Till läsaren

Jag publicerar dessa essäer just nu av ett visst skäl som hör ihop med nuvarande situation: ett skäl som jag kort skulle vilja betona och klargöra.

Även om det mesta av slutsatserna, särskilt inemot slutet, dragits med hänvisning till nutida händelser, så skrevs själva samlingen av preliminära anteckningar om rashygien före kriget. Det var en tid då detta tema var ämnet för dagen, när eugeniska spädbarn (som inte visuellt gick att särskilja från andra spädbarn) sprattlade i alla illustrerade tidningar, när Nietzsches evolutionära fantasier var sista skriket bland de intellektuella och när Mr Bernard Shaw och andra övervägde iden att man genom att avla människor som arbetshästar var inne på den sanna vägen till den högre civilisation, den intellektuella storhet och tilltalande insikt som kännetecknar arbetshästar. Det kan därför verka som om jag attackerade opinionen alltför stridslystet, och det tycks mej som om jag ibland tog den för allvarligt. Men kritiken av rashygienen utvidgades snart av sej själv till en mer allmän kritik av en modern mani: vetenskaplig byråkrati och strikt social organisering.

Och sedan kom den stund då jag kände, inte utan lättnad, att jag lika gärna kunde slänga alla mina anteckningar i elden. Den elden var en mycket stor eld, och den brände upp större saker än sådana pedantiska kvacksalverier. På något sätt hade frågan själv ordnats på ett mycket annorlunda sätt. Vetenskaplig officialism och organisation i den Stat som specialicerat sej på dem hade gått i krig med kristendomens äldre kultur. Antingen skulle preusseriet vinna och protesterna bli hopplösa, eller också skulle preusseriet förlora och protesterna bli onödiga. Medan kriget framskred från giftgas till röverier i neutrala stater, blev det mer och mer uppenbart att den vetenskapligt organiserade staten inte ökade i popularitet. Vad som än hände, skulle ingen engelsman någonsin åter gå runt och sniffa i stanken från detta låga laboratorium. Så jag trodde att allt jag skrev blivit irrelevant och slog det ur hågen.

Det bedrövar mej att jag måste konstatera att det inte blivit irrelevant. Det har till min stora häpnad gradvis blivit tydligt att de härskande klasserna i England ännu fortsätter med antagandet att Preussen är ett mönster för hela världen. Om delar av min bok är nästan nio år gamla, så är det mesta av de andras principer och resonemang bra mycket äldre. De kan inte erbjuda oss något annat än samma vetenskap, samma irriterande byråkrati och samma terrorism från tionde klassens professorer som nyligen ledde det tyska imperiet till dess mycket tvivelaktiga triumf. Av detta skäl samlar jag och publicerar dessa blad tre år efter kriget med Preussen.

G.K.C.

Vad är eugenik?

Det visaste i världen är att skrika innan du blivit skadad. Det är ingen idé att skrika efter att du blivit skadad, särskilt inte sedan du blivit dödligt skadad. Folk talar om folkets otålighet, men kloka historiker vet att de flesta tyrannier möjliggjorts av att folken agerade för sent. Det är ofta helt nödvändigt att stå emot ett tyranni innan det existerar. Det är ingen lösning att med distanserad optimism hävda att planerna bara ligger i luften. Ett slag från en yrkesmördare kan bara pareras medan det fortfarande är i luften.

Det existerar idag ett aktionsschema, en tankeskola, lika kollektiv och omisskännlig som någon av dem vi kan skissera historien med genom att gruppera. Det är ett lika bestämt faktum som Oxfordrörelsen eller Långa parlamentets puritaner; eller jansenisterna; eller jesuiterna. Det är någonting som kan pekas ut, det är någonting som kan diskuteras, och det är någonting som fortfarande kan tillintetgöras. Av bekvämlighet kallas det "eugenik", och att det borde tillintetgöras ska jag försöka bevisa på följande sidor.

Jag vet att det innebär mycket olika saker för olika människor, men det är bara för att det onda alltid drar fördel av tvetydighet. Jag vet att det prisas med höga uttryck för idealism och godhet, med silvertungad retorik om renare moderskap och lyckligare eftervärld. Men det är bara för att det onda alltid smickras, precis som furierna kallades De Älskvärda. Jag vet att det kan inräkna många lärjungar vars avsikter är helt och hållet oskyldiga och humana, och som skulle bli uppriktigt förbluffade av att jag beskriver det som jag gör. Men det är bara för att det onda alltid vinner genom styrkan av sina lysande bedrägerier, och det har i alla tider ingåtts förödande allianser mellan abnorm oskuld och abnorm synd.

Om de bedragna ska jag naturligtvis tala som vi alla gör om sådana verktyg, och döma dem efter det goda de tror de gör och inte efter det onda de verkligen gör. Men eugeniken i sej själv existerar för dem som har nog förnuft att se att idéer existerar, och eugeniken i sej själv, i stora eller små kvantiteter, införd snabbt eller långsamt, av goda eller dåliga motiv, tillämpad på tusen personer eller på tre, eugeniken i sej själv är ingenting att förhandla om mer än vad förgiftning är.

Det är inte särskilt svårt att sammanfatta eugenikens essens, om än somliga eugeniker verkar ha en ganska vag uppfattning om den. Rörelsen består av två delar: en moralisk bas, som är gemensam för alla, och en plan för social tillämpning som varierar ganska mycket.

Vad beträffar den moraliska grunden är det uppenbart att en människas etiska ansvarighet varierar med hennes kunskap om olika konsekvenser. Om jag hade ansvar för en baby, och om den babyn bleve sjuk av att ha ätit upp tvålen, skulle jag troligen skicka efter doktorn. Jag skulle kanske kalla honom bort från mycket allvarligare fall, från sängkanterna hos spädbarn vars diet hade varit mycket mer dödlig, men jag skulle inte anklagas för det. Jag kunde inte förväntas veta tillräckligt om hans andra patienter för att anses förpliktigad att för deras skull offra det barn jag var primärt och direkt ansvarig för.

Nu är eugenikens moraliska bas denna, att det barn vi är primärt och direkt ansvariga för är det ofödda barnet. D.v.s. att vi vet (eller kan komma att veta) tillräckligt om vissa oundvikliga biologiska tendenser för att överväga frukten av någon tänkt förbindelse i det direkta och klara samvetsljus som vi nu bara kan rikta mot den andra parten i denna förbindelse. Den ena plikten kan vara lika definitiv som eller mer definitiv än den andra. Man kan tänka på barnet som inte existerar t.o.m. före hustrun som existerar. Men väl att märka: detta är ett jämförelsevis nytt beaktande på moralens område.

Naturligtvis har vettigt folk alltid ansett att äktenskapets syfte var att avla barn till Guds ära eller enligt naturens plan; men vare sej de räknade sådana barn som Guds belöning för en tjänst eller som naturens premium för förnuft, lämnade de belöningen eller premiet åt Gud eller naturen att sköta - som något mindre definierbart. Den enda person (och detta är poängen) mot vilken de kunde ha precisa plikter var partnern i processen. Att direkt överväga partnerns krav var det närmaste man kunde komma att indirekt överväga eftervärldens krav.

Om haremets kvinnor sjöng hjältens lov när muslimen besteg sin häst, var det för att detta var en passande erkänsla mot en man; om den kristne riddaren hjälpte sin hustru ned från hästen, var det för att detta var en passande erkänsla mot en kvinna. Bestämda och detaljerade bekräftelser av denna typ baserades inte på det ofödda barnet, och betraktade det inte i det agnostiska och opportunistiska ljus i vilket herr Browdie betraktade fröken Squeers´ hypotetiska barn. Genom att se dessa könsrelationer som hälsosamma hoppades de naturligtvis på att de skulle producera friska barn, men detta var allt.

Den muslimska kvinnan förväntade sej utan tvivel att Allah skulle sända vackra söner till en lydig kvinna, men hon skulle inte ha tillåtit någon direkt vision av sådan söner att förändra lydnaden själv. Hon skulle inte ha sagt: "Jag ska nu vara en olydig kvinna, eftersom de lärda informerat mej om att stora profeter ofta är barn till olydiga kvinnor." Riddaren hoppades utan tvivel att helgonen skulle hjälpa honom att få starka barn, om han fullgjorde alla sina plikter, av vilka en kan ha varit att hjälpa sin fru ner från hästen, men han skulle inte ha tvekat att göra det för att han läst i en bok att en serie fall från hästar ofta resulterade i födelsen av ett geni. Både muslimer och kristna skulle ha ansett sådana spekulationer vara inte endast ogudaktiga utan även ytterst opraktiska. Jag håller helt och hållet med dem, men detta är inte poängen här.

Poängen är att en ny skola tror på eugenik framför etik. Och detta bevisas av ett välkänt faktum: att historiens hjältedåd faktiskt är eugenikens brott. Eugenikens böcker och artiklar är fulla av ideer om att icke-eugeniska förbindelser borde betraktas och kan komma att betraktas som vi betraktar synder, att vi verkligen borde känna att giftermål med en invalid är ett slags grymhet mot barn. Men historien lovsjunger människor som har hållit sådana band till invalider heliga; den är full av fall lika överste Hutchinsons och Sir William Temple, som förblev trogna mot sina makar även när skönhet och hälsa tycktes ha gått upp i rök. Och trots att Dorothy Osbornes och fru Hutchinsons sjukdomar kanske inte faller under de eugeniska spekulationerna (jag vet inte), är det uppenbart att de kunde ha gjort det; och förvisso skulle det inte ha gjort någon skillnad beträffande människors åsikter om moralen i handlingen.

Jag diskuterar inte just här vilken moral jag föredrar, men jag insisterar på att attityderna är motsatta. Eugenikern helgonförklarar verkligen just de män som hundratals familjer har kallat smitare. För att vara konsekventa borde de resa statyer över män som övergivit sina älskade på grund av kroppslig olycka, med inskriptioner som firar den gode eugenikern som, efter att hans fästmö fallit av en cykel, nobelt vägrade att gifta sej med henne - eller den unge hjälten som efter att ha hört om en morbror med rosfeber storsint bröt sitt ord.

Vad som är fullkomligt klart är detta: att människorna hittills ansett bandet mellan man och kvinna så heligt, och effekten på barnen så oberäknelig, att de alltid beundrat upprätthållen heder mer än bevarad säkerhet. Utan tvivel tänkte de att t.o.m. barnen knappast blev sämre av att inte vara barn till fegisar och svikare, men detta var inte den första tanken, det första budet.

