(Original PDF) Ancient Greece: A Political,

Social, and Cultural History 4th Edition

download

https://ebookluna.com/product/original-pdf-ancient-greece-a-
political-social-and-cultural-history-4th-edition/

Download more ebook from https://ebookluna.com

 We believe these products will be a great fit for you. Click
the link to download now, or visit ebookluna.com
to discover even more!

(eBook PDF) A Brief History of Ancient Greece: Politics, Society, and

Culture 4th Edition

https://ebookluna.com/product/ebook-pdf-a-brief-history-of-ancient-greece-
politics-society-and-culture-4th-edition/

(eBook PDF) A Brief History of Ancient Greece: Politics, Society, and

Culture 3rd Edition

https://ebookluna.com/product/ebook-pdf-a-brief-history-of-ancient-greece-
politics-society-and-culture-3rd-edition/

(eBook PDF) Pre-Modern East Asia: A Cultural, Social, and Political

History, Volume I: To 1800 3rd Edition

https://ebookluna.com/product/ebook-pdf-pre-modern-east-asia-a-cultural-
social-and-political-history-volume-i-to-1800-3rd-edition/

(eBook PDF) Egypt, Greece, and Rome: Civilizations of the Ancient

Mediterranean 3rd Edition

https://ebookluna.com/product/ebook-pdf-egypt-greece-and-rome-
civilizations-of-the-ancient-mediterranean-3rd-edition/
(eBook PDF) African-American Art: A Visual and Cultural History

https://ebookluna.com/product/ebook-pdf-african-american-art-a-visual-and-
cultural-history/

(eBook PDF) Communicating: A Social, Career, and Cultural Focus 12th

Edition

https://ebookluna.com/product/ebook-pdf-communicating-a-social-career-and-
cultural-focus-12th-edition/

(eBook PDF) Country Music: A Cultural and Stylistic History 2nd Edition

https://ebookluna.com/product/ebook-pdf-country-music-a-cultural-and-
stylistic-history-2nd-edition/

(Original PDF) World Architecture: A Cross-Cultural History 2nd Edition

https://ebookluna.com/product/original-pdf-world-architecture-a-cross-
cultural-history-2nd-edition/

(eBook PDF) Ancient Roman Civilization: History and Sources: 753 BCE to 640
CE

https://ebookluna.com/product/ebook-pdf-ancient-roman-civilization-history-
and-sources-753-bce-to-640-ce/
 C O N T E N T S
B

Maps and Battle Plans    xiii

Preface   xiv
New to the Fourth Edition    xv
Translations Used by Permission    xvi
Timeline   xviii

Introduction  1
A Bird’s-Eye View of Greek History   1
Sources: How We Know About the Greeks   4
Retrieving the Past: The Material Record 5
Retrieving the Past: The Written Record   6
Periodization  7
Frogs Around a Pond   8
City-States  8
Greek City-States  9

C h a p t e r O n e B
Early Greece and the Bronze Age   12
Domestication  17
Sources for Early Greek History   17
The Land of Greece   18
Greece in the Early and Middle Bronze Ages (c. 3000–1600 BC)  22
Minoan Civilization  26
Greece and the Aegean in the Late Bronze Age (1600–1200 BC)  34

vii
 The Years of Glory (c. 1400–1200 BC)  38
The End of the Mycenaean Civilization   51

C h a p t e r Tw o B
The Early Iron Age (c. 1200–750/700 BC)  56
Sources for the Early Iron Age  57
Decline and Recovery, Early Iron Age I (c. 1200–900 BC)  59
The New Society of Early Iron Age II (900–750/700 BC)  64
Revival (c. 900–750 BC)  69
Homer and Oral Poetry   71
Homeric Society  73
Community, Household, and Economy in Early Iron Age II   84
The End of Early Iron Age II (c. 750–700 BC)  88

C h a p t e r T h r e e B
Archaic Greece (750/700–480 BC)  101
Sources for the Seventh and Sixth Centuries   104
The Formation of the City-State (Polis)   105
Government in the Early City-States   107
Emigration and Expansion: The Colonizing Movement   110
Economic and Social Divisions in the Early Poleis   116
Hesiod: The View from Outside   120
The Hoplite Army   124
The Archaic Age Tyrants   126
Art and Architecture   130
Lyric Poetry  135
Philosophy and Science   142
Panhellenic Religious Institutions  145
Relations Among States   148

C h a p t e r F o u r B

Sparta  154
Sources for Spartan History and Institutions   154
The Early Iron Age and the Archaic Period   158
viii
viii
 The Spartan System   162
Demography and the Spartan Economy   173
Spartan Government  176
Sparta and Greece   180
Historical Change in Sparta   181
The Spartan Mirage in Western Thought   183

C h a p t e r F i v e B
The Growth of Athens and the Persian Wars   186
Sources for Early Athens   186
Athens from the Bronze Age to the Early Archaic Age   187
The Reforms of Solon   192
Pisistratus and His Sons   197
The Reforms of Cleisthenes   202
The Rise of Persia   206
The Wars Between Greece and Persia   209
The Other War: Carthage and the Greek Cities of Sicily   227

C h a p t e r S i x B
The Rivalries of the Greek City-States and the Growth
of Athenian Democracy  231
Sources for the Decades After the Persian Wars   232
The Aftermath of the Persian Wars and the Foundation
of the Delian League   234
The First (Undeclared) Peloponnesian War
(460–445 BC)  241
Pericles and the Growth of Athenian Democracy   244
Literature and Art   248
Oikos and Polis   257
The Greek Economy   270

C h a p t e r S e v e n B
Greece on the Eve of the Peloponnesian War   277
Sources for Greece on the Eve of the War   277

ix
 Greece After the Thirty Years’ Peace   279
The Breakdown of the Peace   282
Resources for War   287
Intellectual Life in Fifth-Century Greece   288
Historical and Dramatic Literature of the Fifth Century   291
Currents in Greek Thought and Education   303
The Physical Space of the Polis: Athens on the
Eve of War   310

C h a p t e r E i g h t B
The Peloponnesian War   325
Sources for Greece During the Peloponnesian War   326
The Archidamian War (431–421 BC)  327
The Rise of Comedy   338
Between Peace and War   342
The Invasion of Sicily (415–413 BC)  345
The War in the Aegean and the Oligarchic Coup at Athens
(413–411 BC)  351
Fallout from the Long War   357
The War in Retrospect   364

C h a p t e r N i n e B
The Greek World of the Early
Fourth-Century  369
Sources for Fourth-Century Greece   370
Social and Economic Strains in Postwar Greece    371
Law and Democracy in Athens   382
The Fourth-Century Polis   388
Philosophy and the Polis   392

C h a p t e r T e n B
Philip II and Macedonian Supremacy   409
Sources for Macedonian History   409
Early Macedonia  410

xx
 Macedonian Society and Kingship   411
The Reign of Philip II   415
Macedonian Domination of Greece   426

C h a p t e r E l e v e n B

Alexander the Great   434

Sources for the Reign of Alexander   436
Consolidating Power  437
From Issus to Egypt: Conquest of the Eastern Mediterranean
(332–331 BC)  449
From Alexandria to Persepolis: The King of Asia
(331–330 BC)  452
The High Road to India: Alexander in Central Asia   455
India and the End of the Dream   460
Return to the West   463

