Eugenics and Other EvilsChesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith)
Philosophy
Eugenics and Other Evils
Chesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith)
Eugenics
Round about the year 1913 Eugenics was turned from a fad to a fashion.
Then, if I may so summarise the situation, the joke began in earnest.
The organising mind which we have seen considering the problem of slum
population, the popular material and the possibility of protests, felt
that the time had come to open the campaign. Eugenics began to appear
in big headlines in the daily Press, and big pictures in the
illustrated papers. A foreign gentleman named Bolce, living at
Hampstead, was advertised on a huge scale as having every intention of
being the father of the Superman. It turned out to be a Superwoman,
and was called Eugenette. The parents were described as devoting
themselves to the production of perfect pre-natal conditions. They
"eliminated everything from their lives which did not tend towards
complete happiness." Many might indeed be ready to do this; but in the
voluminous contemporary journalism on the subject I can find no
detailed notes about how it is done. Communications were opened with
Mr. H.G. Wells, with Dr. Saleeby, and apparently with Dr. Karl
Pearson. Every quality desired in the ideal baby was carefully
cultivated in the parents. The problem of a sense of humour was felt
to be a matter of great gravity. The Eugenist couple, naturally
fearing they might be deficient on this side, were so truly scientific
as to have resort to specialists. To cultivate a sense of fun, they
visited Harry Lauder, and then Wilkie Bard, and afterwards George
Robey; but all, it would appear, in vain. To the newspaper reader,
however, it looked as if the names of Metchnikoff and Steinmetz and
Karl Pearson would soon be quite as familiar as those of Robey and
Lauder and Bard. Arguments about these Eugenic authorities, reports of
the controversies at the Eugenic Congress, filled countless columns.
The fact that Mr. Bolce, the creator of perfect pre-natal conditions,
was afterwards sued in a law-court for keeping his own flat in
conditions of filth and neglect, cast but a slight and momentary
shadow upon the splendid dawn of the science. It would be vain to
record any of the thousand testimonies to its triumph. In the nature
of things, this should be the longest chapter in the book, or rather
the beginning of another book. It should record, in numberless
examples, the triumphant popularisation of Eugenics in England. But as
a matter of fact this is not the first chapter but the last. And this
must be a very short chapter, because the whole of this story was cut
short. A very curious thing happened. England went to war.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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