Kort kan vi säga att medan många moralsystem har dragit nästan lika allvarliga gränser kring sex som någonsin någon eugeniker, har de nästan alltid haft karaktären att säkra troheten mellan de båda könen och att lämna resten åt Gud. Att introducera en etik som gör att denna trohet eller otrohet varierar med något slags kalkyl kring ärftlighet är det besynnerligaste av allt, en revolution som inte har inträffat tidigare.

Det är bara rättvist att här (utan att mer än snudda vid saken) tillfoga att många eugeniker skulle säga emot detta, genom att hävda att det fanns ett medvetet eugeniskt skäl för den skräck inför vissa förbindelser som innebar att en man förnekades privilegiet att gifta sej med sin mormor. Dr. S.R. Steinmetz anmärker, med denna rysliga sinnets enkelhet med vilken eugenikerna får vårt blod att frysa, att vi ännu inte vet alldeles säkert vilka motiven var för skräcken inför den förskräckliga sak som är Oidipus´ vånda. Med helt och hållet vänskapliga avsikter ber jag Dr S R Steinmetz att tala för sej själv. Jag vet motiven för att se en mor eller syster som skilda från andra kvinnor, men inte har jag funnit dem genom någon mystisk forskning. Jag fann dem där jag fann en analog aversion mot att äta en baby till frukost. Jag fann dem i en djupt rotad motvilja i den mänskliga själen mot att tycka om något på ett sätt när man redan tycker om det på ett annat helt oförenligt sätt.

Nu är det alldeles sant att denna aversion kan ha agerat eugeniskt och på så sätt haft en viss bekräftelse och bas i fortplantningens lagar. Men det kan verkligen inte finnas någon eugenik som är fullt så dum att han inte ser att detta inte är ett försvar för eugeniken - utan ett direkt förnekande av eugeniken. Om någonting som till sist har upptäckts i ljuset av forskningen är något som man har handlat efter alltifrån begynnelsen i ljuset av naturen, är detta helt enkelt inget skäl för att ständigt lägga sej i folks förehavanden - utan ett skäl för att lämna dem i fred!

Om män inte gifte sej med sina mormödrar när det för allt vad de visste var en mycket hygienisk vana, om vi nu vet att de instinktivt undvek naturvetenskapliga risker, så är detta så långt vi kan förstå en poäng som talar för att låta folk gifta sej med vem de vill. Det är helt enkelt ett konstaterande av att det sexuella urvalet, eller det som kristna kallar att bli förälskad, är en del av människans utrustning som vi på det hela taget och i det långa loppet kan ha förtroende för. Och det innebär förstörelsen av hela denna vetenskap i en enda smäll.

Den andra delen av definitionen, de övertalande eller tvingande metoder man vill ta i anspråk, ska jag syssla med mer fullständigt i den andra delen av denna bok. Men en sammanfattning i stil med följande kan vara användbar här:

Långt in i vår mänsklighets ofattbara förflutna finner vi antagandet att grundandet av en familj är en fri människas personliga äventyr. Innan slaveriet långsamt sjönk ur sikte i kristendomens nya klimat, kan det vara sant eller inte sant att slavar i någon mening avlades fram som boskap och värderades som ett lovande stycke arbetskraft. Om det var så var det i en mycket lösare och vagare mening än beträffande eugenikernas avlingsprojekt, och sådana moderna filosofier läser i den gamla hedendomen in en fantastisk stolthet och grymhet som är helt och hållet modern.

Det kan emellertid hända att hednatidens slavar hade en skugga av välsignelserna hos eugenikerns omsorg. Det är alldeles säkert att fria hedningar skulle ha dödat den förste som föreslog något liknande. Jag menar den som föreslog det på allvar, för Platon var bara en Bernard Shaw som olyckligtvis skrev sina skämt på grekiska.

Bland fria män har lagen, eller ännu oftare tron och oftast av allt sedvänjan lagt alla slags restriktioner på sexlivet av det ena eller andra skälet. Men lag och tro och sed har aldrig koncentrerat sej på något annat än att fixera och bevara familjen när den en gång blivit skapad. Akten att grunda en familj, säger jag ännu en gång, var ett individuellt äventyr utanför Statens gränser. Våra första glömda förfäder lämnade traditionen efter sej, och våra egna senaste fäder och mödrar skulle för bara några år sedan ha tyckt att vi var galningar som ens diskuterade den.

Den kortaste generella definitionen av eugenik utifrån dess praktiska sida är att den i större eller mindre utsträckning strävar efter att kontrollera somliga familjer som om de vore hedniska slavfamiljer. Jag ska senare diskutera frågan om de människor som kan utsättas för denna press, och den ännu mer kluriga frågan om vilka människor som ska utsätta dem för den. Men den måste åtminstone tillämpas av några på några, och detta på grund av vissa kalkyler om fortplantning som påstås kunna demonstreras.

Detta om ämnet i sej själv. Jag säger att denna sak existerar. Jag definierar den så tydligt som saker med moraliska inslag kan definieras och jag kallar den eugenik. Om någon efter detta väljer att påstå att eugenik inte är det grekiska ordet för detta, nöjer jag mej med att svara att "chevaleresk" inte är franska för "hästaktig", och att sådana kontroverslekar är mer hästaktiga än chevalereska.

De första hindren

Innan jag sätter igång med att diskutera dessa saker, finns det ett moln av frontsoldater, av harmlösa och förvirrade moderna skeptiker, som borde klaras av eller kylas ner innan vi kommer till debatten med heresins verkliga doktorer. Om jag sammanfattar mitt påstående så här: "Eugenik, som jag diskuterar här, innebär alldeles tydligt vissa människors kontroll över andras äktenskap och icke-äktenskap, och innebär troligen några fås kontroll över de mångas äktenskap och icke-äktenskap" - ja, då kommer jag först av allt att få den sorts svar som flyter som skummet på tekoppar och samtal. Jag kan grovt och snabbt dela in dessa preliminära motsägare i fem sekter, som jag kommer att kalla Eufemisternas, Kasuisternas, Autokraternas, Precedenternas och Strävarnas. När vi har svarat på de omedelbara protesterna från dessa goda, skrikande, kortsynta personer, kan vi börja göra rättvisa åt de intelligenser som verkligen ligger bakom hela idén.

De flesta eugeniker är Eufemister. Jag menar helt enkelt att korta ord skrämmer dem, medan långa ord lugnar dem. Och de är ytterst oförmögna att översätta det ena till det andra, hur uppenbart det än är att de betyder samma sak. Säg till dem: "Medborgarens övertygande och till och med tvingande förmågor måste göra det möjligt för honom att se till att att livslängdens börda hos den föregående generationen inte blir oproportionerlig och oförsvarlig, särskilt hos kvinnorna" - säg detta till dem och de kommer att gunga lätt fram och tillbaka som spädbarnen som ska sova i sina vaggor. Säg till dem: "Mörda din mor", och de kommer att snabbt sätta sej upp. Ändå är de två meningarna, utifrån kall logik, exakt desamma. Säg till dem: "Det är inte otroligt att det kan komma en tid när den trånga om än en gång användbara distinktionen mellan antropoiden homo och andra djur, som har modifierats i så många moraliska avseenden, kan modifieras också med hänsyn till den viktiga frågan om dietens expansion" - säg detta till dem, och en skönhet född av mumlande ljud kommer att sprida sej i deras ansikten. Men säg till dem, på ett enkelt, manligt, hjärtligt sätt: "Låt oss äta en människa!" och deras häpnad kommer att slå oss med häpnad.

Nå, om någon anser dessa exempel vara extravaganta, ska jag hänvisa till två verkliga fall från den eugeniska diskussionen. När Sir Oliver Lodge talade om "stuteriets" metoder, uttalade sej många eugenister mot grovheten i associationen. Men långt dessförinnan hade en av deras främsta förkämpar skrivit: "Vilket nonsens all denna utbildning är! Vem skulle kunna utbilda en rashäst eller en gråhund?" Vilket helt säkert antingen betyder ingenting alls, eller också just det mänskliga stuteriet. Eller när jag skrev om hur människor skulle "giftas ihop med våld av polisen", blev en annan förfinad eugenist nästan entusiastisk i sin hjärtliga försäkran att något sådant aldrig hade föresvävat dem. Men bara några dagar därefter såg jag ett eugenistiskt uttalande om att staten borde utvidga sin makt på detta område. Staten kan bara vara det samfund som människor tillåter utföra tvångshandlingar, och detta område kan bara bli det sexuella urvalets område. Jag menar det som mer än ett lättsinnigt skämt när jag säger att polisen i allmänhet kommer att finnas med på detta område. Men jag medger villigt att den polis som övervakar bröllop kommer att bli lik den polis som övervakar bröllopspresenter. Han kommer att vara civilklädd. Jag menar inte att en man i blått med hjälm kommer att släpa bruden och brudgummen till altaret. Jag menar att ingen som den mannen i blått är beordrad att arrestera kommer att våga komma ens i närheten av kyrkan. Sir Oliver menade inte att människor skulle bindas i stall och ryktas av stalldrängar. Han menade att de skulle undergå en frihetsinskränkning som är t.o.m. mer infam för en människa. Han menade att den enda viktiga formuleringen för en eugeniker skulle vara "gjord av Smith av Jones". En sådan formulering är en av de kortaste i världen, och den gör förvisso processen kort med Eufemisterna.

Nästa sekt av vidskepliga motståndare är ännu mer irriterande. Jag har av självklara skäl kallat dem Kasuisterna. Anta att jag säger: "Jag ogillar att kannibalismen utbreder sej i West End´s restauranger." Någon säger då säkert: "Nåja, när allt kommer omkring var ju drottning Eleanor kannibal när hon sög blod från sin makes arm." Vad ska man säga till sådana människor? Man kan bara säga: "Ägna dej åt att suga förgiftat blod från folks armar, så ska jag tillåta dej att ge dej själv den ärorika titeln Kannibal." I den här meningen säger folk om eugeniker: "När allt kommer omkring, när vi än avråder en skolpojke från att gifta sej med en galen negress med puckelrygg, är vi i själva verket eugeniker." Återigen kan man bara svara: "Ägna er uteslutande åt sådana skolpojkar som hyser en naturlig attraktion för galna puckelryggiga negresser, så kan ni få ståta med titeln Eugeniker, desto mer som den titeln kommer att bli sällsynt." Men förvisso måste vars och ens sunda förnuft säga honom att om eugeniker bara ägnade sej åt sådana extravaganta fall, skulle det kallas sunt förnuft och inte eugenik. Den mänskliga rasen har uteslutit sådana absurditeter i okända tidsåldrar, och har ännu aldrig kallat det eugenik. Du kan kalla det spöstraff när du dunkar en man i ryggen, du kan kalla det tortyr när en människa tinar upp sina fingrar vild elden, men om du talar så där lite längre kommer du att sluta leva bland levande människor. Om ingenting mer än detta galna minimum av olycka vore inblandat, skulle det inte finnas något som Eugenikerkongressen - och absolut säkert ingenting i stil med denna bok.