C h a p t e r t w e l v e B
Alexander’s Successors and the Cosmopolis   470
A New World   470
Sources for the Hellenistic Period   471
The Struggle for the Succession   474
The Regency of Perdiccas   474
The Primacy of Antigonus the One-Eyed   476
Birth Pangs of the New Order (301–276 BC)  479
The Place of the Polis in the Cosmopolis   484
The Macedonian Kingdoms   489
Hellenistic Society  494
Alexandria and Hellenistic Culture   496
Ethnic Relations in the Hellenistic World   507

EPILOGUE   515
The Arrival of the Romans   519
A Greco-Roman World   526

xi
Glossary  535
Art and Illustration Credits   548
Index  555
Color plates follow pp. 178 and 386

xii
 M A P A N D B A T T L E P L A N S
B

Mycenaean sites in the thirteenth century BC  42

Greek colonization: 750–500 BC  112
The Athenian Agora in the Archaic period, c. 500 BC, showing the earliest public
buildings  134
Peloponnesus  157
Attica  204
The Persian empire in the reign of Darius   213
The Persian wars 224
The Athenian empire at its height   237
Sicily and southern Italy   278
Alliances at the outset of the Peloponnesian War in 431   284
Theaters of operation during the Peloponnesian War   328
Diagram of Syracuse and Epipolae   348
Macedonia and its neighbors   413
Alexander’s campaign  440
Plan of the Battle of Issus   446
Plan of the Battle of Gaugamela   452
The Greek view of the inhabited world   459
The Hellenistic world   480
The Greek World in the Roman Period   516

xiii
 P R E F A C E
B

T his book is designed to share with readers a rich and complex vision of an-
cient Greece that has been forged by the collaboration of several scholars with
different backgrounds and varying interests. We undertook the writing of the first
edition over two decades ago because of our frustration in the search for a single
volume that provided readers with a comprehensive history of Greek civilization
from its beginnings in the second millennium BC through the Hellenistic era. At
that time it had been more than a quarter of a century since the last attempt to tell
the story of Greece in depth from the Bronze Age though the Hellenistic era. We
hoped that what we wrote would be useful and give pleasure both to the general
reader and to the student who is asked to read it in college. Our intent was to write
a book that was long enough to provide depth and detail, and short enough to
enable the instructor to assign primary sources that would expand the student’s
understanding of a world that is both familiar and alien. It would also incorporate
the fruits of the most recent scholarship, while providing a balance between po-
litical, military, social, cultural, and economic history. The many kind words and
reviews our book received indicated that we achieved our goals.
Scholarship does not stand still, however. Since the publication of the third edi-
tion of Ancient Greece, exciting discoveries have been made in all areas of Greek his-
tory. Incorporating the results of this scholarship in this new edition has been both
challenging and pleasurable. In the process we have reviewed every paragraph,
revised and expanded the suggested readings, and improved the illustration pro-
gram. We have paid particular attention to the finds of underwater archaeologists.
As before, we have profited enormously from the work of innumerable scholars
whose names never appear in our book. We are also greatly indebted to Charles
Cavaliere of the Oxford University Press and his excellent staff for their support
and help; we are very grateful to the following readers who took time out from
busy schedules to examine our work and make numerous useful criticisms and
suggestions: Daniel Christensen, Biola University; Diana Harris Cline, George
Washington University; David Graf, University of Miami; Philip Kaplan, Univer-
sity of North Florida; Elizabeth Kosmetatou, University of Illinois–Springfield;

xiv
Vincent Tomasso. We are equally grateful to the readers of the past who helped
us prepare previous editions.
We must also thank Robert Lejeune, who offered computer assistance when
it was most needed and endured our assorted technoflubs with remarkable pa-
tience; thanks too, again, to Lee Harris Pomeroy for help and advice on the art pro-
gram. Finally, we acknowledge with thanks the publishers who have generously
granted permission to quote from translations published by them. All translations
from Herodotus and Thucydides are from Walter Blanco’s version in the Norton
­Critical Editions of those authors. Similarly, all translations from Xenophon’s
­Hellenica are from John Marincola’s version in the Landmark Xenophon’s Hellenika.
All unattributed translations in the text are by the authors.
The authors would also like to call the reader’s attention to three features of
our book: the timeline at the beginning, which provides a brief but comprehensive
overview of Greek history; the extensive glossary at the end, which provides cap-
sule descriptions of many of the terms that occur in the book; and the color plates,
which bring our readers closer to the physical reality of the remarkable objects and
buildings the Greek created. Abbreviations for standard works follow those used
in The Oxford Classical Dictionary, 4th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
We are particularly fortunate to have found an expert in the period of Roman
Greece to work with us on this edition of Ancient Greece, Professor Georgia Tsou-
vala of Illinois State University, who has provided a rich account of this important
phase of Greek history. We hope this new edition will, like its predecessor, help
teachers, students, and general readers explore and enjoy the fascinating history
of ancient Greece.

NEW TO THE FOURTH EDITION

• Updated accounts of Bronze and Iron Age Greece
• Improved coverage of Magna Graecia
• Expanded treatment of Roman Greece
• New translations of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides
• Other new translations, including recently discovered poems of Sappho
and Posidippus

Jennifer Roberts, New York City Sarah Pomeroy, Sag Harbor, New York
Stanley Burstein, Los Alamitos, California David W. Tandy, Leeds, United Kingdom

xv
 T R A N S L A T I O N S U S E D B Y

P E R M I S S I O N
B

Barker, Ernest, and R. F. Stalley. 1998. The Politics of Aristotle. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Blanco, Walter. 2013. The Histories, from Herodotus: The Histories, Walter Blanco and Jennifer
Roberts, eds., 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton.
———. 1998. The Peloponnesian War, from Thucydides: The Peloponnesian War, Walter Blanco
and Jennifer Tolbert Roberts, eds. New York: W. W. Norton.
Brunt, P. A. 1976. Arrian: Anabasis of Alexander. Vol. I. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge,
MA and London: Harvard University Press.
Burstein, Stanley M. 1985. The Hellenistic Age from the Battle of Ipsos to the Death of Kleopatra
VII. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Chinnock, E. J. 1893. Arrian’s Anabasis of Alexander and Indica. London and New York: G.
Bell & Sons.
Clayman, Dee L. 2014. Berenice II and the Golden Age of Ptolemaic Egypt. Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press.
Dickinson, Patric. 1970. Aristophanes, Plays. Vol. 1. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gagarin, Michael, and Paul Woodruff, eds. 1995. “Encomium of Helen,” in Early Greek Po-
litical Thought from Homer to the Sophists. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Green, Peter. 1997. The Argonautika: The Story of Jason and the Quest for the Golden Fleece.
Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press.
Hanson, Ann. 1975. “Hippocrates: Diseases of Women 1,” Signs 1: 567–584.
Heisserer, A. J. 1980. In Alexander the Great and the Greeks: The Epigraphic Evidence. Norman:
University of Oklahoma Press.
Jameson, M. 1970. “A Decree of Themistocles from Troizen,” Hesperia 29 (1960): 200–201,
modified by P. Green. 1970. Xerxes at Salamis. New York and London: Praeger.
Kitzinger, Rachel. 2016. Medea, from The Greek Plays, Mary Lefkowitz and James Romm, ed.
New York: Penguin Random House.
Lombardo, Stanley. 1997. Homer, Iliad. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett.
Lombardo, Stanley. 2000. Homer, Odyssey. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett.
Marchant, E. C. 1925. Xenophon. Vol. 7, Scripta Minora. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA.

