Image from the time.
Posted on 12/29/2008 4:45:27 AM PST by Ethan Clive Osgoode
Exerpts from "The Problem of Race Regeneration", 1911, Moffat, Yard & co., pg. 29-on. Ellis was one of Margaret Sanger's boyfriends. He was a member of the Eugenics Society (when Leonard Darwin was president) and so was she. Ellis wrote books on eugenics and sexology. Through promotion by eugenical societies, the "feeble-minded" movement went international. According to Samuel J. Holmes, as of around 1936 more than 20,000 eugenic sterilizations were performed in the USA and more than 56,000 in Germany.
Havelock Ellis
It is necessary to remember that feeble-mindedness is largely handed on by heredity. It was formerly supposed that idiocy and feeble-mindedness are mainly due to environmental conditions -- to the drink, depravity, general disease, or lack of nutrition of the parents; and a few authorities on the feeble-minded still hold that view. But serious as the results of such bad environmental conditions may be, and frequent as they are in the parentage of the feeble-minded, they do not form the fundamental factor in the production of the feeble-minded, and some scientific authorities even deny that they can produce mental defect in the offspring at all, though that position is doubtless too extreme. Exact investigation is now showing that feeble-mindedness is inherited to an enormous extent. Some years ago Dr. Ashby, speaking from a large experience, estimated that at least 75 per cent, of feeble-minded children are born with an inherited tendency to mental defect. More precise investigation has since shown that this estimate was under the mark.
Not only is feeble-mindedness inherited, and in a much greater degree than has hitherto been suspected even by expert authorities, but the feeble-minded tend to have a much larger number of children than normal people. That, indeed, we might expect, apart altogether from the question of any innate fertility. The feeble-minded have no forethought and no self-restraint. They are not ordinarily capable of resisting their own impulses or the solicitations of others, and they are unable to understand adequately the motives which guide the conduct of ordinary people. The average number of children of feeble-minded people seems to be usually about one-third more than in normal families, and is sometimes very much greater.
Eichholz, another authority on the feeble-minded, found that in one group of defective families about 60 per cent, of the children died young. That is probably an unusually high proportion, and in Eichholz's cases it seems to have been associated with very unusually large families; but the infant mortality in such families is always very high.
This large early mortality of the offspring of the feeble-minded is, however, very far from settling the question of the disposal of the mentally defective, or we should not find large families of them propagated from generation to generation. The large number who die early merely serves, roughly speaking, to reduce the size of the abnormal family to the size of the normal family, and some authorities consider that it scarcely suffices to do this, for we must remember that there is a considerable mortality even in the so-called normal family during early life. Moreover, we have to consider the social disorder and the heavy expense which accompany this large infantile mortality. Illegitimacy is frequently the result of feeble-mindedness since feeble-minded women are peculiarly unable to resist temptation. A great number of such women are continually coming into the workhouses and giving birth to illegitimate children whom they are unable to support, and who often never become capable of supporting themselves, but in their turn tend to produce a new feeble-minded generation, more especially since the men who are attracted to these feeble-minded women are themselves -- according to the generally recognised tendency of the abnormal to be attracted to the abnormal -- feeble-minded or otherwise mentally defective. This is not only the cause of a great burden on the rates, but also a perpetual danger to society and a constant, it may be ever-increasing, depreciation of the quality of the race.
Moreover, by our present methods of charity we increase rather than diminish the evil, for, as Sir Edward Fry has well said, "the beneficence of one generation becomes the burthen and the injury of all succeeding ones." "Vastly more effective than ten million dollars to charity," remarks in the same spirit Dr. Davenport, the Director of the New York Station for Experimental Evolution, "would be ten millions to Eugenics. He who by such a gift should redeem mankind from vice, imbecility, and suffering would be the world's wisest philanthropist." There is no need to put such an expenditure of wealth in opposition to charity. It would be charity, and in accordance with the whole Christian conception and tradition of charity. But it would be charity according to knowledge, charity applied at the right spot, and not merely allowed to run to waste, or, worse, to turn to poison.
