Race Improvement; or, Eugenics: A Little Book on a Great SubjectBaker, La Reine Helen McKenzie
Philosophy
Race Improvement; or, Eugenics: A Little Book on a Great Subject
Baker, La Reine Helen McKenzie
Eugenics
direct bearing on any human need.
I deny that people do not care what becomes of the race. There never
has been a time in the history of the world when parents would not
rather have a healthy progeny than an unhealthy. The nation would
always prefer to be able to boast of improvement instead of blushing
for its deteriorating citizenship. As long as Mothers love their own
young and as long as the average man sympathises with undeserved
suffering there will be perpetual possibilities for rousing interest in
the most promising of all sciences, Eugenics.
Eugenics is a word invented by Francis Galton to cover the philosophy,
collection of facts, the science, whatever we can call it, which
regards race improvement as a desirable and practicable process.
Stirpiculture is an older word for a similar idea. New descriptive or
misleading phrases will be invented from time to time, sometimes by
friends, sometimes by enemies of the movement. It may be well from
the first to clear away some misinterpretations. Accusations against
new ideas commonly take the form of attempting to show that the new
and possibly good idea is irretrievably committed to some other idea,
generally an older and discredited one. It is the universal rule,
particularly in Anglo-Saxon countries, to regard sex-relationships as
so sacrosanct that merely to mention them is to outrage modesty and
shock morality. Fortunately or otherwise we have had to overcome this
silly secretiveness. The horrible white-slave traffic, the loathsome
increase of venereal diseases, the frequent revelations such as the
Thaw case forced on the public, the necessity for protecting children
from outrage--all these and other things have made not only possible
but obviously desirable that decency, wisdom and humanity should make
their voice heard. The time has come when we will not tolerate the
daily scandal of having our newspapers polluted with details of sexual
abnormalities while we are refused the opportunity of educating the
people in the direction of purity, health, and efficiency in the
sexual relation. Eugenics is concerned primarily and materially with
the normal sex relationship, which in modern civilised lands means the
ordinary legal monogamic marriage. It is perfectly true that there
have been pioneer reformers, to whom the world owes much who have
linked their ideals of race improvement to an advocacy of freer sex
relationships. Modern eugenists have no such divided council. They
aim at encouraging the best births and discouraging the worst, and
all details of their propaganda must be subordinate to this great
aspiration. Seeing then that through monogamic marriage the Anglo-Saxon
race must overwhelmingly flow now and in all the sighted future, we
resolutely direct our attention to this institution as we find it.
On the lines of which the race has approved we shall proceed for our
reforms. The United States great in a thousand ways, although often the
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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