The science of life : fully illustrated in tone and line and including many diagrams

THE PRESENT PHASE OF HUMAN ASSOCIATION

tives incapable of self-control. Six thousand such operations have been performed in California alone and it would be difficult to find fault with the results. The reader will find an up-to-date account in Gosney and Popenoe’s “Sterilization for Human Betterment.’’ That there is a pressing need for such negative eugenics in the Atlantic communities, due to the steady elimination of death selection from human conditions, is shown by the British Board of Education Report of the Mental Deficiency Committee (1929). This records an increase of one hundred per cent. in the defectives of Great Britain between 1906 and 1927, while the population as a whole has increased only fourteen per cent. At present there are close on ten thousand certifiable defectives in every million of the English population. The birthrate of defectives it seems has not risen, but the defective children have been better taken care of and have survived. So that they in their turn are capable of parentage.

Apart from this traceable (and easily controllable) increase of idiots and imbeciles, there is very little evidence that any change in the average human being is now going on. There is a considerable amount of talk about the rapid multiplication of the unfit, but underlying this there is an assumption of the eugenic superiority of the more prosperous classes over the artisan and labourer mass. It is doubtful if there is any such superiority. People talk of “the ladder of social Opportunity” lifting brains and energy, and of stupidity and_ shiftlessness sinking to the slums. But on the other hand it may be argued that a quite stupid acquisitiveness and meanness may accumulate wealth, and that a large proportion of business successes are merely the lucky ones among a multitude of gamblers. Few great scientific discoverers have died rich, and the best human brains have quite other preoccupations than getting or getting on. Advocates of the universal diffusion of birth-control knowledge argue that shallow, self-indulgent and meanspirited types will be tempted to eliminate themselves altogether. How far selfindulgent people fall into one or several general and distinguishable types is not known.

In a little while it may be possible to handle these issues with exacter definition and much more confidence. All those who have had experience of birth-control work in the slums seem to be convinced that there is a residuum, above the level of the definable “ defective,”? which is too

stupid or shiftless or both to profit by existing birth-control methods. These “ unteachables * constitute pockets of evil germ-plasm responsible for a large amount of vice, disease, defect, and pauperism. But the problem of their elimination is a very subtle one, and there must be no suspicion of harshness or brutality in its solution. Many of these low types might be bribed or otherwise persuaded to accept voluntary sterilization. But while there is no evidence of any alarming uncontrollable degeneration of Homo sapiens, there is still less indication of any modification to adapt him to his extraordinarily changed and changing circumstances. ‘That is the most perplexing aspect of human reproduction. Positive eugenics remains a dream, a note of interrogation. We have the rapid development of novel political, social, and economic arrangements with which the ordinary man does not keep pace. Science has vastly increased the destructive possibilities of war, and there is no sign yet of any effective restraint upon war possibilities. The inventions and organizations that have produced the peculiar Opportunities and dangers of the modern world have been the work so far of a few hundred thousand exceptionally clever and enterprising people. The rest of mankind has just been carried along by them, and has remained practically what it was a thousand years ago. Upon an understanding and competent minority, which may not exceed a million or so in all the world, depends the whole progress and stability of the collective human enterprise at the present time. They are in perpetual conflict with hampering traditions and the obduracy of nature. They are themselves encumbered by the imperfection of their own trainings and the lack of organized solidarity. By wresting education more or less completely from its present function of transmitting tradition, they may be able to bring a few score or a few hundred millions into active co-operation with their efforts. Their task will still be a gigantic one.

We are only able to guess at the amount of undeveloped capacity that goes to waste in each generation. There will certainly remain a considerable proportion of mankind, incapable it seems of being very much educated, incapable of broad understandings and co-operative enterprise, incapable of conscious helpful participation in the adventure of the race, and yet as reproductive as any other element in the world community. For a number of generations, at any rate, a

875