Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/25

 EUGENICS 13

alone in the study of individual faculty often carry us to very incomplete conclu- sions, if not corrected by larger and more scientific conceptions of the social good. I remember our chairman, in his earlier social essays, once depicted an ideally perfect state of society.. I have a distinct recollection of my own sense of relief that my birth had occurred in the earlier ages of comparative barbarism. For Mr. Pearson, I think, proposed to give the kind of people who now scribble on our railway carriages no more than a short shrift and the nearest lamp-post. I hope we shall not seriously carry this spirit into eugenics. It might renew, in the name of science, tyrannies that it took long ages of social evolution to emerge from. Judging from what one sometimes reads, many of our ardent reformers would often be willing to put us into lethal chambers, if our minds and bodies did not conform to certain standards. We are apt to forget in these matters that that sense of responsibility to life which distinguishes the higher societies is itself an asset painfully acquired by the race a social asset of such importance that the more immediate gain aimed at would count by the side of it as no more than dust in the balance. Our methods of knowledge are as yet admittedly very imperfect. Mr. Galton himself, I remember, as the result of his earlier researches into human faculty, put the intellectual caliber of what are called the lower races many degrees below that of the European races. I ventured to point out some years ago that this assumption appeared to be premature, and the data upon which it was founded insufficient. So much is now generally admitted. Yet it would have been awkward had we proceeded to draw any large practical con- clusion from it at the time. The deficiency of what have been called the lower races is now seen to be, not so much an intellectual deficiency, as a deficiency in social qualities and social history, and therefore in social inheritance.

Many examples of a similar kind might be given. It may be remembered, for instance, how a generation or two ago Malthusianisrn was urged upon us in the name of science and almost with the zeal of a religion. We have lived to see the opposite view now beginning to be urged with much the same zeal and emphasis. A nation or a race cannot afford to make practical mistakes on a large scale in these matters.

I trust and believe that much that Mr. Galton anticipates will be realized. But I think we must go slowly with our science of eugenics, and that we must take care, above all things, that it advances with, and does not precede, a real science of our social evolution. We must come to the work in a humble spirit. Even the highest representatives of the various social sciences must realize that in the specialized study of sociology as a whole they are scarcely more than distinguished amateurs. Otherwise, in few other departments of study would there be so much danger of incomplete knowledge, and even of downright quackery, clothing itself with the mantle and authority of science.

BY MRS. DR. DRYSDALE VICKERY.

The speech which has interested me most is that of Dr. Hutchison. Impor- tant as is the quality of hereditary stock, yet at the present juncture I would say that of still greater importance is this, that we have such a vast number of our population growing up under bad conditions. The result is an artificial, a merely economic, multiplication of inferior stocks. The question I wish to raise is this : Are we producing, in this country and in all civilized countries, a greater pro- portion of new individuals than can be favorably absorbed ? In a country like Russia the surplus of births over deaths amounts to two millions in the year ; in Germany the surplus is a million ; in Britain, not quite half a million. Can we, in an old state of society, absorb that amount of new individuals and give them fair conditions of existence? I think not.

Dr. Warner spoke of the importance of our teaching of girls. I hold very strongly that the question of heredity, as we study it at present, is very much a question of masculine heredity only, and that heredity with feminine aspects is very much left out of account. Mr. Galton told us that a certain number of burgesses' names had absolutely disappeared ; but what about the names of their wives, and how would that consideration affect his conclusion? In the future, the question of population will, I hope, be considered very much from the