C. W. Saleeby

“ If the race degenerates—through, say, the selection of the worst for parenthood—the time will come when its heritage is too much for it. The pearls of the ancestral art are now cast before swine, and are trampled on: statues, temples, books are destroyed or burnt or lost. If an Empire has been built, the degenerate race cannot sustain it. There is no wealth but life: and if the quality of the life fails, neither battleships nor libraries nor symphonies nor anything else will save a nation. ”

“ If society be organised so that these are factors of more survival-value than the disinterested search for truth, or mother-love, or the power to create great poetry or music—then, according to the inevitable and universal law of the survival of the fittest, our parasites will oust our poets and our poisoners our philosophers. These things have happened and may happen again at any time. It does not matter that the good thing, in virtue of survival-value then superior, has been evolved. Nature never gives a final verdict in favour of good or bad but only and always in favour of the fit. ”

“ Though some will say that the keeping alive of diseased children, or even of many children at first healthy, is a disaster, I maintain that no such question of choice, selection or discrimination can find any warrant in any form of morality—eugenic or other—from the moment at which the child in question began its individual existence. Those of us who advocate the eugenic idea must be perpetually on our guard against the insidious alliance of any who, agreeing with our premises, declare that it is a mistake, for instance, to prosecute a campaign against infant mortality. ”

“ The doctrine of organic evolution, and of the age-long ascent of man through the selection of the fittest (who have, on the whole, been the best) for parenthood, is one not of despair but of hope. Exactly half a century ago it struck horror into the minds of our predecessors. Man, then, is only an erected ape, they thought—as if any historical doctrine, however true, could shorten the dizzy distance to which man has climbed since he was simian: and man being an ape, they thought his high dreams palpably vain. ”

“ We owe the modern spirit and modern progress, he tells us, neither to politicians nor to political institutions, nor to theologians nor to philosophers, but to science, which, he well says, “is the great instrument of social change, all the greater because its object is not change but knowledge; and its silent appropriation of this dominant function, amid the din of political and religious strife, is the most vital of all the revolutions which have marked the development of modern civilisation.” ”

“ We shall raise a generation which looks upon the ordinary money-changing politician as an impudent public nuisance, and the brutal, blood-stained Imperialist, shouting about the Empire which his very existence almost suffices to condemn, whilst he battens on the cannibal sale of alcoholic poison to babies and the mothers of future babies, as the very type of those traitors—they of its own household—who have helped to destroy every Empire in history. ”

“ Here, then, is the colossal paradox: absolute and literal continuity of life, every cell from a preceding cell throughout the ages—omnis cellula e cellula; yet three times in every century the living and only wealth of nations is reduced to dust, and is raised up again from helpless infancy. Where else is such catastrophic continuity?
Each individual enters the world in a fashion the dramatic and sensational character of which can be realised by none who have not witnessed it; and in a few years the individual dies, scarcely less dramatically as a rule, and sometimes more so. ”

“ Need one apologise for declaring again, that we require a new political economy which teaches that gold is for the purchase of life, and not life for the purchase of gold. For the public outrage under discussion, whereby an untold measure of life, present and to come, “breathing and to be,” is to be destroyed and defiled for a squabble over shillings, one can adequately quote only the words of Romeo to the apothecary: “There is thy gold; worse poison to men's souls, doing more murders in this loathsome world, than those poor compounds that thou may'st not sell.” ”

“ It is imaginable, though no more, that natural selection, in certain circumstances, might have worked otherwise: the penalty for less as against greater fitness might imaginably have been not death but merely sterility—the denial of future parenthood. This is the ideal of race-culture. Had this been possible, Nature could have effected her end, which is fitter and fuller life, without having incidentally to mete out premature death to such an overwhelming majority of all her creatures. ”

“ They outnumber us as the ocean outweighs a raindrop; to avert evil from one of them is as much as to relieve evil in one of us,—how much more to prevent the misery of five in the next generation, fifty in the next and unnumbered hosts beyond? To serve the future of the race is not to benefit a fiction: the men and women of a hundred and a thousand years hence will be as real as we. ”

“ It may be, it assuredly is, a deplorable thing that the woman of fifty, to take an instance, should become alcoholic, but at the worst this is only the fate of an individual—in the main at any rate. Such principles as these will some day be the cardinal principles of legislation, and not only in regard to alcohol. The time will and must come when public opinion will urge, whether in the name of a New Imperialism or of common morality or of self-protection, that in our attempts to deal with alcohol we shall begin by removing its fingers from the throat of the race: “Women and children first.” ”

“ Nature recognises neither high nor low but only fitness or value for life in the conditions that actually obtain. These laws enthroned and dethroned the civilisations of the past: they have enthroned and may dethrone us. But this end is not inevitable, since man—and this is his great character—not merely reacts to his environment, as all creatures must, but can create and recreate it. The business of eugenics or race-culture is to create an environment such [48] that the human characters of which the human spirit approves shall in it outweigh those of which we disapprove. ”

