A whole culture of scientific genocide directed and targeted towards certain groups of individuals of whom the world's most powerful and elite willfully decided upon their own to make it their goal to eliminate from world, these specific groups of individuals.

THE GROUNDWORK OF EUGENICS. Does a real biological science of the evolution of human societies exist ? This is the problem foremost in the minds of many thinkers to-day, and likely in the near future to force itself irresistibly on the attention not only of statesmen, but of all who have the national welfare at heart. Can we place ourselves outside the community of which we form a part, and study the effects upon it of environ- ment, of occupation, of nourishment and of breeding in the same judicial manner as the owner of a herd of shorthorns approaches the like problems? The question cannot be answered with a light ' Yes ' or ' No ' according to the taste or sentiment of the respondent. We are not in the position of the owner, but we are members of the herd ourselves — with all the feelings of our class, the prejudices of our edu- cation or want of education, the strong emotions of our sex, and the complex passions of our race and stock. We cannot make direct experiments on our fellow-men, and study train- ing and nurture and parentage as it is possible for the owner of a thoroughbred stud to do. Yet if these admitted diffi- culties forced us to answer ' No ' to our question, they would equally compel us to deny the possibility of a real study of medicine. The clinical ward, the post-mortem room, the pathological laboratory, the asylum and the sanatorium — nay, the bared soul as well as the bared body of many a private patient — compel the higher type of medical man, who is ever student as well as adviser, to repress sternly the A 2 4 THE GROUNDWORK OF EUGENICS personal and place himself outside the herd for the further- ance of his science and the effectiveness of his craft. To him also social conditions render direct experiment largely impracticable. He can only seek for and may pos- sibly discover a group of his fellows, who are making the required experiment on their own initiative. But such is the great variety of human conduct and taste, such the extent of human blindness and folly, that it is possible with time and energy to discover and observe groups of individuals making most of the experiments, that the student of medicine or eugenics might wish to institute had he the aloofness of a superman controlling a herd of men. Man himself makes the experiments which are directly impossible for the eugenist. This stock marries kin for six generations ; those parents surfeit themselves with alcohol ; there the tuberculous taint meets insanity ; here the man of genius marries into his class ; there he takes a woman of the people. There is hardly a phase of nurture and of environ- ment, or of parentage and of ancestry which cannot be followed up, — not in a single experiment, but in repeated experiments, — if the time and energy to investigate are forthcoming. The science of eugenics does not propose to experiment on man ; it endeavours to lay before us the results of man's experiments on himself, and this in such numerous cases that the evidence must carry with it conviction. Our object is to form an analytical record of man's experiments on himself, to draw from the history of his successes and failures the biological laws which govern his social development, and upon the basis of the knowledge thus gained to predict what lines of conduct foster, what lines check national wel- fare. Conduct may be enforced by a social or by a legal sanction. The possibilities of enforcing conduct by such THE GROUNDWORK OF EUGENICS 5 sanctions form the subject of 'Practical Eugenics,' which I shall exclude entirely front consideration in this lecture. It can only be properly discussed after we have rrieasured the present state of our knowledge, and are able to estimate its relation to our existing social organisation. Before discussing practical eugenics we must know the relative weight of nature and nurture, of heredity and race, of environment and training. These are wide subjects, on which at present — even if we confine our attention to man — we have only partial knowledge. Some phases of what we do know will be discussed in the later lectures, and when these are con- cluded we can return with greater fitness to what is feasible in practical eugenics. Meanwhile I return to my point that, while the student of eugenics can make no direct experiments on man, he can observe those experiments which mankind is every day on so vast a scale making upon itself. And he has to observe those experiments in the calm scientific manner of the physician in his clinic ; he must not be led away to immedi- ate action by the first individual case, which appeals to his sympathy and emotions. The general rule can only be learnt when the statistics of many individual cases have been dealt with. Each characteristic, each virtue and each vice is protean in its forms, and not until we have massed case upon case in our experience can we deduce the