illegitimacy laws or any organized effort toward defending the unmarried
mother."
This peculiarly Victorian reticence may be inherited from the founder of
Eugenics. Galton declared that the "Bohemian" element in the Anglo-Saxon
race is destined to perish, and "the sooner it goes, the happier for
mankind." The trouble with any effort of trying to divide humanity
into the "fit" and the "unfit," is that we do not want, as H. G. Wells
recently pointed out,(5) to breed for uniformity but for variety. "We
want statesmen and poets and musicians and philosophers and strong
men and delicate men and brave men. The qualities of one would be the
weaknesses of the other." We want, most of all, genius.
Proscription on Galtonian lines would tend to eliminate many of the
great geniuses of the world who were not only "Bohemian," but actually
and pathologically abnormal--men like Rousseau, Dostoevsky, Chopin, Poe,
Schumann, Nietzsche, Comte, Guy de Maupassant,--and how many others?
But such considerations should not lead us into error of concluding that
such men were geniuses merely because they were pathological specimens,
and that the only way to produce a genius is to breed disease and
defect. It only emphasizes the dangers of external standards of "fit"
and "unfit."
These limitations are more strikingly shown in the types of so-called
"eugenic" legislation passed or proposed by certain enthusiasts.
Regulation, compulsion and prohibitions affected and enacted by
political bodies are the surest methods of driving the whole problem
under-ground. As Havelock Ellis has pointed out, the absurdity and even
hopelessness of effecting Eugenic improvement by placing on the statute
books prohibitions of legal matrimony to certain classes of people,
reveal the weakness of those Eugenists who minimize or undervalue the
importance of environment as a determining factor. They affirm that
heredity is everything and environment nothing, yet forget that it is
precisely those who are most universally subject to bad environment who
procreate most copiously, most recklessly and most disastrously. Such
marriage laws are based for the most part on the infantile assumption
that procreation is absolutely dependent upon the marriage ceremony,
an assumption usually coupled with the complementary one that the only
purpose in marriage is procreation. Yet it is a fact so obvious that it
is hardly worth stating that the most fertile classes who indulge in the
most dysgenic type of procreating--the feeble-minded--are almost totally
unaffected by marriage laws and marriage-ceremonies.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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