The Social Context of Eugenic Thought

By Professor W. H. G. Armytage

II. Towards The Child Care State

Readers of the Daily Mail in 1912 (and there were four and a half million of them) were doubtless startled to read H. G. Wells’ forecast of “chronic social conflict” possibly even “frankly revolutionary outbreaks that may destroy us altogether or leave us only a dwarfed and enfeebled nation” unless “a national plan of social development” to abolish labour as a class were immediately drawn up and implemented (1).

Wells had been invited to contribute articles on “Labour Unrest” probably because of the great success of his long and careful exposé of the Webbs and their permeative policies. Speaking (as Remington) in The New Machiavelli (1911) he had advocated the fostering of a “race mind” - a concept which would have the potency that the idea of a United Italy had had in Machiavelli’s thought. As he put it:

“The old haphazard system of pairing, qualified more and more by worldly discretions, no longer secures a population numerous enough or good enough for the growing needs and possibilities of our Empire.” (2)

“What is the use”, he asked, “of pushing research and building cities, improving facilities of life, making great fleets, waging wars, whilst this aimless decadence remains the quality of the biological outlook?” (3). Even methods employed to date were counter productive since “the best of all possible babies” were being burnt “in the furnaces that run the machinery” (4).

Wells was not alone in holding these pessimistic views. A contributor to the staid pages of the Contemporary Review asked the question “The ages of Catholicism often sterilised their best in a convent. Do we also sterilise our best? And can no remedy be found?” (5)

Foreign observers shared this analysis. An American doctor flatly dismissed the “day of the Briton as colonist” as “practically past”. He pointed out that “but for the Irishman and the foreigner his birth-rate would be as portentious as that of his Gallic neighbours across the Channel. So intent is he in extending his empire over negroes and negroids that he has hopelessly pauperised one-tenth of his kin in his own home”. (6) He went on to point out that the problem of the neglected could be remedied by diverting one fifth of the money then spent “on battleships and bayonets” - a juxtaposition of budgetary priorities which was to ring down the years.

The depauperisation of that one-tenth at home became the immediate concern of the Parliamentary Labour Party subsequent upon its election of James Ramsey MacDonald as its Chairman in 1911. MacDonald saw that Socialism had to be a biological creed, capitalism being “the enemy of the family”. Not for him the flyblown rhetoric of Bebelian Socialism and its nightmare visions of public feeding rooms, communal kitchens and sleeping barracks. Instead he promised that one of the first cares of Socialism would be “to protect the family” (7). This took the sting out of the accusation by the London Anti-Socialist Municipal Society (encouraged by Balfour) that Socialism aimed at one great State Family (8).

Yet the Anti-Socialists still had to combat the fact that Socialism envisaged what Oscar Wilde had foreseen as “the State ‘living for others’ leaving ‘us’ to enjoy ourselves and if not ourselves then at least the ‘States’ amenities”. Here was the great middle class opportunity which they were to exploit by means of the “direct grants” given to schools in 1907, the State-aided universities and later the State Medical Service. MacDonald saw as the chief advantage of Socialism that it would “relieve us from that sordid necessity of living for others which in the present condition of things presses so hardly on almost everybody”.

Here Ramsay MacDonald’s ethical background was crucial. He had been secretary of the Progressive Review, launched in 1896 to provide “coherent form and rational purpose to a progressive party that would supplant the disintegrating Liberal Party”. He had also written a regular column for the Ethical World. Above all he believed with William James that man was “par excellence the educable animal” (9). Indeed one can see him sniffing the revitalising breeze of ethical sentiment wafting in from the United States with its Dewey (-eyed) message that science could identify “the specific causes” of “many of the moral evils from which we suffer... poverty, crime, social injustice, breaking down of the family...” (10).

Was it therefore surprising that MacDonald should be invited to speak at Caxton Hall, Westminster, at the Public Morals Conference organised by the National Social Purity Crusade as party of their “Forward Movement to Arouse the Social Conscience”? (11). Well aware of the fact that the uncertain state of employment and the difficulty of obtaining suitable housing largely accounted for the “decline of the family” (i.e. lower fertility) among the better working class (12), Ramsay MacDonald responded to the ideas of his friend J. A. Hobson that surplus wealth should be creamed off (after production costs had been met) to remedy this. Such creaming, effected by ever more steeply graduated scales of taxation, would virtually put butter before guns, houses before dreadnoughts and public ownership of monopolies before private profit (13).

