International Eugenics Congress

“ There is not thus in reality too much risk of seeing the renewal of the population carried out in a dangerous manner by its least valuable section. However, even among the working classes, the most highly paid occupations are not those among which one finds the greatest number of children.
The economic, social, or moral burden of children is a factor bound up in a complex manner, not only with the individual conditions of existence, but also with the transformations of society, progress in manners and customs, and the conception which one forms of life. ”

“ Race-hygiene does not aim at an indiscriminate motherhood insurance of married and unmarried mothers, but it aims at the economic subvention and encouragement of legitimate fertility of healthy and able parents, connected with, and rendered possible by, a reduction of female labour away from the home. Marriage is one of the most important hygienic institutions for the individual as well as for the race, and it is folly to allow its decay and to replace it by substitutes. ”

“ To the student of genetics, man, like any other animal, is material for working out the manner in which characters, whether physical or mental, are transmitted from one generation to the next. Viewed in this way he must be regarded as unpromising, not only from the small size of his families, the time consumed in their production, and the long period of immaturity, but also because full experimental control is here out of the question. ”

“ The humanity of the future will be physically and mentally superior to the existing humanity, but the amelioration of the species ought not to aim at the equality of races and populations. These races and populations ought not to lose their acquisition of particular adaptations to different conditions of existence.
A science of universal or common eugenics should allow a eugenic ethnology to exist, which should indicate and facilitate for each race or nation the defence and propagation of its own physical type and its own mentality. ”

“ Researches relating to physiological heredity and pathological heredity ought to be pursued without interruption, but it is necessary to make known [18] as soon as possible to the masses of the people the individual conditions, fully understood, which alone permit a favourable and healthy procreation. In a word, it is necessary, by every means and as soon as possible, to organise a great movement in order to show to the greatest number of human beings the absolute necessity for a conscientious, i.e., an enlightened procreation. ”

“ In order to be really effective and to contribute to the improvement of the individual and to the betterment of the race, the control of the development should, as far as possible, be exerted over all children, and it should last during the whole period of their evolution. ”

“ The next and the greatest concern of race-hygiene—much greater than the relative increase of inferiority—is, to-day, neomalthusianism, the intentional restriction of the number of births in varying degrees up to complete unproductiveness. Though conscious regulation of the production of children is absolutely necessary, it becomes fatal to a nation if under no control but the egotism of the individual. ”

“ This class of society, in the grip of this poison, is unfortunately not sterile; their miserable descendants come to dock in the asylum; so much so that if we mass together the various elements, if we add the unfortunates permanently disabled, such as epileptics, and the increasing crowd of feeble-minded, idiotic, tuberculous children, the mind recoils aghast at the gravity of the danger. ”

“ Bluhm's repeated assertion, which is regarded by many as a dogma, that economic conditions cannot be deliberately influenced (i.e., that they are of the character of a law of nature) must not remain uncontradicted as a principal. It is absolutely unproved, though the difficulty of influencing our economic life cannot be denied; the economic order has been created by man and must be altered if it proves harmful for the race. ”

“ The purpose of these operations being to assist a diminished birth capacity in women, and this diminished capacity arising partly from constitutional and consequently hereditary factors, this question suggests itself: Is the average birth capacity of women progressively diminished by the fact that an increasing number of women, more or less unfit for childbirth, are artificially assisted in bringing forth living children who inherit this weakness from the mother? ”

“ The economic élite is not in the least the product of the possession of superior qualities, but is simply the result of a blind struggle between incomes, which carries to the top those who, at the start, possess a larger income through causes which may be absolutely independent of the possession of superior endowments. ”

“ They consider, that by maintaining inferior variations up to the age of reproduction, the average quality of the race must suffer and that to certain defects—which otherwise would rapidly disappear—an opportunity is given to spread through an entire people. This point of view, short sighted as it may be, must be examined into. It appears to be forgotten that on the one hand hygiene is powerless in cases of a high degree of degeneration and that on the other hand hygiene, by prevention of illness, does away with a number of causes of inferiority. ”

“ Crowd psychology is characterised chiefly by the incompetence of the masses, their dependence upon traditional methods of party government, and their feeling of gratitude to leaders who have suffered for the cause. Finally, the necessity for party organisations grows with every increase of numbers and extension of functions. It is physically impossible for large party groups to govern themselves directly. All parties live in a state of perpetual warfare with opposing parties, and, if they are revolutionary in character, with the social order itself. ”

“ In a district where breast feeding is as general as it is in the one examined into here, the number of women who voluntarily renounce every attempt at suckling must necessarily be small. The curve dealing with the children who had no breast feeding at all is [E29] therefore likely to give a fairly correct picture of the absolute or primary incapacity for suckling on the mother's part; absolute incapacity does not of course mean that the mother could not produce a single drop of milk, but that she does not produce enough to satisfy the child, and therefore must resort to artificial feeding. ”

“ History and genealogy both speak unmistakably for heredity. Men of genius have as many eminent relationships as the expectations of heredity demand. The same is true among the highest aristocratic classes, and is equally true under democratic government, as is proved by a study of the family history of those Americans whose names are in the Hall of Fame. ”