xvi
Marincola, John. 2009. The Hellenika, from The Landmark Xenophon’s Hellenika, Robert B.
Strassler, ed. New York: Random House.
Nisetich, Frank. 2005. The New Posidippus: A Hellenistic Poetry Book, Kathryn Gutzwiller, ed.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
———. 2016. Antigone, from The Greek Plays, Mary Lefkowitz and James Romm, ed. New
York: Penguin Random House.
Papillon, Terry L. 2004. Isocrates II. The Oratory of Classical Greece. Austin, Texas: University
of Texas Press.
Parker, Douglass. 1969. Lysistrata, from Aristophanes: Four Comedies, William Arrowsmith,
ed. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Pomeroy, Sarah B. 1994. Xenophon: Oeconomicus, A Social and Historical Commentary. Oxford:
Clarendon Press.
Pomeroy, Sarah B. 2002. Spartan Women. New York: Oxford University Press.
Romm, James. 2016. The Persians, from The Greek Plays, Mary Lefkowitz and James Romm,
ed. New York: Penguin Random House.
Ruden, Sarah. 2016. Agamemnon, from The Greek Plays, Mary Lefkowitz and James Romm,
ed. New York: Penguin Random House.
Saunders, A. N. W. 1975. Demosthenes and Aeschines. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin.
Scott-Kilvert, Ian. 1960. The Rise and Fall of Athens: Nine Greek Lives by Plutarch. Harmond-
sworth, UK: Penguin.
Sherman, C. L. 1954. Diodorus of Sicily, Library of History. Vol. VI. Loeb Classical Library.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Tandy, David W., and Walter C. Neale, trs. and eds. 1996. Hesiod’s Works and Days: A Trans-
lation and Commentary for the Social Sciences (© by the Regents of the University of
California). Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Todd, O. J. 1968. Xenophon: Memorabilia and Oeconomicus. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer-
sity Press.
Verity, Anthony. 2008. Pindar. The Complete Odes. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Waterfield, Robin. 1994. Plato. Symposium. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
———. 1998. Plutarch. Greek Lives. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Welles, C. B. 1934. Royal Correspondence in the Hellenistic Period. London: Yale University
Press.
West, M. I. 1991. Greek Lyric Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
———. 2005. “A New Sappho Poem.” Times Literary Supplement, June 26.

xvii
 T I M E L I N E
B

Political & Cultural

Period Military Events Social Events Development

7000–3000 Permanent farming Domestication of plants

Neolithic villages and animals; pottery

3000–2100 Social ranking emerges;

Early Bronze Age villages and districts
ruled by hereditary chiefs

2500 Widespread use

of bronze and other
metals in Aegean

2100–1600 2250–2100 Lerna and 2250–2100 Incursions of 2250–2100 Indo-

Middle Bronze Age other sites destroyed Indo-European-speakers European gods intro-
into Greece duced into Greece

1900 First palaces in

Crete

1900 Mainland con-

tacts with Crete and
the Near East

1800 Cretans develop

Linear A writing

1600–1200 1600 Mycenae and other 1600 Shaft graves

Late Bronze Age sites become power
centers; small kingdoms
emerge

xviii
 Political & Cultural
Period Military Events Social Events Development

1490 Mycenaeans take 1500 Tholos tombs

over Crete
1450 Linear B writing

1375 Knossos destroyed 1400–1200 Height of 1400 New palaces in

Mycenaean power and Greece
prosperity

1250–1225 “The Trojan

War”

1200–900 1200 Invaders loot and 1200–1050 Palace system 1200 Cultural decline
Early Iron Age I burn the palace centers collapses
(Submycenaean 1125–1050)
(Protogeometric 1050–900) 1050 Small chiefdoms 1050 Iron technology
established; migrations of
mainland Greeks to Ionia

1000 Dorian Greeks settle 1000 Monumental

in the mainland and the building at Lefkandi
islands

900–c. 750/00 Early Iron Age 900 Population begins to

II (Early Geometric 900–850) increase; new settlements
(Middle Geometric 850–750) established; trade and
manufacture expand

800 Rapid population 800 Greeks develop an

growth alphabet; earliest tem-
ples built

776 Traditional date of

first Olympian games

750/700–480 730–700 First Messenian 750–700 City-states 750–720 Iliad and

Archaic Period (Late War; Lelantine War emerge Odyssey composed
Geometric 750–700)
750 Overseas colonization 720 “Orientalizing
to the West begins period” in art begins

700–650 Evolution of 700 Hesiod; period of

hoplite armor and tactics lyric poetry begins

669 Battle of Hysiae 670–500 Tyrants rule in

many city-states
continued

xix
 Political & Cultural
Period Military Events Social Events Development

650 Second Messenian 650 Colonization of Black 650 Temples built of

War Sea area begins; earliest stone and marble;
known stone inscription Corinthian black-figure
of a law; “Lycurgan technique
Reforms” at Sparta; the
“Great Rhetra” (?)

632 Cylon fails in attempt Poetry of Sappho,

at tyranny in Athens Alcaeus

620 Law code of Draco in

Athens

600 Lydians begin to mint 600 Beginnings of sci-

coins ence and philosophy
(the “Presocratics”)

582–573 Pythian,
Isthmian, Nemean
games inaugurated

560–510 Peisistratus and Peisistratus expands reli-

his sons tyrants of Athens gious festivals at Athens

550 Sparta dominant in

the Peloponnesus

530 Athenian red-

figure technique

507–501 Cleisthenes insti-

tutes political reforms in
Athens

499 Ionian Greeks rebel Pindar begins to write

from Persian empire

494 Defeat of Argos by Fifth-century rationalists

Peloponnesian League and scientists; Hippo­
in Battle of Sepea crates; advances in medi-
cine; increase in literacy
490 Battle of Marathon 489 Trial of Miltiades

486 Decision to choose

Athenian archons by lot

482 Ostracism of Aristides

xx
Discovering Diverse Content Through
Random Scribd Documents
The Project Gutenberg eBook of Parenthood
and Race Culture: An Outline of Eugenics
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States
and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no
restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it
under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this
ebook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the
United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where
you are located before using this eBook.

Title: Parenthood and Race Culture: An Outline of Eugenics

Author: C. W. Saleeby

Release date: June 11, 2013 [eBook #42913]

Most recently updated: October 23, 2024

Language: English

Credits: Produced by Sean/AB, Sandra Eder and the Online

Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
produced from images generously made available by The
Internet Archive/American Libraries.)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PARENTHOOD

AND RACE CULTURE: AN OUTLINE OF EUGENICS ***
PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE

BOOKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR

“WORRY: THE DISEASE OF THE AGE”

“EVOLUTION: THE MASTER KEY”
“HEALTH, STRENGTH, AND HAPPINESS”
Etc., Etc.

