Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 11.djvu/302

 286 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

you say you will breed each of these intellectual categories, each of those physical types, then it amounts to confessing that you will let things pretty much have their own way, and that you renounce guiding nature and directing consciously the species toward an ideal type. If you admit that you have no fixed standard of beauty and mental attainment, of physical and intellectual perfection, to propose as the aim of eugenic selection ; if your artificial man-breading is not destined to develop certain well-defined organic qualities to the detriment of others, then eugenics means simply that people about to marry should choose handsome, healthy young individuals ; and this, I am sorry to say, is a mere triviality, as already, without any scientific consciousness or intervention, people are attracted by beauty, health, and youth, and repulsed by the visible absence of these qualities.

The principle of sexual selection is the natural promoter of eugenics ; it is a constant factor in biology, and undoubtedly at work in mankind. The immense majority of men and women marry the best individual among those that come within their reach. Only a small minority is guided in its choice by considerations of a social and economical order, which may determine selections to which the natural instinct would object. But even such a choice, contrary as it seems to the principle of eugenics, might be justified to a certain extent. The noble Ernest Renan would never have been chosen for his physical apparance by any young woman of natural taste ; nor would Darmesteter, the great philologist, who was afflicted with gibbosity. Yet these men had high qualities that were well worth being perpetuated in the species. A young and beautiful woman could put in a plausible plea for her marrying an elderly rich financier or nobleman of not very pleasing appearance. In both cases her proper organic qualities may vouchsafe fair offspring which will better develop in economically and socially favorable surroundings than it would have done in poverty and obscurity, even if the father had been a much finer specimen of man.

It seems to me that the problem must be approached from another side. There have been pure human races in prehistorical times. Actually every Euro- pean nation represents a mixture, different in its proportion only, of all the races of Europe, and probably some of Asia and northern Africa. Probably every European has in his ancestry representatives of a great number of human types, good and indifferent ones. He is the bearer of all the potentialities of the species. By atavism, any one of the ancestral types may revive in him. Place him in favorable conditions, and there is a fair chance of his developing his potentialities and of his growing into resemblance with the best of his ancestors. The essential thing, therefore, is not so much the selection of particular individuals every individual having probably latent qualities of the best kind as the creating of favorable conditions for the development of the good qualities. Marry Hercules with Juno, and Apollo with Venus, and put them in slums. Their children will be stunted in growth, rickety and consumptive. On the other hand, take the miserable slum-dwellers out of their noxious surroundings, house, feed, clothe them well, give them plenty of light, air, and leisure, and their grandchildren, perhaps already their children, will reproduce the type of the fine, tall Saxons and Danes of whom they are the offspring.

If eugenics is only to produce a few Grecian gods and goddesses in the sacred circle of the privileged few, it has a merely artistico-aesthetical, but no politico- ethnological, interest. Eugenics, in order to modify the aspect and value of the nation, must ameliorate, not some select groups, but the bulk of the people ; and this aim is not to be attained by trying to influence the love-life of the masses. It can be approached only by elevating their standard of life. Redeem the millions of their harrowing care, give them plenty of food and rational hygienics, and allow their natural sympathies to work out their matrimonial choice, and you will have done all the eugenics that is likely to strengthen, embellish, and ennoble the race. In one word : Eugenics, to be largely efficient, must be considered, not as a biological, but as an economic question.

One word more as to the restriction of marriage. There is no doubt that laws and customs have had, at all times and in all places, the effect of narrowing the circle within which the matrimonial selection could take place. But I believe it would be an error to conclude that therefore it would be within the power