Jag hade tänkt kalla nästa sorts vidskepliga människor Idealisterna; men jag tror att detta implicerar en ödmjukhet mot det obestämt goda som de knappast visar, så jag kallar dem Autokraterna. De är de människor som i allmänhet försöker få oss att förstå att varje modern reform kommer att "fungera" väl, eftersom de kommer att vara med och övervaka. Var de ska vara, och hur länge, förklarar de inte särskilt tydligt. Jag invänder inte mot att de ser framåt mot tallösa liv efter varandra, ty detta är skuggan av ett mänskligt eller gudomligt hopp. Men inte ens en teosof förväntar sej att vara en hel massa människor på en gång. Och dessa människor påstår sej helt uppenbart vara ansvariga för en hel rörelse efter att den har lämnat deras händer. Varje person lovar att vara omkring tusen poliser. Om du frågar dem hur det eller det kommer att fungera, svarar de: "Oh, jag skulle verkligen insistera på detta" eller "Jag skulle aldrig gå så långt som det", som om de kunde återvända till denna jord och göra vad inget spöke någonsin helt lyckats göra: tvinga människor att överge sina synder. Om detta är det nog att säga att de inte förstår en lags natur mer än en hunds. Om du släpper lös en lag, kommer den att göra som hunden gör. Den kommer att lyda sin egen natur, inte din. Den mening du lagt in i lagen (eller hunden) kommer att uppfyllas. Men du kommer inte att kunna uppfylla så mycket som ett fragment av något du har glömt att lägga in i den.

Tillsammans med sådana idealister går de märkliga människor som verkar anse att man kan helga och rena varje kampanj i all oändlighet genom att repetera de abstrakta dygders namn som dess bättre försvarare har i sinnet. Dessa människor kommer att säga: "Så långt som från att sikta mot slaveri, söker eugenikerna sann frihet, frihet från sjukdom och degeneration" o.s.v. Eller de säger: "Vi kan försäkra herr Chesterton att eugenikerna inte har någon intention att segregera de oskadliga; rättvisa och barmhärtighet är själva mottot för..." o.s.v. Det kortaste svaret på detta är följande: Många som talar på detta sätt är agnostiker eller allmänt negativa till officiell religion. Anta att någon av dem sa: "Anglikanska kyrkan är full av hyckleri." Vad skulle han tro om mej om jag svarade: "Jag försäkrar dej att hyckleri fördöms av varje form av kristendom, och den förkastas särskilt av psalmboken"? Anta att han sa att den romerska kyrkan var skyldig till stora grymheter. Vad skulle han tro om mej om jag svarade: "Kyrkan är uttryckligen förpliktigad till ödmjukhet och barmhärtighet, och kan därför inte vara grym"? Denna sorts människor behöver inte uppehålla oss länge.

Sedan finns de som jag kallar Precedenterna, som det vimlar av särskilt i Parlamentet. De representeras bäst av den allvarliga tjänsteman som häromdagen sa att han inte kunde förstå klagomålen på lagförslaget om sköra personer, eftersom den bara utvidgade principerna i de gamla lagarna om vansinne. Till vilket man återigen bara kan svara: "Precis. Den bara utvidgar principerna i vansinneslagarna till personer utan minsta spår av vansinne." Detta ljushuvud till politiker hittar en gammal lag om, låt oss säga, att hålla spetälska i karantän. Han ändrar helt enkelt ordet "spetälska" till "långnästa" och säger frankt att principen är densamma.

Kanske är de svagaste av alla dessa hjälplösa personer som jag har kallat Strävarna. Priset bland dem tar en annan parlamentsledamot som försvarade samma lagförlag som "ett ärligt försök" att hantera ett stort ont: som om någon hade rätt att tvinga in och förslava sina medmänniskor som ett slags kemiskt experiment, i ett tillstånd av vördnadsfull agnosticism beträffande vad det kunde mynna ut i. Men denna fåniga anmärkning, att man med vilja kan införa inkvisitionen eller terrorn, och sedan vagt förtrösta på hoppet om framtiden, kommer jag att behöva ta itu med på större allvar i ett av de följande kapitlen. Här är det tillräckligt att säga att det bästa en ärlig Strävare kunde göra vore att göra ett ärligt försök att ta reda på vad han gör. Och att inte göra något annat förrän han har kommit på det.

Till sist har vi en grupp kontroversialister som är så hopplösa och futila att jag helt har misslyckats med att komma på ett namn för dem. Men när än någon försöker argumentera rationellt för eller emot något existerande och igenkännbart ting, t.ex. den lagstiftning som rör eugenik, finns det alltid folk som börjar pajkastningen om socialism och individualism, och säger: "Du sätter dej emot all statlig inblandning; jag håller på statlig inblandning. Du är en individualist; jag å andra sidan" o.s.v. På detta kan jag bara, med hjärtbrustet tålamod, att jag inte är en individualist, men en fattig, syndig men döpt journalist som försöker skriva en bok om eugeniker, som han mött åtskilliga av, medan han aldrig mött en individualist och på intet sätt är säker på att han skulle känna igen en sådan om han gjorde det. Kort sagt förnekar jag inte, utan vill starkt bekräfta, statens rätt att ingripa för att bota ett stort ont. Vad jag säger är att i detta fall skulle staten ingripa för att skapa ett stort ont, och att jag inte tänker vända mej från diskussionen kring denna direkta fråga till bottenlösa grubblerier om socialism och individualism, eller om de relativa fördelarna med att alltid svänga till höger och alltid svänga till vänster.

Vad resten beträffar, finns det utan tvivel en enorm massa vettiga fast ganska tanklösa människor, vars djupt rotade känsla är att varje djup förändring i vårt samhälle på något sätt måste vara oändligt avlägsen. De kan inte tro att människor i hattar och rockar som dem själva kan förbereda en revolution, och hela deras viktorianska filosofi har lärt dem att sådana transformationer alltid är långsamma. Och därför tänker de, när jag talar om eugeniklagstiftningen, eller eugenikstatens ankomst, på allt detta som någonting likt en tidsmaskin, något som, bra eller dåligt, kommer att passa bra för deras barnbarns barnbarn, människor som ju kan vara mycket annorlunda än de själva och kanske kommer att gilla det - och i vilket fall som helst är mycket avlägsna släktingar. På allt detta har jag till att börja med ett mycket kort och enkelt svar. Eugenikstaten har börjat. De första eugeniklagarna har redan

will have to fit itself to their great-great-great-grandchild, who may be very different and may like it; and who in any case is rather a distant relative. To all this I have, to begin with, a very short and simple answer. The Eugenic State has begun. The first of the Eugenic Laws has already been adopted by the Government of this country; and passed with the applause of both parties through the dominant House of Parliament. This first Eugenic Law clears the ground and may be said to proclaim negative Eugenics; but it cannot be defended, and nobody has attempted to defend it, except on the Eugenic theory. I will call it the Feeble-Minded Bill both for brevity and because the description is strictly accurate. It is, quite simply and literally, a Bill for incarcerating as madmen those whom no doctor will consent to call mad. It is enough if some doctor or other may happen to call them weak-minded. Since there is scarcely any human being to whom this term has not been conversationally applied by his own friends and relatives on some occasion or other (unless his friends and relatives have been lamentably lacking in spirit), it can be clearly seen that this law, like the early Christian Church (to which, however, it presents points of dissimilarity), is a net drawing in of all kinds. It must not be supposed that we have a stricter definition incorporated in the Bill. Indeed, the first definition of "feeble-minded" in the Bill was much looser and vaguer than the phrase "feeble-minded" itself. It is a piece of yawning idiocy about "persons who though capable of earning their living under favourable circumstances" (as if anyone could earn his living if circumstances were directly unfavourable to his doing so), are nevertheless "incapable of managing their affairs with proper prudence"; which is exactly what all the world and his wife are saying about their neighbours all over this planet. But as an incapacity for any kind of thought is now regarded as statesmanship, there is nothing so very novel about such slovenly drafting. What is novel and what is vital is this: that the defence of this crazy Coercion Act is a Eugenic defence. It is not only openly said, it is eagerly urged, that the aim of the measure is to prevent any person whom these propagandists do not happen to think intelligent from having any wife or children. Every tramp who is sulky, every labourer who is shy, every rustic who is eccentric, can quite easily be brought under such conditions as were designed for homicidal maniacs. That is the situation; and that is the point. England has forgotten the Feudal State; it is in the last anarchy of the Industrial State; there is much in Mr. Belloc's theory that it is approaching the Servile State; it cannot at present get at the Distributive State; it has almost certainly missed the Socialist State. But we are already under the Eugenist State; and nothing remains to us but rebellion.

Anarkin från ovan

A silent anarchy is eating out our society. I must pause upon the expression; because the true nature of anarchy is mostly misapprehended. It is not in the least necessary that anarchy should be violent; nor is it necessary that it should come from below. A government may grow anarchic as much as a people. The more sentimental sort of Tory uses the word anarchy as a mere term of abuse for rebellion; but he misses a most important intellectual distinction. Rebellion may be wrong and disastrous; but even when rebellion is wrong, it is never anarchy. When it is not self-defence, it is usurpation. It aims at setting up a new rule in place of the old rule. And while it cannot be anarchic in essence (because it has an aim), it certainly cannot be anarchic in method; for men must be organised when they fight; and the discipline in a rebel army has to be as good as the discipline in the royal army. This deep principle of distinction must be clearly kept in mind. Take for the sake of symbolism those two great spiritual stories which, whether we count them myths or mysteries, have so long been the two hinges of all European morals. The Christian who is inclined to sympathise generally with constituted authority will think of rebellion under the image of Satan, the rebel against God. But Satan, though a traitor, was not an anarchist. He claimed the crown of the cosmos; and had he prevailed, would have expected his rebel angels to give up rebelling. On the other hand, the Christian whose sympathies are more generally with just self-defence among the oppressed will think rather of Christ Himself defying the High Priests and scourging the rich traders. But whether or no Christ was (as some say) a Socialist, He most certainly was not an Anarchist. Christ, like Satan, claimed the throne. He set up a new authority against an old authority; but He set it up with positive commandments and a comprehensible scheme. In this light all mediæval people—indeed, all people until a little while ago—would have judged questions involving revolt. John Ball would have offered to pull down the government because it was a bad government, not because it was a government. Richard II. would have blamed Bolingbroke not as a disturber of the peace, but as a usurper. Anarchy, then, in the useful sense of the word, is a thing utterly distinct from any rebellion, right or wrong. It is not necessarily angry; it is not, in its first stages, at least, even necessarily painful. And, as I said before, it is often entirely silent.