PARENTHOOD
AND
 R A C E C U LT U R E
An Outline of Eugenics

BY
CALEB WILLIAMS SALEEBY
M.D., Ch.B., F.Z.S., F.R.S. Edin.

FELLOW OF THE OBSTETRICAL SOCIETY OF EDINBURGH, MEMBER

OF
COUNCIL OF THE EUGENICS EDUCATION SOCIETY, OF THE
SOCIOLOGICAL SOCIETY, AND OF THE NATIONAL LEAGUE
FOR PHYSICAL EDUCATION AND IMPROVEMENT
MEMBER OF THE ROYAL INSTITUTION
AND OF THE SOCIETY FOR THE
STUDY OF INEBRIETY
ETC., ETC.

CASSELL AND COMPANY, LTD.

LONDON, NEW YORK, TORONTO AND MELBOURNE
1909
 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Dedicated
TO

F R A N C I S G A LT O N
THE

AUGUST MASTER OF ALL EUGENISTS

 PREFACE
This book, a first attempt to survey and define the whole field of
eugenics, appears in the year which finds us celebrating the
centenary of the birth of Charles Darwin and the jubilee of the
publication of The Origin of Species. It is a humble tribute to that
immortal name, for it is based upon the idea of selection for
parenthood as determining the nature, fate and worth of living
races, which is Darwin's chief contribution to thought, and which
finds in eugenics its supreme application. The book is also a tribute
to the august pioneer who initiated the modern study of eugenics in
the light of his cousin's principle. A few years ago I all but persuaded
Mr. Galton himself to write a general introduction to eugenics, but he
felt bound to withdraw from that undertaking, and has given us
instead his Memories, which we could ill have spared.
The present volume seeks to supply what is undoubtedly a real need
at the present day—a general introduction to eugenics which is at
least considered and responsible. I am indebted to more than one
pair of searching and illustrious eyes, which I may not name, for
reading the proofs of this volume. My best hopes for its utility are
based upon this fact. If there be any other reason for hope it is that
during the last six years I have not only written incessantly on
eugenics, but have spoken upon various aspects of it some hundreds
of times to audiences as various as one can well imagine—a mainly
clerical assembly at Lambeth Palace with the Primate in the Chair,
drawing-rooms of title, working-class audiences from the Clyde to
the Thames. It has been my rule to invite questions whenever it was
possible. Such a discipline is invaluable. It gives new ideas and
points of view, discovers the existing forms of prejudice, sharply
corrects the tendency to partial statement. It is my hope that these
many hours of cross-examination will be profitable to the present
reader.
It has been sought to define the scope of eugenics, and my
consistent aim has been, if possible, to preserve its natural unity
without falling into the error, which I seem to see almost
everywhere, of excluding what is strictly eugenic. Our primary idea,
beyond dispute, is selection for parenthood based upon the facts of
heredity. This, however, is not an end, but a means. Some eugenists
seem to forget the distinction. Our end is a better race. If then,
beyond selecting for parenthood, it be desirable to take care of
those selected—as, for instance, to protect the expectant mother
from alcohol, lead or syphilis—that is strict eugenics on any
definition worth a moment's notice. It then appears, of course, that
our demands come into contact with those prejudices which political
parties call their principles. A given eugenic proposal or argument,
for instance, may be stamped as “Socialist” or as “Individualist,” and
people who have labelled their eyes with these catchwords, which
eugenics will ere long make obsolete, proceed to judge eugenics by
them. But the question is not whether a given proposal is socialistic,
individualistic or anything else, but whether it is eugenic. If it is
eugenic, that is final. To this all parties will come, and by this all
parties will be judged. The question is not whether eugenics is, for
instance, socialist, but whether socialism is eugenic. I claim for
eugenics that it is the final and only judge of all proposals and
principles, however labelled, new or old, orthodox or heterodox.
Some years ago I ventured to coin the word eugenist, which is now
the accepted term. With that label I believe any man or woman may
well be content. If this be granted, the old catchwords and the bias
they create forgotten, we may be prepared to consider what the
scope of eugenics really is.
Eugenics is not, for instance, a sub-section of applied mathematics.
It is at once a science, and a religion, based upon the laws of life,
and recognising in them the foundation of society. We shall some
day have a eugenic sociology, to which the first part of this volume
seeks to contribute: and the sociology and politics which have not
yet discovered that man is mortal will go to their own place.
Only when we begin to think and work continuously at eugenics is
its range revealed. The present volume is a mere introduction to the
principles of the subject: the full elucidation of its practice is a
problem for generations to come. Nor is it easy to set logical limits to
our inquiry. We may say that eugenics deals with conceptions: and
that the care of the expectant mother is outside its scope: but of
what use is it to have a eugenic conception if its product is
thereafter to be ruined by, for instance, the introduction of lead into
the mother's organism? Again, the care of the individual is, in part, a
eugenic concern: for if we desire his offspring we desire that he shall
not contract transmissible disease nor vitiate his tissues with such a
racial poison as alcohol. Plainly, everything that affects every
possible parent is a matter of eugenic concern: and not only those
factors which affect the choice for parenthood.
It follows that the second portion of this volume, which deals with
the practice of eugenics, cannot be more than merely indicative. In
the available space it has been attempted to define certain
constituents of practical eugenics, but in any case the entire ground
has not been surveyed. The concept of the racial poisons may be
commended to special consideration. Whether a poison be so-called
“chemical,” as lead, or made by a living organism, as the poison of
syphilis, is of great practical importance, because of the infection
involved in the second case: but, in principle, both cases belong to
the same category. Sooner or later, eugenists must face the
transmissible infections, and repudiate as hideous and devilish the
so-called morality which discountenances any attempt to save
unborn innocence from a nameless fate. He or she who would rather
leave this matter is placing “religion” or “morality” or “politics” above
the welfare of the life to come, and therein continuing the daily
prostitution of those great names.
Again, the practice of eugenics may be commended and accepted as
the business of the patriot: and two chapters have been devoted to
the question as seen from the national point of view. I am of nothing
more certain than that the choice for Great Britain to-day is between
national eugenics and the fate of all her Imperial predecessors from
Babylon to Spain. The whole book might have been written from this
standpoint, but such a book would have been beneath the true
eugenic plane, which is not national but human. I believe in the
patriotism of William Watson, who desires the continuance of his
country because, as he addresses her,

“O England, should'st thou one day fall,

· · · · · · · ·
Justice were thenceforth weaker throughout all
The world, and truth less passionately free,
And God the poorer for thine overthrow.”

