If, then, anyone could devise for us a means by which the genius, potentially existing at any time, were realised, he would have performed in effect a service equivalent to that of which eugenics repudiates the present possibility—the actual creation of genius. But if we consider what the conditions are which cause the waste of genius, we realise at once that they mainly inhere in the level of the human environment of the priceless potentiality in question. As we noted elsewhere, in an age like that of Pericles genius springs up on all hands. It is encouraged and welcomed because the average level of the human environment in which it finds itself is so high. But if eugenics can raise the average level of intelligence, in so doing not merely does it render more likely, as Mr. Galton points out, the production of men of the highest ability, but it provides those conditions in which men of genius, now swamped, can swim. We could not undertake to produce a Shakespeare, but we might reasonably hope to produce a generation which would not damage or destroy its Shakespeares. And even if men of genius still found it necessary, as men of genius have found it necessary, to “play to the gallery,” they would play, as Mr. Galton says of the demagogue in a eugenic age, “to a more sensible gallery than at present.”
Darwin somewhere points out that it is not the scientific, but the unscientific man who denies future possibilities. Thus though an advocate of eugenics may be applauded for his judgment if he declares that the creation of genius will for ever be impossible, yet I should not care to assert that the ultimate limitations of eugenics can thus be defined. We have yet to hear the last of Mendelism.
Eugenics and unemployment.—Let us look now at another aspect of the promise of race-culture. When the time comes that quality rather than quantity is the ideal of those who concern themselves with the population question, it is quite evident that not a few of the social problems which we now find utterly insoluble will disappear. In this brief outline, we can only allude to one or two points. Take, for instance, the question of unemployment. We know that some by no means small proportion of the unemployed were really destined to be unemployable from the first, as for instance by reason of hereditary disease. It were better for them and for us had they never been born. Many more of the unemployed have been made unemployable by the influence of over-crowding, to which they were subjected in their years of development. Is there, can there be, any real and permanent remedy for over-crowding, but the erection of parenthood into an act of personal and provident responsibility?
Eugenics and woman.—Take, again, the woman question. No one will deny that in many of its gravest forms, especially in its economic form, and the question of the employment of women, wisely or horribly, this depends (to a degree which few, I think, realise) upon the fact that there are now, for instance, 1,300,000 women in excess in this country. Is it then proposed, the reader will say, by means of race-culture to exterminate the superfluous woman? Indeed, no. But is the reader aware that Nature is not responsible for the existence of the superfluous woman? There are more boys than girls born in the ratio of about 103 or 104 to 100: and Nature means them all to live, boys and girls alike. If they did so live, we should have merely the problem of the superfluous man, which would not be an economic problem at all. But we destroy hosts of all the children that are born, and since male organisms are in general less resistant than female organisms, we destroy a disproportionate number of boys, so that the natural balance of the sexes is inverted. Unlike ancient societies, we largely practise male infanticide. Can the reader believe that there is any permanent and final means of arresting this wastage of child-life, with its singular and far-reaching consequences,—other than the elevation of parenthood, on the principles which race-culture enjoins, even wholly apart from the question of the selection of parents? We shall not succeed in keeping all the children alive (with a trivial number of exceptions), thereby abolishing the superfluous woman by keeping alive the boy who should have grown up to be her partner, until we greatly reduce the birth-rate; as it must and will be reduced when the ideal of race-culture is realised, and no child comes into the world that is not already loved and desired in anticipation.
Eugenics and cruelty to children.—This ideal, also, offers us in its realisation the only complete remedy for the present ghastly cruelty under which so many children suffer even in Great Britain, even in the twentieth century. Is the reader aware that the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children enquired into the ill-treatment or cruel neglect of 115,000 children in the year beginning April 1st, 1906? It has been reasonably and carefully estimated that “over half a million children are involved in the total of the wastage of child-life and the torture and neglect of child-life in a single year.” Surely Mr. G. R. Sims, to whom I would offer a hearty tribute for his recent services to childhood, is justified in saying, “Against the guilt of race-suicide our men of science are everywhere preaching their sermons to-day. It is against the guilt of race-murder that the cry of the children should ring through the land.” As regards race suicide and the men of science, I am not so sure as to the assertion. But the truth of the second sentence quoted is as indisputable as it is horrible.
Now no legislation conceivable will wholly cure this evil nor avert its consequences. At bottom it depends upon human nature, and you can cure it only by curing the defect of human nature. This, in general, is of course beyond the immediate powers of man, but evidently we should gain the same end if only we could confine the advent of children to those parents who desired them—that is to say, those in whom human nature displayed the first, if not indeed almost the only, requisite for the happiness of childhood. To this most beneficent and wholly moral end we shall come, notwithstanding the blind and pitiable guidance of most of our accredited moral teachers to-day. By no other means than the realisation of the ideal defined, that every new baby shall be loved and desired in anticipation—an ideal which is perfectly practicable—can the black stain of child murder and child torture and child neglect be removed from our civilisation.
Ruskin and race-culture.—The name of Ruskin, perhaps, would not occur to the reader as likely to afford support to the fair hopes of the eugenist. Consider then, these words from Time and Tide:—
“You leave your marriages to be settled by supply and demand, instead of wholesome law. And thus, among your youths and maidens, the improvident, incontinent, selfish, and foolish ones marry, whether you will or not; and beget families of children necessarily inheritors in a great degree of these parental dispositions; and for whom, supposing they had the best dispositions in the world, you have thus provided, by way of educators, the foolishest fathers and mothers you could find; (the only rational sentence in their letters, usually, is the invariable one, in which they declare themselves ‘incapable of providing for their children's education’). On the other hand, whosoever is wise, patient, unselfish, and pure among your youth, you keep maid or bachelor; wasting their best days of natural life in painful sacrifice, forbidding them their best help and best reward, and carefully excluding their prudence and tenderness from any offices of parental duty. Is not this a beatific and beautifully sagacious system for a Celestial Empire, such as that of these British Isles?”