What is eugenics? / by Leonard Darwin.

  • Darwin, Leonard, 1850-1943.
Date:
1932
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Credit: What is eugenics? / by Leonard Darwin. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    66 WHAT IS EUGENICS? making for success. These include honesty, industry, per¬ severance, sobriety, intelligence, good-fellowship, strength, and good health. Looking to the mass of mankind, the man who wins his way into a better position generally possesses a considerable balance of good qualities. Good jobs are, it is true, often obtained by favouritism. Much good work is ill paid. And men often fail from want of training or opportunity. These are aU evils against which we must fight, and they are evils which will diminish with any real advance in civilization. A continuous deterioration in the inborn qualities of the people would, however, be certain in time to show itself in a decline in our civilization, and thus put an end to all such hopes. Here again it may be asked, If the differential birth-rate is really producing such harmful effects, why are they not clearly visible ? The reason is that the causes of the harm now being done have been at work for only a comparatively short time, and that the changes for the worse are being produced only very slowly. A century ago there was much less movement up and down between the social classes ; the barriers between them being then much harder to surmount. In recent years great efforts have been made, by the award of scholarships and in other ways, to pick out the best even in the poorest districts, so as to help them to win high wages. The families of the artizan and middle classes were larger half a century ago than they are at present ; whilst in the poorest quarters children were then dying with terrible frequency. The smaller families now being produced by those doing weU-paid work leave more vacancies which can be filled from outside; and to fiH them more persons are available because of the diminished death-rate amongst the poor. We are faced with a new and formidable condition of things ; so new that it is not surprising that no signs of the damage being done are yet clearly visible. If we look far enough into the past, the warnings we may thus obtain are clear enough; for wherever civiliza¬ tion has become very luxurious, it has begun to go down¬ hill. One early sign of this deterioration has been the