Even such staunch trumpeters of Empire as Rudyard Kipling blew cold at the effect some “profits” were having on the reproductive capacity of Englishmen: expensive education and the social whirl received a blast when his Collected Verse was published in 1912:

“Harrer an’ Trinity College” cries a father, “I ought to ha’ sent you to sea,

But I stood you an education. An’ what have you done for me?

...your rooms at college was beastly - more like a whore’s than a man’s,

Till you married that thin flanked woman, as white and stale as a bone,

And she gave you your social nonsense; but where’s that kid o’ your own?

I’ve seen your carriages blocking the half o’ the Cromwell Road,

But never the doctor’s brougham to help the missus unload.” (14)

Not in the Cromwell, but in the Old Kent Road and the less salubrious hinterlands of other big cities the “missus” bore a very heavy load because the “cult of the child” had, in the words of the Daily Telegraph become “much more minute, much more elaborate” (15). And the minuteness and elaboration were effected by ever increasing echelons of social repair (16) which placed a heavier load on working class mothers. No longer able to send their children out to work, scrounge, beg or pilfer to augment the family income, they found themselves, after the Children’s Act of 1908, actually liable to prosecution for exposing them in a manner likely to cause unnecessary suffering or injury. They could have their children taken away from them, they could be prosecuted for “overlaying” them after a few drinks with the husband. And even if an unwanted pregnancy resulted in yet another child, they could not farm them out without informing the local authorities. Washing, clothing, feeding, were increasingly monitored by schools, and husbands, though responsible for begetting them, could not be made to provide the extra housekeeping money.

Was it therefore any wonder that the abortifacient trade still prospered or that, as the author of one of the Tracts for the Times should write “Among the English every doctor knows the thinly veiled indifference or even repulsion with which women view the seemingly endless stream of babies they give birth to.” (17) That is why William Bateson publicly approved the decline in the birth rate as “the most promising omen for the happiness of future generations.” (18).

But whereas husbands had unions which could wring a rise in wages from their employers, wives had no such groups to squeeze money from their husbands and improve their degrading terms of labour. Indeed the wife had two fundamental disabilities: the law did not enforce contract for her as against her employer husband, nor did it adequately protect her against his personal violence.

So expensive and bewildering was it for a working class woman to escape the tyranny of an unsatisfactory husband that, as the phrase went, she “ran away” with somebody else (if she had kept her looks) or, what was even more likely, he “took up with” a younger woman. It was the moral aspect of this which greatly disturbed serious people ever since 1906 when the Society for Promoting Reforms in the Marriage and Divorce Laws of England (formed in 1903) merged with the Divorce Law Reform Association (founded soon afterwards) to form the Divorce Law Reform Union. This, under its President, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, became so active that a divorce court judge spoke out so strongly in the House on Lords on its behalf, that he was appointed Chairman of a Royal Commission to look into the matter (19).

This Commission recommended the cheapening of divorce and the extension of the grounds on which it could be obtained. Moreover wives were now put on an equal footing with their husbands on these grounds which were defined as adultery, desertion for over three years, cruelty (including V.D), incurably insanity, habitual drunkenness and imprisonment under commuted death sentence (20).

The inevitable minority report, signed by the Archbishop of York, the Warden of All Souls and Sir Lewis Dibdin did not think that the demand for divorce was quite as widespread as suggested. This prompted one woman to question whether the Archbishop and his fellow signatories would “be willing that dock labourers should be afforded no practical redress for blows and kicks from their employers provided that these did not endanger life or limb?...To live in danger of bodily ill-treatment is quite as derogatory to the self respect of a woman as to that of a man.” “Until this problem of the status and of the rights of the married woman of the people be honestly faced and solved”, wrote another woman, “not all the proposals of the Eugenics Congress, nor the efforts of the philanthropists, nor the labours of Parliament will avail to arrest social decay.” (21)

But with women’s rights, as with a national health service, the opposition came from the interpreters of the conventional wisdom. The main argument against women’s rights had, in the opinion of that constitutional oracle, A. V. Dicey been authoritatively put by the Boer War hero, Lord Roberts, in the House of Lords on 23 April 1908 (22).

And Lord Roberts had also converted some Socialists, like Robert Blatchford, who, by the end of 1909 contributed a decalogue of articles for the jingoistic Daily Mail on the need for national defence “to take precedence over every other question at present before the country”. (23).

The National Purity Campaign provided yet further support for the National Service League in the person of J. St. Loe Strachey (24) who furthermore persuaded Baden Powell not to let the Scouts become co-educational and thereby destroy the movement. So Baden Powell, helped by his sister Agnes, formed the Girl Guides in 1910: “How Girls can Help build the Empire” was the subtitle of their Handbook published in 1912.

