at one with
the most recent biometrical eugenists of to-day
("the nation has
for years been putting its money on 'Environment,'
when
'Heredity' wins in a canter," as Karl Pearson
prefers to put it),
and at the same time revealed the breadth of his
vision in
comparison with the ordinary social reformer, who,
in that day,
was usually a fanatical believer in the influence of
training and
surroundings. Noyes sets forth the position of
Darwin on the
principles of breeding, and the step beyond Darwin,
which had
been taken by Galton. He then remarks that, when
Galton comes to
the point where it is necessary to advance from
theory to the
duties the theory suggests, he "subsides into the meekest
conservatism." (It must be remembered that this was written at an
early stage in Galton's work.) This conclusion was
entirely
opposed to Noyes' practical and religious
temperament. "Duty is
plain; we say we ought to do it--we want to do it;
but we cannot.
The law of God urges us on; but the law of society
holds us back.
The boldest course is the safest. Let us take an
honest and
steady look at the law. It is only in the timidity
of ignorance
that the duty seems impracticable." Noyes
anticipated Galton in
regarding eugenics as a matter of religion.
Noyes proposed to term the work of modern science in
propagation
"Stirpiculture," in which he has sometimes been followed by
others. He considered that it is the business of the
stirpiculturist to keep in view both quantity and
quality of
stocks, and he held that, without diminishing
quantity, it was
possible to raise the quality by exercising a very
stringent
discrimination in selecting males. At this point,
Noyes has been
supported in recent years by Karl Pearson and
others, who have
shown that only a relatively small portion of a
population is
needed to produce the next generation, and that, in
fact, twelve
per cent. of one generation in man produces fifty
per cent. of
the next generation. What we need to ensure is that
this small
reproducing section of the population shall be the
best adapted
for the purpose. "The _quantity_ of production will be in direct
proportion to the number of fertile females," as
Noyes saw the
question, "and the _value_ produced, so far as it depends on
selection, will be nearly in inverse proportion to
the number of
fertilizing males." In this matter, Noyes
anticipated Ehrenfels.
The two principles to be held in mind were, "Breed from the
best," and "Breed in-and-in," with a cautious and occasional
introduction of new strains. (It may be noted that
Reibmayr, in
his recent _Entwicklungsgeschichte des Genics und
Talentes_,
argues that the superior races, and superior
individuals, in the
human species, have been produced by an unconscious
adherence to
exactly these principles.) "By segregating superior families, and
by breeding these in-and-in, superior varieties of
human beings
might be produced, which would be comparable to the
thoroughbreds
in all the domestic races." He illustrates this by the early
history of the Jews.
Noyes finally criticises the present method, or lack
of method,
in matters of propagation. Our marriage system, he
states,
"leaves mating to be determined by a general
scramble." By
ignoring, also, the great difference between the
sexes in
reproductive power, it "restricts each man, whatever may be his
potency and his value, to the amount of production
of which one
woman, chosen blindly, may be capable." Moreover, he continues,
"practically it discriminates against the best, and in favor of
the worst; for, while the good man will be limited
by his
conscience to what the law allows, the bad man, free
from moral
check, will distribute his seed beyond the legal
limits, as
widely as he dares." "We are safe every way in saying that there
is no possibility of carrying the two precepts of
scientific
propagation into an institution which pretends to no
discrimination, allows no suppression, gives no more
liberty to
the best than to the worst, and which, in fact, must
inevitably
discriminate the wrong way, so long as the inferior
classes are
most prolific and least amenable to the admonitions
of science
and morality." In modifying our sexual institutions, Noyes
insists there are two essential points to remember:
the
preservation of liberty, and the preservation of the
home. There
must be no compulsion about human scientific
propagation; it must
be autonomous, directed by self-government, "by the free choice
of those who love science well enough to 'make
themselves eunuchs
for the Kingdom of Heaven's sake.'" The home, also, must be
preserved, since "marriage is the best thing for man as he is;"
but it is necessary to enlarge the home, for, "if all could learn
to love other children than their own, there would
be nothing to
hinder scientific propagation in the midst of homes
far better
than any that now exist."
