ABSTRACT
Others were not convinced by this analysis. An increasing emphasis was being placed on what the scientist Sir Francis Galton termed ‘eugenics’, which he defined as ‘the study of the agencies under social control that may improve or impair the racial qualities of future generations either physically or mentally’.4 A Eugenic Education Society was founded in 1907. By 1909, it was producing its own journal, the Eugenics Review. Eugenicists argued that social policies, albeit with the best of intentions, were counterproductive. It was ‘penalizing the fit for the sake of the unfit’. One contemporary suggested that ‘preventive medicine and civilisation between them have already deteriorated in marked degree the healthy vigour of our race . . . the effect
is already discernible – race decay’.5 The remedy was selective breeding. It was argued that, while the prudent, educated middle classes were already using rational means of birth control, the ‘unfit’ were conceiving large numbers of children whom they could not properly maintain and care for and, in simple terms, degenerating the national gene-pool. Meanwhile, ever higher rates and taxes were being demanded of the prudent in order to support the ‘unfit’. The existing trend needed to be reversed.