The Colonial life for which Guides were to be prepared (in addition to ‘invasion’ and ‘useful’ womanly occupations) was further endorsed as an outlet for surplus women by Dr. C. W. Saleeby. This would prevent polygamy, prostitution and other evils - Lesbianism, was hinted at in Clemence Dane’s Regiment of Women (1911) - and incidentally check the marriage of Englishmen to coloured women (25). Lesbianism seemed to one prominent medical man to lie behind “legislative programmes” aimed at “licence for themselves or else restrictions for men”. Drafted by “sexually embittered women in whom everything has turned into gall and bitterness of heart and hatred of men”, these programmes enlisted the “millions of our excess population... which had better long ago have gone out to mate with its complement beyond the sea.” (26).

These sentiments were published in The Times on 28 March 1912. Eight months later a group of men who, like Lord Roberts, believed that “the hypothesis of evolution” could only be called “pessimistic” by “those who prefer any illusion to the truth, and invariably test reality by the comfort or discomfort that its recognition brings to their indolence” formed a small group at Lord Roberts’ house which met from November 1912 onwards (27).

The needs of the Empire and the work of another army - General Booth’s Salvation Army - greatly preoccupied Kipling’s friend, Rider Haggard, who shared Theodore Roosevelt’s gloomy apprehensions about racial decline, holding that “the civilised world” was wallowing “in a slough worse perhaps than the primeval mud of the Savage” (28). “Few men now writing in English”, said Theodore Roosevelt, better grasped in their books on sociological questions “the dangers that beset the future of the English-speaking peoples and the way these dangers can be met”. Roosevelt was reviewing Regeneration (1910), Haggard’s account of what the Salvation Army was doing for illegitimate children, unmarried mothers, the destitute, the ill, the depraved and the despairing. Haggard refused to take a fee for it and turned the copyright over to the Salvation Army. He also advocated changes in the laws governing the ownership of land, like compulsory surrender for cooperative farming on the Danish model.

Haggard’s opportunity to apply his remedies came with his appointment to the Dominions Royal Commission in 1912: an enquiry into the resources and potential of the Empire (29).

But it would take more than the Salvation Army to produce an ‘Imperial race’. As a Cambridge physics don pointed out, “conscious development of the race” was possible through the improvement of the environment “not only because of its immediate effect but also for its influence on coming generations.” This Cambridge physicist, W. C. Dampier-Whetham and his wife optimistically held that there was “plenty of good stock in England”, and if that was realised, “ways of encouraging its reproduction and checking that of the evil strains” would soon be found (30).

Amongst those evil strains the most obvious were those of the feeble-minded whose condition had been examined between 1904 and 1908 by a Royal Commission. Rejecting its conclusions that feeble-mindedness was probably “spontaneous” in origin, Dr. Saleeby described “the modern student of syphilis” as being “astonished by this pronouncement” (31). For to him the real origin of feeble-mindedness lay “either in the feeble-minded prostitutes such as our streets are filled with” or the “racial poisons” like abortifacient drugs and alcohol.

One of the members of this Commission, Mrs. Pinsent of the National Association for the Care of the Feeble-Minded, read a paper to the Church Congress in 1910. Its title, “Social Responsibility and Heredity”, covered a number of case histories in the American fashion and then cited what the community had tried to do yet failed. That failure she insisted necessitated permanent care.

Behind her was not only the National Association for the Care of the Feeble-Minded, but the Eugenics Society which she had joined with Mrs. Dendy. Coupling the names of both societies on their notepaper, these two women had written to every candidate in the 1910 General Election asking them to support measures to discourage “the feeble-minded and other degenerates” from parenting. When the support they received escalated to include 800 representatives from the local authorities, public bodies and boards of guardians, they launched the inevitable private members bill. Ultimately in 1913 an Act was passed establishing a Central Board of Control to replace the Lunacy Commissioners. The trend of the Act was summed up by one who proposed nearly 200 amendments as it was going through the Commons. “The Bill has some merits,” he wrote, “but it was one whereby prostitutes could be sent to feeble-minded houses to save mankind from infection.” (32)

That infection was now to catalyse further political action, as we shall subsequently see.

References:

(1) H. G. Wells, Experiment in Autobiography. Gollancz and the Cresset Press, 1934, pp. 663-5.

(2) H. G. Wells, The New Machiavelli (1910), Book 3, Chapter 4.

(3) Ibid.

