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
has been an admission of unaccomplished desires, the reason must be
ascribed to the limited scope of the inquiry. The nation has to take
itself seriously in hand. We need to get beyond the citizen of to-day,
we have to consider the citizen of to-morrow.
As to religion, I appeal both to those who love God and to those who
love their fellow-man. It is futile at this time of day to quote
against the living race the dictates of a dead age. It is monstrous
also to slander the noble men and women who are at present engaged in
the secular activities of our Churches by pretending to believe that
they are not most keenly anxious to aid in any uplifting work for the
regeneration of the world. Every institution which is teaching, feeding
or otherwise helping children is a nucleus for Eugenic enterprise.
The neglect of Eugenics in the last generation has clogged the wheels
of progress in this generation. We cannot and must not forget the
victims of our national neglect, but we can do greatest honour to
our philanthropists and workers for the general uplift by seriously
endeavouring to eliminate from the coming generation the hopelessly
unfit and by encouraging the multiplication of the efficient.
There is no immorality in our proposals, as a glance at these pages
will abundantly prove. The Family of the future is going to be sweeter,
purer and nobler. It may even be more numerous, for while Eugenists
resolutely set themselves to discourage the national burdening by
debt, danger and decay which inevitably follow in the footsteps of
a deteriorating race, we have nevertheless no opinions whatever as
to whether a numerically large or small family is best. Race suicide
is no worse than race murder. We cannot imagine a nobler sight than
an enormous and increasing race of the vitally fit. A temporary
and deliberate discouragement of certain unwelcome elements may be
momentarily embarrassing, but this is only half the story. Our ports
of entry are firmly closed in the face of undesirable aliens, not for
the purpose of reducing our population, far from it. Our stability,
our greatness, our very existence depend on the success with which we
have attracted to our shores those immigrants whose children to-day
are our boast and pride. Eugenics, it cannot be too often said, is no
mere phase of Malthusianism. It is not _a_ population question it is
_the_ population question. It dismisses Malthus as a spent force, as a
prophet whose message was only half delivered, as a Jeremiah who would
have deprived the world of its saviours as well as of its betrayers.
Of Malthus it may truly be said that in forbidding those who would
"wade through slaughter to a throne" he "shut the gates of mercy on
mankind." No philosophy to-day can meet the needs of to-day if it
indiscriminately decreases both. Both methods are evil. We must weigh
as well as count. The Sphinx of civilisation sits waiting our answer to
her riddle. We have mingled the seeds of evil with the seeds of good.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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