This memorable pamphlet contains no exposition of
the precise
measures adopted by the Oneida Community to carry
out these
principles. The two essential points were, as we
know, "male
continence" (see _ante_ p. 553), and the enlarged family, in
which all the men were the actual or potential mates
of all the
women, but no union for propagation took place,
except as the
result of reason and deliberate resolve. "The
community," says
H.J. Seymour, one of the original members (_The
Oneida
Community_, 1894, p. 5), "was a _family_, as
distinctly separated
from surrounding society as ordinary households. The
tie that
bound it together was as permanent, and at least as
sacred, as
that of marriage. Every man's care, and the whole of
the common
property, was pledged for the maintenance and
protection of the
women, and the support and education of the
children." It is not
probable that the Oneida Community presented in
detail the model
to which human society generally will conform. But
even at the
lowest estimate, its success showed, as Lord Morely
has pointed
out (_Diderot_, vol. ii, p. 19), "how modifiable are some of
these facts of existing human character which are
vulgarly deemed
to be ultimate and ineradicable," and that "the discipline of the
appetites and affections of sex," on which the
future of
civilization largely rests, is very far from an
impossibility.
In many respects, the Oneida Community was ahead of
its
time,--and even of ours,--but it is interesting to
note that, in
the matter of the control of conception, our
marriage system has
come into line with the theory and practice of
Oneida; it cannot,
indeed, be said that we always control conception in
accordance
with eugenic principles, but the fact that such
control has now
become a generally accepted habit of civilization,
to some extent
deprives Noyes' criticism of our marriage system of
the force it
possessed half a century ago. Another change in our
customs--the
advocacy, and even the practice, of abortion and
castration--would not have met with his approval; he
was strongly
opposed to both, and with the high moral level that
ruled his
community, neither was necessary to the maintenance
of the
stirpiculture that prevailed.
The Oneida Community endured for the space of one
generation, and
came to an end in 1879, by no means through a
recognition of
failure, but by a wise deference to external
pressure. Its
members, many of them highly educated, continued to
cherish the
memory of the practices and ideals of the Community.
Noyes Miller
(the author of _The Strike of a Sex_, and
_Zugassant's
Discovery_) to the last, looked with quiet
confidence to the time
when, as he anticipated, the great discovery of
Noyes would be
accepted and adopted by the world at large. Another
member of the
Community (Henry J. Seymour) wrote of the Community
long
afterwards that "It was an anticipation and
imperfect miniature
of the Kingdom of Heaven on earth."
Perhaps the commonest type of proposal or attempt to
improve the
biological level of the race is by the exclusion of
certain classes of
degenerates from marriage, or by the encouragement of
better classes of
the community to marry. This seems to be, at present,
the most popular
form of eugenics, and in so far as it is not effected by compulsion but is
the outcome of a voluntary resolve to treat the question of the creation
of the race with the jealous care and guardianship which so tremendously
serious, so godlike, a task involves, it has much to be said in its favor
and nothing against it.
But it is quite another matter when the attempt is made to regulate such
an institution as marriage by law. In the first place we do not yet know
enough about the principles of heredity and the
transmissibility of
pathological states to enable us to formulate sound
legislative proposals
on this basis. Even so comparatively simple a matter as the relationship
of tuberculosis to heredity can scarcely be said to be a matter of common
agreement, even if it can yet be claimed that we possess adequate material
on which to attain a common agreement. Supposing,
moreover, that our
knowledge on all these questions were far more advanced than it is, we
still should not have attained a position in which we
could lay down
general propositions regarding the desirability or the undesirability of
certain classes of persons procreating. The question is necessarily an
individual question, and it can only be decided when all the circumstances
of the individual case have been fairly passed in
review.
The objection to any legislative and compulsory
regulation of the right to
marry is, however, much more fundamental than the
consideration that our
knowledge is at present inadequate. It lies in the
extraordinary
confusion, in the minds of those who advocate such
legislation, between
legal marriage and procreation. The persons who fall
into such confusion
have not yet learnt the alphabet of the subject they
presume to dictate
about, and are no more competent to legislate than a
child who cannot tell
A from B is competent to read.