This is a patriotism as splendid and vital as the patriotism of the

music-halls and of the political and journalistic makers of wars is foul
and fatal: and it is only in terms of such patriotism that the appeal to
love of country is permissible in the advocacy of eugenics, which is a
concern for all mankind.
The prophet of that kind of Imperialism which has destroyed so
many Empires, has lately approved the emigration of our best to the
Colonies, on the ground that “it is good to give the second eleven a
chance.” But as students of history know, it is at the heart that
Empires rot. The case of Ireland is at present an insoluble one
because the emigration of the worthiest has had full sway. So with
the agricultural intellect: the “first eleven” having gone to the towns.
Rome sent her “first eleven” to her Colonies: if you were not good
enough to be a Roman soldier you could at least remain and be a
Roman father: and the children of such fathers perished in the
downfall of the Empire which they could no longer sustain. I can
imagine no more foolish or disastrous advice than this of Mr.
Kipling's, in commending that transportation of the worthiest which,
thoroughly enough persisted in, must inevitably mean our ruin.
The national aspect of eugenics suggests its international aspect,
and its inter-racial aspect. Not having spent six weeks rushing
through the United States, I am unfortunately dubious as to the
worth of any opinions I may possess regarding the most urgent form
of this question to-day. I mistrust not merely the brilliant students
who, unhampered by biological knowledge, pierce to the bottom of
this question in the course of such a tour, but also the humanitarian
bias of those who, like M. Finot, or the distinguished American
sociologist, Mr. Graham Brooks, would almost have us believe that
the negro is mentally and morally the equal of the Caucasian. Least
of all does one trust the vulgar opinions of the man in the street.
Wisdom on this matter waits for the advent of real knowledge.
Similarly in the matter of Caucasian-Mongolian unions. I question
whether any living man knows enough to warrant the expression of
any decided opinion on this subject. Merely I here recognise
miscegenation in general as a problem in eugenics, to which
increasing attention must yearly be devoted. But it would have been
ridiculous to attempt to deal with that great subject here. As for the
marriage of cousins, to take the opposite case, I always reply to the
question, “Should cousins marry?” that it depends upon the cousins.
The good qualities of a good stock, the bad qualities of a bad stock,
are naturally accentuated by such unions: I doubt whether there is
much more to be said about them.

In the following general study of a subject to which no human affair

is wholly alien, it has been impossible to deal adequately with the
great question of eugenic education—that is to say, education as for
parenthood. If only to emphasise its overwhelming importance, one
must here insist upon the argument. There is, I believe, no greater
need for society to-day than to recognise that education must
include, must culminate in, preparation for the supreme duty of
parenthood. This involves instruction regarding those bodily
functions which exist not for the body nor for the present at all, but
for the future life of mankind. The exercise of these functions
depends upon an instinct which I have for some time been in the
habit of terming the racial instinct—a name which at once suggests
to us that we are to represent this instinct, to the boy or girl at
puberty, not as something the satisfaction of which is an end in itself
—that is the false and degrading assertion which will be made by the
teachers whom youth will certainly find, if we fail in our duty—but as
existing for what is immeasurably higher than any selfish end. Youth
must be taught that it is for man the self-conscious, “made with
such large discourse, looking before and after,” as Hamlet says, to
deal with his instincts in terms of their purpose, as no creature but
man can do. The boy and girl must learn that the racial instinct
exists for the highest of ends—the continuance and ultimate
elevation of the life of mankind. It is a sacred trust for the life of this
world to come. We must teach our boys what it is to be really
“manly”—the fine word used by the tempter of youth when he
means “beast-ly.” To be manly is to be master of this instinct. And
the “higher education” of our girls, as we must teach ourselves, will
be lower, not higher, if it does not serve and conserve the future
mother, both by teaching her how to care for and guard her body,
which is the temple of life to come, and how afterwards to be a right
educator of her children. The leading idea upon which one would
insist is that the key to any of the right and useful methods of
eugenic education is to be found in the conception of the racial
instinct as existing for parenthood, and to be guarded, reverenced,
educated for that supreme end. It is for the reader who may be
responsible for youth of either sex with this key to solve the problem
on the lines best suited to his or her particular case.
By the application of mathematical methods to statistics we can
ascertain their real meaning, if they have any. If, as frequently
happens, they have none, mathematical analysis is worse than
useless. Mr. Galton is the pioneer of this study, which Professor Karl
Pearson has named biometrics. Biometrics is not eugenics, as some
have supposed, but is a branch of scientific enquiry which, like
genetics, obstetrics and many more, contributes to the foundations
of eugenics. In the Appendix reference is made to various
publications, mostly inexpensive, which deal with biometrics. In the
text I have availed myself of biometric, genetic and other results
impartially. Differences of opinion between this school and that of
scientific workers are to be regretted by the eugenist; but it is for
him to accept and use knowledge of eugenic significance no matter
by what method it has been obtained. Directly he fails to do so he
ceases to be a eugenist and becomes the ordinary partisan. No
reference is made in the following pages, for instance, to the law of
ancestral inheritance, formulated by the Master to whom the volume
is dedicated and of whom all eugenists are the followers. I believe
that law, despite its beauty, to be without basis in fact and
incompatible with demonstrated Mendelian phenomena: and though
the book is dedicated to Mr. Galton, it is more deeply dedicated to
the Future. This, indeed, is the Credo of the eugenist: Expecto
resurrectionem mortuorum, et vitam venturi saeculi.

Woman is Nature's supreme instrument of the future. The eugenist

is therefore deeply concerned with her education, her psychology,
the conditions which permit her to exercise her great natural
function of choosing the fathers of the future, the age at which she
should marry, and the compatibility between the discharge of her
incomparable function of motherhood and the lesser functions which
some women now assume. Obstetrics, and the modern physiology
and psychology of sex, must thus be harnessed to the service of
eugenics, and I hope to employ them for the elucidation, in a future
volume, of the problems of woman and womanhood, thus regarded.
 CONTENTS

PART I
THE THEORY OF EUGENICS
CHAPTER PAGE
1. Introductory 1
2. The Exchequer of Life 17
3. Natural Selection and the Law of Love 35
4. The Selection of Mind 52
5. The Multiplication of Man 71
6. The Growth of Individuality 86
7. Heredity and Race-Culture 99
8. Education and Race-Culture 120
9. The Supremacy of Motherhood 145
10. Marriage and Maternalism 160

PART II
THE PRACTICE OF EUGENICS

11. Negative Eugenics 171

12. Selection through Marriage 184
13. The Racial Poisons: Alcohol 205
 14. The Racial Poisons: Lead, Narcotics,
Syphilis 246
15. National Eugenics: Race-Culture and
History 254
16. National Eugenics: Mr. Balfour on
Decadence 279
17. The Promise of Race-Culture 287
APPENDIX Concerning Books to Read 305
INDEX 321

PARENTHOOD AND RACE

CULTURE
 PART I.—THE THEORY OF
EUGENICS

CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTORY

“A little child shall lead them”