But it is not only in themselves that the feeble-minded are a burden on the present generation and a menace to future generations. They are seen to be even a more serious danger when we realise that in large measure they form the reservoir from which the predatory classes are recruited. This is, for instance, the case as regards the fallen. Feeble-minded girls, of fairly high grade, may often be said to be predestined to immorality if left to themselves, not because they are vicious, but because they are weak and have little power of resistance. They cannot properly weigh their actions against the results of their actions; and even if they are intelligent enough to do that, they are still too weak to regulate their actions accordingly. Moreover, even when, as often happens among the high-grade feeble-minded, they are quite able and willing to work, after they have lost their respectability by having a child the opportunities for work become more restricted, and they drift into prostitution. The association between prostitution and feeble-mindedness is intimate. Everywhere, there can be no doubt, a considerable proportion of these women were, at the very outset, in some slight degree feeble-minded, mentally and morally a little blunted through some taint of inheritance.
Criminality, again, is associated with feeble-mindedness in the most intimate way. Not only do criminals tend to belong to large families, but the families that produce feeble-minded offspring also produce criminals, while a certain degree of feeble-mindedness is extremely common among criminals, and the most hopeless and typical, though fortunately rare, kind of criminal, frequently termed a "moral imbecile" is nothing more than a feeble-minded person whose defect is shown not so much in his intelligence as in his feelings and his conduct. Even the possession of a considerable degree of cunning is no evidence against mental defect, but may rather be said to be a sign of it, for it shows an intelligence unable to grasp the wider relations of life and concentrated on the gratification of petty and immediate desires. Thus it happens that the cunning of criminals is frequently associated with almost inconceivable stupidity.
Closely related to the great feeble-minded class, and from time to time falling into crime, are the inmates of workhouses, tramps, and the unemployable. The so-called "able-bodied" inmates of our workhouses are frequently found, on medical examination, to be in more than 50 per cent, cases mentally defective, equally so whether they are men or women. Tramps, by nature and profession, who overlap the workhouse population, and are estimated to number 20,000 to 50,000 in England and Wales, when the genuine unemployed are eliminated, are everywhere found to be a very degenerate class, among whom the most mischievous kinds of feeble-mindedness and mental perversion prevail, as well as the tendency to petty criminality and sometimes to more serious crime. Inebriates the people who are chronically and helplessly given to drink largely belong to the same great family, and do not so much become feeble-minded because they drink, but possess the tendency to drink because they have a strain of feeble-mindedness from birth.
These are the kind of people tramps, prostitutes, paupers, criminals, inebriates, all tending to be born a little defective who largely make up the great degenerate families whose histories are from time to time recorded. Such a family was that of the "Jukes" in America, who, in the course of five generations, produced 709 known descendants who were on the whole unfit for society, and have been a constant danger and burden to society. Yet another such family is that of the "Zeros." Three centuries ago they were highly respectable people living in a Swiss valley. But they intermarried with an insane stock, and subsequently married other women of an unbalanced nature. In recent times 310 members of this family have been studied, and it is found that vagrancy, feeble-mindedness, mental troubles, criminality, pauperism, immorality, are, as it may be termed, their patrimony.
These classes, with their tendency to weak-mindedness, their inborn laziness, lack of vitality, and unfitness for organised activity, contain the people who complain that they are starving for want of work, though they will never perform any work that is given them.
It will be seen that in this sketch of the problem before us in an effort to regenerate the race, much stress is laid on the feeble-minded in the full sense of that term. Little has been said of insanity, which differs from feeble-mindedness by being acquired during life, though nearly always on a basis of inherited weakness. There is a reason for attempting to make this distinction, notwithstanding the fact that in many families feeble-mindedness is found side by side with insanity, and has indeed been said to be the tree upon which most insanities are grafted. Feeble-mindedness is an absolute dead weight on the race; it is an evil that is unmitigated. The heavy and complicated social burdens and injuries it inflicts on the present generation are without compensation, while the unquestionable fact that in all degrees it is highly inheritable renders it a deteriorating poison to the race; it depreciates the whole quality of a people. But insanity is not so fatal, so incurable, so altogether without compensation. The candidates for insanity may never become insane, or, having become insane, they may recover. Such candidates for insanity may be the best of people, above the average in intelligence, in conduct, in ideals; even in their eccentricities they may furnish a necessary element of variety and colour to life. We need not, in- deed, share the fear of those who think that if the insane disappeared or ceased to propagate there would be no more genius. It is certainly true that some men of the highest genius have themselves been on the borderland, and even over the borderland, of insanity, but if rarely or never happens that people of genius spring from parents who were definitely insane. If, however, we wish to attack these problems radically we are wise to concentrate ourselves, in the first place, on the problem of feeble-mindedness.
