W. Grant Hague

“ So long as there exists an unsupported mother or a suffering child; so long as we rely on hospitals and prisons, penitentiaries and the police, to minister to the correction and regeneration of the unfit and degenerate; so long as we tolerate grafting politicians and deprive the poor of breathing spaces, sanitary appliances, and a hygienic environment; so long as war and pestilence deprive posterity of the best of the race for parenthood; so long as we emphasize rescue rather than prevention, so long must the eugenist strive unceasingly to preach his propaganda of race regeneration. ”

“ We are beginning to learn that we can modify these characteristics by proper selection, by environment, and by education. This process will, to an eminent degree, redound to the permanent advantage of mankind. We may reasonably aspire to a system of race-culture which will eliminate the undesirable or unfit, and conserve all effort in the propagation of the desirable or fit. This is a consummation to be desired, and if by any system of eugenics the promise of the future is realized it is deserving of the intelligent interest and the active coöperation of every aspiring mother. ”

“ You may be exhausting your vitality and fraying your nerves by social exigencies,—those empty occupations which fill the lives of so many fussy, loquacious females,—echoless, wasted, babbling moments, of supreme important to the social bubbles who ceaselessly chase them but of no more interest to humanity than the wasted evening zephyrs that play tag with the sand eddies on the surface of the dead and silent desert. ”

“ It is not what the doctor does that brings a baby through a dangerous sickness; it is the faithfulness of the nurse in carrying out his instructions that is responsible for the outcome. A timid, halting, doubting nurse can quickly undo all a physician hopes to accomplish; while a prompt, faithful nurse, with initiative, and good judgment, can save a little life in a crisis, even in the absence of the physician. Follow instructions implicitly, even though the carrying out of the instructions seem to cause the baby pain and suffering,—it is for the baby's best interest. ”

“ If we understood all there is to know about environment; if we knew the laws of heredity, and psychology, and eugenics, and then could apply them, and educate the product of this combination of forces, we would be very near to the super-man. One must have a sober mental horizon to evolve the picture which would be the product of the above solution and then to estimate its meaning on human happiness and progress. We are approaching the ethics of right living,—of justice and truth,—the divine in man. ”

“ The great foundation of education—character—is not taught in the public schools. There is no systematized process of developing a child's power of concentration; there is not time for this in the cramming process now in vogue and with the enormous pressure placed on teachers. No teacher can do justice to more than fifteen children through the school hours. In many of our public schools there are fifty and sixty children under one instructor. This is fatal to the nervous system of the teacher and deprives the pupils of that personal sympathy which is of such vital importance. ”

“ When parents weigh in the balance the possibility of a wrecked life, of destroying the right to have children, or of bringing them into the world blind or diseased; of permanently destroying the hope of happiness, peace, and success, no combination of advantages in a son-in-law is deserving of the slightest consideration. We are treating of the sacred things of life—of life itself. If parents combine to crucify and betray their daughters—to sell them body and soul into bondage for social or other advantages ”

“ Eugenics and Motherhood.—Any plan or scheme which has for its object race regeneration must concern itself with the health, the education, and the psychology of woman; the environment which shall surround her period of motherhood, and her selection of the fathers of the future. Society must safeguard her in all her relations. The race to-morrow are the babies of to-day. The wealth of a nation therefore is the type of baby that will constitute its civilization from generation to generation, and absolutely nothing else counts. ”

“ If every mother were educated to the extent as indicated in the above outline the appalling infant mortality would fall into insignificance. It is not a difficult task, nor would it take a long time to carry out; it is the work for willing women who have time and who perhaps spend that time in less desirable but more dramatic ways. It is education that is needed, and it is education that is willingly received, as all mothers are ready to devote their time in the acquirement of knowledge that will help them save their offspring. ”

“ When a girl marries she does not know what fate has in store for her, nor is there any possible way of knowing under the present marriage system. If she begets a sickly, puny child,—assuming she herself has providentially escaped immediate disease,—she devotes all her mother love and devotion to it, but she is fighting a hopeless fight, as I previously explained when I stated that one-half of the total effort of one-third of the race is expended in combating conditions against which no successful effort is possible. ”

“ It may seem unkind to criticise the conduct of any woman at such a time. It is not prompted by a lack of patience or justice however. These women permit, in spite of every assurance to the contrary, an unreasonable fear to overwhelm them; and because of this fear they refuse to be guided into a path of conduct that will save them suffering and shorten the pains which they complain of. It is our conviction that if a woman would try to follow the advice of the physician at this time, at least half of all the seeming suffering would be avoided. ”

“ The physician or nurse whom you are told by one of these irresponsible individuals not to take, may be the one above all others whom you should take. When you hear a gossiping woman decry a physician, depend upon it, she owes him something,—most often it is a bill, but it may only be a grudge. There is no class of men in any community who are maligned and abused so much as are physicians. They seem to be the choice victims of the enmity and spite of every malicious feminine tongue. A woman should think twice before she utters a criticism regarding the work of a physician. ”