Anarchy is that condition of mind or methods in which you cannot stop yourself. It is the loss of that self-control which can return to the normal. It is not anarchy because men are permitted to begin uproar, extravagance, experiment, peril. It is anarchy when people cannot end these things. It is not anarchy in the home if the whole family sits up all night on New Year's Eve. It is anarchy in the home if members of the family sit up later and later for months afterwards. It was not anarchy in the Roman villa when, during the Saturnalia, the slaves turned masters or the masters slaves. It was (from the slave-owners' point of view) anarchy if, after the Saturnalia, the slaves continued to behave in a Saturnalian manner; but it is historically evident that they did not. It is not anarchy to have a picnic; but it is anarchy to lose all memory of mealtimes. It would, I think, be anarchy if (as is the disgusting suggestion of some) we all took what we liked off the sideboard. That is the way swine would eat if swine had sideboards; they have no immovable feasts; they are uncommonly progressive, are swine. It is this inability to return within rational limits after a legitimate extravagance that is the really dangerous disorder. The modern world is like Niagara. It is magnificent, but it is not strong. It is as weak as water—like Niagara. The objection to a cataract is not that it is deafening or dangerous or even destructive; it is that it cannot stop. Now it is plain that this sort of chaos can possess the powers that rule a society as easily as the society so ruled. And in modern England it is the powers that rule who are chiefly possessed by it—who are truly possessed by devils. The phrase, in its sound old psychological sense, is not too strong. The State has suddenly and quietly gone mad. It is talking nonsense; and it can't stop.


Now it is perfectly plain that government ought to have, and must have, the same sort of right to use exceptional methods occasionally that the private householder has to have a picnic or to sit up all night on New Year's Eve. The State, like the householder, is sane if it can treat such exceptions as exceptions. Such desperate remedies may not even be right; but such remedies are endurable as long as they are admittedly desperate. Such cases, of course, are the communism of food in a besieged city; the official disavowal of an arrested spy; the subjection of a patch of civil life to martial law; the cutting of communication in a plague; or that deepest degradation of the commonwealth, the use of national soldiers not against foreign soldiers, but against their own brethren in revolt. Of these exceptions some are right and some wrong; but all are right in so far as they are taken as exceptions. The modern world is insane, not so much because it admits the abnormal as because it cannot recover the normal.

We see this in the vague extension of punishments like imprisonment; often the very reformers who admit that prison is bad for people propose to reform them by a little more of it. We see it in panic legislation like that after the White Slave scare, when the torture of flogging was revived for all sorts of ill defined and vague and variegated types of men. Our fathers were never so mad, even when they were torturers. They stretched the man out on the rack. They did not stretch the rack out, as we are doing. When men went witch-burning they may have seen witches everywhere—because their minds were fixed on witchcraft. But they did not see things to burn everywhere, because their minds were unfixed. While tying some very unpopular witch to the stake, with the firm conviction that she was a spiritual tyranny and pestilence, they did not say to each other, "A little burning is what my Aunt Susan wants, to cure her of back-biting," or "Some of these faggots would do your Cousin James good, and teach him to play with poor girls' affections."

Now the name of all this is Anarchy. It not only does not know what it wants, but it does not even know what it hates. It multiplies excessively in the more American sort of English newspapers. When this new sort of New Englander burns a witch the whole prairie catches fire. These people have not the decision and detachment of the doctrinal ages. They cannot do a monstrous action and still see it is monstrous. Wherever they make a stride they make a rut. They cannot stop their own thoughts, though their thoughts are pouring into the pit.

A final instance, which can be sketched much more briefly, can be found in this general fact: that the definition of almost every crime has become more and more indefinite, and spreads like a flattening and thinning cloud over larger and larger landscapes. Cruelty to children, one would have thought, was a thing about as unmistakable, unusual and appalling as parricide. In its application it has come to cover almost every negligence that can occur in a needy household. The only distinction is, of course, that these negligences are punished in the poor, who generally can't help them, and not in the rich, who generally can. But that is not the point I am arguing just now. The point here is that a crime we all instinctively connect with Herod on the bloody night of Innocents has come precious near being attributable to Mary and Joseph when they lost their child in the Temple. In the light of a fairly recent case (the confessedly kind mother who was lately jailed because her confessedly healthy children had no water to wash in) no one, I think, will call this an illegitimate literary exaggeration. Now this is exactly as if all the horror and heavy punishment, attached in the simplest tribes to parricide, could now be used against any son who had done any act that could colourably be supposed to have worried his father, and so affected his health. Few of us would be safe.

Another case out of hundreds is the loose extension of the idea of libel. Libel cases bear no more trace of the old and just anger against the man who bore false witness against his neighbour than "cruelty" cases do of the old and just horror of the parents that hated their own flesh. A libel case has become one of the sports of the less athletic rich—a variation on baccarat, a game of chance. A music-hall actress got damages for a song that was called "vulgar," which is as if I could fine or imprison my neighbour for calling my handwriting "rococo." A politician got huge damages because he was said to have spoken to children about Tariff Reform; as if that seductive topic would corrupt their virtue, like an indecent story. Sometimes libel is defined as anything calculated to hurt a man in his business; in which case any new tradesman calling himself a grocer slanders the grocer opposite. All this, I say, is Anarchy; for it is clear that its exponents possess no power of distinction, or sense of proportion, by which they can draw the line between calling a woman a popular singer and calling her a bad lot; or between charging a man with leading infants to Protection and leading them to sin and shame. But the vital point to which to return is this. That it is not necessarily, nor even specially, an anarchy in the populace. It is an anarchy in the organ of government. It is the magistrates—voices of the governing class—who cannot distinguish between cruelty and carelessness. It is the judges (and their very submissive special juries) who cannot see the difference between opinion and slander. And it is the highly placed and highly paid experts who have brought in the first Eugenic Law, the Feeble-Minded Bill—thus showing that they can see no difference between a mad and a sane man.

That, to begin with, is the historic atmosphere in which this thing was born. It is a peculiar atmosphere, and luckily not likely to last. Real progress bears the same relation to it that a happy girl laughing bears to an hysterical girl who cannot stop laughing. But I have described this atmosphere first because it is the only atmosphere in which such a thing as the Eugenist legislation could be proposed among men. All other ages would have called it to some kind of logical account, however academic or narrow. The lowest sophist in the Greek schools would remember enough of Socrates to force the Eugenist to tell him (at least) whether Midias was segregated because he was curable or because he was incurable. The meanest Thomist of the mediæval monasteries would have the sense to see that you cannot discuss a madman when you have not discussed a man. The most owlish Calvinist commentator in the seventeenth century would ask the Eugenist to reconcile such Bible texts as derided fools with the other Bible texts that praised them. The dullest shopkeeper in Paris in 1790 would have asked what were the Rights of Man, if they did not include the rights of the lover, the husband, and the father. It is only in our own London Particular (as Mr. Guppy said of the fog) that small figures can loom so large in the vapour, and even mingle with quite different figures, and have the appearance of a mob. But, above all, I have dwelt on the telescopic quality in these twilight avenues, because unless the reader realises how elastic and unlimited they are, he simply will not believe in the abominations we have to combat.

One of those wise old fairy tales, that come from nowhere and flourish everywhere, tells how a man came to own a small magic machine like a coffee-mill, which would grind anything he wanted when he said one word and stop when he said another. After performing marvels (which I wish my conscience would let me put into this book for padding) the mill was merely asked to grind a few grains of salt at an officers' mess on board ship; for salt is the type everywhere of small luxury and exaggeration, and sailors' tales should be taken with a grain of it. The man remembered the word that started the salt mill, and then, touching the word that stopped it, suddenly remembered that he forgot. The tall ship sank, laden and sparkling to the topmasts with salt like Arctic snows; but the mad mill was still grinding at the ocean bottom, where all the men lay drowned. And that (so says this fairy tale) is why the great waters about our world have a bitter taste. For the fairy tales knew what the modern mystics don't—that one should not let loose either the supernatural or the natural.

Galningen och lagen

The modern evil, we have said, greatly turns on this: that people do not see that the exception proves the rule. Thus it may or may not be right to kill a murderer; but it can only conceivably be right to kill a murderer because it is wrong to kill a man. If the hangman, having got his hand in, proceeded to hang friends and relatives to his taste and fancy, he would (intellectually) unhang the first man, though the first man might not think so. Or thus again, if you say an insane man is irresponsible, you imply that a sane man is responsible. He is responsible for the insane man. And the attempt of the Eugenists and other fatalists to treat all men as irresponsible is the largest and flattest folly in philosophy. The Eugenist has to treat everybody, including himself, as an exception to a rule that isn't there.

The Eugenists, as a first move, have extended the frontiers of the lunatic asylum: let us take this as our definite starting point, and ask ourselves what lunacy is, and what is its fundamental relation to human society. Now that raw juvenile scepticism that clogs all thought with catchwords may often be heard to remark that the mad are only the minority, the sane only the majority. There is a neat exactitude about such people's nonsense; they seem to miss the point by magic. The mad are not a minority because they are not a corporate body; and that is what their madness means. The sane are not a majority; they are mankind. And mankind (as its name would seem to imply) is a kind, not a degree. In so far as the lunatic differs, he differs from all minorities and majorities in kind. The madman who thinks he is a knife cannot go into partnership with the other who thinks he is a fork. There is no trysting place outside reason; there is no inn on those wild roads that are beyond the world.


The madman is not he that defies the world. The saint, the criminal, the martyr, the cynic, the nihilist may all defy the world quite sanely. And even if such fanatics would destroy the world, the world owes them a strictly fair trial according to proof and public law. But the madman is not the man who defies the world; he is the man who denies it. Suppose we are all standing round a field and looking at a tree in the middle of it. It is perfectly true that we all see it (as the decadents say) in infinitely different aspects: that is not the point; the point is that we all say it is a tree. Suppose, if you will, that we are all poets, which seems improbable; so that each of us could turn his aspect into a vivid image distinct from a tree. Suppose one says it looks like a green cloud and another like a green fountain, and a third like a green dragon and the fourth like a green cheese. The fact remains: that they all say it looks like these things. It is a tree. Nor are any of the poets in the least mad because of any opinions they may form, however frenzied, about the functions or future of the tree. A conservative poet may wish to clip the tree; a revolutionary poet may wish to burn it. An optimist poet may want to make it a Christmas tree and hang candles on it. A pessimist poet may want to hang himself on it. None of these are mad, because they are all talking about the same thing. But there is another man who is talking horribly about something else. There is a monstrous exception to mankind. Why he is so we know not; a new theory says it is heredity; an older theory says it is devils. But in any case, the spirit of it is the spirit that denies, the spirit that really denies realities. This is the man who looks at the tree and does not say it looks like a lion, but says that it is a lamp-post.

