them up began to degenerate. Now the only explanation of racial degeneration yet offered by the historians—apart from the foolish one of racial senility—is the Lamarckian one of the transmission of habits of luxury and idleness from parent to child: an explanation which the modern study of heredity empowers us to repudiate. What theory of this alleged degeneration is there to offer in its place: and especially what theory which explains racial degeneration amongst not the conquered but the conquerors: amongst the successful, the Imperial, the cultured, the leisured, the well-catered for in all respects, bodily and mental? Why is it that not enslaved but Imperial peoples degenerate? Why is it that nothing fails like success?

What I believe to be the true and sufficient answer has been given by no historian: but the key to it is only fifty years old. The reason is that no race or species, vegetable or animal or human, can maintain—much less raise—its organic level unless its best be selected for parenthood. It is true of a race as of an individual that it must work for its living—so to speak—if it is not to degenerate. When the terms are too easy, down you go. The tape-worm has given up even digesting for its living, and we know its degeneracy—all hooks and mouth. Society works and hands over its predigested food to such social parasites amongst ourselves. You must struggle or you will degenerate—even if only with rhyme or counterpoint, not necessarily for bread. “Effort is the law,” as Ruskin said: whether for a livelihood or for enjoyment. Living things are the product of the struggle for existence: we are thus evolved strugglers by constitution: and directly we cease to struggle we forfeit the possibilities of our birthright. “Thou, O God,” said Leonardo, “hast given all good things to man at the price of labour.”

The case is the same with races. Directly the conditions become too easy, selection ceases, and it is as successful to be incompetent or lazy or vicious as to be worthy. The hard conditions that kept weeding out the unworthy are now relaxed and the fine race they made goes back again. Finally there occurs the phenomenon of reversed selection, when it is fitter to be bad than good, cowardly than brave—as when religious persecution murders all who are true to themselves and spares hypocrites and apostates: or when healthy children are killed in factories whilst feeble-minded children or deaf-mutes are carefully tended until maturity and then sent into the world to reproduce their maladies. Under reversed selection such results are obtained as a breeder of race-horses or plants would obtain if he went to work on similar lines: the race degenerates rapidly: and if it be an Imperial race its Empire comes crashing down about its ears. All Empires and civilisations hitherto have involved the partial or complete arrest or reversal of the process of natural selection: and the racial degeneration which necessarily ensued has been the cause of their invariable doom.

When a primitive race is making its way by force, selection is stringent. The weak, cowardly, diseased, stupid are expunged from generation to generation. As civilisation advances, a higher ethical level is reached: all true civilisation tending to abrogate and ameliorate the struggle for existence. The diseased and weakly and feeble-minded are no longer left to pay the penalty sternly exacted by Nature for unfitness: they are allowed to survive and multiply. A successful race can apparently afford to permit this, as a race that is fighting for its existence cannot. But in reality no race can afford this absolutely fatal process.