Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/35

 EUGENICS 23

qualities unscrupulousness and acquisitiveness and a vulgar idea of achieve- ment. Given a family of morally and intellectually superior types, all contented with simple conditions, and averse to commercial struggle, are they to be classed as ill-born, or failures? If, finally, it should be shown that a common condition of thriving for large or other families is the possession of capital for a start in business, we are brought to no conclusion in eugenics, but set asking for one in terms of politics.

3. It is, indeed, highly important to set up such common standards as shall preclude replication of morbid stocks, including in these those seen to tend to insanity, dumbness, suicide, dipsomania, erotism, violence, etc. Mr. Gallon's past work has done much to bring the importance of heredity home to thinking people. But there is a danger of seeming to ask too much. For one thing, we must not overlook the fact that mere high physical stamina is not necessarily, or even very probably, a condition of high brain power. Merely " delicate " people, therefore, are not to be warned off marriage. Many great men (e. g., Newton and Voltaire) were extremely fragile in infancy. Some (e. g., Calvin, Pope, Spencer, Heine, Stevenson) were chronic invalids. For another thing, though it seems clear that high capacity in one parent is often neutralized by the lack of it in the other, it is vain to think to eliminate the factor of love or instinctive pre- ference in marriage.

4. It seems impossible, finally, to separate eugenics from politics, inasmuch as the bad physical and moral conditions set up by poverty i. e., ill-feeding, ill-housing, ill-clothing, and early prolificacy on the one hand, and ignorance in child-rearing and begetting on the other are the great forces of " kakogenics." Mr. Galton says : " There is strong reason for believing that the rise and decline of nations is closely connected with " the rate of reproduction in the " upper " or other classes. I respectfully suggest that an effect is here put for a cause. The true causation of the rise and decline of nations, surely, is proximately a general economic process, depending primarily on physical environment (that is, natural resources), and secondarily on political direction, which is conditioned by political environment. That is to say, Rome did not rise through the fecundity or fall through the infecundity of her ruling or other classes. In the early period they were normally fecund. In the period of empire they appear to have become infecund as a result of the bad relation to life set up by their imperialistic econom- ics. But mere fecundity on their part would not have made that economics healthy, or rectified their relation to life. Saracen society has often presented fecund aristocracies, without any arrest of social decline. The depopulation of imperial Italy and of post-Alexandrian Greece, on the other hand, was not a physiological, but an economic, process. The Greeks went to the new and more facile economic conditions. For Rome, the import of grain as tribute from rich soils killed the competition of Italian soil, and slave labor was rather a result than a cause of the elimination of the old peasantry.

Perhaps, indeed, Mr. Galton would not dissent from the general propo- sition that eugenics involves politics. But it seems to me that the necessary regression is obscured when it is suggested that eugenics is mainly a matter of the right adjustment of individual conduct, in a social system politically fixed. If this be meant, I submit that it is a form of the fallacy of prescribing " a new heart " as the sufficient means to social regeneration. Nations can only very gradually change their hearts, and part of the process consists in changing their houses, their clothes, their alimentation, their economic position, and their insti- tutions as a means to the rest.

BY W. BATESON, M.A., F.R.S.

With the objects of the paper everyone will sympathize, and there can be no doubt that this discussion will do something to promote the study of heredity and the introduction of scientific method in the breeding of man and other animals. An exact knowledge of the laws of inheritance will be a factor in the destiny of mankind, as large as, if not larger than, any yet brought to bear.

I notice that in the paper stress is laid on the " actuarial side of heredity,''