Introduction

This book is an account of the eugenics movement in Britain. It is centred mainly on the Eugenics Society, founded in 1907 as the Eugenics Education Society, with the purpose of promoting, to paraphrase Francis Galton, those agencies under social control which might improve the human race. As this definition shows, its interests lay both in human biology and in social problems. Its members were mainly either biological or social scientists, with a proportion of social activists who were not scientists, but who found its social goals important enough to devote themselves to the Society and the eugenics movement.