“ The struggle for existence takes place, not as a clever French writer glibly informs his readers, between different species, but between individuals of the same species, brothers and sisters and cousins.... In Nature's struggle for existence, death, immediate obliteration, is the fate of the vanquished, whilst the only reward to the victors—few, very few, but rare and beautiful in the fitness which has carried them to victory—is the permission to reproduce their kind—to carry on by heredity to another generation the specific qualities by which they triumphed. ”

“ While we read and write, play at politics or ping-pong, this woman and myriads like her are doing the essential work of the world. The worm waits for us as well as for her and them: and in a few years her children and theirs will be Mankind. We need a prophet to cry aloud and spare not; to tell us that if this is the fate of mothers in the ranks which supply the overwhelming proportion of our children, our nation may number Shakespeare and Newton amongst the glories of its past, and the lands of ancient empires amongst its present possessions, but it can have no future ”

“ You cannot go wrong if you simply educate every one to the utmost. Doubtless some persons are more suited for parenthood than others, but only let education be wise and universal, and any question of selection by marriage or otherwise will be superfluous. A thousand difficulties offered by public sentiment, by convention, by the churches, by the large measure of uncertainty which attends the working of heredity, could be ignored, if race-culture were simply a matter of education. ”

“ Nevertheless, we cannot know too much about the ancestry, on both sides, and the early environment, of great men. At present it is always tacitly assumed that a great man is the son of his father alone. The biographer would probably admit, if pressed, that doubtless some woman or other was involved in the matter, and that her name was so and so—if any one thinks it worth mentioning. On the score of heredity alone, however, we derive, men and women alike, with absolute equality from both parents; and we cannot know too much about the mothers of men of genius. ”

“ Hence in breeding for intelligence we cannot afford to ignore that upon which intelligence depends. Even if we could produce genius at will, we should find our young geniuses just as dependent upon motherhood as the common run of mankind. Newton himself was a seven months' baby, and the potentialities of gravitation and the calculus and the laws of motion in his brain could not save him: motherhood could and did.
Even our least biological reformers must admit that purely physical motherhood, up to the point of birth, can scarcely be omitted in any schemes for social reform or race-culture. ”

“ Yet this continuous life has been and apparently always must be lived in a tissue of amazing discontinuity—amazing, at least, to those who can see the wonderful in the commonplace. For though the world-phenomenon which we call Man has been so long continuous, and is at this moment perhaps as much modified by the total past as if it were really a single undying individual, yet only a few decades ago, a mere second in the history of the earth, no human being now alive was in existence. “As for man, his days are as grass: as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth. ”

“ Education is, indeed, of all differences not divinely appointed, an instant effacer and reconciler. Whatever is undivinely poor, it will make rich; whatever is undivinely maimed, and halt, and blind, it will make whole, and equal, and seeing. The blind and the lame are to it as to David at the siege of the Tower of the Kings, ‘hated of David's soul.’ But there are other divinely-appointed differences, eternal as the ranks of the everlasting hills, and as the strength of their ceaseless waters. And these, education does not do away with ”

“ The results of education, physical, mental, or moral, are limited to the individuals educated. The children do not begin where the parents left off, but they make a fresh start where the parents did. Thus even though we had and employed an ideal method of education, we should make no permanent improvement by its means alone in the breed of mankind, any more than the breeder of race-horses could attain his end by the same means. In each generation the same problem, the same difficulties, the same limitations inherent in the nature of the new material, would have to be faced. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is the culture of the racial life which is the vital industry of any nation, and which Mr. Balfour has not even distantly alluded to. I agree that our hope for the future is to be found in science: that, as has been said already, perchance our acquired or traditional progress in knowledge has now reached the point at which we have sufficient to reveal to us the necessity of racial progress and the means by which that may be effected.
“Science and industry,”—yes, indeed! But the industry is to be the making not of machines but men. ”

“ The services which a conscious race-culture, thus directed, may even now accomplish, can scarcely be over-estimated; and even if we cannot reach the public heart at once we can reach the public head by means of the public pocket—which will benefit obviously and greatly when these proposals are carried out. As Thoreau observes, for a thousand who are lopping off the branches of an evil there is but one striking at its roots. If we strike at the roots of certain grave and costly evils of the present day, we shall abundantly demonstrate that this is a matter of the most vital economy. ”

“ No one can think so who knows its strength and the relative impotence of the physical, but it is certainly possible that the course of progress may be greatly delayed in any given nation or race by worship of the physical, or even, as Sparta shows, by worship of what may be called the physical virtues as against the moral and intellectual virtues. But those who are interested in the survival of any particular race or nation have to remember that arrest or retardation of progress therein, relatively to its wiser neighbours, must, before long, result in its utter downfall. ”

“ Before looking more closely than we are commonly apt to do at the meaning of the phrases “natural selection” and “survival of the fittest,” let us exercise the right of man the moral being, as distinguished from man the scientist or observer of Nature, to pass ethical judgments upon the facts which it is the business of all the sciences, except ethics itself, merely to record and interpret in and for themselves. We are beginning at last, half a century after the publication of the Origin of Species in 1859, to realise the power of the law of selection ”