Part 1
ESSAYS IN EUGENICS.
BY
SIR FRANCIS GALTON, F.R.S.
London: THE EUGENICS EDUCATION SOCIETY. 1909.
PREFACE.
The following Essays are re-printed in the chronological order of their delivery. They will, therefore, help to show something of the progress of Eugenics during the last few years, and to explain my own views upon its aims and methods, which often have been, and still sometimes are, absurdly misrepresented. The practice of Eugenics has already obtained a considerable hold on popular estimation, and is steadily acquiring the status of a practical question, and not that of a mere vision in Utopia.
The power by which Eugenic reform must chiefly be effected, is that of Popular Opinion, which is amply strong enough for that purpose whenever it shall be roused. Public Opinion has done as much as this on many past occasions and in various countries, of which much evidence is given in the Essay on Restrictions in Marriage. It is now ordering our acts more intimately than we are apt to suspect, because the dictates of Public Opinion become so thoroughly assimilated that they seem to be original and individual to those who are guided by them. By comparing the current ideas at widely different epochs and under widely different civilizations we are able to ascertain what part of our convictions is really innate and permanent, and what part has been acquired and is transient.
It is above all things needful for the successful progress of Eugenics that its advocates should move discreetly and claim no more efficacy on its behalf than the future will confirm; otherwise a re-action will be invited. A great deal of investigation is still needed to shew the limit of practical Eugenics, yet enough has been already determined to justify large efforts to instruct the public in an authoritative way, as to the results hitherto obtained by sound reasoning, applied to the undoubted facts of social experience.
My best thanks are due to the Editor of Nature, to the Council of the Sociological Society, and to the Clarendon Press of Oxford, for permission to reprint those among the following essays that first appeared in their Publications.
FRANCIS GALTON.
CONTENTS.
PAGE.
I. THE POSSIBLE IMPROVEMENT OF THE HUMAN BREED UNDER EXISTING CONDITIONS OF LAW AND SENTIMENT 1
II. EUGENICS, ITS DEFINITION, SCOPE, AND AIMS 35
III. RESTRICTIONS IN MARRIAGE 44
IV. STUDIES IN NATIONAL EUGENICS 60
V. EUGENICS AS A FACTOR IN RELIGION 68
VI. PROBABILITY, THE FOUNDATION OF EUGENICS 73
VII. LOCAL ASSOCIATIONS FOR PROMOTING EUGENICS 100
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[Illustration: STANDARD SCHEME OF DESCENT]
THE POSSIBLE IMPROVEMENT OF THE HUMAN BREED,
UNDER THE EXISTING CONDITIONS OF LAW AND SENTIMENT.[1]
In fulfilling the honourable charge that has been entrusted to me of delivering the Huxley lecture, I shall endeavour to carry out what I understand to have been the wish of its founders, namely, to treat broadly some new topic belonging to a class in which Huxley himself would have felt a keen interest, rather than to expatiate on his character and the work of his noble life.
That which I have selected for to-night is one which has occupied my thoughts for many years, and to which a large part of my published inquiries have borne a direct though silent reference. Indeed, the remarks I am about to make would serve as an additional chapter to my books on “Hereditary Genius” and on “Natural Inheritance.” My subject will be the possible improvement of the human race under the existing conditions of law and sentiment. It has not hitherto been approached along the ways that recent knowledge has laid open, and it occupies in consequence a less dignified position in scientific estimation than it might. It is smiled at as most desirable in itself and possibly worthy of academic discussion, but absolutely out of the question as a practical problem. My aim in this lecture is to show cause for a different opinion. Indeed I hope to induce anthropologists to regard human improvement as a subject that should be kept openly and squarely in view, not only on account of its transcendent importance, but also because it affords excellent but neglected fields for investigation. I shall show that our knowledge is already sufficient to justify the pursuit of this perhaps the grandest of all objects, but that we know less of the conditions upon which success depends than we might and ought to ascertain. The limits of our knowledge and of our ignorance will become clearer as we proceed.