I do not mean that all mad delusions are as concrete as this, though some are more concrete. Believing your own body is glass is a more daring denial of reality than believing a tree is a glass lamp at the top of a pole. But all true delusions have in them this unalterable assertion—that what is not is. The difference between us and the maniac is not about how things look or how things ought to look, but about what they self-evidently are. The lunatic does not say that he ought to be King; Perkin Warbeck might say that. He says he is King. The lunatic does not say he is as wise as Shakespeare; Bernard Shaw might say that. The lunatic says he is Shakespeare. The lunatic does not say he is divine in the same sense as Christ; Mr. R.J. Campbell would say that. The lunatic says he is Christ. In all cases the difference is a difference about what is there; not a difference touching what should be done about it.

For this reason, and for this alone, the lunatic is outside public law. This is the abysmal difference between him and the criminal. The criminal admits the facts, and therefore permits us to appeal to the facts. We can so arrange the facts around him that he may really understand that agreement is in his own interests. We can say to him, "Do not steal apples from this tree, or we will hang you on that tree." But if the man really thinks one tree is a lamp-post and the other tree a Trafalgar Square fountain, we simply cannot treat with him at all. It is obviously useless to say, "Do not steal apples from this lamp-post, or I will hang you on that fountain." If a man denies the facts, there is no answer but to lock him up. He cannot speak our language: not that varying verbal language which often misses fire even with us, but that enormous alphabet of sun and moon and green grass and blue sky in which alone we meet, and by which alone we can signal to each other. That unique man of genius, George Macdonald, described in one of his weird stories two systems of space co-incident; so that where I knew there was a piano standing in a drawing-room you knew there was a rose-bush growing in a garden. Something of this sort is in small or great affairs the matter with the madman. He cannot have a vote, because he is the citizen of another country. He is a foreigner. Nay, he is an invader and an enemy; for the city he lives in has been super-imposed on ours.

Now these two things are primarily to be noted in his case. First, that we can only condemn him to a general doom, because we only know his general nature. All criminals, who do particular things for particular reasons (things and reasons which, however criminal, are always comprehensible), have been more and more tried for such separate actions under separate and suitable laws ever since Europe began to become a civilisation—and until the rare and recent re-incursions of barbarism in such things as the Indeterminate Sentence. Of that I shall speak later; it is enough for this argument to point out the plain facts. It is the plain fact that every savage, every sultan, every outlawed baron, every brigand-chief has always used this instrument of the Indeterminate Sentence, which has been recently offered us as something highly scientific and humane. All these people, in short, being barbarians, have always kept their captives captive until they (the barbarians) chose to think the captives were in a fit frame of mind to come out. It is also the plain fact that all that has been called civilisation or progress, justice or liberty, for nearly three thousand years, has had the general direction of treating even the captive as a free man, in so far as some clear case of some defined crime had to be shown against him. All law has meant allowing the criminal, within some limits or other, to argue with the law: as Job was allowed, or rather challenged, to argue with God. But the criminal is, among civilised men, tried by one law for one crime for a perfectly simple reason: that the motive of the crime, like the meaning of the law, is conceivable to the common intelligence. A man is punished specially as a burglar, and not generally as a bad man, because a man may be a burglar and in many other respects not be a bad man. The act of burglary is punishable because it is intelligible. But when acts are unintelligible, we can only refer them to a general untrustworthiness, and guard against them by a general restraint. If a man breaks into a house to get a piece of bread, we can appeal to his reason in various ways. We can hang him for housebreaking; or again (as has occurred to some daring thinkers) we can give him a piece of bread. But if he breaks in, let us say, to steal the parings of other people's finger nails, then we are in a difficulty: we cannot imagine what he is going to do with them, and therefore cannot easily imagine what we are going to do with him. If a villain comes in, in cloak and mask, and puts a little arsenic in the soup, we can collar him and say to him distinctly, "You are guilty of Murder; and I will now consult the code of tribal law, under which we live, to see if this practice is not forbidden." But if a man in the same cloak and mask is found at midnight putting a little soda-water in the soup, what can we say? Our charge necessarily becomes a more general one. We can only observe, with a moderation almost amounting to weakness, "You seem to be the sort of person who will do this sort of thing." And then we can lock him up. The principle of the indeterminate sentence is the creation of the indeterminate mind. It does apply to the incomprehensible creature, the lunatic. And it applies to nobody else.

The second thing to be noted is this: that it is only by the unanimity of sane men that we can condemn this man as utterly separate. If he says a tree is a lamp-post he is mad; but only because all other men say it is a tree. If some men thought it was a tree with a lamp on it, and others thought it was a lamp-post wreathed with branches and vegetation, then it would be a matter of opinion and degree; and he would not be mad, but merely extreme. Certainly he would not be mad if nobody but a botanist could see it was a tree. Certainly his enemies might be madder than he, if nobody but a lamplighter could see it was not a lamp-post. And similarly a man is not imbecile if only a Eugenist thinks so. The question then raised would not be his sanity, but the sanity of one botanist or one lamplighter or one Eugenist. That which can condemn the abnormally foolish is not the abnormally clever, which is obviously a matter in dispute. That which can condemn the abnormally foolish is the normally foolish. It is when he begins to say and do things that even stupid people do not say or do, that we have a right to treat him as the exception and not the rule. It is only because we none of us profess to be anything more than man that we have authority to treat him as something less.

Now the first principle behind Eugenics becomes plain enough. It is the proposal that somebody or something should criticise men with the same superiority with which men criticise madmen. It might exercise this right with great moderation; but I am not here talking about the exercise, but about the right. Its claim certainly is to bring all human life under the Lunacy Laws.

Now this is the first weakness in the case of the Eugenists: that they cannot define who is to control whom; they cannot say by what authority they do these things. They cannot see the exception is different from the rule—even when it is misrule, even when it is an unruly rule. The sound sense in the old Lunacy Law was this: that you cannot deny that a man is a citizen until you are practically prepared to deny that he is a man. Men, and only men, can be the judges of whether he is a man. But any private club of prigs can be judges of whether he ought to be a citizen. When once we step down from that tall and splintered peak of pure insanity we step on to a tableland where one man is not so widely different from another. Outside the exception, what we find is the average. And the practical, legal shape of the quarrel is this: that unless the normal men have the right to expel the abnormal, what particular sort of abnormal men have the right to expel the normal men? If sanity is not good enough, what is there that is saner than sanity?

Without any grip of the notion of a rule and an exception, the general idea of judging people's heredity breaks down and is useless. For this reason: that if everything is the result of a doubtful heredity, the judgment itself is the result of a doubtful heredity also. Let it judge not that it be not judged. Eugenists, strange to say, have fathers and mothers like other people; and our opinion about their fathers and mothers is worth exactly as much as their opinions about ours. None of the parents were lunatics, and the rest is mere likes and dislikes. Suppose Dr. Saleeby had gone up to Byron and said, "My lord, I perceive you have a club-foot and inordinate passions: such are the hereditary results of a profligate soldier marrying a hot-tempered woman." The poet might logically reply (with characteristic lucidity and impropriety), "Sir, I perceive you have a confused mind and an unphilosophic theory about other people's love affairs. Such are the hereditary delusions bred by a Syrian doctor marrying a Quaker lady from York." Suppose Dr. Karl Pearson had said to Shelley, "From what I see of your temperament, you are running great risks in forming a connection with the daughter of a fanatic and eccentric like Godwin." Shelley would be employing the strict rationalism of the older and stronger free thinkers, if he answered, "From what I observe of your mind, you are rushing on destruction in marrying the great-niece of an old corpse of a courtier and dilettante like Samuel Rogers." It is only opinion for opinion. Nobody can pretend that either Mary Godwin or Samuel Rogers was mad; and the general view a man may hold about the healthiness of inheriting their blood or type is simply the same sort of general view by which men do marry for love or liking. There is no reason to suppose that Dr. Karl Pearson is any better judge of a bridegroom than the bridegroom is of a bride.



An objection may be anticipated here, but it is very easily answered. It may be said that we do, in fact, call in medical specialists to settle whether a man is mad; and that these specialists go by technical and even secret tests that cannot be known to the mass of men. It is obvious that this is true; it is equally obvious that it does not affect our argument. When we ask the doctor whether our grandfather is going mad, we still mean mad by our own common human definition. We mean, is he going to be a certain sort of person whom all men recognise when once he exists. That certain specialists can detect the approach of him, before he exists, does not alter the fact that it is of the practical and popular madman that we are talking, and of him alone. The doctor merely sees a certain fact potentially in the future, while we, with less information, can only see it in the present; but his fact is our fact and everybody's fact, or we should not bother about it at all. Here is no question of the doctor bringing an entirely new sort of person under coercion, as in the Feeble-Minded Bill. The doctor can say, "Tobacco is death to you," because the dislike of death can be taken for granted, being a highly democratic institution; and it is the same with the dislike of the indubitable exception called madness. The doctor can say, "Jones has that twitch in the nerves, and he may burn down the house." But it is not the medical detail we fear, but the moral upshot. We should say, "Let him twitch, as long as he doesn't burn down the house." The doctor may say, "He has that look in the eyes, and he may take the hatchet and brain you all." But we do not object to the look in the eyes as such; we object to consequences which, once come, we should all call insane if there were no doctors in the world. We should say, "Let him look how he likes; as long as he does not look for the hatchet."

Now, that specialists are valuable for this particular and practical purpose, of predicting the approach of enormous and admitted human calamities, nobody but a fool would deny. But that does not bring us one inch nearer to allowing them the right to define what is a calamity; or to call things calamities which common sense does not call calamities. We call in the doctor to save us from death; and, death being admittedly an evil, he has the right to administer the queerest and most recondite pill which he may think is a cure for all such menaces of death. He has not the right to administer death, as the cure for all human ills. And as he has no moral authority to enforce a new conception of happiness, so he has no moral authority to enforce a new conception of sanity. He may know I am going mad; for madness is an isolated thing like leprosy; and I know nothing about leprosy. But if he merely thinks my mind is weak, I may happen to think the same of his. I often do.

In short, unless pilots are to be permitted to ram ships on to the rocks and then say that heaven is the only true harbour; unless judges are to be allowed to let murderers loose, and explain afterwards that the murder had done good on the whole; unless soldiers are to be allowed to lose battles and then point out that true glory is to be found in the valley of humiliation; unless cashiers are to rob a bank in order to give it an advertisement; or dentists to torture people to give them a contrast to their comforts; unless we are prepared to let loose all these private fancies against the public and accepted meaning of life or safety or prosperity or pleasure—then it is as plain as Punch's nose that no scientific man must be allowed to meddle with the public definition of madness. We call him in to tell us where it is or when it is. We could not do so, if we had not ourselves settled what it is.

