Darwinism and Race Progress

by John Berry Haycraft

[The Necessity for replacing One Selective Agency by Another.]

The microbes and other selective agencies have been improving the race, or at any rate have in the past been preventing its deterioration, but it by no means follows that this action is to be permitted to them in the future. We have studied them and have followed out their life histories; we know on what they thrive, and also that which is injurious to them; we can exterminate them; and human affection, that emotion beyond all others that we have to trust to for race perfection, demands complete control over “their reckless inroads.” But if the selecting microbe is to disappear, we have to replace it by something else. If the individuals of to-day are to have the advantage of better surface drainage, and an absence of their microscopic foes, the children of the future must not be the sufferers; and we must replace the selective influence of the microbe by the selective action of man’s forethought, which shall provide that these children shall alone be produced by healthy parents. We need have no fear of the removal of the selective influences that at present surround us, provided a selection is still carried on; but if we remove selective influences without replacing them by others, then racial decay is certainly and inevitably upon us. At the present time people with strong strains of insanity or phthisis marry freely. The dangers are to a certain extent realised, but these are generally overcome by the power either of personal attraction or dowry. A man may be summoned for neglecting to send his son to school, but at present there is no strong public feeling against the knowingly begetting a son who all his life may suffer from weak lungs or brain, and hence obvious disease is no bar in the marriage market.

[How it is that the Production of Children by Diseased Parents is tolerated.]

We cannot wonder at this state of things when we recall the fact that in less advanced times than the present a rapidly recruited population was often the determining cause of a nation’s continued existence. The depopulation produced by war and zymotic disease was often so dreadful that nations with great fertility alone survived; and thus it came about that all minor questions were sunk in the one great necessity, namely, that of keeping the population large enough to resist extinction or to effect foreign conquest.

Added to this, most of the sickly diseased offspring died in infancy as a result of improper feeding or want of care, and there was no such thing as the existence of a large section of the community evincing an increase of hereditary weakness. Under these conditions the parents of large families added so much the more to the strength and power of the community, and the production of children came to be regarded as a virtue. This view of the question very naturally survives, and is probably the reason why at the present day marriage with a diseased person is not viewed as a sin against the children that are to be produced, and against the community at large.

[The Necessity for producing Posterity out of our Best Types.]

But the end towards which we have to aim is the production in each generation of children from the best and healthiest of the population alone, for it is surely only reasonable that we should as a community pay the same care and attention to our own race propagation that a gardener does to his roses or chrysanthemums, or a dog-fancier to his hounds or terriers, or a cattledealer to his southdowns or shorthorns. That there is no means of improving our race so efficaciously as by selection we may be certain, and that there is no other way is highly probable; our interest in the subject, and the value we place upon changes the effects of which we shall never live to see, will determine whether we are prepared to adapt our ideas and modes of action to the lines that reason and the knowledge of the times have clearly pointed out as the only ones which it is expedient to follow.

I have so far only indicated in most general terms the aim which in my opinion we should have in view. We have in the two succeeding chapters to consider several problems somewhat similar to those which we have already discussed, and then it will be more easy to obtain a general view of the whole question. We may then consider what steps it may be advisable to take with a view to bringing about satisfactory selection of the population, remembering always that in such a matter nothing can be accomplished which has not the sanction and approval of the mass of the community. The education and conviction of the masses must precede legislation, so that we shall have to consider what is expedient, from a practical point of view, for us to do at the present time, and we shall leave speculation as to possible future action to those who have greater gifts of foresight, and who believe in the possibility of predicting the future action of such a complex machine as an empire of men and women.

FOOTNOTES

[19] “Problems of Greater Britain,” vol. i., chap. ii.