_Human Variety._—The natural character and faculties of human beings differ at least as widely as those of the domesticated animals, such as dogs and horses, with whom we are familiar. In disposition some are gentle and good-tempered, others surly and vicious; some are courageous, others timid; some are eager, others sluggish; some have large powers of endurance, others are quickly fatigued; some are muscular and powerful, others are weak; some are intelligent, others stupid; some have tenacious memories of places and persons, others frequently stray and are slow at recognising. The number and variety of aptitudes, especially in dogs, is truly remarkable; among the most notable being the tendency to herd sheep, to point and to retrieve. So it is with the various natural qualities that go towards the making of civic worth in man. Whether it be in character, disposition, energy, intellect, or physical power, we each receive at our birth a definite endowment, allegorised by the parable related in St. Matthew, some receiving many talents, others few; but each person being responsible for the profitable use of that which has been entrusted to him.
_Distribution of Qualities in a Nation._—Experience shows that while talents are distributed in endless different degrees, the frequency of those different degrees follows certain statistical laws, of which the best known is the Normal Law of Frequency. This is the result whenever variations are due to the combined action of many small and different causes, whatever may be the causes and whatever the object in which the variations occur, just as twice 2 always makes 4, whatever the objects may be. It therefore holds true with approximate precision for variables of totally different sorts, as, for instance, stature of man, errors made by astronomers in judging minute intervals of time, bullet marks around the bull’s-eye in target practice, and differences of marks gained by candidates at competitive examinations. There is no mystery about the fundamental principles of this abstract law; it rests on such simple fundamental conceptions as, that if we toss two pence in the air they will, in the long run, come down one head and one tail twice as often as both heads or both tails. I will assume then, that the talents, so to speak, that go to the formation of civic worth are distributed with rough approximation according to this familiar law. In doing so, I in no way disregard the admirable work of Prof. Karl Pearson on the distribution of qualities, for which he was adjudged the Darwin Medal of the Royal Society a few years ago. He has amply proved that we must not blindly trust the Normal Law of Frequency; in fact, that when variations are minutely studied they rarely fall into that perfect symmetry about the mean value which is one of its consequences. Nevertheless, my conscience is clear in using this law in the way I am about to. I say that _if_ certain qualities vary normally, such and such will be the results; that these qualities are of a class that are found, whenever they have been tested, to vary normally to a fair degree of approximation, and consequently we may infer that our results are trustworthy indications of real facts.
A talent is a sum whose exact value few of us care to know, although we all appreciate the inner sense of the beautiful parable. I will, therefore, venture to adapt the phraseology of the allegory to my present purpose by substituting for “talent” the words “normal-talent.” The value of this normal talent in respect to each and any specified quality or faculty is such that one-quarter of the people receive for their respective shares more than one normal-talent _over and above_ the average of all the shares. Our normal-talent is therefore identical with what is technically known as the “probable error.” Therefrom the whole of the following table starts into life, evolved from that of the “_probability integral_.”
TABLE I.—_Normal distribution (to the nearest_ per _ten-thousand and to the nearest_ per _hundred.)_
─────┬───┬───┬────┬────┬─┬────┬────┬───┬───┬──────┬────── │–4°│–3°│ –2°│ –1°│M│ +1°│ +2°│+3°│+4°│ │ ─────┼───┼───┼────┼────┼─┼────┼────┼───┼───┼──────┼────── _v_ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ │V and │ and │_u_│_t_│_s_ │_r_ │ │ R │ S │ T │ U │above.│Total below│ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ ─────┼───┼───┼────┼────┼─┼────┼────┼───┼───┼──────┼────── 35│180│672│1613│2500│ │2500│1613│672│180│ 35 │10,000 ─────┴───┼───┼────┼────┼─┼────┼────┼───┼───┴──────┼────── 2 │ 7│ 16│ 25│ │ 25│ 16│ 7│ 2 │ 100 ─────────┴───┴────┴────┴─┴────┴────┴───┴──────────┴──────
It expresses the distribution of any normal quality, or any group of normal qualities, among 10,000 persons in terms of the normal-talent. The M in the upper line occupies the position of Mediocrity, or that of the average of what all have received: the +1°, +2°, etc., and the –1°, –2°, etc., refer to normal talents. These numerals stand as graduations at the heads of the vertical lines by which the table is divided. The entries between the divisions are the numbers per 10,000 of those who receive sums between the amounts specified by those divisions. Thus, by the hypothesis, 2500 receive more than M but less than M +1°, 1613 receive more than M +1° but less than M +2°, and so on. The terminals have only an inner limit, thus 35 receive more than 4°, some to perhaps a very large and indefinite amount. The divisions might have been carried much farther, but the numbers in the classes between them would become less and less trustworthy. The left half of the series exactly reflects the right half. As it will be useful henceforth to distinguish these classes, I have used the _capital_ or large letters R, S, T, U, V, for those above mediocrity and corresponding _italic_ or small letters, _r_, _s_, _t_, _u_, _v_, for those below mediocrity, _r_ being the counterpart of R, _s_ of S, and so on.