It is doubtless a significant fact that the districts with a high death-rate are also, as has lately been found, the districts with a high lunacy rate; the selection of death kills off the unfit, but it does not necessarily improve the quality of those it spares; though it seems, at all events, to make a rough attempt to preserve, on the whole, the level of life. But, whatever the exact action of natural selection may be, as soon as we begin to interfere with it and improve the conditions of life, by caring for the unfit, enabling them to survive and to propagate their like -- as they will not fail to do in so far as they belong to unfit stocks -- then we are certainly, without intending it, doing our best to lower the level of life. We increase, or at best retain, the unfit, while at the same time we burden the fit with the task of providing for the unfit. In this way we deteriorate the general quality of life in the next generation, except in so far as our improvement of the environment may enable some to remain fit who under less favourable conditions would join the unfit.
It is now possible for us to realise how the way lies open to the next great forward step in social reform. Our sense of social responsibility is becoming a sense of racial responsibility. It is that enlarged sense of responsibility which renders possible what we call the regeneration of the race.
It is only of recent years that it has been rendered possible. Until lately the methods of propagating the race continued to be the same as those of savages thousands of years ago. Children "came" and their parents disclaimed all responsibility for their coming; the children were sent by God, and if they all turned out to be idiots the responsibility was God's. That is all changed now. We have learnt that in this, as in other matters, the Divine force works through us, and that we are not entitled to cast the burden of our evil actions on to any Higher Power. It is we who are, more immediately, the creators of men. We generate the race; we alone can regenerate the race.
Galton, during the last years of his life, believed that we are approaching a time when eugenic considerations will become a factor of religion, and when our existing religious conceptions will be reinterpreted in the light of a sense of social needs so enlarged as to include the needs of the race which is to come. Certainly, for those who have been taught to believe that man was in the first place created by God, it should not be difficult to realise the Divine nature of the task of human creation which has since been placed in the hands of men, to recognise it as a practical part of religion, and to cherish the sense of its responsibilities.
If our new knowledge in this field is still very imperfect, there is one point concerning which general agreement may be said to be reached, and that is the desirability of breeding out, so far as possible, the feeble-minded. Even the Mendelian students of heredity, who, with considerable reason, regard inheritance as a highly complicated matter, conclude that, at all events, we may feel sure that it will be well, if possible, to eliminate the feeble-minded from the race. No doubt there are some who would regret the disappearance of weak-mindedness with its possibilities of the "divine fool," and so it may be as well to say that there is no chance of eliminating the occasional possibility of imbecility, or allied conditions, as a natural spontaneous variation. It is the feeble-minded families with their complicated and multiform ramifications which we may safely try to root up. That is why on previous pages it has been thought well to exhibit some of these ramifications of feeble-mindedness, and to show how much social and racial damage they cause. If we seek to classify the feeble-minded, taken in the largest mass, with reference not to their forms but to the degree of their mental defectiveness, they may be said (following Damaye's classification) to fall into four groups:
- Complete idiots who live a merely vegetative existence;
- incomplete idiots with few and rudimentary ideas;
- imbeciles, with limited and often perverted ideas, but capable of being taught to read and write; and
- the weak-minded who can be educated to a varying extent by special methods.
The need of confining and caring for the first two classes is fairly clear; the feeble-minded of the third class obviously require special attention because they are capable of being very mischievous. It is the large fourth class which presents the most difficult problem.