Marriage, in so far as it is the partnership for mutual help and
consolation of two people who in such partnership are
free, if they
please, to exercise sexual union, is an elementary right of every person
who is able to reason, who is guilty of no fraud or
concealment, and who
is not likely to injure the partner selected, for in
that case society is
entitled to interfere by virtue of its duty to protect its members. But
the right to marry, thus understood, in no way involves the right to
procreate. For while marriage _per se_ only affects the two individuals
concerned, and in no way affects the State, procreation, on the other
hand, primarily affects the community which is
ultimately made up of
procreated persons, and only secondarily affects the two individuals who
are the instruments of procreation. So that just as the individual couple
has the first right in the question of marriage, the
State has the first
right in the question of procreation. The State is just as incompetent to
lay down the law about marriage as the individual is to lay down the law
about procreation.
That, however, is only one-half of the folly committed by those who would
select the candidates for matrimony by statute. Let us suppose--as is not
indeed easy to suppose--that a community will meekly
accept the abstract
prohibitions of the statute book and quietly go home
again when the
registrar of marriages informs them that they are shut out from legal
matrimony by the new table of prohibited degrees. An
explicit prohibition
to procreate within marriage is an implicit permission to procreate
outside marriage. Thus the undesirable procreation,
instead of being
carried out under the least dangerous conditions, is
carried out under the
most dangerous conditions, and the net result to the
community is not a
gain but a loss.
What seems usually to happen, in the presence of a
formal legislative
prohibition against the marriage of a particular class, is a combination
of various evils. In part the law becomes a dead letter, in part it is
evaded by skill and fraud, in part it is obeyed to give rise to worse
evils. This happened, for instance, in the Terek
district of the Caucasus
where, on the demand of a medical committee, priests
were prohibited from
marrying persons among whose relatives or ancestry any cases of leprosy
had occurred. So much and such various mischief was
caused by this order
that it was speedily withdrawn.[452]
If we remember that the Catholic Church was occupied for more than a
thousand years in the attempt to impose the prohibition of marriage on its
priesthood,--an educated and trained body of men, who
had every spiritual
and worldly motive to accept the prohibition, and were, moreover, brought
up to regard asceticism as the best ideal in life,[453]-
-we may realize
how absurd it is to attempt to gain the same end by mere casual
prohibitions issued to untrained people with no motives to obey such
prohibitions, and no ideals of celibacy.
The hopelessness and even absurdity of effecting the
eugenic improvement
of the race by merely placing on the statute book
prohibitions to certain
classes of people to enter the legal bonds of matrimony as at present
constituted, reveals the weakness of those who
undervalue the eugenic
importance of environment. Those who affirm that
heredity is everything
and environment nothing seem strangely to forget that it is precisely the
lower classes--those who are most subjected to the
influence of bad
environment--who procreate most copiously, most
recklessly, and most
disastrously. The restraint of procreation, and a
concomitant regard for
heredity, increase _pari passu_ with improvement of the environment and
rise in social well-being. If even already it can be
said that probably
fifty per cent. of sexual intercourse--perhaps the most procreatively
productive moiety--takes place outside legal marriage, it becomes obvious
that statutory prohibition to the unfit classes to
refrain from legal
marriage merely involves their joining the procreating classes outside
legal matrimony. It is also clear that if we are to
neglect the factor of
environment, and leave the lower social classes to the ignorance and
recklessness which are the result of such environment, the only practical
method of eugenics left open is that by castration and abortion. But this
method--if applied on a wholesale scale as it would need to be[454] and
without reference to the consent of the individual--is entirely opposed
to modern democratic feeling. Thus those short-sighted eugenists who
overlook the importance of environment are overlooking the only practical
channel through which their aims can be realized.
Attention to procreation
and attention to environment are not, as some have
supposed, antagonistic,
but they play harmoniously into each other's hands. The care for
environment leads to a restraint on reckless
procreation, and the
restraint of procreation leads to improved environment.
