United States or Malawi ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Who are the people with the breadth and tolerance and infinite wisdom, in whose hands it would be safe to place the remodeling of man? It is hard to conceive that it can be seriously considered. Nature in her own way is a eugenist. By her slow processes she is continually wiping out the unfit and adapting man to the environment where he must live.
Briefly, we may say that while many moral systems have set restraints on sex almost as severe as any Eugenist could set, they have almost always had the character of securing the fidelity of the two sexes to each other, and leaving the rest to God.
The Eugenist points out that heredity is the great determining factor in the lives of men and women. Eugenics is the attempt to solve the problem from the biological and evolutionary point of view.
They strengthen chiefly the present generation. The blight of the fact that acquired characters cannot be transmitted, meets us here. This improved environment can only slowly, if at all, improve the race, and every effort made in this direction must be repeated with each generation. Under such circumstances is it to be wondered at that the eugenist is hoping to raise the strain?
The Eugenist really sets up as saints the very men whom hundreds of families have called sneaks.
Who is the man who is the lost subject that governs the Eugenist's verb? In a large number of cases I think we can simply say that the individual Eugenist means himself, and nobody else. Indeed one Eugenist, Mr. A.H. Huth, actually had a sense of humour, and admitted this. He thinks a great deal of good could be done with a surgical knife, if we would only turn him loose with one.
These families can often show longer, and usually much better pedigrees than the peerage; the persistence of marked ability in many of them, for several generations, is the delight of the eugenist. They are perhaps the best specimens of humanity to be found in any country of the world.
The important point is, however, that there is more fact and realism in the wildest and most elegant old fictions about disinherited dukes and long-lost daughters than there is in this Eugenist attempt to make the poor all of a piece a sort of black fungoid growth that is ceaselessly increasing in a chasm. There is a cheap sneer at poor landladies: that they always say they have seen better days.
It is my business to acquaint myself with the literature of both eugenics and feminism, and I know that hitherto the eugenists have inclined to oppose the claims of feminism, Sir Francis Galton, for instance, having lent his name to the anti-suffrage side; whilst the feminists, one and all, so far as Anglo-Saxondom is concerned for Ellen Key must be excepted are either unaware of the meaning of eugenics at all, or are up in arms at once when the eugenist or at any rate this eugenist, who is a male person mildly inquires: But what about motherhood? and to what sort of women are you relegating it by default?
The result was that in that fine book, "Mankind in the Making," where he inevitably came to grips with the problem, he threw down to the Eugenists an intellectual challenge which seems to me unanswerable, but which, at any rate, is unanswered. I do not mean that no remote Eugenist wrote upon the subject; for it is impossible to read all writings, especially Eugenist writings.
Word Of The Day