A considerable proportion of the higher grade feeble-minded can, with careful training, be taught to earn their living in the world. The bulk of them need to be isolated from the world in special institutions and colonies, where they can to some extent be utilised, where they will do no harm to themselves or others, and be reasonably safe from the risk of propagating their kind. This was the main recommendation of the Royal Commission on the Feeble-Minded in 1908. It will, however, be an expensive and costly measure if carried out on an adequate scale. It must also be remembered that the improved education and training of the hereditary feeble-minded, in order to fit them for some work in the world at large, will not enable them to produce any fitter offspring than if they had remained untaught and untrained. In view of these considerations it seems desirable to supplement the recommendations of the Royal Commission by the adoption of methods for rendering those of the feeble-minded who are free to move about in the world unable to propagate their kind, as can now be done in simple and harmless ways. The feeble-minded, realising their own weakness, are often willing, and even anxious, to be in this way protected against themselves. To make such a practice compulsory, or to apply it to criminals who are not hereditarily feeble-minded, would not only be on many grounds undesirable, but it would unnecessarily discredit the method. It is the more reasonable, as well as the more Christian plan, to allow the unfit to make themselves "eunuchs for the kingdom of Heaven's sake" and not as a punishment.
Even, however, if we confine our preventive methods to the feeble-minded our problem still remains very extensive, for we have to remember that feeble-mindedness accounts for a large part of that burden of pauperism which the gigantic machinery of the Poor Law was devised to deal with, and which a Royal Commission investigated in the most elaborate detail only a few years ago. That Commission, in the ponderous volumes jt produced, set forth some excellent recommendations on matters of detail. But it failed to go to the root of the matter and devised no method for damming the stream of pauperism at its source. The more perfectly the Poor Law machinery works, the more it encourages the evil it seeks to deal with. That is so because of the nature of the human material composing the great bulk of pauperism. It is mentally defective, so that the workhouse (which seems so awful a fate to ordinary poor people) is as welcome to the pauper as the prison often is to the criminal. An investigation not long since carried out at the instance of the Council of the Eugenics Education Society, though not extensive in its scope, perhaps brings us nearer to the remedy for pauperism than ill the elaborate recommendations of the Royal Commissioners. It was found that paupers tend to belong to pauper families, even to the fourth generation, and that they tend to intermarry with pauper families; it was also found that they tend to manifest more or less obvious signs of mental weakness, and the conclusion was inevitable that their hereditary pauperism was based on an inheritance of mental defect. It is obvious that all our philanthropy directed to the present generation only will not remove this kind of pauperism but rather increase it; we need to extend our philanthropy to the generations to come. And if, for instance, we resolved, with all proper precautions, in the case of these defective paupers of the second, third, or later generations, not to give Poor Law relief, except to those who had voluntarily consented, as a condition of such relief, to undergo the preventive surgical treatment referred to , we should be effectively working for the abolition of pauperism.
In these simple and practical ways by specially training the feeble-minded, by confining them in suitable institutions and colonies, and by voluntary sacrifice of procreative power on the part of those who are able to work in the world we shall be able, even in a single generation, largely to remove one of the most serious and burdensome taints in our civilisation, and so mightily work for the regeneration of the race.
In the great garden of life it is not otherwise than in our public gardens. We repress the license of those who, to gratify their own childish or perverted desires, would pluck up the shrubs or trample on the flowers, but in so doing we achieve freedom and joy for all. If in our efforts to better social conditions and to raise the level of the race we seek to cultivate the sense of order, to encourage sympathy and foresight, to pull up racial weeds by the roots, it is not that we may kill freedom and joy, but rather that we may introduce the conditions for securing and increasing freedom and joy. In these matters, indeed, the gardener in his garden is our symbol and our guide. The beginning of the world is figured as an ordered and yet free life of joy in a garden. All our efforts for the regeneration of the race can be but a feeble attempt to bring a little nearer that vision of Paradise.
Thanks for your response
> It should NOT under any circumstances, be forced on us by the government or any other elitist, we-know-what’s-good-for-you-even-if-you-don’t group.
Now that is an interesting twist. You see it as a personal liberties issue, it would seem. That makes sense, and is a natural extension from the Ethics issue.