This book will be mere foolishness to those who repeat the inhuman
and animal cry that we have to take the world as we find it—the
motto of the impotent, the forgotten, the cowardly and selfish, or
the merely vegetable, in all ages. The capital fact of man, as
distinguished from the lower animals and from plants, is that he
does not have to take the world as he finds it, that he does not
merely adapt himself to his environment, but that he himself is a
creator of his world. If our ancestors had taken and left the world as
they found it, we should be little more than erected monkeys to-day.
For none who accept the hopeless dogma is this book written. They
are welcome to take and leave the world as they find it; they are of
no consequence to the world; and their existence is of interest only
in so far as it is another instance of that amazing wastefulness of
Nature in her generations, with which this book will be so largely
concerned.
Beginning, perhaps, some six million years ago, the fact which we
call human life has persisted hitherto, and shows no signs of
exhaustion, much less impending extinction, being indeed more
abundant numerically and more dominant over other forms of life
and over the inanimate world to-day than ever before. It is a
continuous phenomenon. The life of every blood corpuscle or skin
cell of every human being now alive is absolutely continuous with
that of the living cells of the first human beings—if not, indeed, as
most biologists appear to believe, of the first life upon the earth. Yet
this continuous life has been and apparently always must be lived in
a tissue of amazing discontinuity—amazing, at least, to those who
can see the wonderful in the commonplace. For though the world-
phenomenon which we call Man has been so long continuous, and is
at this moment perhaps as much modified by the total past as if it
were really a single undying individual, yet only a few decades ago,
a mere second in the history of the earth, no human being now alive
was in existence. “As for man, his days are as grass: as a flower of
the field, so he flourisheth. For the wind passeth over it, and it is
gone; and the place thereof shall know it no more.” Indeed, not
merely are we individually as grass, but in a few years the hand that
writes these words, and the tissues of eye and brain whereby they
are perceived, will actually be grass. Here, then, is the colossal
paradox: absolute and literal continuity of life, every cell from a
preceding cell throughout the ages—omnis cellula e cellula; yet three
times in every century the living and only wealth of nations is
reduced to dust, and is raised up again from helpless infancy. Where
else is such catastrophic continuity?
Each individual enters the world in a fashion the dramatic and
sensational character of which can be realised by none who have not
witnessed it; and in a few years the individual dies, scarcely less
dramatically as a rule, and sometimes more so. This continuous and
apparently invincible thing, human life, which began so humbly and
to the sound of no trumpets, in Southern Asia or the neighbourhood
of the Caspian Sea, but which has never looked back since its birth,
and is now the dominant fact of what might well be an astonished
earth, depends in every age and from moment to moment upon
here a baby, there a baby and there yet another; these curious little
objects being of all living things, animal or vegetable, young or old,
large or small, the most utterly helpless and incompetent, incapable
even of finding for themselves the breasts that were made for them.
If but one of all the “hungry generations” that have preceded us had
failed to secure the care and love of its predecessor, the curtain
would have come down and a not unpromising though hitherto
sufficiently grotesque drama would have been ended for ever.
This discontinuity it is which persuades many of us to conceive
human life to be not so much a mighty maze without a plan, as a
mere stringing of beads on an endless cord of which one end arose
in Mother Earth, whilst the other may come at any time—but goes
nowhere. The beads, which we call generations, vary in size and
colour, no doubt, but on no system; each one makes a fresh start;
the average difference between them is merely one of position; and
the result is merely to make the string longer. Or the generations
might be conceived as the links of an indeterminate chain,
necessarily held to each other: but suggesting not at all the idea of a
living process such that its every step is fraught with eternal
consequence. In a word, we incline to think that History merely goes
on repeating itself, and we have to learn that History never repeats
itself. Every generation is epoch-making.
It is thus to the conception of parenthood as the vital and organic
link of life that we are forced: and the whole of this book is really
concerned with parenthood. We shall see, in due course, that no
generation, whether of men or animals or plants, determines or
provides, as a whole, the future of the race. Only a percentage, as a
rule a very small percentage indeed, of any species reach maturity,
and fewer still become parents. Amongst ourselves, one-tenth of any
generation gives birth to one-half the next. These it is who, in the
long run, make History: a Kant or a Spencer, dying childless, may
leave what we call immortal works; but unless the parents of each
new generation are rightly chosen or “selected”—to use the technical
word—a new generation may at any time arise to whom the greatest
achievements of the past are nothing. The newcomers will be as
swine to these pearls, the immortality of which is always conditional
upon the capacity of those who come after to appreciate them.
There is here expressed the distinction between two kinds of
progress: the traditional progress which is dependent upon
transmitted achievement, but in its turn is dependent upon racial
progress—this last being the kind of progress of which the history of
pre-human life upon the planet is so largely the record and of which
mankind is the finest fruit hitherto.

It is possible that a concrete case, common enough, and thus the

more significant, may appeal to the reader, and help us to realise
afresh the conditions under which human life actually persists.
Forced inside a motor-omnibus one evening, for lack of room
outside, I found myself opposite a woman, poorly-clothed, with a
wedding-ring upon her finger and a baby in her arms. The child was
covered with a black shawl and its face could not be seen. It was
evidently asleep. It should have been in its cot at that hour. The
mother's face roused feelings which a sonnet of Wordsworth's might
have expressed, or a painting by some artist with a soul, a
Rembrandt or a Watts, such as we may look for in vain amongst the
be-lettered to-day. Here was the spectacle of mother and child,
which all the great historic religions, from Buddhism to Christianity,
have rightly worshipped; the spectacle which more nearly symbolises
the sublime than any other upon which the eye of a man, himself
once such a child, can rest; the spectacle which alone epitomises the
life of mankind and the unalterable conditions of all human life and
all human societies, reminding us at once of our individual mortality,
and the immortality of our race—