In the lowest line the same values are given, but more roughly, to the nearest whole percentage.
It will assist in comprehending the values of different grades of civic worth to compare them with the corresponding grades of adult male stature in our nation. I will take the figures from my “Natural Inheritance,” premising that the distribution of stature in various peoples has been well investigated and shown to be closely normal. The average height of the adult males, to whom my figures refer, was nearly 5 feet 8 inches, and the value of their “normal-talent” (which is a measure of the spread of distribution) was very nearly 1–3/4 inches. From these data it is easily reckoned that Class U would contain men whose heights exceed 6 feet 1–1/4 inches. Even they are tall enough to overlook a hatless mob, while the higher classes, such as V, W and X, tower above it in an increasingly marked degree. So the civic worth (however that term may be defined) of U-class men, and still more of V-class, are notably superior to the crowd, though they are far below the heroic order. The rarity of a V-class man in each specified quality or group of qualities is as 35 in 10,000, or say, for the convenience of using round numbers, as 1 to 300. A man of the W class is ten times rarer, and of the X class rarer still; but I shall avoid giving any more exact definition of X than as a value considerably rarer than V. This gives a general but just idea of the distribution throughout a population of each and every quality taken separately so far as it is normally distributed. As already mentioned, it does the same for _any_ group of normal qualities; thus, if marks for classics and for mathematics were severally normal in their distribution, the combined marks gained by each candidate in both those subjects would be distributed normally also, this being one of the many interesting properties of the law of frequency.
_Comparison of the Normal Classes with those of Mr. Booth._—Let us now compare the normal classes with those into which Mr. Charles Booth has divided the population of all London in a way that corresponds not unfairly with the ordinary conception of grades of civic worth. He reckons them from the lowest upwards, and gives the numbers in each class for East London. Afterwards he treats all London in a similar manner, except that sometimes he combines two classes into one and gives the joint result. For my present purpose, I had to couple them somewhat differently, first disentangling them as I best could. There seemed no better way of doing this than by assigning to the members of each couplet the same proportions that they had in East London. Though this was certainly not accurate, it is probably not far wrong. Mr. Booth has taken unheard of pains in this great work of his to arrive at accurate results, but he emphatically says that his classes cannot be separated sharply from one another. On the contrary, their frontiers blend, and this justifies me in taking slight liberties with his figures. His class A consists of criminals, semi-criminals, loafers and some others, who are in number at the rate of 1 per cent. in all London—that is 100 per 10,000, or nearly three times as many as the _v_ class: they therefore include the whole of _v_ and spread upwards into the _u_. His class B consists of very poor persons who subsist on casual earnings, many of whom are inevitably poor from shiftlessness, idleness or drink. The numbers in this and the A class combined closely correspond with those in _t_ and all below _t_.