As I wish to confine myself in this chapter to the primary point of the plain existence of sanity and insanity, I will not be led along any of the attractive paths that open here. I shall endeavour to deal with them in the next chapter. Here I confine myself to a sort of summary. Suppose a man's throat has been cut, quite swiftly and suddenly, with a table knife, at a small table where we sit. The whole of civil law rests on the supposition that we are witnesses; that we saw it; and if we do not know about it, who does? Now suppose all the witnesses fall into a quarrel about degrees of eyesight. Suppose one says he had brought his reading-glasses instead of his usual glasses; and therefore did not see the man fall across the table and cover it with blood. Suppose another says he could not be certain it was blood, because a slight colour-blindness was hereditary in his family. Suppose a third says he cannot swear to the uplifted knife, because his oculist tells him he is astigmatic, and vertical lines do not affect him as do horizontal lines. Suppose another says that dots have often danced before his eyes in very fantastic combinations, many of which were very like one gentleman cutting another gentleman's throat at dinner. All these things refer to real experiences. There is such a thing as myopia; there is such a thing as colour-blindness; there is such a thing as astigmatism; there is such a thing as shifting shapes swimming before the eyes. But what should we think of a whole dinner party that could give nothing except these highly scientific explanations when found in company with a corpse? I imagine there are only two things we could think: either that they were all drunk, or they were all murderers.

And yet there is an exception. If there were one man at table who was admittedly blind, should we not give him the benefit of the doubt? Should we not honestly feel that he was the exception that proved the rule? The very fact that he could not have seen would remind us that the other men must have seen. The very fact that he had no eyes must remind us of eyes. A man can be blind; a man can be dead; a man can be mad. But the comparison is necessarily weak, after all. For it is the essence of madness to be unlike anything else in the world: which is perhaps why so many men wiser than we have traced it to another.

Lastly, the literal maniac is different from all other persons in dispute in this vital respect: that he is the only person whom we can, with a final lucidity, declare that we do not want. He is almost always miserable himself, and he always makes others miserable. But this is not so with the mere invalid. The Eugenists would probably answer all my examples by taking the case of marrying into a family with consumption (or some such disease which they are fairly sure is hereditary) and asking whether such cases at least are not clear cases for a Eugenic intervention. Permit me to point out to them that they once more make a confusion of thought. The sickness or soundness of a consumptive may be a clear and calculable matter. The happiness or unhappiness of a consumptive is quite another matter, and is not calculable at all. What is the good of telling people that if they marry for love, they may be punished by being the parents of Keats or the parents of Stevenson? Keats died young; but he had more pleasure in a minute than a Eugenist gets in a month. Stevenson had lung-trouble; and it may, for all I know, have been perceptible to the Eugenic eye even a generation before. But who would perform that illegal operation: the stopping of Stevenson? Intercepting a letter bursting with good news, confiscating a hamper full of presents and prizes, pouring torrents of intoxicating wine into the sea, all this is a faint approximation for the Eugenic inaction of the ancestors of Stevenson. This, however, is not the essential point; with Stevenson it is not merely a case of the pleasure we get, but of the pleasure he got. If he had died without writing a line, he would have had more red-hot joy than is given to most men. Shall I say of him, to whom I owe so much, let the day perish wherein he was born? Shall I pray that the stars of the twilight thereof be dark and it be not numbered among the days of the year, because it shut not up the doors of his mother's womb? I respectfully decline; like Job, I will put my hand upon my mouth.

Den flygande auktoriteten

It happened one day that an atheist and a man were standing together on a doorstep; and the atheist said, "It is raining." To which the man replied, "What is raining?": which question was the beginning of a violent quarrel and a lasting friendship. I will not touch upon any heads of the dispute, which doubtless included Jupiter Pluvius, the Neuter Gender, Pantheism, Noah's Ark, Mackintoshes, and the Passive Mood; but I will record the one point upon which the two persons emerged in some agreement. It was that there is such a thing as an atheistic literary style; that materialism may appear in the mere diction of a man, though he be speaking of clocks or cats or anything quite remote from theology. The mark of the atheistic style is that it instinctively chooses the word which suggests that things are dead things; that things have no souls. Thus they will not speak of waging war, which means willing it; they speak of the "outbreak of war," as if all the guns blew up without the men touching them. Thus those Socialists that are atheist will not call their international sympathy, sympathy; they will call it "solidarity," as if the poor men of France and Germany were physically stuck together like dates in a grocer's shop. The same Marxian Socialists are accused of cursing the Capitalists inordinately; but the truth is that they let the Capitalists off much too easily. For instead of saying that employers pay less wages, which might pin the employers to some moral responsibility, they insist on talking about the "rise and fall" of wages; as if a vast silver sea of sixpences and shillings was always going up and down automatically like the real sea at Margate. Thus they will not speak of reform, but of development; and they spoil their one honest and virile phrase, "the class war," by talking of it as no one in his wits can talk of a war, predicting its finish and final result as one calculates the coming of Christmas Day or the taxes. Thus, lastly (as we shall see touching our special subject-matter here) the atheist style in letters always avoids talking of love or lust, which are things alive, and calls marriage or concubinage "the relations of the sexes"; as if a man and a woman were two wooden objects standing in a certain angle and attitude to each other, like a table and a chair.

Now the same anarchic mystery that clings round the phrase, "il pleut," clings round the phrase, "il faut." In English it is generally represented by the passive mood in grammar, and the Eugenists and their like deal especially in it; they are as passive in their statements as they are active in their experiments. Their sentences always enter tail first, and have no subject, like animals without heads. It is never "the doctor should cut off this leg" or "the policeman should collar that man." It is always "Such limbs should be amputated," or "Such men should be under restraint." Hamlet said, "I should have fatted all the region kites with this slave's offal." The Eugenist would say, "The region kites should, if possible, be fattened; and the offal of this slave is available for the dietetic experiment." Lady Macbeth said, "Give me the daggers; I'll let his bowels out." The Eugenist would say, "In such cases the bowels should, etc." Do not blame me for the repulsiveness of the comparisons. I have searched English literature for the most decent parallels to Eugenist language.


The formless god that broods over the East is called "Om." The formless god who has begun to brood over the West is called "On." But here we must make a distinction. The impersonal word on is French, and the French have a right to use it, because they are a democracy. And when a Frenchman says "one" he does not mean himself, but the normal citizen. He does not mean merely "one," but one and all. "On n'a que sa parole" does not mean "Noblesse oblige," or "I am the Duke of Billingsgate and must keep my word." It means: "One has a sense of honour as one has a backbone: every man, rich or poor, should feel honourable"; and this, whether possible or no, is the purest ambition of the republic. But when the Eugenists say, "Conditions must be altered" or "Ancestry should be investigated," or what not, it seems clear that they do not mean that the democracy must do it, whatever else they may mean. They do not mean that any man not evidently mad may be trusted with these tests and re-arrangements, as the French democratic system trusts such a man with a vote or a farm or the control of a family. That would mean that Jones and Brown, being both ordinary men, would set about arranging each other's marriages. And this state of affairs would seem a little elaborate, and it might occur even to the Eugenic mind that if Jones and Brown are quite capable of arranging each other's marriages, it is just possible that they might be capable of arranging their own.

This dilemma, which applies in so simple a case, applies equally to any wide and sweeping system of Eugenist voting; for though it is true that the community can judge more dispassionately than a man can judge in his own case, this particular question of the choice of a wife is so full of disputable shades in every conceivable case, that it is surely obvious that almost any democracy would simply vote the thing out of the sphere of voting, as they would any proposal of police interference in the choice of walking weather or of children's names. I should not like to be the politician who should propose a particular instance of Eugenics to be voted on by the French people. Democracy dismissed, it is here hardly needful to consider the other old models. Modern scientists will not say that George III., in his lucid intervals, should settle who is mad; or that the aristocracy that introduced gout shall supervise diet.

I hold it clear, therefore, if anything is clear about the business, that the Eugenists do not merely mean that the mass of common men should settle each other's marriages between them; the question remains, therefore, whom they do instinctively trust when they say that this or that ought to be done. What is this flying and evanescent authority that vanishes wherever we seek to fix it? 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. And this may be true. A great deal of good could be done with a loaded revolver, in the hands of a judicious student of human nature. But it is imperative that the Eugenist should perceive that on that principle we can never get beyond a perfect balance of different sympathies and antipathies. I mean that I should differ from Dr. Saleeby or Dr. Karl Pearson not only in a vast majority of individual cases, but in a vast majority of cases in which they would be bound to admit that such a difference was natural and reasonable. The chief victim of these famous doctors would be a yet more famous doctor: that eminent though unpopular practitioner, Dr. Fell.

To show that such rational and serious differences do exist, I will take one instance from that Bill which proposed to protect families and the public generally from the burden of feeble-minded persons. Now, even if I could share the Eugenic contempt for human rights, even if I could start gaily on the Eugenic campaign, I should not begin by removing feeble-minded persons. I have known as many families in as many classes as most men; and I cannot remember meeting any very monstrous human suffering arising out of the presence of such insufficient and negative types. There seem to be comparatively few of them; and those few by no means the worst burdens upon domestic happiness. I do not hear of them often; I do not hear of them doing much more harm than good; and in the few cases I know well they are not only regarded with human affection, but can be put to certain limited forms of human use. Even if I were a Eugenist, then I should not personally elect to waste my time locking up the feeble-minded. The people I should lock up would be the strong-minded. I have known hardly any cases of mere mental weakness making a family a failure; I have known eight or nine cases of violent and exaggerated force of character making a family a hell. If the strong-minded could be segregated it would quite certainly be better for their friends and families. And if there is really anything in heredity, it would be better for posterity too. For the kind of egoist I mean is a madman in a much more plausible sense than the mere harmless "deficient"; and to hand on the horrors of his anarchic and insatiable temperament is a much graver responsibility than to leave a mere inheritance of childishness. I would not arrest such tyrants, because I think that even moral tyranny in a few homes is better than a medical tyranny turning the state into a madhouse. I would not segregate them, because I respect a man's free-will and his front-door and his right to be tried by his peers. But since free-will is believed by Eugenists no more than by Calvinists, since front-doors are respected by Eugenists no more than by house-breakers, and since the Habeas Corpus is about as sacred to Eugenists as it would be to King John, why do not they bring light and peace into so many human homes by removing a demoniac from each of them? Why do not the promoters of the Feeble-Minded Bill call at the many grand houses in town or country where such nightmares notoriously are? Why do they not knock at the door and take the bad squire away? Why do they not ring the bell and remove the dipsomaniac prize-fighter? I do not know; and there is only one reason I can think of, which must remain a matter of speculation. When I was at school, the kind of boy who liked teasing half-wits was not the sort that stood up to bullies.

