ABSTRACT
Eugenics is the attempt to improve the biological character of a breed by deliberate methods adopted to that end. The ideas upon which it is based are Darwinian, and, appropriately enough, the President of the Eugenics Society is a son of Charles Darwin; but the more immediate progenitor of eugenic ideas was Francis Galton, who strongly emphasised the hereditary factor in human achievement. In our day, especially in America, heredity has become a party question. American Conservatives maintain that the finished character of a grown man is mainly due to congenital characteristics, while American Radicals maintain, on the contrary, that education is everything and heredity nothing. I cannot agree with either of these two extreme positions, nor with the premise which they share and which gives rise to their opposite prejudices, namely that Italians, South Slavs, and such are inferior, as finished products, to the native-born American of the Ku Klux Klan. No data exist as yet for determining, in regard to human mental capacity, what part is due to heredity and what to education. If the matter were to be scientifically determined,
it would be necessary to take thousands of pairs of identical twins, separate them at birth, and educate them in ways as widely divergent as possible. At present, however, this experiment is not practicable. My own belief, which I confess to be unscientific and based merely upon impressions, is that, while anybody can be ruined by a bad education, and in fact almost everybody is, only people with certain native aptitudes can achieve great excellence in various directions. I do not believe that any degree of education would turn the average boy into a first-class pianist; I do not believe that the best school in the world could turn us all into Einsteins; I do not believe that Napoleon was not superior in native endowment to his schoolfellows at Brienne, and had merely learned strategy through watching his mother manage her brood of unruly sons. I am convinced that in such cases, and to a lesser degree in all cases of ability, there is a native aptitude which causes education to produce better results than it does with average material. There are, indeed, obvious facts which point to this conclusion, such as that one can generally tell whether a man is a clever man or a fool by the shape of his head, which can hardly be regarded as a characteristic conferred by education. Then again, consider the opposite extreme, that of idiocy, imbecility, and feeblemindedness. Not even the most fanatical opponent of eugenics denies that idiocy is, at any rate in most cases, congenital, and to any person with a feeling for statistical symmetry, this implies that at the opposite end also there will be a corresponding percentage of persons with abnormally great capacity. I shall therefore assume without more ado that human beings differ in regard to congenital mental capacity. I shall assume also, what is perhaps more dubious, that clever people are preferable to their opposite. These two points being conceded, the foundations are laid for the eugenists’ case. We must not, therefore, pooh-pooh the whole position, whatever we may think of some of the details in certain of its advocates.