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TABLE II.—_Comparison of Mr. Booth’s Classification of All London with the Normal Classes._
────┬─────────────────────────────────────────────┬───────┬─────────┬───────┬────┬──────── │ │ │ │ │ │Normal Nos.│ Mr. Booth’s classes. │Approx.│Resorted.│Approx.│Nos.│classes. ────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────┼───────┼─────────┼───────┼────┼──────── 97│ H. All above G │ 100 │ 100 │ 100 │ 89│ T and │ │ │ │ │ │ above ────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────┼───────┼─────────┼───────┼────┼──────── │⎧G. Lower Middle ⎫│ │ ⎧ 150 │ 150 │ 161│ S 200│⎩F. High-class labour above 30s. per week ⎭│ 200 │ ⎨ ├───────┼────┼──────── │ │ │ ⎩ 50 ⎫ │ │ │ ────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────┼───────┤ ⎬ │ 250 │ 250│ R │ E. Regular standard earnings from 22s. to ⎫│ │ ⎧ 200 ⎭ │ │ │ 382│ 30s. per week ⎭│ 400 │ ⎨ ├───────┼────┼──────── │ │ │ ⎩ 200 ⎫ │ │ │ ────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────┼───────┤ ⎬ │ 250 │ 250│ _r_ │⎧D. Regular earnings under 22s. per week ⎫│ │ ⎧ 50 ⎭ │ │ │ 227│⎩C. Intermittent earnings, improvident, poor⎭│ 200 │ ⎨ ├───────┼────┼──────── │ │ │ ⎩ 150 │ 150 │ 161│ _s_ ────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────┼───────┤ ├───────┼────┼──────── 94│⎧B. Casual; very poor ⎫│ 100 │ 100 │ 100 │ 89│ _t_ and │⎩A. Criminals, loafers, &c. ⎭│ │ │ │ │ below ────┴─────────────────────────────────────────────┴───────┴─────────┴───────┴────┴──────── 1000 1000 1000 1000
The two columns headed “Nos.” give respectively the numbers per thousand in Mr. Booth’s and in the Normal Classes.
Class C are supported by intermittent earnings; they are a hard-working people, but have a very bad character for improvidence and shiftlessness. In Class D the earnings are regular, but at the low rate of twenty-one shillings or less a week, so none of them rise above poverty, though none are very poor. D and C together correspond to the whole of _s_ combined with the lower fifth of _r_. The next class, E, is the largest of any, and comprises all those with regular standard earnings of twenty-two to thirty shillings a week. This class is the recognised field for all forms of co-operation and combination; in short for trades unions. It corresponds to the upper four-fifths of _r_, combined with the lower four-fifths of R. It is therefore essentially the mediocre class, standing as far below the highest in civic worth as it stands above the lowest class with its criminals and semi-criminals. Next above this large mass of mediocrity comes the honourable class _F_, which consists of better paid artisans and foremen. These are able to provide adequately for old age, and their sons become clerks and so forth. _G_ is the lower middle class of shopkeepers, small employers, clerks and subordinate professional men, who as a rule are hard-working, energetic and sober. F and G combined correspond to the upper fifth of R and the whole of S, and are, therefore, a counterpart to D and C. All above G are put together by Mr. Booth into one class H, which corresponds to our T, U, V and above, and is the counterpart of his two lowermost classes, A and B. So far, then, as these figures go, civic worth is distributed in fair approximation to the normal law of frequency. We also see that the classes _t_, _u_, _v_ and below are undesirables.
_Worth of Children._—The brains of the nation lie in the higher of our classes. If such people as would be classed W or X could be distinguishable as children and procurable by money in order to be reared as Englishmen, it would be a cheap bargain for the nation to buy them at the rate of many hundred or some thousands of pounds per head. Dr. Farr, the eminent statistician, endeavoured to estimate the money worth of an average baby born to the wife of an Essex labourer and thenceforward living during the usual time and in the ordinary way of his class. Dr. Farr, with accomplished actuarial skill, capitalised the value at the child’s birth of two classes of events, the one the cost of maintenance while a child and when helpless through old age, the other its earnings as boy and man. On balancing the two sides of the account the value of the baby was found to be five pounds. On a similar principle, the worth of an X-class baby would be reckoned in thousands of pounds. Some such “talented” folk fail, but most succeed, and many succeed greatly. They found great industries, establish vast undertakings, increase the wealth of multitudes and amass large fortunes for themselves. Others, whether they be rich or poor, are the guides and light of the nation, raising its tone, enlightening its difficulties and imposing its ideals. The great gain that England received through the immigration of the Huguenots would be insignificant to what she would derive from an annual addition of a few hundred children of the classes W and X. I have tried, but not yet succeeded to my satisfaction, to make an approximate estimate of the worth of a child at birth according to the class he is destined to occupy when adult. It is an eminently important subject for future investigators, for the amount of care and cost that might profitably be expended in improving the race clearly depends on its result.
