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Updated: September 17, 2025
There is no doubt whatever that the meager knowledge we possess of heredity in man will be amplified and will ultimately indicate on the one hand the marriages which are advisable and, on the other hand, those which are not. Indeed, the foundations for a science called Eugenics, which purposes to improve the human race in this way, have already been laid.
The publications of the Eugenics Laboratory all tend to show that a high rate of fertility is correlated with extreme poverty, recklessness, deficiency and delinquency; similarly, that among the more intelligent, this rate of fertility decreases.
We are doing our utmost to select and educate and train the fit. Are we producing potential fitness? Long experience has taught us that we cannot produce a silk purse from a sow's ear. Eugenics emerges as an important aspect of every long term group endeavor. Qualities and capacities are handed on from parent to offspring. Are we reproducing fitness or unfitness?
The science of eugenics, new-fangled as the word itself, will place upon the statute-book matters and considerations which our forefathers left to the Lord. Considerable progress has already been made in this country. The marriage of insane persons, persons absolutely non compos, was, of course, always void at the common law, and the church law as well. They are incapable of contract.
This seems to be, at present, the most popular form of eugenics, and in so far as it is not effected by compulsion but is the outcome of a voluntary resolve to treat the question of the creation of the race with the jealous care and guardianship which so tremendously serious, so godlike, a task involves, it has much to be said in its favor and nothing against it.
A biologist naturally believes that the ultimate aim of eugenics is improvement of physical and psychical qualities; but considering the ethical-social-biological complications of human sex-problems, it seems improbable that any decided and extensive improvement is likely to come if we continue to limit our interpretation of the principles of eugenics to the purely biological standpoint of the breeder of plants and animals.
Many a raid on a witch, right or wrong, seemed to the villagers who did it a righteous popular rising against a vast spiritual tyranny, a papacy of sin. Yet we know that the thing degenerated into a rabid and despicable persecution of the feeble or the old. It ended by being a war upon the weak. It ended by being what Eugenics begins by being.
What brings the eugenics movement into the Flatland category is not its attitude toward the question of genius, or perhaps even of singularity, but its attitude toward the life of mankind as a whole if indeed it can be said to have any attitude toward the life of mankind as a whole. The profound elements of that life seem not to come at all within the range of its contemplation.
Thus Francis Galton, in the preface to the "Bible of Eugenics," his essays on Hereditary Genius, declares: "There is nothing either in the history of domestic animals or in that of evolution to make us doubt that a race of sane men may be formed who shall be as much superior, mentally and morally, to the Modern European, as the Modern European is to the lowest of the Negro races."
The three lines in the middle, with rhythmic ripples, show the overtones." He paused a moment and faced us. "Many a person," he resumed, "is a biotype in whom a full complement of what are called inhibitions never develops. That is part of your eugenics. Throughout life, and in spite of the best of training, that person reacts now and then to a certain stimulus directly.
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