R.L. Dugdale, The Jukes, 4th ed., 1910. It is noteworthy that Dugdale, who wrote nearly forty years ago, was concerned to prove the influence of bad environment rather than of bad heredity. At that time the significance of heredity was scarcely yet conceived. It remains true, however, that bad heredity and bad environment constantly work together for evil.
[37] Jörger, Archiv für Rassen-und Gesellschafts-Biologie, 1905, p. 294. Criminal families are also recorded by Aubry, La Contagion du Meutre.
[38] Even during school life this burden is serious. Mr. Bodey, Inspector of Schools, states that the defective school child costs three times as much as the ordinary school child.
[39] I have set forth these considerations more fully in a popular form in The Problem of the Regeneration of the Race, the first of a series of "New Tracts for the Times," issued under the auspices of the National Council of Public Morals.
[40] C.B. Davenport, "Euthenics and Eugenics," Popular Science Monthly, January, 1911.
[41] The use of the terms "fit" and "unfit" in a eugenic sense has been criticized. It is said, for instance, that in a bad environment it may be precisely the defective classes who are most "fit" to survive. It is quite true that these terms are not well adapted to resist hyper-critical attack. The persistence with which they are employed seems, however, to indicate a certain "survival of the fittest." The terms "worthy" and "unworthy," which some would prefer to substitute, are unsatisfactory, for they have moral associations which are misleading. Galton spoke of "civic worth" in this connection, and very occasionally used the term "worthy" (with inverted commas), but he was careful to point out (Essays in Eugenics, p. 35) that in eugenics "we must leave morals as far as possible out of the discussion, not entangling ourselves with the almost hopeless difficulties they raise as to whether a character as a whole is good or bad."
[42] Dr. Toulouse has devoted a whole volume to the results of a minute personal examination of Zola, the novelist, and another to Poincaré, the mathematician. Such minute investigations are at present confined to men of genius, but some day, perhaps, we shall consider that from the eugenic standpoint all men are men of genius.
[43] Sterilization for social ends was introduced in Switzerland a few years ago, in order to enable some persons with impaired self-control to be set at liberty and resume work without the risk of adding to the population defective members who would probably be a burden on the community. It was performed with the consent of the subjects (in some cases at their urgent request) and their relations, so requiring no special legislation, and the results are said to be satisfactory. In some American States sterilization for some classes of defective persons has been established by statute, but it is difficult to obtain reliable information as regards the working and the results of such legislation.
[44] When Professor Giddings speaks of the "goal of mankind," it must, of course, be remembered, he is using a bold metaphor in order to make his meaning clearer. Strictly speaking, mankind has no "goals," nor are there any ends in Nature which are not means to further ends.
II
THE CHANGING STATUS OF WOMEN [45]
The Origin of the Woman Movement—Mary Wollstonecraft—George Sand—Robert Owen—William Thompson—John Stuart Mill—The Modern Growth of Social Cohesion—The Growth of Industrialism—Its Influence in Woman's Sphere of Work—The Education of Women—Co-education—The Woman Question and Sexual Selection—Significance of Economic Independence—The State Regulation of Marriage—The Future of Marriage—Wilhelm von Humboldt—Social Equality of Women—The Reproduction of the Race as a Function of Society—Women and the Future of Civilization.
I
It was in the eighteenth century, the seed-time of modern ideas, that our great-grandfathers became conscious of a discordant break in the traditional conceptions of women's status. The vague cries of Justice, Freedom, Equality, which were then hurled about the world, were here and there energetically applied to women—notably in France by Condorcet—and a new movement began to grow self-conscious and coherent. Mary Wollstonecraft, after Aphra Behn the first really noteworthy Englishwoman of letters, gave voice to this movement in England.
The famous and little-read Vindication of the Rights of Women, careless and fragmentary as it is, and by no means so startling to us as to her contemporaries, shows Mary Wollstonecraft as a woman of genuine insight, who saw the questions of woman's social condition in their essential bearings. Her intuitions need little modification, even though a century of progress has intervened. The modern advocates of woman's suffrage have little to add to her brief statement. She is far, indeed, from the monstrous notion of Miss Cobbe, that woman's suffrage is the "crown and completion" of all progress so far as women's movements are concerned. She looks upon it rather as one of the reasonable conditions of progress. It is pleasant to turn from the eccentric energy of so many of the advocates of women's causes to-day, all engaged in crying up their own particular nostrum, to the genial many-sided wisdom of Mary Wollstonecraft, touching all subjects with equal frankness and delicacy.
The most brilliant and successful exponent of the new revolutionary ideas—making Corinne and her prototype seem dim and ineffectual—was undoubtedly George Sand. The badly-dressed woman who earned her living by scribbling novels, and said to M. du Camp, as she sat before him in silence rolling her cigarette, "Je ne dis rien parceque je suis bête," has exercised a profound influence throughout Europe, an influence which, in the Sclavonic countries especially, has helped to give impetus to the resolution we are now considering. And this not so much from any definite doctrines that underlie her work—for George Sand's views on such matters varied as much as her political views—as from her whole temper and attitude. Her large and rich nature, as sometimes happens in genius of a high order, was twofold; on the one hand, she possessed a solid serenity, a quiet sense of power, the qualities of a bonne bourgeoise, which found expression in her imperturbable calm, her gentle look and low voice. And with this was associated a massive, almost Rabelaisian temperament (one may catch glimpses of it in her correspondence), a sane exuberant earthliness which delighted in every manifestation of the actual world. On the other hand, she bore within her a volcanic element of revolt, an immense disgust of law and custom. Throughout her life George Sand developed her strong and splendid individuality, not perhaps as harmoniously, but as courageously and as sincerely as even Goethe.
Robert Owen, who, like Saint-Simon in France, gave so extraordinary an impulse to all efforts at social reorganization, and who planted the seed of many modern movements, could not fail to extend his influence to the region of sex. A disciple of his, William Thompson, who still holds a distinguished position in the history of the economic doctrines of Socialism, wrote, under the inspiration of a woman (a Mrs. Wheeler), and published in 1825, an