Fair to say that I learn something new just about every day on the FRee Republic. Today it has been all about Eugenics.
Time spent on this Forum is time well invested.
“These classes... contain the people who complain that they are starving for lack of work, though they will never perform any work that is given them.”
That sentence, or a variation of it, is repeated on FR every week; I hear it daily among business and professional people. The reasons are just as Havelock Ellis stated them: “inborn laziness, lack of vitality, and unfitness for organized activity”.
Some people were meant to live a subsistence existence in an agrarian environment — watching animals, seeing that plants get adequate water, rooting out weeds, doing harvest work. For thousand of years, that is how people lived. The industrial revolution changed all that; unable to adapt (feeble-mindedness?) these people became superfluous. We in civilized Europe and America have provided a safety net of welfare for these people, but what do you do when the economy contracts and these people keep breeding?
The problem is made worse by the fact that large numbers of these people are congregated in cities. A few years ago, I looked at murder statistics for my state. Almost all the murders take place in the most populous counties. Smaller (and much poorer) counties seldom have these crimes. Why?
I don't have a solution. I don't think anybody on earth does. The solutions proposed by Ellis and Sanger, as you point out, led straight to Nazi race theory. However, if you ignore the problem, you get the Paris mobs of the French Revolution, the Bolshevik chaos of 1917, and appeals to disaffected masses in Africa, Asia, Europe, and yes, the United States by Islamofascists (2008).
“Even so, come, Lord Jesus”
Come on, man! "Hereditary pauperism"? Of course it is bad science. Ellis's article should be illustration enough. But read more on it here: Inbred Science
but rather that it is “unethical science” or “evil science” that we as humans oughtn’t to meddle with.
Eugenics poses a problem for Darwinians. Because if one cannot breed humans like dogs to obtain desired breeds (artificial selection), then neither can nature do it by natural selection. So a Darwinian biologist must affirm, in the back of his mind, the scientific validity of eugenics. He may say that it is immoral, or undesirable. Or he may feel that it is desirable, but not politically wise to talk about it. Then there is the type who thinks it is good science and desirable and politically expedient. Richard Dawkins (like Julian Huxley) is that type. He says that we can breed musical geniuses by eugenic selection. He has a heavy ideological commitment to Darwinism, so he has to say that. Because if eugenics is a false science, so is Darwinism.
That is very much an "Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?" statement.
Could the human race, if treated as nothing more than animal stock, be changed through selective breeding? Yes, it certainly could. A lot of genetic problems could be removed by not allowing those who are carriers of them to breed. Similarly, desirable traits could be selectively chosen to be spread more widely or even universally.
The only real problem in that case is that the "breeding stock" has the same lifespan as those making the eugenics decisions. If you are breeding cattle or dogs, you can get a new generation every couple of years or so, thus during a career a breeder can handle a couple dozen generations. You might only get two complete generations during a career of a eugenicist.
However, the morality of it is the primary issue. Who would have the right to tell another whether or not to have children and that some of those children should be killed because they have genetically undesirable traits and society's resources shouldn't be "wasted" on them? Would you trust our current Congressional Clowns to make those decisions? Would you want a Kennedy (or, perhaps worse, a Clinton) deciding on the eugenics goals? Would we be bred for the population's benefit, or only the benefit of those deciding what the breeding goals are?
” If we seek to classify the feeble-minded, taken in the largest mass, with reference not to their forms but to the degree of their mental defectiveness, they may be said (following Damaye’s classification) to fall into four groups:
1. Complete idiots who live a merely vegetative existence;
2. incomplete idiots with few and rudimentary ideas;
3. imbeciles, with limited and often perverted ideas, but capable of being taught to read and write; and
4. the weak-minded who can be educated to a varying extent by special methods.”
I saw this and started categorizing the people I work with...
I had that book out of the library just recently.
How do you know?
Look at the situation in our country right now. Young girls, ages 12, 13, and 14, are rewarded for having babies. These girls are not the brightest, most accomplished in the population.
Anyone who thinks our welfare system is not selectively breeding hasn't looked at the numbers.
