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Updated: June 26, 2025
Of course this does not apply to everything that comes from the eugenics camp, nor to every person that calls himself a eugenist. But on the other hand it is by no means only of the crude projects of half-educated reformers, or the outgivings of the prophets of our popular magazines, that it is true.
Now it is perfectly true that this aversion may have acted eugenically; and so had a certain ultimate confirmation and basis in the laws of procreation. But there really cannot be any Eugenist quite so dull as not to see that this is not a defence of Eugenics but a direct denial of Eugenics.
If Spencer had cared to pursue his point half a century ago, he had the key to it in his hands. Youth prefers the natural to the acquired qualities. Nature, greatest of match-makers, has so constructed youth because she is a Eugenist, and because she knows that it is the natural qualities and not the acquired ones which are transmitted to offspring.
We name children after their fathers, and the fact that they are also to some extent of the maternal stock is obscured. But when we ask to what extent they are also of maternal stock, we find that there is a rigorous equality between the sexes in this matter. It is a fact which has been ignored or inadequately recognized by every feminist and by every eugenist from Plato until the present time.
Or is it not rather a circumstance to give one pause, that these commercially unsuccessful and socially neglected people, whose large families the self-satisfied eugenist views with such solemn misgivings, should be in the main so kindly, so generous, and sometimes so lofty in their sentiments as in fact they are?
They mean that the public is to be given up, not as a heathen land for conversion, but simply as a pabulum for experiment. That is the real, rude, barbaric sense behind this Eugenic legislation. The Eugenist doctors are not such fools as they look in the light of any logical inquiry about what they want.
Data bearing upon physique and physiognomy, details of anatomy and function, mind and behaviour will so be co-ordinated as no eugenist has hitherto succeeded in doing. Laws of endocrine inheritance will emerge that will bring the control of heredity within measurable distance. Standards and norms of a new kind would be obtained.
The meanest Thomist of the mediæval monasteries would have the sense to see that you cannot discuss a madman when you have not discussed a man. The most owlish Calvinist commentator in the seventeenth century would ask the Eugenist to reconcile such Bible texts as derided fools with the other Bible texts that praised them.
Only one came and he was Irish. However, he wore silk stockings and a violet coat of aggressively ecclesiastical cut, so he looked quite as well as if he had had a seat in the House of Lords. I introduced him to the eugenic pig breeder, but they did not seem to hit it off together. After a few remarks, probably about the weather, they separated. The eugenist is rather a shaggy man to look at.
It is always "Such limbs should be amputated," or "Such men should be under restraint." Hamlet said, "I should have fatted all the region kites with this slave's offal." The Eugenist would say, "The region kites should, if possible, be fattened; and the offal of this slave is available for the dietetic experiment." Lady Macbeth said, "Give me the daggers; I'll let his bowels out."
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