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Updated: June 6, 2025
In practical eugenics, though sooth to say when eugenics begins to become practical many professing eugenists seem to think that it is wandering from the point the great fact of expectant motherhood must be reckoned with.
If it was so it was so in a much looser and vaguer sense than the breeding of the Eugenists; and such modern philosophers read into the old paganism a fantastic pride and cruelty which are wholly modern. It may be, however, that pagan slaves had some shadow of the blessings of the Eugenist's care. It is quite certain that the pagan freemen would have killed the first man that suggested it.
And indeed the statistics of Jewish vitality and brain-power, and even of artistic faculty, are amazing enough to invite investigation from all eugenists, biologists, and statesmen.
He meant that the only formula important to Eugenists would be "by Smith out of Jones." Such a formula is one of the shortest in the world; and is certainly the shortest way with the Euphemists. The next sect of superficial objectors is even more irritating. I have called them, for immediate purposes, the Casuists. Suppose I say "I dislike this spread of Cannibalism in the West End restaurants."
And one is enough to do the business. The error of the eugenists lies in the assumption that a physically healthy man is the best fitted to survive. This is true of rats and the pediculae, but not of the higher animals, e. g., horses, dogs and men. In these higher animals one looks for more subtle qualities, chiefly of the spirit.
No one has pointed this out more convincingly than Huxley in his “Evolution and Ethics.” The progress of the race is not natural, but artificial and accidental and precarious. Therefore Nietzsche believes in artificial selection. The Superman is not born, he must be bred. Nietzsche is the spiritual father and forerunner of the Eugenists.
But the scientific Eugenists fail to recognize that this restraint of fecundity is due to a deliberate foresight and is a conscious effort to elevate standards of living for the family and the children of the responsible and possibly more selfish sections of the community.
All these things the Eugenists sees and points out with a courage entirely admirable. But as a positive program of redemption, orthodox Eugenics can offer nothing more "constructive" than a renewed "cradle competition" between the "fit" and the "unfit." It sees that the most responsible and most intelligent members of society are the less fertile; that the feeble-minded are the more fertile.
The Eugenists get the ear of the humane but rather hazy cliques by saying that the present "conditions" under which people work and breed are bad for the race; but the modern mind will not generally stretch beyond one step of reasoning, and the consequence which appears to follow on the consideration of these "conditions" is by no means what would originally have been expected.
But even if I yelled out a credo when the Eugenists had me on the rack, I should not know what creed to yell. I might get an extra turn of the rack for confessing to the creed they confessed quite a week ago. Now let no light-minded person say that I am here taking extravagant parallels; for the parallel is not only perfect, but plain.
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