>>”Because people are not animals nor a commodity.”<<
People and animals are too a commodity. Who does your taxes? Certainly not a retarded person, I hope. Your choice of the smartest most highly qualified person is yours to make.
As for your statement that animals are not a commodity tells me that you are not a farmer or raise animals for market. ‘High yield’ vegetables have been produced through vast scientific research to give you more for your buck. You'll notice this the next time you go to the store and rummage through the veggies to pick out that certain perfect apple, etc. That apple was genetically bred to give the highest shine, sugar content, taste and appearance to entice you into buying it. Your purchase confirms the grower's assumption and you are then, in turn, condoning the continued genetic creation of the ‘perfect’ apple.
When you go to the market with a sickly steer that was the product of a sickly mother-father you will get less money for your stock. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that this continued behavior will not allow them to remain in farming-ranching business much longer.
Both humans and animals are a commodity. Never look for a potential mate at a free clinic!
Do you mean 'unfit' in the evolutionary sense, i.e., genetically?
We in civilized Europe and America have provided a safety net of welfare for these people, but what do you do when the economy contracts and these people keep breeding?
If you say that these people "breed", then you must mean that they are a genetic or evolutionary variant of man, different from the rest. I.e., they are paupers genetically, and pass down their pauperism genetically. This is much like R.A. Fisher, who argued that upperclass British twits and the lower class are two different evolutionary variants of man. Upon reflecting, do you think any of this is true?
Just because we *can* technically do something doesn’t mean that we *have* to or *ought* to or *must* do it.
That pretty well sums it up, I'd say.
It goes to show the danger of divorcing science from any moral constraints. This is the danger that those who wish to keep *religion* out of science fail to see.
Science can deal with the *can* part. Religion deals with the *ought not to* part.
That's also the crux of the embryonic stem cell research issue. And the euthanasia issue.
I didn’t say that animals aren’t a commodity. Please reread that sentence again, more carefully.
Perhaps it would help if I inserted a comma.....
”Because people are not animals, nor a commodity.”
It’s a compound sentence from:
People are not animals.
People are not a commodity.
Anyway, I think I get what you’re trying to point out about the accountant. But that is not in the sense that I meant.
People are not just breeding stock for the wishes of the few for some unknown purpose. The last thing I want is some power hungry despot deciding who gets to live or die or breed based on their arbitrary standards of what it *best* for humanity.
Because nurture plays such a key role in developing the full potential of the innate intelligence a person is born with, there is no way that anyone can adequately make the judgment of what that potential is when a particular individual is born. Least of all some government politician.
Solzhenitsyn rightly points out that genetics (nature) vs (environment) nurture are two sides of the same materialistic coin. We are supposed to choose one or a mixture of both. However, those of us who believe in a spiritual component to man should reject this false dichotomy.
I agree, but for those who don’t have the concept of the spiritual component, there has to be some way of convincing them.
Look for one in the hog-pen, where the commodities gather.
Some things just have to be rejected. Such as the idea that men have no souls. That is the idea behind nature vs. nurture, and behind the notion that people can be bred like dogs to slobber less, be good around children, and pay their bills on time.
I mean “unfit” in the sense of non-adaptability. A “fit” person adapts to changes. Is this a genetic trait? Nature or nurture? I think both, and that the culture of “the group” reinforces tendencies that are already there.
Notwithstanding all the silly movies that have been put out where an aristocrat marries a pauper and creates children that are good-old-just-like-me-and-you Americans, in general, upper-class British twits tend to marry other upper-class British twits. The lower-class people do likewise. Theodore Dalrymple, one of the best authors writing today, tells tales of these people that would curl your hair.
Different evolutionary variants? I can’t say, because, like everybody else on earth, I don’t know the mix of nature and nurture. Obviously, both play a part. But having observed my children’s and grandchildren’s classmates, I know that you can’t put a quart into a one pint container. What do we do with the one pint containers?
Having read the intervening posts between 30 and 36, I want to say that I believe that the poorest panhandler has a soul that is no more debased than the finest aristocrat. ALL have sinned and come short of the Glory of God.
My points are in reference to sociological and economic problems confronted by all societies.
Image from the time.
Eugenics would only work well if I were King.
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