general drift of the whole series. I would illustrate this by an attempt to consider some of the sources of feeble-mindedness in the children of the industrial classes made to my knowledge quite recently in a large manufacturing town. The family history of several hundred mentally defective children was followed up with considerable energy and success. The result was that a most striking amount of alcoholism was demonstrated to 6 THE GROUNDWORK OF EUGENICS exist in the ancestry, and it was supposed that this investi- gation confirmed the view that alcoholism in the parent was one of the chief sources of mental defect in the children. I suggested that a control series of normal children from the same school districts should also have their family histories worked out ; this was a harder task as the parents naturally resented inquiry, but the result showed a ' striking amount of alcoholism ' in the parents of the normal children ! It would have taken far larger and more detailed data to deter- mine whether the intensity of alcoholism was greater in the ancestry of the mentally defective or in that of the normal children. My informant — a very keen and active social worker — adopted the view that the prevalent alcoholism showed that the whole industrial population of the district was degenerate, and that it was purely the result of chance that some families had and some had not produced mentally defective children. All that had been done was to divide the population into two groups by the presence or absence of children of this character. Now personally I might not be prepared to accept this view; I might argue that alcoholism is a sign, just as much as feeble-mindedness, of mental abnormality and not the cause of the latter. But the important point I want to em- phasise at present is : that we are not compelled because we find alcoholic parents to the feeble-minded to assume that alcohol is the source of feeble-mindedness. It is a very complex statistical problem to determine whether alcoholism is more or less prevalent in the parents of one or other class of children. And had it been determined as more prevalent, it would not follow that alcoholism was the source of the feeble-mindedness ; both may be different manifestations of the same ancestral weakness. You will find this a useful point to bear in mind, when you note how THE GROUNDWORK OF EUGENICS / alcoholism occurs in association with insane, feeble-minded, deaf-mute, criminal and generally defective stocks. But association is not necessarily causation, and we may waste on the fight against alcohol energy which could only destroy the admitted social evils, if it were directed to the ex- termination of the degenerate stocks themselves. I have dwelt somewhat at length on this problem of feeble-minded ness in children and alcoholism in ancestry because it is not only a typical case, but a nationally im- portant case. It is such an easy stage to pass from the inspection of a few individual instances to a state of intense social feeling — to a demand for the use of the axe in the beer saloon — that we want above all things some calm scientific investigation of human society and its biological growth removed from the cries of the market-place and the appeals of political parties. It is on this ground that the study of human society must, I claim, be admitted to an adequate place in the curriculum of our universities. It is not so many years ago since the professor of animal biology and the biological laboratory were unknown to the academic world. Think what that absence meant for the knowledge of living forms — nay, for the general culture of mankind, for it marks a date before Charles Darwin had revolutionised our outlook on life ! Are we to assert that this great biological movement, which has won its way to equal rights in the academic fraternity, is to stop short when it approaches the subject of man as a gregarious animal? Is there no science of those vital factors which may improve or impair, physically or mentally, the racial qualities of future generations? And if there be such a science is it not the first duty of the universities to discover and propound its laws ? Now the genuine man of science will never admit that 8 THE GROUNDWORK OF EUGENICS any portion of nature, that any group of mental or physical phenomena is anoDiic, or without definite and discoverable sequences. We do not despair of meteorology because the method or the man that will make it a fairly precise science is yet in the seeking. Astronomy sprang triumphant from astrology, and the great Kepler himself, son of a woman tried for witchcraft, started life by writing horoscopes. It would be as reasonable to throw alchemy and Paracelsus in the balance against modern chemical science, as to assert that we must measure the possibilities of a study of human society to-day by the sociology of yesterday and the social science of the day before. The difference is great and it is threefold. In the first place it is a difference of mental training and intellectual attitude. It is the difference between the student of human- ities and the student of science.