That, however it may be, does not concern my argument. I mention the case of the strong-minded variety of the monstrous merely to give one out of the hundred cases of the instant divergence of individual opinions the moment we begin to discuss who is fit or unfit to propagate. If Dr. Saleeby and I were setting out on a segregating trip together, we should separate at the very door; and if he had a thousand doctors with him, they would all go different ways. Everyone who has known as many kind and capable doctors as I have, knows that the ablest and sanest of them have a tendency to possess some little hobby or half-discovery of their own, as that oranges are bad for children, or that trees are dangerous in gardens, or that many more people ought to wear spectacles. It is asking too much of human nature to expect them not to cherish such scraps of originality in a hard, dull, and often heroic trade. But the inevitable result of it, as exercised by the individual Saleebys, would be that each man would have his favourite kind of idiot. Each doctor would be mad on his own madman. One would have his eye on devotional curates; another would wander about collecting obstreperous majors; a third would be the terror of animal-loving spinsters, who would flee with all their cats and dogs before him. Short of sheer literal anarchy, therefore, it seems plain that the Eugenist must find some authority other than his own implied personality. He must, once and for all, learn the lesson which is hardest for him and me and for all our fallen race—the fact that he is only himself.

We now pass from mere individual men who obviously cannot be trusted, even if they are individual medical men, with such despotism over their neighbours; and we come to consider whether the Eugenists have at all clearly traced any more imaginable public authority, any apparatus of great experts or great examinations to which such risks of tyranny could be trusted. They are not very precise about this either; indeed, the great difficulty I have throughout in considering what are the Eugenist's proposals is that they do not seem to know themselves. Some philosophic attitude which I cannot myself connect with human reason seems to make them actually proud of the dimness of their definitions and the uncompleteness of their plans. The Eugenic optimism seems to partake generally of the nature of that dazzled and confused confidence, so common in private theatricals, that it will be all right on the night. They have all the ancient despotism, but none of the ancient dogmatism. If they are ready to reproduce the secrecies and cruelties of the Inquisition, at least we cannot accuse them of offending us with any of that close and complicated thought, that arid and exact logic which narrowed the minds of the Middle Ages; they have discovered how to combine the hardening of the heart with a sympathetic softening of the head. Nevertheless, there is one large, though vague, idea of the Eugenists, which is an idea, and which we reach when we reach this problem of a more general supervision.

It was best presented perhaps by the distinguished doctor who wrote the article on these matters in that composite book which Mr. Wells edited, and called "The Great State." He said the doctor should no longer be a mere plasterer of paltry maladies, but should be, in his own words, "the health adviser of the community." The same can be expressed with even more point and simplicity in the proverb that prevention is better than cure. Commenting on this, I said that it amounted to treating all people who are well as if they were ill. This the writer admitted to be true, only adding that everyone is ill. To which I rejoin that if everyone is ill the health adviser is ill too, and therefore cannot know how to cure that minimum of illness. This is the fundamental fallacy in the whole business of preventive medicine. Prevention is not better than cure. Cutting off a man's head is not better than curing his headache; it is not even better than failing to cure it. And it is the same if a man is in revolt, even a morbid revolt. Taking the heart out of him by slavery is not better than leaving the heart in him, even if you leave it a broken heart. Prevention is not only not better than cure; prevention is even worse than disease. Prevention means being an invalid for life, with the extra exasperation of being quite well. I will ask God, but certainly not man, to prevent me in all my doings. But the decisive and discussable form of this is well summed up in that phrase about the health adviser of society. I am sure that those who speak thus have something in their minds larger and more illuminating than the other two propositions we have considered. They do not mean that all citizens should decide, which would mean merely the present vague and dubious balance. They do not mean that all medical men should decide, which would mean a much more unbalanced balance. They mean that a few men might be found who had a consistent scheme and vision of a healthy nation, as Napoleon had a consistent scheme and vision of an army. It is cold anarchy to say that all men are to meddle in all men's marriages. It is cold anarchy to say that any doctor may seize and segregate anyone he likes. But it is not anarchy to say that a few great hygienists might enclose or limit the life of all citizens, as nurses do with a family of children. It is not anarchy, it is tyranny; but tyranny is a workable thing. When we ask by what process such men could be certainly chosen, we are back again on the old dilemma of despotism, which means a man, or democracy which means men, or aristocracy which means favouritism. But as a vision the thing is plausible and even rational. It is rational, and it is wrong.

It is wrong, quite apart from the suggestion that an expert on health cannot be chosen. It is wrong because an expert on health cannot exist. An expert on disease can exist, for the very reason we have already considered in the case of madness, because experts can only arise out of exceptional things. A parallel with any of the other learned professions will make the point plain. If I am prosecuted for trespass, I will ask my solicitor which of the local lanes I am forbidden to walk in. But if my solicitor, having gained my case, were so elated that he insisted on settling what lanes I should walk in; if he asked me to let him map out all my country walks, because he was the perambulatory adviser of the community—then that solicitor would solicit in vain. If he will insist on walking behind me through woodland ways, pointing out with his walking-stick likely avenues and attractive short-cuts, I shall turn on him with passion, saying: "Sir, I pay you to know one particular puzzle in Latin and Norman-French, which they call the law of England; and you do know the law of England. I have never had any earthly reason to suppose that you know England. If you did, you would leave a man alone when he was looking at it." As are the limits of the lawyer's special knowledge about walking, so are the limits of the doctor's. If I fall over the stump of a tree and break my leg, as is likely enough, I shall say to the lawyer, "Please go and fetch the doctor." I shall do it because the doctor really has a larger knowledge of a narrower area. There are only a certain number of ways in which a leg can be broken; I know none of them, and he knows all of them. There is such a thing as being a specialist in broken legs. There is no such thing as being a specialist in legs. When unbroken, legs are a matter of taste. If the doctor has really mended my leg, he may merit a colossal equestrian statue on the top of an eternal tower of brass. But if the doctor has really mended my leg he has no more rights over it. He must not come and teach me how to walk; because he and I learnt that in the same school, the nursery. And there is no more abstract likelihood of the doctor walking more elegantly than I do than there is of the barber or the bishop or the burglar walking more elegantly than I do. There cannot be a general specialist; the specialist can have no kind of authority, unless he has avowedly limited his range. There cannot be such a thing as the health adviser of the community, because there cannot be such a thing as one who specialises in the universe.



Thus when Dr. Saleeby says that a young man about to be married should be obliged to produce his health-book as he does his bank-book, the expression is neat; but it does not convey the real respects in which the two things agree, and in which they differ. To begin with, of course, there is a great deal too much of the bank-book for the sanity of our commonwealth; and it is highly probable that the health-book, as conducted in modern conditions, would rapidly become as timid, as snobbish, and as sterile as the money side of marriage has become. In the moral atmosphere of modernity the poor and the honest would probably get as much the worst of it if we fought with health-books as they do when we fight with bank-books. But that is a more general matter; the real point is in the difference between the two. The difference is in this vital fact: that a monied man generally thinks about money, whereas a healthy man does not think about health. If the strong young man cannot produce his health-book, it is for the perfectly simple reason that he has not got one. He can mention some extraordinary malady he has; but every man of honour is expected to do that now, whatever may be the decision that follows on the knowledge.

Health is simply Nature, and no naturalist ought to have the impudence to understand it. Health, one may say, is God; and no agnostic has any right to claim His acquaintance. For God must mean, among other things, that mystical and multitudinous balance of all things, by which they are at least able to stand up straight and endure; and any scientist who pretends to have exhausted this subject of ultimate sanity, I will call the lowest of religious fanatics. I will allow him to understand the madman, for the madman is an exception. But if he says he understands the sane man, then he says he has the secret of the Creator. For whenever you and I feel fully sane, we are quite incapable of naming the elements that make up that mysterious simplicity. We can no more analyse such peace in the soul than we can conceive in our heads the whole enormous and dizzy equilibrium by which, out of suns roaring like infernos and heavens toppling like precipices, He has hanged the world upon nothing.

We conclude, therefore, that unless Eugenic activity be restricted to monstrous things like mania, there is no constituted or constitutable authority that can really over-rule men in a matter in which they are so largely on a level. In the matter of fundamental human rights, nothing can be above Man, except God. An institution claiming to come from God might have such authority; but this is the last claim the Eugenists are likely to make. One caste or one profession seeking to rule men in such matters is like a man's right eye claiming to rule him, or his left leg to run away with him. It is madness. We now pass on to consider whether there is really anything in the way of Eugenics to be done, with such cheerfulness as we may possess after discovering that there is nobody to do it.

Den obesvarade utmaningen

Dr. Saleeby did me the honour of referring to me in one of his addresses on this subject, and said that even I cannot produce any but a feeble-minded child from a feeble-minded ancestry. To which I reply, first of all, that he cannot produce a feeble-minded child. The whole point of our contention is that this phrase conveys nothing fixed and outside opinion. There is such a thing as mania, which has always been segregated; there is such a thing as idiotcy, which has always been segregated; but feeble-mindedness is a new phrase under which you might segregate anybody. It is essential that this fundamental fallacy in the use of statistics should be got somehow into the modern mind. Such people must be made to see the point, which is surely plain enough, that it is useless to have exact figures if they are exact figures about an inexact phrase. If I say, "There are five fools in Acton," it is surely quite clear that, though no mathematician can make five the same as four or six, that will not stop you or anyone else from finding a few more fools in Acton. Now weak-mindedness, like folly, is a term divided from madness in this vital manner—that in one sense it applies to all men, in another to most men, in another to very many men, and so on. It is as if Dr. Saleeby were to say, "Vanity, I find, is undoubtedly hereditary. Here is Mrs. Jones, who was very sensitive about her sonnets being criticised, and I found her little daughter in a new frock looking in the glass. The experiment is conclusive, the demonstration is complete; there in the first generation is the artistic temperament—that is vanity; and there in the second generation is dress—and that is vanity." We should answer, "My friend, all is vanity, vanity and vexation of spirit—especially when one has to listen to logic of your favourite kind. Obviously all human beings must value themselves; and obviously there is in all such valuation an element of weakness, since it is not the valuation of eternal justice. What is the use of your finding by experiment in some people a thing we know by reason must be in all of them?"