Legislation on marriage, to be effectual, must be
enacted in the home, in
the school, in the doctor's consulting room. Force is
helpless here; it is
education that is needed, not merely instruction, but
the education of the
conscience and will, and the training of the emotions.
Legal action may come in to further this process of
education, though it
cannot replace it. Thus it is very desirable that when there has been a
concealment of serious disease by a party to a marriage such concealment
should be a ground for divorce. Epilepsy may be taken as typical of the
diseases which should be a bar to procreation, and their concealment
equivalent to an annulment of marriage.[455] In the
United States the
Supreme Court of Errors of Connecticut laid it down in 1906 that the
Superior Court has the power to pass a decree of divorce when one of the
parties has concealed the existence of epilepsy. This
weighty deliverence,
it has been well said,[456] marks a forward step in
human progress. There
are many other seriously pathological conditions in
which divorce should
be pronounced, or indeed, occur automatically, except
when procreation has
been renounced, for in that case the State is no longer concerned in the
relationship, except to punish any fraud committed by
concealment.
The demand that a medical certificate of health
should be
compulsory on marriage, has been especially made in
France. In
1858, Diday, of Lyons, proposed, indeed, that all
persons,
without exception, should be compelled to possess a
certificate
of health and disease, a kind of sanitary passport.
In 1872,
Bertillon (Art. "Demographic," _Dictionnaire Encyclopédique des
Sciences Médicales_) advocated the registration, at
marriage, of
the chief anthropological and pathological traits of
the
contracting parties (height, weight, color of hair
and eyes,
muscular force, size of head, condition of vision,
hearing, etc.,
deformities and defects, etc.), not so much,
however, for the end
of preventing undesirable marriages, as to
facilitate the study
and comparison of human groups at particular
periods. Subsequent
demands, of a more limited and partial character,
for legal
medical certificates as a condition of marriage,
have been made
by Fournier (_Syphilis et Mariage_, 1890), Cazalis
(_Le Science
et le Mariage_, 1890), and Jullien (_Blenorrhagie et
Mariage_,
1898). In Austria, Haskovec, of Prague ("Contrat
Matrimonial et
L'Hygiène Publique," _Comptes-rendus Congrès
International de
Médecine_, Lisbon, 1906, Section VII, p. 600),
argues that, on
marriage, a medical certificate should be presented,
showing that
the subject is exempt from tuberculosis, alcoholism,
syphilis,
gonorrhoea, severe mental, or nervous, or other
degenerative
state, likely to be injurious to the other partner,
or to the
offspring. In America, Rosenberg and Aronstam argue
that every
candidate for marriage, male or female, should
undergo a strict
examination by a competent board of medical
examiners, concerning
(1) Family and Past History (syphilis, consumption,
alcoholism,
nervous, and mental diseases), and (2) Status
Presens (thorough
examination of all the organs); if satisfactory, a
certificate of
matrimonial eligibility would then be granted. It is
pointed out
that a measure of this kind would render unnecessary
the acts
passed by some States for the punishment by fine, or
imprisonment, of the concealment of disease. Ellen
Key also
considers (_Liebe und Ehe_, p. 436) that each party
at marriage
should produce a certificate of health. "It seems to me just as
necessary," she remarks, elsewhere (_Century of the Child_, Ch.
I), "to demand medical testimony concerning capacity for
marriage, as concerning capacity for military
service. In the one
case, it is a matter of giving life; in the other,
of taking it,
although certainly the latter occasion has hitherto
been
considered as much the more serious."
The certificate, as usually advocated, would be a
private but
necessary legitimation of the marriage in the eyes
of the civil
and religious authorities. Such a step, being
required for the
protection alike of the conjugal partner and of
posterity, would
involve a new legal organization of the matrimonial
contract.
That such demands are so frequently made, is a
significant sign
of the growth of moral consciousness in the
community, and it is
good that the public should be made acquainted with
the urgent
need for them. But it is highly undesirable that
they should, at
present, or, perhaps, ever, be embodied in legal
codes. What is
needed is the cultivation of the feeling of
individual
responsibility, and the development of social
antagonism towards
those individuals who fail to recognize their
responsibility. It
is the reality of marriage,