“ If his individual ability is responsible in one instance, why not apply the same system to all pupils? If this system is responsible for the brilliancy of one pupil, why does not the same system make all brilliant? ”

“ So long as one marriage in twelve ends in divorce, the ethics of the female need enlightenment. We shall not get another standard of morals until women themselves demand it and insist on it. If they lend themselves to breaking down the conspiracy of silence, the women may solve the marriage problem by refusing to marry rakes.
We need a more liberal construction of the intent of eugenics in order to clarify the obtuse minds so that its propaganda of education may be easily and justly comprehended. ”

“ One of the saddest parts of life, one of the real tragedies of living, is the fact that most of us have to live so long before we really begin to profit by our experiences. Could we only be taught to learn the lesson of experience earlier, when life is younger and hope stronger, we would have so much more to live for and so many more satisfied moments to profit by. ”

“ It would seem to be the destiny of a race to achieve material prosperity at the expense of its morality. When conditions render possible the fulfilment of every human desire, the race exhausts its vitality in a surfeitment of caprice. The animal instincts predominate, and the potential vigor of the people is exhausted in contributing to its own amusement. Each succeeding civilization has reached this epochal period, and has fallen, victim of the rapacity of stronger and younger invading antagonists, themselves to succumb to the same insidious process. ”

“ No sane person can regard with complacency the vicious environment in which the future mothers of the race "tango" their time, their morals, and their vitality away. We do not assume to pass judgment on the merits of the dance; we do, however, emphatically condemn the surroundings.
The moving-picture shows, vaudeville entertainments, dancing carnivals, the ease of travel, the laxity of laws, the opportunities for promiscuous interviews, all tend to give youth a false impression of the reality of life and to make the path of the degenerate easy and attractive. ”

“ No woman can earn support for herself and children outside of her home and competently assume the responsibilities of motherhood at the same time. Whatever aid a mother renders to the state, as a result of effort in factory or shop, is of infinitely less value, from an economic standpoint, than her contribution as mother in caring for her own children in her own home. A careful study of infant mortality, and the conditions of child life, so far as survival value is concerned, condemns in the strongest and most vital sense this whole practice. ”

“ When religion was not the dominating power, mankind was ruled by militant tyrants. The non-elect were slaves,—uneducated, uncivilized, debased and diseased. The elect were licentious and indolent. Neither class practised any domestic virtues, or respected the institution of motherhood. The process of the selection of the fittest for survival for the purpose of parentage, and for the consummation of the evolutionary gradation, through which the human race is apparently destined to pass, was again in abeyance for a series of generations. ”

“ No mother should work, because in the care of her children she is already doing the supreme work. The proper care of children is so continuous and exacting a task, and of such importance to posterity, that it must be regarded as the highest and foremost work—and adequate in itself—and its efficiency must not be hampered by mothers having to do anything else. ”

“ From the eugenic standpoint the present system of education is not satisfactory. To attain our end it is essential to devise other means of education. It must be remembered, however, that no system of education alone can ever enable us to achieve our end, no matter how perfect the system may be. Education can only draw out what is in the child; it cannot draw out what is not there. What the child is, depends upon its heredity. The pedagogic ability of the school-master will never make a genius. ”

“ So long as these conditions exist need we not tremble for the future of the race? Is not this future welfare a personal issue, or can we trust the future of our daughters to the same indiscriminate fate that has written the pages of history in the past? ”

“ Time passes, and if she is an ordinary woman she scarcely does justice to herself. Her duties are exacting, and her physical condition is not given the study and care which she ought to give it. She does not understand the importance of the hygiene of pregnancy, and the day of the confinement finds her more or less exhausted, and worn out. She passes through the crisis of maternity, however, and spends the customary ten days in bed. At the end of that period the nurse and physician leave her to face the most important problem of life alone. ”

“ Suppose we tried to teach that baby to walk a month before nature was ready; each day we patiently coax it to "step out," we guide it from support to support, and we protect it from stumbling. Some day it walks, and we congratulate ourselves on the victory, when as a matter of fact, we not only had nothing to do with it but were impertinent meddlers, not instructors. Nature was the teacher and she was quite capable of completing the task without our aid. It is reasonable also to assume that any effort to force a natural function is quite likely to do much harm. ”

“ We who are alive to-day must begin the work, and leave it to posterity to carry forward. We must do our part. Every mother must become an enthusiastic eugenist. If she begins to teach, and preach, and practise its principles now, she will contribute to the heredity of unborn generations. To those of us who are alive to-day, environment is the vastly more important consideration, for our heredity is fixed and beyond the power of control. The question of eugenics for the present generation, therefore, is a question of environment. ”

“ When heredity, [29] psychology, and eugenics combine to dictate the system, we shall doubtless find, that, in the beginning, it will be a system of individualization. In the interest of health and of justice, and consequently of efficiency, this would seem to be the natural and the logical lead.
So long as human nature is as it is, we must meet conditions as they exist. We know as parents, and some of us know as physicians, that a task easily performed by one individual, without any apparent harmful results, will tax the capacity of another individual to the very utmost. ”