LITMIR.BIZ

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the whole argument here—as, for instance, regarding the singular use of the word “natural”—I do most entirely deny the right of the eugenic idea to any voice or place as to the fate of children once they have come into being. Another writer, arguing on the same lines, says à propos of the abolition of infant mortality: “This last change which, as the Huddersfield experiment shows, is easy of accomplishment, is likely to be completely effected in the next few years, and we shall then have abolished the one factor which in any important degree at present tends to redress the balance between the rates of reproduction of the superior and the inferior classes.” These are the words of Dr. W. McDougall, the distinguished psychologist. Dr. McDougall has subsequently shown that he repudiates the apparent deduction from them, and entirely approves of the present campaign of mercy to childhood. Nevertheless, these arguments, plainly derived from the principle of natural selection, do express a most important truth—viz., that indiscriminate survival must lead to racial decadence, whether in man, microbe or moss. I submit that the difficulty can be solved only by the eugenic principle.

      The fittest must become parents, and the unfit[2] must not; then kill the unfit, says Nature. And this indeed, in all living species other than man, is what Nature does. But “thou shalt not kill,” says the moral law—not even the unfit. As the foregoing will have shown, some thinkers to-day propose to avail themselves in this dilemma of the “New Decalogue”:—

      “Thou shalt not kill but need'st not strive

       Officiously to keep alive.”

      This is no solution of the problem. There is only one solution, and that is the eugenic solution. Nature can preserve a race only by destroying the unfit. We who are intelligent must preserve and elevate the race by preventing the unfit from ever coming into existence at all. We must replace Nature's selective death-rate by a selective birth-rate. This is merciful and supremely moral; it means vast economy in life and money and time and suffering; it is natural at bottom, but it is Nature raised to her highest power in that almost supra-natural fact—the moral intelligence of man.

      The dilemma defined.—The moral law, and our natural human sympathy, insist that we should seek to preserve all the children that come into the world, to amplify the health of the healthy, and to neutralise, as far as possible, the unfitness of the unfit. A mother brings her malformed baby to the surgeon, and he does his best to patch up the gaps left by the imperfect processes of development. Otherwise the baby will die. Who dares look that mother in the face and say “Ah, but it is better for the race that your child should die!” Such a doctrine, I submit, blasphemes our humanity; it is intolerable to any decent person who will pause to think what it means: and yet, in so saying, we seem to defy Nature with her imperative law of the survival of the fittest only. Pre-eugenic writers on evolution state the case in all its hardness. Dr. Archdall Reid says that “If we wish to improve the individual, we must attend to his acquirements by providing proper shelter, food, and training.” Well, we do wish to improve the individual, and to preserve the individual! We do not wish the super-man on the terms of Nietzsche—the super-man obtained at the cost of love would turn out to be inferior to any brute-beast, an intellectual fiend. But, Dr. Reid goes on to say, “such means will not effect an improvement of the race. … On the contrary, they will cause deterioration[3] by an increased survival of the unfit.” The provision of “proper shelter, food and training” will cause racial decadence! Is it not evident, then, that such provisions must rather be styled improper, and that we must refrain from doing anything for the defects and needs of the individual, lest a worse thing befall the race? This is an outrageous proposition, yet it is offered us as a necessary inference from the principle of natural selection or the survival of the fittest—which no one now dares to dispute.

      Herbert Spencer, to whom we owe the phrase “the survival of the fittest,” expresses this critical difficulty as follows: “The law that each creature shall take the benefits and the evils of its own nature has been the law under which life has evolved thus far. Any arrangements which, in a considerable degree, prevent superiority from profiting by the rewards of superiority, or shield inferiority from the evils it entails—any arrangements which tend to make it as well to be inferior as to be superior, are arrangements diametrically opposed to the progress of organisation, and the reaching of a higher life.” This is permanently and necessarily true, and in our care for childhood we have to reckon with it. Yet even Spencer himself did not pursue this supremely important enquiry to what I shall in a moment submit to be its logical and almost incredibly hopeful conclusion.

      

      Huxley, writing his well-known Romanes Lecture, “Evolution and Ethics,” at a time when, unfortunately, he had somewhat parted company with Spencer, and was too ready to accept any argument that made against Spencer's political views, cuts the Gordian knot in an astonishingly unsatisfactory fashion. He declares that “the ethical progress of society depends, not on imitating the cosmic process [that is, the selection of the fittest], still less in running away from it, but in combating it.” This is shallow thinking and very poor philosophy. One wonders how Huxley can have forgotten the great dictum of Bacon that Nature can be commanded only by obeying her. He declares that moral evolution is the direct contradiction and antithesis of the process of organic evolution hitherto. He says, “Social progress means a checking of the cosmic process at every step and the substitution for it of another, which may be called the ethical process;” and he declares it to be a fallacy to suppose “that because on the whole animals and plants have advanced in perfection of organisation, by means of the struggle for existence and the consequent survival of the fittest; therefore men in society, men as ethical beings, must look to the same process to help them towards perfection.”

      With all this Huxley offers us no real solution whatever, no hint that he has realised in any degree what must be the consequences of indiscriminate survival. It is astonishing how personal bias, so alien to the whole character of the man as a rule, blinded him to a solution which, as it seems to me, stared him in the face. Assuredly we can transmute and elevate and raise to its highest power what he calls the cosmic process, and can reconcile cosmic with ethical evolution, by extending to the unfit all our sympathy but forbidding them parenthood. I deny that the provision of a proper environment for the individual entails racial deterioration. Cosmic and moral evolution are compatible if, whilst caring for each individual, whether maim, halt, blind, or insane, and whilst admitting the categorical imperative of the law of love which demands our care for him, we continue to obey the indication of Nature, which forbids such an individual to perpetuate his infirmity. Nature has no choice; if she is to avert the coming of the unfit race she must summarily extinguish its potential ancestor, but we can prohibit the reproduction of his infirmity whilst doing all we can for the success of his individual life. This is the ideal course indicated and approved by biology and morality alike.

      The eugenic reconciliation.—I submit, then, that there is no inconsistency in fighting simultaneously for the preservation and care of all babies and all children without discrimination of any kind—and, on the other hand, in declaring that, if the degeneration of the race is to be averted, still more if racial, which is the only sure, progress, is to be attained, we must have the worthy and only the worthy to be the parents of the future. I submit further that only the eugenist can maintain his position in this matter at the present day.

      On his one hand is the improvident humanitarian with his feeling heart, he who, seeing misery and disease and death, whether in babyhood, childhood, or at any other time of life, seeks to improve the environment and so relieve these evils. Close beside this wholly indiscriminate humanitarianism is that which declares that with childhood is the future and therefore devotes its energies especially to the young, is grateful for every baby born, whatever its state, and when adult years are reached, assumes that all will be well for the future, though the principle of natural selection is thus made of none effect.

      On the other side of the eugenists stand those whom we may for short call the Nietzscheans. They see one-half of the truth of natural selection; they see that through struggle and internecine war, species have hitherto maintained themselves or ascended. They declare that all improvement of the environment, or at any rate all humanitarian effort, tends to abrogate the struggle for existence, and even, as is only too often true, to select unworth and let worth

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