The Social Direction of Evolution: An Outline of the Science of Eugenics

by William E. Kellicott

Section 1. The directors of the State prison and the superintendents of State hospitals for the insane at Middletown and Norwich are hereby authorized and directed to appoint for each of said institutions, respectively, two skilled surgeons, who, in conjunction with the physician or surgeon in charge at each of said institutions, shall examine such persons as are reported to them by the warden, superintendent, or the physician or surgeon in charge, to be persons by whom procreation would be inadvisable.

Such board shall examine the physical and mental condition of such persons, and their record and family history so far as the same can be ascertained, and if in the judgment of the majority of said board, procreation by any such person would produce children with an inherited tendency to crime, insanity, feeble-mindedness, idiocy, or imbecility, and there is no probability that the condition of any such person so examined will improve to such an extent as to render procreation by such person advisable, or, if the physical and mental condition of any such person will be substantially improved thereby, then the said board shall appoint one of its members to perform the operation of vasectomy or oöphorectomy, as the case may be, upon such person. Such operation shall be performed in a safe and humane manner, and the board making such examination, and the surgeon performing such operation, shall receive from the State such compensation, for services rendered, as the warden of the State prison or the superintendent of either of such hospitals shall deem reasonable.

Section 2. Except as authorized by this Act, every person who shall perform, encourage, assist in, or otherwise promote the performance of either of the operations described in Section 1 of this Act, for the purpose of destroying the power to procreate the human species; or any person who shall knowingly permit either of such operations to be performed upon such person—unless the same be a medical necessity—shall be fined not more than one thousand dollars, or imprisoned in the State prison not more than five years, or both.

These States are to be commended in the highest possible terms for their enlightened action in this direction. Who can say how many families of Jukes and Zeros have already been inhibited by this simple and humane means? "Could such a law be enforced in the whole United States, less than four generations would eliminate nine tenths of the crime, insanity and sickness of the present generation in our land. Asylums, prisons and hospitals would decrease, and the problems of the unemployed, the indigent old, and the hopelessly degenerate would cease to trouble civilization."

And yet probably for years to come those mental states and conditions of servitude graciously termed "conservatism" will continue to insure an undiminished horde of these unfortunates. The situation here is interestingly analogous to that in connection with certain of the infectious diseases. Concerning the eradication of typhoid fever, to mention a single concrete example, competent authorities declare that we now possess all of the information necessary to make typhoid fever as obsolete in civilized communities as is cholera or smallpox. "The average third-year medical student knows enough about typhoid fever to be able to stamp it out if he were endowed with absolute power." "Typhoid fever has passed beyond the catalogue of diseases; it is a crime." Our knowledge of the causes of many of the conditions leading to gross physical and mental defect and criminality has progressed already to such a point that we could if we would eradicate them in large proportion from our civilization. The great horde of defectives, once in the world, have the right to live and to enjoy as best they may whatever freedom is compatible with the lives and freedom of the other members of society. They have not the right to produce and reproduce more of their kind for a too generous and too blindly "charitable" society to contend against. The greater crime consists in allowing the hereditary criminal to be born.

A well-known British alienist, Tredgold, after pointing out that the duty of medical science is to fight and relieve disease in every shape and form, adds: "That if social science does not keep pace with medical science in this matter the end will be national disaster. In other words, I would lay it down as a general principle that as soon as a nation reaches that stage of civilization in which medical knowledge and humanitarian sentiment operate to prolong the existence of the unfit, then it becomes imperative upon that nation to devise such social laws as will insure that these unfit do not propagate their kind.

"For, mark you, it is not as if these degenerates mated solely amongst themselves. Were that so, it is possible that, even in spite of the physician, the accumulated morbidity would become so powerful as to work out its own salvation by bringing about the sterility and extinction of its victims. The danger lies in the fact that these degenerates mate with the healthy members of the community and thereby constantly drag fresh blood into the vortex of disease and lower the general vigour of the nation."

Such a practice as vasectomy then represents nicely the eugenic aim of allowing the individual, who is himself never to be blamed for his hereditary constitution, the greatest possible personal freedom and liberty, of allowing full play of sympathy for the individual, and at the same time of exercising the greatest sympathy to society in prohibiting the hereditary criminal from procreating a long line of descendants endowed as badly as he himself was through no fault of his own, but through the gross neglect of society.

Another quotation from Pearson: "To-day we feed our criminals up, and we feed up our insane, we let both out of the prison or asylum 'reformed' or 'cured,' as the case may be, only after a few months to return to State supervision, leaving behind them the germs of a new generation of deteriorants. The average number of crimes due to the convicts in his Majesty's prisons to-day is ten apiece. We cannot reform the criminal, nor cure the insane from the standpoint of heredity; the taint varies not with their mental or moral conduct. These are the products of the somatic cells; the disease lies deeper in their germinal constitution. Education for the criminal, fresh air for the tuberculous, rest and food for the neurotic—these are excellent, they may bring control, sound lungs, and sanity to the individual; but they will not save the offspring from the need of like treatment, nor from the danger of collapse when the time of strain comes. They cannot make a nation sound in mind and body, they merely screen degeneracy behind a throng of arrested degenerates. Our highly developed human sympathy will no longer allow us to watch the State purify itself by the aid of crude natural selection. We see pain and suffering only to relieve it, without inquiry as to the moral character of the sufferer or as to his national or racial value. And this is right—no man is responsible for his own being; and nature and nurture, over which he had no control, have made him the being he is, good or evil. But here science steps in, crying: Let the reprieve be accepted, but next remind the social conscience of its duty to the race ... let there be no heritage if you would build up and preserve a virile and efficient people. Here, I hold, we reach the kernel of the truth which the science of eugenics has at present revealed."

It is also a part of eugenic practice to oppose vigorously and unmistakably any social practice leading to the reduction in the reproductivity of the desirable and valuable elements of society. There is to be included here for censure a long list of customs and practices, from the enforced celibacy of the Church to the horror of horrors—warfare. A moment's reflection will suggest many reprehensible practices of this kind more or less current in certain classes or communities. The requirement of nonmarriage on the part of women teachers—persons of tested and demonstrated ability, is a very general practice of decidedly noneugenic character. In Great Britain more than 75,000 nurses, all of whom must have passed physical examination, are cut off from reproduction by the same requirement of nonmarriage. Many less striking but all too common practices have the final effect of forbidding marriage to the healthy, physically or mentally capable, helpful, classes. "Help wanted. Must be unencumbered."