A criminal is an unsocial man, an undeveloped being, one, generally speaking, whose pregenital stock was below par, and failed in the conservation, development and transmission of a physical, mental and moral capacity equalling that of the average of his race. The physical debility or inherited tendency to nerve weakness—so universal in the present day—has clearly a causal relation with the increase of crime deplored by the principal authorities on the subject in Europe and America.
In the United States we are told by Mr. D. A. Wells and by Mr. Howard Wines, an eminent specialist in criminal matters, that crime is steadily increasing at a faster rate than in due proportion to the increase of population. Nearly all the chief statisticians abroad tell the same tale. Dr. Mischler, of Vienna, and Professor Von Liszt, of Marburg, draw a deplorable picture of the increase of crime in Germany. In France, the criminal problem is as formidable and perplexing as in Germany. M. Henri Joli estimates that crime has increased 133 per cent. within the last half century, and is steadily rising. Taking Victoria as a typical Australasian colony, we find that even in the antipodes, which are not vexed to the same extent as Europe with social and economic difficulties, crime is persistently raising its head ... it is a more menacing danger among the Victorian Colonists than it is at home. (Crime and its Causes, W. D. Morrison. Published in 1891, pp. 12 and 13.)
While physical degeneracy creates crime, a non-moral life on the other hand causes further physical deterioration. The pursuit of wealth for purely personal ends is pre-eminently anti-social. Breadth of thought and social feeling grow impossible to the man whose life is devoted to the business of amassing riches; and Dr. Henry Maudsley gives it as his conviction, based upon wide observation of family life, that such men are extremely unlikely to beget healthy children. In cases where the father has toiled upwards from poverty to vast wealth, “I have witnessed the results,” he says, “in a degeneracy mental and physical of his offspring which has sometimes gone as far as extinction of the family in the third or fourth generation. I cannot but think after what I have seen that the extreme passion for getting rich does predispose to mental degeneration in the offspring, either to moral defect or to moral and intellectual deficiency, or to outbreaks of positive insanity under the conditions of life.” (The Physiology and Pathology of the Mind, p. 206.)
This fact alone is amply sufficient to condemn an industrial system that creates monopolies, concentrates wealth, stimulates greed, degrades the upper classes by superfluous luxury, the lower by envy, poverty, despair, and tends generally to physical, mental and moral decay. But were the entire economic system judiciously reconstructed, fatal elements would remain so long as man fails to grapple with the biological problem and fails to bring the great life forces of reproduction under conscientious direction and control.
Gravitation and all well studied mechanical and chemical forces have been adapted by man to special purposes in relation with his civilized life; even so must the sexual forces that belong to his basic existence be in their turn dominated and made conformable with his higher moral and spiritual needs. In this regard his primary need is that there shall be no transmission of disease or constitutional debility from one generation to another; but that the entire strength of the laws of heredity shall create an improvement of stock and thereby lift humanity to a higher level of physical health and efficiency.
In seeking the true method of attaining this end, it is our duty to look first to the teaching of the great founders of social philosophy. Without their invaluable services in discovering and setting forth the one unbroken process of law which “connects all phenomena from the motion of molecules and the courses of the suns to the phenomena of human thought and the destinies of nations” (J. M. Robertson), no intellects could to-day grasp the causes of misery and, conceiving the possibility of circumventing these causes, devise a scheme of scientific action to reverse the trend of general movement and evolve conditions of genuine and universal happiness.
In this sphere, however—the sphere of eugenics, or improvement of the human stock, as also in regard to the population and sex problems—Darwin and Herbert Spencer have failed us. The mind of the former, habituated to dwell on the favourable aspects of the struggle for existence during the early epochs of man’s history, was blind to the consequences of the genesis and growth of the broadly social element in man. Barbarous man could let cosmic forces prevail to exterminate the weak. Sympathetic man is compelled by virtue of his enlarged subjective nature to institute a new struggle, viz., a struggle against the struggle for existence (a phrase used by Lange), and already his triumph is everywhere visible in the survival of the unfit to struggle.
Darwin opposed the proposal to restrain population on the score that this would minimize the struggle which had created civilization in the past and which must needs, he thought, carry it on in the future, and both Darwin and Herbert Spencer “assumed that a generalization which sums up the progressive forces of a collectively unconscious society, i.e. a society without the conception of evolution and of a universal sociology, must equally sum up the progressive principles of a collectively conscious society, a society which has realized evolution and is constructing a universal sociology. Though they themselves are our greatest helpers towards such consciousness, they failed to realize that our attainment of it must revolutionize human history.” (Modern Humanists, J. M. Robertson, p. 234).
Turning then to less illustrious men, Mr. Francis Galton is our most advanced teacher in the field of eugenics. He faces the problem of race regeneration and has put forth a scheme or policy of action, resting on Dr. Matthews Duncan’s alleged facts regarding the relative fertility in early and late marriages. He shows that a group of a hundred mothers whose marriages and those of their daughters should take place at the age of twenty, would, in the course of a few generations, breed down a group of a hundred mothers whose marriages and those of their daughters were delayed until the age of twenty-nine. Let us then, he reasons, promote by every means in our power the early marriage of human beings of superior quality, whilst we discountenance early marriage in those social members who are less favourably endowed. And “few,” he says, “would deserve better of their country than those who determine to live celibate lives through a reasonable conviction that their issue would probably be less fitted than the generality to play their part as citizens.” (Inquiries into Human Faculty, p. 336.)
In examination for official appointments he would have attention paid to a candidate’s ancestral qualifications as well as his personal ability. The man of inherited sound constitution and average ability should be preferred to the man of superior ability who belongs to a delicate and short-lived family. The former will in all probability become the more valuable servant of the two. Some scheme should be devised by which to bestow marks for family merit, to put, as it were, a guinea stamp to the sterling guinea’s worth of natural nobility; and this, he conceives, might set a great social avalanche in motion. It would open the eyes of every family, and of society at large, to the importance of marriage alliance with a good stock; it would introduce the subject of race as a permanent topic of consideration, and lead to a careful collecting of family histories and noting of those facts which are absolutely necessary for guidance in right conduct. Late marriage, as advised by Malthus, Mr. Galton utterly condemns. The prudent alone are influenced by that doctrine, and it is, he says, a most pernicious rule of conduct in its bearing upon race. His policy, then, is early and fruitful marriage for the best specimens of our race, and widespread celibacy in the case of those less highly favoured, whilst everywhere the sentiment should prevail that eugenics, or the improvement of the human stock, is the primary consideration in marriage and the guiding principle in sex relations.