Parenthood and Race Culture: An Outline of Eugenics

by C. W. Saleeby

Motherhood and history.—Here, also, reference must again be made to another factor of history to which, as I think, the biologist must attach enormous importance, but which no historian yet has adequately reckoned with. Our prime assumption from beginning to end is that “there is no wealth but life,” or, if one may venture to improve upon Ruskin, there is no wealth but mind; and in the attempt to suggest interpretations of history based upon this truth, so little recked of by the historian, we have considered the life in question from the point of view of its determination by heredity, and its varying value according to the inherent and transmissible characters selected in each generation. But a word must be said as to the other factor which, with heredity, determines the character of the individual—and that factor is the environment. I wish merely to note the most important aspect of the environment of human beings, and to observe that historians hitherto have wholly ignored it; yet its influence is incalculable. I refer to motherhood.

One might have the most perfect system of selection of the finest and highest individuals for parenthood; but the babies whose potentialities—heredity gives no more—are so splendid, are always, will be always, dependent upon motherhood. What was the state of motherhood during the decline and fall of the Roman Empire? This factor counts in history; and always will count so long as, three times in every century, the only wealth of nations is reduced to dust, and is raised again from helpless infancy. As to Rome we know little, whatever may be suspected: but we know that here in the heart of the greatest Empire in history—and it is at the heart that Empires rot—thousands of mothers go out every day to tend dead machines, whilst their own flesh and blood, with whom lies the Imperial destiny, are tended anyhow or not at all. It may yet be said by some enlightened historian of the future that the living wealth of this people, in the twentieth century, began to be eaten away by the cancer which we call “married women's labour,” and that, as will be evident to that historian's readers, its damnation was sure. To-day our historians and politicians think in terms of regiments and tariffs and “Dreadnoughts”: the time will come when they must think in terms of babies and motherhood. We must think in such terms too if we wish Great Britain to be much longer great. Meanwhile some of us see the perennial slaughter of babies in this land, and the deterioration of many for every one killed outright, the waste of mothers' travail and tears: and we recall Ruskin's words:—

“Nevertheless, it is open, I repeat, to serious question, which I leave to the reader's pondering, whether, among national manufactures, that of Souls of a good quality may not at last turn out a quite leadingly lucrative one? Nay, in some far-away and yet undreamt-of hour, I can even imagine that England may cast all thoughts of possessive wealth back to the barbaric nations among whom they first arose; and that, while the sands of the Indus and adamant of Golconda may yet stiffen the housings of the charger, and flash from the turban of the slave, she, as a Christian mother, may at last attain to the virtues and the treasures of a Heathen one, and be able to lead forth her Sons, saying:—

“These are MY Jewels.”

Had all Roman mothers been Cornelias, would Rome have fallen?[80] Consider the imitation mothers—no longer mammalia—to be found in certain classes to-day—mothers who should be ashamed to look any tabby-cat in the face; consider the ignorant and downtrodden mothers amongst our lower classes; and ask whether these things are not making history.

The survival of the Jews.—The principles the discussion of which has here been attempted had all been set down before it suddenly seemed clear that they found their warrant and application in the unexampled riddle of the persistence and success, throughout more than two thousand years and a thousand vicissitudes, of the Jewish people. It is true that we have here no exception to the apparent law that Empires are mortal, for within this period there never was a Jewish Empire: the Jews were never subject to the risk involved for racial or inherent progress by the possession of great acquired powers. But just as the fall of Empires has often not been the fall of races—various races having at various times carried on the same Imperial tradition—so the persistence of the Jews, as contrasted with the impermanence of Empires, has been the persistence of a race. I believe that the principles already laid down offer us an adequate explanation of this unique case: and further, that if we had begun with the case of the Jews, endeavouring, by the investigation of their case, to explain the contrasted case of other races and of all Empires hitherto, we should have arrived at the same principles.

It has been asserted that that race or people decays in which selection ceases or is reversed; that in the absence of selection of the worthy for parenthood, no species, vegetable, animal or human, can prosper—much less progress. Now the Jews, the one human race of which we know assuredly that it has persisted unimpaired, have been the most continuously and stringently selected of any race, I suppose, that can be named. Every measure of persecution and repression practised against them by the people amongst whom they have lived, has directly tended towards the very end which those people least desired to compass. Other peoples found themselves prosperous through the efforts of their fathers; the struggle for existence abated; it was, so to say, as fit to be unfit as to be fit—with the inevitable result. But this has never been the case of the Jews. They have always had to struggle for life intensely: and their unexampled struggle has been a great source of their unexampled strength. The Jew who was a weakling or a fool had no chance at all; the weaklings and the fools being weeded out, intensity and strength of mind became the common heritage of this amazing people.

Secondly, there was everything to favour motherhood. Here religious precept and ethical tradition joined with stem necessity to the same end—the end which always meant a new and strong beginning for the next generation. Even to-day all observers are agreed that infant mortality is at a minimum amongst the Jews; their children are superior in height and weight and chest measurement to Gentile children brought up amidst poverty far less intense in our own great cities; in a better material environment, but a far inferior maternal environment. The Jewish mother is the mother of children innately superior, on the average, since they are the fruit of such long ages of stringent parental selection, and she makes more of them because she fails to nurse them only in the rarest cases, when she has no choice, and because in every detail her maternal care is incomparably superior to that of her Gentile sister. Given a high standard of motherhood in a highly selected race, what other result than that we daily witness and envy can we expect?