Here it will be as well to pause a moment and avert one possible misunderstanding. I do not mean that you and I cannot and do not practically see and personally remark on this or that eccentric or intermediate type, for which the word "feeble-minded" might be a very convenient word, and might correspond to a genuine though indefinable fact of experience. In the same way we might speak, and do speak, of such and such a person being "mad with vanity" without wanting two keepers to walk in and take the person off. But I ask the reader to remember always that I am talking of words, not as they are used in talk or novels, but as they will be used, and have been used, in warrants and certificates, and Acts of Parliament. The distinction between the two is perfectly clear and practical. The difference is that a novelist or a talker can be trusted to try and hit the mark; it is all to his glory that the cap should fit, that the type should be recognised; that he should, in a literary sense, hang the right man. But it is by no means always to the interests of governments or officials to hang the right man. The fact that they often do stretch words in order to cover cases is the whole foundation of having any fixed laws or free institutions at all. My point is not that I have never met anyone whom I should call feeble-minded, rather than mad or imbecile. My point is that if I want to dispossess a nephew, oust a rival, silence a blackmailer, or get rid of an importunate widow, there is nothing in logic to prevent my calling them feeble-minded too. And the vaguer the charge is the less they will be able to disprove it.


One does not, as I have said, need to deny heredity in order to resist such legislation, any more than one needs to deny the spiritual world in order to resist an epidemic of witch-burning. I admit there may be such a thing as hereditary feeble-mindedness; I believe there is such a thing as witchcraft. Believing that there are spirits, I am bound in mere reason to suppose that there are probably evil spirits; believing that there are evil spirits, I am bound in mere reason to suppose that some men grow evil by dealing with them. All that is mere rationalism; the superstition (that is the unreasoning repugnance and terror) is in the person who admits there can be angels but denies there can be devils. The superstition is in the person who admits there can be devils but denies there can be diabolists. Yet I should certainly resist any effort to search for witches, for a perfectly simple reason, which is the key of the whole of this controversy. The reason is that it is one thing to believe in witches, and quite another to believe in witch-smellers. I have more respect for the old witch-finders than for the Eugenists, who go about persecuting the fool of the family; because the witch-finders, according to their own conviction, ran a risk. Witches were not the feeble-minded, but the strong-minded—the evil mesmerists, the rulers of the elements. Many a raid on a witch, right or wrong, seemed to the villagers who did it a righteous popular rising against a vast spiritual tyranny, a papacy of sin. Yet we know that the thing degenerated into a rabid and despicable persecution of the feeble or the old. It ended by being a war upon the weak. It ended by being what Eugenics begins by being.

When I said above that I believed in witches, but not in witch-smellers, I stated my full position about that conception of heredity, that half-formed philosophy of fears and omens; of curses and weird recurrence and darkness and the doom of blood, which, as preached to humanity to-day, is often more inhuman than witchcraft itself. I do not deny that this dark element exists; I only affirm that it is dark; or, in other words, that its most strenuous students are evidently in the dark about it. I would no more trust Dr. Karl Pearson on a heredity-hunt than on a heresy-hunt. I am perfectly ready to give my reasons for thinking this; and I believe any well-balanced person, if he reflects on them, will think as I do. There are two senses in which a man may be said to know or not know a subject. I know the subject of arithmetic, for instance; that is, I am not good at it, but I know what it is. I am sufficiently familiar with its use to see the absurdity of anyone who says, "So vulgar a fraction cannot be mentioned before ladies," or "This unit is Unionist, I hope." Considering myself for one moment as an arithmetician, I may say that I know next to nothing about my subject: but I know my subject. I know it in the street. There is the other kind of man, like Dr. Karl Pearson, who undoubtedly knows a vast amount about his subject; who undoubtedly lives in great forests of facts concerning kinship and inheritance. But it is not, by any means, the same thing to have searched the forests and to have recognised the frontiers. Indeed, the two things generally belong to two very different types of mind. I gravely doubt whether the Astronomer-Royal would write the best essay on the relations between astronomy and astrology. I doubt whether the President of the Geographical Society could give the best definition and history of the words "geography" and "geology."

Now the students of heredity, especially, understand all of their subject except their subject. They were, I suppose, bred and born in that brier-patch, and have really explored it without coming to the end of it. That is, they have studied everything but the question of what they are studying. Now I do not propose to rely merely on myself to tell them what they are studying. I propose, as will be seen in a moment, to call the testimony of a great man who has himself studied it. But to begin with, the domain of heredity (for those who see its frontiers) is a sort of triangle, enclosed on its three sides by three facts. The first is that heredity undoubtedly exists, or there would be no such thing as a family likeness, and every marriage might suddenly produce a small negro. The second is that even simple heredity can never be simple; its complexity must be literally unfathomable, for in that field fight unthinkable millions. But yet again it never is simple heredity: for the instant anyone is, he experiences. The third is that these innumerable ancient influences, these instant inundations of experiences, come together according to a combination that is unlike anything else on this earth. It is a combination that does combine. It cannot be sorted out again, even on the Day of Judgment. Two totally different people have become in the sense most sacred, frightful, and unanswerable, one flesh. If a golden-haired Scandinavian girl has married a very swarthy Jew, the Scandinavian side of the family may say till they are blue in the face that the baby has his mother's nose or his mother's eyes. They can never be certain the black-haired Bedouin is not present in every feature, in every inch. In the person of the baby he may have gently pulled his wife's nose. In the person of the baby he may have partly blacked his wife's eyes.

Those are the three first facts of heredity. That it exists; that it is subtle and made of a million elements; that it is simple, and cannot be unmade into those elements. To summarise: you know there is wine in the soup. You do not know how many wines there are in the soup, because you do not know how many wines there are in the world. And you never will know, because all chemists, all cooks, and all common-sense people tell you that the soup is of such a sort that it can never be chemically analysed. That is a perfectly fair parallel to the hereditary element in the human soul. There are many ways in which one can feel that there is wine in the soup, as in suddenly tasting a wine specially favoured; that corresponds to seeing suddenly flash on a young face the image of some ancestor you have known. But even then the taster cannot be certain he is not tasting one familiar wine among many unfamiliar ones—or seeing one known ancestor among a million unknown ancestors. Another way is to get drunk on the soup, which corresponds to the case of those who say they are driven to sin and death by hereditary doom. But even then the drunkard cannot be certain it was the soup, any more than the traditional drunkard who is certain it was the salmon.

Those are the facts about heredity which anyone can see. The upshot of them is not only that a miss is as good as a mile, but a miss is as good as a win. If the child has his parents' nose (or noses) that may be heredity. But if he has not, that may be heredity too. And as we need not take heredity lightly because two generations differ—so we need not take heredity a scrap more seriously because two generations are similar. The thing is there, in what cases we know not, in what proportion we know not, and we cannot know.

Now it is just here that the decent difference of function between Dr. Saleeby's trade and mine comes in. It is his business to study human health and sickness as a whole, in a spirit of more or less enlightened guesswork; and it is perfectly natural that he should allow for heredity here, there, and everywhere, as a man climbing a mountain or sailing a boat will allow for weather without even explaining it to himself. An utterly different attitude is incumbent on any conscientious man writing about what laws should be enforced or about how commonwealths should be governed. And when we consider how plain a fact is murder, and yet how hesitant and even hazy we all grow about the guilt of a murderer, when we consider how simple an act is stealing, and yet how hard it is to convict and punish those rich commercial pirates who steal the most, when we consider how cruel and clumsy the law can be even about things as old and plain as the Ten Commandments—I simply cannot conceive any responsible person proposing to legislate on our broken knowledge and bottomless ignorance of heredity.

But though I have to consider this dull matter in its due logical order, it appears to me that this part of the matter has been settled, and settled in a most masterly way, by somebody who has infinitely more right to speak on it than I have. Our press seems to have a perfect genius for fitting people with caps that don't fit; and affixing the wrong terms of eulogy and even the wrong terms of abuse. And just as people will talk of Bernard Shaw as a naughty winking Pierrot, when he is the last great Puritan and really believes in respectability; just as (si parva licet etc.) they will talk of my own paradoxes, when I pass my life in preaching that the truisms are true; so an enormous number of newspaper readers seem to have it fixed firmly in their heads that Mr. H.G. Wells is a harsh and horrible Eugenist in great goblin spectacles, who wants to put us all into metallic microscopes and dissect us with metallic tools. As a matter of fact, of course, Mr. Wells, so far from being too definite, is generally not definite enough. He is an absolute wizard in the appreciation of atmospheres and the opening of vistas; but his answers are more agnostic than his questions. His books will do everything except shut. And so far from being the sort of man who would stop a man from propagating, he cannot even stop a full stop. He is not Eugenic enough to prevent the black dot at the end of a sentence from breeding a line of little dots.

But this is not the clear-cut blunder of which I spoke. The real blunder is this. Mr. Wells deserves a tiara of crowns and a garland of medals for all kinds of reasons. But if I were restricted, on grounds of public economy, to giving Mr. Wells only one medal ob cives servatos, I would give him a medal as the Eugenist who destroyed Eugenics. For everyone spoke of him, rightly or wrongly, as a Eugenist; and he certainly had, as I have not, the training and type of culture required to consider the matter merely in a biological and not in a generally moral sense. 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. I do mean that the leading Eugenists write as if this challenge had never been offered. The gauntlet lies unlifted on the ground.



Having given honour for the idea where it is due, I may be permitted to summarise it myself for the sake of brevity. Mr. Wells' point was this. That we cannot be certain about the inheritance of health, because health is not a quality. It is not a thing like darkness in the hair or length in the limbs. It is a relation, a balance. You have a tall, strong man; but his very strength depends on his not being too tall for his strength. You catch a healthy, full-blooded fellow; but his very health depends on his being not too full of blood. A heart that is strong for a dwarf will be weak for a giant; a nervous system that would kill a man with a trace of a certain illness will sustain him to ninety if he has no trace of that illness. Nay, the same nervous system might kill him if he had an excess of some other comparatively healthy thing. Seeing, therefore, that there are apparently healthy people of all types, it is obvious that if you mate two of them, you may even then produce a discord out of two inconsistent harmonies. It is obvious that you can no more be certain of a good offspring than you can be certain of a good tune if you play two fine airs at once on the same piano. You can be even less certain of it in the more delicate case of beauty, of which the Eugenists talk a great deal. Marry two handsome people whose noses tend to the aquiline, and their baby (for all you know) may be a goblin with a nose like an enormous parrot's. Indeed, I actually know a case of this kind. The Eugenist has to settle, not the result of fixing one steady thing to a second steady thing; but what will happen when one toppling and dizzy equilibrium crashes into another.

This is the interesting conclusion. It is on this degree of knowledge that we are asked to abandon the universal morality of mankind. When we have stopped the lover from marrying the unfortunate woman he loves, when we have found him another uproariously healthy female whom he does not love in the least, even then we have no logical evidence that the result may not be as horrid and dangerous as if he had behaved like a man of honour.