“While we, the brave, the mighty and the wise,

We Men, who in our morn of youth defied
The Elements, must vanish;—be it so!
Enough, if something from our hands have power
To live, and act, and serve the future hour:”
—the spectacle which alone, if any can, may reconcile us to death;
the spectacle of that which alone can sanctify the love of the sexes;
the spectacle of motherhood in being, the supreme duty and
supreme privilege of womanhood—“a mother is a mother still, the
holiest thing alive.”
This woman, utterly unconscious of the dignity of her attitude and of
the contrast between herself and the imitation of a woman,
elegantly clothed, who sat next her, giving her not a thought nor a
glance, nor yet room for the elbow bent in its divine office, was
probably some thirty-two or three years old, as time is measured by
the revolutions of the earth around the sun. Measured by some
more relevant gauge, she was evidently aged, her face grey and
drawn, desperately tired, yet placid—not with due exultation but
with the calm of one who has no hope. She was too weary to draw
the child to her bosom, and her arms lay upon her knees; but
instead she bent her body downwards to her baby. She looked
straight out in front of her, not at me nor at the passing phantasms
beyond, but at nothing. The eyes were open but they were too tired
to see. The face had no beauty of feature nor of colour nor of
intelligence, but it was wholly beautiful, made so by motherhood;
and I think she must have held some faith. The tint of her skin and
of her eyeballs spoke of the impoverishment of her blood, her need
of sleep and rest and ease of mind. She will probably be killed by
consumption within five years and will certainly never hold a grand-
child in her arms. The pathologist may lay this crime at the door of
the tubercle bacillus; but a prophet would lay it at the reader's door
and mine.
While we read and write, play at politics or ping-pong, this woman
and myriads like her are doing the essential work of the world. The
worm waits for us as well as for her and them: and in a few years
her children and theirs will be Mankind. We need a prophet to cry
aloud and spare not; to tell us that if this is the fate of mothers in
the ranks which supply the overwhelming proportion of our children,
our nation may number Shakespeare and Newton amongst the
glories of its past, and the lands of ancient empires amongst its
present possessions, but it can have no future; that if, worshipping
what it is pleased to call success, it has no tears nor even eyes for
such failures as these, it may walk in the ways of its insensible heart
and in the sight of its blind eyes, yet it is walking not in its sleep but
in its death, is already doomed and damned almost past recall; and
that, if it is to be saved, there will avail not “broadening the basis of
taxation,” nor teaching in churches the worship of the Holy Mother
and Holy Child, whilst Motherhood is blasphemed at their very doors,
but this and this only—the establishment, not in statutes but in the
consciences of men and women, of a true religion based upon these
perdurable and evident dogmas—that all human life is holy, all
mothers and all children, that history is made in the nursery, that the
individual dies, that therefore children determine the destinies of all
civilisations, that the race or society which succeeds with its
mammoth ships and its manufactures but fails to produce men and
women, is on the brink of irretrievable doom; that the body of man
is an animal, endowed with the inherited animal instincts necessary
for self-preservation and the perpetuation of the race, but that, if the
possession of this body by a conscious spirit, “looking before and
after,” is anything more than a “sport” of the evolutionary forces, it
demands that, the blind animal instincts notwithstanding, the
desecration of motherhood, the perennial slaughter and injury of
children, the casual unconsidered birth of children for whom there is
no room or light or air or food, and of children whose inheritance
condemns them to misery, insanity or crime, must cease; and that
the recurrent drama of human love and struggle reaches its happy
ending not when the protagonists are married, but when they join
hands over a little child that promises to be a worthy heir of all the
ages. This religion must teach that the spectacle of a prematurely
aged and weary and hopeless mother, which he who runs or rides
may see, produced by our rude foreshadowings of civilisation, is an
affront to all honest and thoughtful eyes: that where there are no
mothers, such as mothers should be, the people will assuredly
perish, though everything they touch should turn to gold, though
science and art and philosophy should flourish as never before. I
believe that history, rightly read, teaches these tremendous lessons.
In our own day the bounds of imagination are undoubtedly
widening. Means of communication, the press, the camera, the
decadence of obsolete dogmas, making room for the simple daily
truths of morality which have “the dignity of dateless age” and are
too hard for the teeth of time—these account in large measure for
the fact that the happier half of the world is at last beginning to
realise how the other half lives. There is perhaps more divine
discontent with things as they are than ever heretofore: this being
due, as has been suggested, perhaps as much to the modern aids of
imagination as to any inherent increase of sympathy. Science, too, in
the form of sociology and economics, adds warrant to the demand
for some radical reform of the conditions of life. It teaches that all
forms of life are interdependent; that society is thus an organism in
more than merely loose analogy; that the classes pay abundantly for
the state of the masses: whilst medicine teaches that the
tuberculosis, for instance, which slays so many members of the
middle and upper classes, is bred by and in the overcrowding of the
lower classes, this and many other diseases promising to resist all
measures less radical than the abolition of half our current social
practice.
Hence it is that we hear so much of social reform; and the promises
of representatives of many political -isms jostle one another at the
gates of our ears. The Anarchist at one extreme, and the Collectivist
at the other, with the Individualist and the Socialist somewhere
between, offer their panaceas. To me, I confess, they seem little
better than the scholastic metaphysicians of old days, like them
mistaking words for things, incapable of understanding each other,
evading precise definition and using terms which never mean the
same thing twice as missiles and weapons of abuse: and, above all,
mistaking means for ends.
But the leading error common to them all, as I seem to see it, is
their conception of society as a stable thing—a piece of machinery
which must be properly “assembled,” as the engineers say; forgetful
of the extraordinary discontinuity which inheres in the swift-
approaching death of all its parts, and their replacement by helpless
immaturity. The first fact of society really is that all its individuals are
mortal. This we all know, but I question whether even Herbert
Spencer fully reckoned with it; and certainly the common run of
social speculators have not begun to realise what it means. Human
life is made up of generations, and the key to all progress lies in the
nature of the relation between one generation and another. Spencer
records the case of an Oxford graduate, desirous to be his secretary,
who did not know that the population of Great Britain is increasing.
Here is a capital present fact of the—merely quantitative—relation
between successive generations. So far as any influence on their
theory or practice is concerned, it is still unknown to nearly all our
advisers. Yet this fact of the ceaseless multiplication of man, which
has distinguished him from the first, and is absolutely peculiar to him
of all living species, animal or vegetable, as Sir E. Ray Lankester has
lately pointed out, is the source of the major facts of history and the
besetting condition of every social problem that can be named at
this hour.
The professional and dedicated teachers of morality seem to be in
little better case. They believe in babies, perhaps, as the prime and
only really valid source of the weal and wealth and strength of
nations, and as the great moralisers and humanisers of the
generation that gives them birth. They are beginning to join in that
public outcry against infant mortality which will yet abolish this
abominable stain upon our time. But they are lamentably
uninformed. They do not know, for instance, that a high infant
mortality habitually goes with a high birth-rate, not only in human
society but in all living species; and they have yet to appreciate the
proposition which I have so often advanced and which, to me at any
rate, seems absolutely self-evident, that until we have learnt how to
keep alive all the healthy babies now born—that is to say, not less
than ninety per cent. of all, the babies in the slums included—it is
monstrous to cry for more, to be similarly slain. These bewailings
about our mercifully falling birth-rate, uncoupled with any attention
to the slaughter of the children actually born, are pitiable in their
blindness and would be lamentable if they had any effect—of which
there is fortunately no sign whatever, but indeed the contrary.
Humanitarian sentiment, also, is terribly misguided. “Why always the
benefit of the future, has the present no claim upon us?” I have
been asked. Assuredly all sentient life, and therefore pre-eminently
all human life, in which sentiency is so incommensurably intensified
by self-consciousness, the power of “looking before and after,” has a
claim upon us: but the question could have been asked by no one
whose imagination had been worthily employed. Our posterity will in
due course be as actual and present as we, their deeds and
sufferings and hopes as actual and present as ours. They outnumber
us as the ocean outweighs a raindrop; to avert evil from one of them
is as much as to relieve evil in one of us,—how much more to
prevent the misery of five in the next generation, fifty in the next
and unnumbered hosts beyond? To serve the future of the race is
not to benefit a fiction: the men and women of a hundred and a
thousand years hence will be as real as we. And to serve the future
is to put out our talent at compound interest a thousand-fold