“ A striking peculiarity of cities, especially large cities, is, as pointed out before, the high mortality amongst men; for this general observation Figure C 83, male and female mortality in town and country, offers an example. Whereas the female mortality in Berlin, in the higher age groups, is even lower than in Mecklenburg with its preponderantly country population—which is evidence that in town life there are no inherent circumstances adversely affecting all persons in a high degree—the male mortality in all the age groups is higher, and in some much higher. ”

“ The ignorance of parents and the defects of children. The State has invaded the home, and has set standards, both physical and moral, for the family. It is the duty of the State to secure the proper physical environment for the home. It is a municipal problem. It is a problem of public health. The whole movement looks to the triumph of a vital democracy, which is more important than either political or industrial democracy.
Relations of alcoholism to neurasthenia, of tuberculosis to feeble-mindedness, of bad social and labour conditions to both, indicate cross sections in the problem. ”

“ It has a very sensible influence on the frequency of miscarriages and of stillbirths; this increases with the increase in age. The age of the mother at the time of marriage exercises a decisive influence upon the vitality of the offspring: the greater the age of the mother at the time of marriage the less will be the vitality of the children.
The age of the father at the birth of his child has some influence on the number of stillbirths among his children. This influence—at any rate above a given age—increases with the increase in the father's age. ”

“ He shows, from investigations made by von Riffel, that the physical condition of childless couples is on the average inferior to that of fertile parents. This, however, by no means holds good in every case. Evidence to the contrary is given by the pedigree of an aristocratic family which has died out in the male line. It may be looked upon as typical. One generation (the second) , with three times as many grown up men than women, produces only four boys (44% of the children) , of whom two reach maturity. With the fourth generation the male issue dies out. ”

“ Seeing that the unfit are at present able to survive; does nature end or mend degenerate stocks, or have the lines of neuropathic inheritance only been partially cut off by this tendency to "anticipation"? What we want to know is: What is the fate of all the offspring of an insane parent or parents; for there are a great many facts which show that a disease may be latent and re-appear in a stock when the conditions of mating or environment are unfavourable? ”

“ As the influence of the birth interval on child mortality is still very perceptible after the tenth or later children, it may be assumed that it is not caused exclusively by the exhaustion of the maternal organism produced by the rapid sequence of births. The varying length of breast-feeding of the children has probably also its influence. Though these statistics give no data about the mode of infant feeding, it is nevertheless probable that in those families in which there are longer intervals between consecutive births each child is suckled for a longer period. ”

“ Artificial selection could be perfectly applied to the human species, in which case marriages would be arranged between persons better endowed, physically and mentally, and the worse endowed would be excluded from marriage. But this selection encounters the gravest practical difficulties; because, if it is relatively easy to estimate the physical qualities of man, nothing on the other hand is harder than to estimate his mental qualities. A dynamometer of intelligence does not exist, and Galton's method of observing the points of merit of University graduates is very insufficient and fallible. ”

“ Of my studies on criminals, the result is: that the children of young parents are found in large numbers guilty of offences against property; and this is natural. The first impulse to that is not due to wickedness, which impels them to inflict harm on others, but to love of pleasure, of revel, of idleness—all features of youth, during which period the passions are very active, and no restraint present with which to repress and subjugate them. ”

“ Characters, each exhibiting simple Mendelian segregation, may become linked together more or less completely in the process of heredity, or the reverse may occur. Our knowledge of these phenomena is at present almost completely confined to cases in plants, but evidence is beginning to be obtained for their occurrence in animals. It is not unlikely that they will be found to play a considerable part in human heredity. For one of the most noticeable things about man is the frequency with which children resemble one or other parent to the seemingly almost complete exclusion of the other. ”

“ Now that many studies on the physiology and hygiene of reproduction of man have been made, and many investigations on degeneration have been conducted, we may face the problem of the betterment of the race, from a practical standpoint.
If the eugenic action cannot yet strive directly against hereditary transmission of anomalies, it can fight successfully against the causes of degeneration which act during the development of the individual. ”

“ The offspring of mixed unions present in their psychology a mixture, again a combination or fusion of the mental characters of the parent races: sometimes certain psychical characters of a race become the dominant characters.
All ethnic groupings have their destiny marked out by the grade attained in the human psycho-physical hierarchy. Nevertheless, it is necessary that each race or nation, when it knows its contribution to the development of [10] universal civilisation, should contemplate the preservation of its own ethnic type. ”

“ The exclusion from parenthood of such wards of the State as the feeble-minded, the insane, and the pauper has gone beyond debate; and for all that are legally excluded from parenthood, custodial care is required. There is need to develop a new ethical sense of the individual in regard to his own relations to the social group. We have not yet sufficient facts to establish a definite relation between physical fitness and social efficiency. ”

“ Then only, when societies have fulfilled this duty, will they have the right to investigate what they ought and can effect against those for whom future offspring would be recognised as fatally disastrous.
Finally, it is fully understood that researches relating to selection in the human species must be pursued in a parallel manner, as is now done with such fruitful results for animals and vegetables in Genetics, and in throwing light upon the constantly increasing conquests of this other science. ”