_Descent of Qualities in a Population._—Let us now endeavour to obtain a correct understanding of the way in which the varying qualities of each generation are derived from those of its predecessor. How many, for example, of the V class in the offspring come respectively from the V, U, T, S and other classes of parentage? The means of calculating this question for a normal population are given fully in my “Natural Inheritance.” There are three main senses in which the word parentage might be used. They differ widely, so the calculations must be modified accordingly, (1) The amount of the quality or faculty in question may be known in each parent. (2) It may be known in only one parent. (3) The two parents may belong to the same class, a V-class father in the scale of male classification always marrying a V-class mother, occupying identically the same position in the scale of female classification.
I select this last case to work out as being the one with which we shall here be chiefly concerned. It has the further merit of escaping some tedious preliminary details about converting female faculties into their corresponding male equivalents, before men and women can be treated statistically on equal terms. I shall assume in what follows that we are dealing with an ideal population, in which all marriages are equally fertile, and which is statistically the same in successive generations both in numbers and in qualities, so many per cent. being always this, so many always that, and so on. Further, I shall take no notice of offspring who die before they reach the age of marriage, nor shall I regard the slight numerical inequality of the sexes, but will simply suppose that each parentage produces one couplet of grown-up filials, an adult man and an adult woman.
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TABLE III.—_Descent of Qualities in a Population. (The difference between the sexes only affects the value of the Unit of the Scale of Distribution.)_
_Conditions._—(1) Parents to be always alike in class, (2) Statistics of population to continue unchanged, (3) Normal Law of Frequency to be applicable throughout.
────────────────────────────────────────────┬───────┬───┬────┬────┬────┬────┬───┬──────┬──────────── _Per_ 100 Father (or _Mothers_). │ 2 │ 7 │ 16 │ 25 │ 25 │ 16 │ 7 │ 2 │ 100 │ ╭─┴─╮ │ │ │ │ │ │ │╭─┴─╮ │ _Per_ 10,000 ” │ 35 180│671│1614│2500│2500│1614│672│180 35│ 10,000 ────────────────────────────────────────────┼───────┼───┼────┼────┼────┼────┼───┼──────┼──────────── Names of classes │_v_ _u_│_t_│_s_ │_r_ │ R │ S │ T │ U V │ Totals ────────────────────────────────────────────┼───────┼───┼────┼────┼────┼────┼───┼──────┼──────────── │ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ Sons (or │ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ │_daughters_) Sons ⎫ of 35 ⎧ Fathers ⎫ of V │ │ │ │ │ 1│ 6│ 12│ 10 6│ 35 _Daughters_ ⎭ ⎩ _Mothers_ ⎭ class │ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ ” 180 ” ” U │ │ │ │ 4│ 20│ 52│ 61│ 33 10│ 180 ” 671 ” ” T │ │ │ 7│ 44│ 150│ 234│170│ 57 10│ 672 ” 1614 ” ” S │ │ 6│ 57│ 253│ 512│ 509│224│ 47 5│ 1613 ” 2500 ” ” R │ 3│ 42│ 248│ 678│ 860│ 510│140│ 18 3│ 2502 ” 2500 ” ” _r_│ 3 18│140│ 510│ 860│ 678│ 248│ 42│ 3 │ 2502 ” 1614 ” ” _s_│ 5 47│224│ 509│ 512│ 253│ 57│ 6│ │ 1613 ” 671 ” ” _t_│ 10 57│170│ 234│ 150│ 44│ 7│ │ │ 672 ” 180 ” ” _u_│ 10 33│ 61│ 52│ 20│ 4│ │ │ │ 180 ” 35 ” ” _v_│ 6 10│ 12│ 6│ 1│ │ │ │ │ 35 ────────────────────────────────────────────┼───────┼───┼────┼────┼────┼────┼───┼──────┼──────────── Total 10,000 Fathers (or _Mothers_) │ 34 168│655│1623│2522│2522│1623│655│168 34│ 10,004 │ ╰─┬─╯ │ │ │ │ │ │ │╰─┬─╯ │ ” 100 ” │ 2 │ 7│ 16│ 25│ 25│ 16│ 7│ 2 │ ────────────────────────────────────────────┴───────┴───┴────┴────┴────┴────┴───┴──────┴────────────
_Note._—The agreement in distribution between fathers (or _mothers_) and sons (or _daughters_) is exact to the nearest whole per centage. The slight discrepancy in the ten-thousandths is mainly due to the classes being too few and too wide; theoretically they should be extremely numerous and narrow.