compounded. The weak imagination would rather build a sanatorium
for consumptives and see it filled with grateful patients. This is a
palpable, sensible good, for which the meanest visual faculty
suffices: but the strong imagination would rather open the closed
windows of nurseries or work at the mechanical problems of
ventilation, aye, or even at the structure of the bacteriological
microscope—finding the spectacle, in the mind's eye, of healthy men
and women fifty years hence as grateful and as real a reward as the
sight of a sanatorium in the present. The pace of progress will be
incalculably hastened when men, whether workers or bequeathers or
administrators, enlarge their imaginations so as to perceive that the
future will be, and therefore indeed is, as real as the present.[1] I
appeal to the reason of the kind-hearted reader. Would you rather
make one man or child happy now, or two or a thousand a century
hence?
It is, in a word, the idea of continuous causation or evolution that
explains the remarkable contrast between our outlook on the future
and our fathers'. In older—that is to say, younger—days, men's
interest in posterity was most naïvely and quaintly selfish. If they
raised a monument or did any piece of work which obviously would
endure beyond the span of their own lives, their chief motive seems
to have been that we should think well of them, nor forget how well
they thought of themselves. They were not concerned with us, but
with our opinion of them. They were anxious about the verdict of
posterity; and the verdict is that they little realised their
responsibility for us, or betrayed it if they did. There is also the frank
attitude of Sir Boyle Roche's famous bull, “What has posterity done
for us?” This is a quite familiar and conspicuous sentiment—as
familiar as any other form of selfishness: but it is as if a father
should say, “What have my children done for me?” and is open to
the same condemnation. We are assuredly responsible for posterity
as any parent for any child. Before the nineteenth century this fact
could be realised by very few. To-day, when the truth of organic
evolution is a commonplace, and when the plasticity of the forces of
evolution is slowly becoming realised, we must face our tremendous
responsibility and privilege in a spirit worthy of those to whom such
mighty truths have been revealed.
Parenthood and birth—in these the whole is summed. At the mercy
of these are all past discovery, all past achievement in art or science,
in action or in thought. The human species, secure though it be, is
only a race after all; only a sequence of runners who quasi cursores,
vitaï lampada tradunt—like runners, hand on the lamp of life, as
Lucretius said. This it is which, to the thoughtful observer, makes
each birth such an overwhelming event. It is a great event for the
mother and the father, but how much greater if its consequences be
only half realised. Education in its full sense, “the provision of an
environment,” as I would define it, is a mighty and necessary force,
for nothing but potentiality is given at birth: but no education, no
influence of traditional progress, can avail, unless the potentialities
which these must unfold are worthy. The baby comes tumbling
headlong into the world. The fate of all the to-morrows depends
upon it. Hitherto its happening has depended upon factors animal
and casual enough, utterly improvident, concerned but rarely with
this tremendous consequence. Fate may be mistress, but she works
only too often by Chance, as Goethe remarked. Fate and Chance
hitherto have never failed to keep up the supply which the death of
the individual makes imperative: and forces have been at work
determining for progress, to some extent, but most imperfectly, the
parentage of these headlong babies. Yet the human intelligence
cannot remain satisfied with their working—and much less so when
it realises how they can be controlled, how effectively, and to what
high ends. The physician may and must concern himself, on these
occasions, with the immediate needs of the mother and the child,
and when these are satisfied he may feel that his duty has been
done; but, as he journeys homewards, he must surely reflect—that
this astonishing thing, then, has happened again, as indeed it has
happened many times this very day; that whilst this baby is to
become an individual man or woman, an end in himself or herself, in
its young loins and in those of its like are the hosts of all the unborn
who are yet to be. If, then, these babies differ widely from each
other, as they do; if these differences are, on the whole, capable of
prediction in terms of heredity; if the future state of mankind is
involved in these differences, which will in their turn be transmitted
to the children of such as themselves become parents; and if this
business of parenthood will be confined to only a small proportion of
these babies, of whom one-half will never reach puberty; if these
things be so, as they are, cannot these babies be chosen in
anticipation, there being thus effected an enormous vital economy,
Nature being commanded to the highest ends by the only method,
which is to obey her, as Bacon said; and the human intelligence thus
making its supreme achievement—the ethical direction and vast
acceleration of racial progress? What man can do for animals and
plants, can he not do for himself? Give imagination its fleetest and
strongest wing, it can never conceive a task so worth the doing.
This, and this alone, is what requires to be brought home to the
general reader and the reformer alike. Says Mr. H. G. Wells: “It
seemed to me then that to prevent the multiplication of people
below a certain standard, and to encourage the multiplication of
exceptionally superior people, was the only real and permanent way
of mending the ills of the world. I think that still.” And then, in a few
sketchy pages, Mr. Wells discredits, as with one glance of great eyes,
the very proposal which he thinks to be the only real and permanent
way of mending the ills of the world. Not one man in thousands has
got so far as to hold this opinion; and it is the more lamentable that
Mr. Wells, having reached it, should hold it in the loose, formal, and
inoperative fashion in which the man in the street or the woman in
the pew holds the dogmas of orthodox theology. We need to
educate public opinion—that “chaos of prejudices”—up to Mr. Wells'
standard, and then we need to accomplish the much harder task of
converting a mere intellectual speculation into a living belief.
But so surely as this belief, the crowning and practical conclusion to
which all the teachings of modern biology converge, comes to life in
men's minds, so surely the difficulties will be met, not only on paper
but also in practice. “Where there's a will there's a way.” Meanwhile
men are content to work at the impermanent, if not indeed at
measures which directly war against the selection of the best for
parenthood: they do not realise the stern necessity of obeying
Nature in this respect—for it is Her selection of parents that alone
has raised us from the beast and the worm—and since necessity
alone, whether inner or outer, whether of character or circumstance,
is the mother of invention, they fail to find the methods by which our
ideal can be carried out. There is nothing, either in the character of
the individual man and woman, or in the structure of society, that
makes the ideal of race-culture impossible to-day: nor must action
wait for further knowledge of heredity. Little though we surely know
so far, we have abundance of assured knowledge for immediate
action in many directions—knowledge which is agreed upon by
Lamarckians and neo-Lamarckians, Darwinians and Weismannians,
Mendelians and biometricians alike. All of these agree, for instance,
as to the fact that the insane tendency is transmissible and is
transmitted by heredity. We need only public opinion to say, “Then
most surely those who have such a tendency must forgo
parenthood.”
For it is public opinion that governs the world. If it were, as it will be
one day—which may these pages hasten—an elementary and radical
truth, as familiar and as cogent to all, man in the House or man in
the public-house, as the fact of the earth's gravitation—that racial
maintenance, much more racial progress, depends absolutely upon
the selection of parents; if the establishment of this selective process
in the best and widest manner were the admitted goal of all
legislation and all social and political speculation—who can question
that the thing would be practicable and indeed easy? Without the
formation of public opinion this is as hopelessly Utopian and
inaccessible an ideal as words ever framed; public opinion once
formed, nothing could be more palpably feasible. Hence Mr. Galton's
wisdom in demanding that, before we dictate courses of procedure,
and even before we can expect profit from scientific investigation,
whether by the biometric method of which he is the founder, or by
any other, public opinion must be formed; that the idea of eugenics
or good-breeding must be instilled into the conscience of civilisation
like a new religion—a religion of the most lofty and austere, because
the most unselfish, morality, a religion which sets before it a sublime
ideal, terrestrial indeed in its chosen theatre, but celestial in its
theme, human in its means, but literally superhuman in its goal. If
the intrinsic ennoblement of mankind does not answer to this
eulogy, where is the ideal that does?

CHAPTER II
THE EXCHEQUER OF LIFE
Welcome to our website – the ideal destination for book lovers and
knowledge seekers. With a mission to inspire endlessly, we offer a
vast collection of books, ranging from classic literary works to
specialized publications, self-development books, and children's
literature. Each book is a new journey of discovery, expanding
knowledge and enriching the soul of the reade

Our website is not just a platform for buying books, but a bridge
connecting readers to the timeless values of culture and wisdom. With
an elegant, user-friendly interface and an intelligent search system,
we are committed to providing a quick and convenient shopping
experience. Additionally, our special promotions and home delivery
services ensure that you save time and fully enjoy the joy of reading.

Let us accompany you on the journey of exploring knowledge and

personal growth!

ebookluna.com