Eugenics appeals to the individual, asking for a little imagination, which will make us realise that the future will one day be the present and that to serve it is to serve no fiction or phantom, but a reality as real as the present generation.
It teaches the responsibility of the noblest and most sacred of all professions, which is parenthood, and it makes a sober and dignified claim to be regarded as a constituent of the religion of the future.
It goes to the root of the matter; where the well-meaning, but short-sighted, pin their faith on the hospitals, the eugenist seeks to brand the transmission of hereditary disease as a crime, and thus literally to extirpate it altogether.
That its methods are practicable is proved by the fact that it is practised—as by the northern society for the “permanent care of the feeble-minded,” which serves the present and the future simultaneously and reconciles the law of love with the earlier law of nature—which asserts that parenthood must be denied to the unworthy—without blame or malice, but without exception. It suggests the principles of a New Imperialism, and offers, I submit, our sole chance of escape from the fate which has overtaken all previous civilisations. It honours men and women by declaring that human parenthood is crowned with responsibility to the unborn, and to all time coming, and that man, the animal in body, is also a self-conscious being, “looking before and after,” who is human because he is responsible, and to whom the laws of nature have been revealed, not to satisfy an intellectual curiosity, but for the highest end conceivable—the elevation of his race.
Let me quote a fine passage from Wordsworth's “Prelude”:—
“With settling judgments now of what would last
And what would disappear; prepared to find
Presumption, folly, madness, in the men
Who thrust themselves upon the passive world
As Rulers of the world; to see in these,
Even when the public welfare is their aim,
Plans without thought, or built on theories
Vague and unsound; and having brought the books
Of modern statists to their proper test,
Life, human life, with all its sacred claims
Of sex and age, and heaven-descended rights,
Mortal, or those beyond the reach of death;
And having thus discerned how dire a thing
Is worshipped in that idol proudly named
‘The Wealth of Nations’; where alone that wealth
Is lodged, and how increased; and having gained
A more judicious knowledge of the worth
And dignity of individual man,
No composition of the brain, but man
Of whom we read, the man whom we behold
With our own eyes—I could not but enquire—
Not with less interest than heretofore,
But greater, though in spirit more subdued—
Why is this glorious creature to be found
One only in ten thousand? What one is,
Why may not millions be? What bars are thrown
By Nature in the way of such a hope?”
Consider how far we have come, the base degrees by which we did ascend, and answer with Shakespeare, “There are many events in the womb of time which will be delivered.”