(4) Ibid., pp. 5-6

(5) H. S. Shelton, “Eugenics” Contemporary Review, January 1912, p. 95.

(6) H. S. Iseman M.D., Race Suicide, New York, The Cosmopolitan Press, 1912, p. 126

(7) J. Ramsay MacDonald, Socialism and Society 6th ed., 1908, p. 204.

(8) The Case against Socialism: A Handbook for Speakers and Candidates with a Prefatory letter by the Rt. Hon. A. J. Balfour. George Allen & Sons, 1908, p. 402.

(9) Rita N. Soper, Ethics and Society in England. The Revolution in the Social Sciences 1870-1914. University of California Press, 1978, pp. 181, 141.

(10) John Dewey and J. H. Tufts, Ethics 1908.

(11) The Nation’s Morals. Being the proceedings of the Public Morals Conference Held in London on the 14th and 15th July 1910. Cassell & Co., 1910, pp. 132, 161-171.

(12) F. A. McKenzie, Cassell’s Magazine, January 1909; G. B. Lissendsen, “Racial Suicide: The Reply of the Masses” Westminster Review, September 1909, pp. 267-70

(13) J. A, Hobson, The Industrial System: An Enquiry into Earned and Unearned Income, 1909

(14) Rudyard Kipling’s Verse. Definitive Edition. Hodder and Stoughton, 1942, p. 132

(15) The Daily Telegraph, 17 January 1914.

(16) See for instance the massive array of such associations recorded as participating in a conference by Helen H. Blogg, Infant Welfare Conference of Health Promoting Institutions. P. S. King, 1911, p. 79.

(17) Havelock Ellis, The Task of Social Hygiene. Constable & Co., 1912. This was supported by a Doctor writing in the B.M.J. on 5 June 1913 (p.58) “I recently attended a woman in a neighbouring village with her fourteenth baby. During her convalescence I ventured to suggest a slight limitation of this extravagence, knowing that eight of her children are on the “parish” and four are “degenerates”. She said ‘Oh sir, the Lord will provide!’. Surely this is the general opinion of crass improvidence and should be prevented.”

(18) W. Bateson, Biological Fact and the Structure of Society (The Herbert Spencer Lecture 1912), p. 23. Decreasing age cohorts now made it possible to reorganise the existing school premises. With a Cambridge science graduate as President to the Board of Education - a Quaker double blue too - promising greatly increased grants for intermediate schools in that year, and in the following year (22 July 1913) promising £100,000 to local authorities as a prelude to a “more comprehensive measure”, a new bill seemed in the offing. And so it was. For one was presented in 1914 proposing that every county and county borough would have to provide “a complete progressive system of education in that area”, thereby restoring “the liberty which the Cockerton Judgement took away”. This measure of 1914 also envisaged “the establishment of Advisory Provincial Councils in grouped areas... empowered to undertake such administrative duties as the authorities may see fit to delegate.” Such duties might also include the provision of teacher training colleges and coordinated work done in higher technical schools and universities. The “model” was nothing less than a road from primary school to university, sustained by “arches” (i.e. the new secondary schools), to be engineered where necessary by a provincial consortium of local education authorities. As a member of the Birth Rate Commission exulted: “What real education may achieve, we can only guess.”

J. A. Pease, A National System of Education. Liberal Publication Department, 1913, p. 7;

C. W. Saleeby, The Progress of Eugenics; Cassell, 1914;

Peter Roweland. The Last Liberal Government’s Unfinished Business. 1911-1914. Barrie & Jenkins, 1971, pp. 187-8, 193, 199, 211-12.

(19) Hansard, 14 July 1909.

(20) Royal Commission on Divorce and Matrimonial Causes (1912) Cd 6478-81.

(21) Anna Martin, “The Mother and Social Reform”. The Nineteenth Century and After. June 1913, p. 1255.

(22) A. V. Dicey, “Woman Suffrage” Quarterly Review, January 1909, p. 304.

(23) “It is absolutely necessary that at least two years shall be given to diligent and serious training.” Daily Mail, 23 December 1909.

(24) J. St. L. Strachey, A New Way of Life, Macmillan, 1909; Hansard, 12 July 1909.

(25) A. James Hammerton, Emigrant Gentlewoman, Croome Helm, 1970, pp. 169-70.

(26) Sir Almoth Wright, quoted in Duncan Crow, The Edwardian Woman, Macmillan, 1978, pp. 218-220.

(27) Lord Roberts, Fallacies and Facts: An Answer to ‘Compulsory Service’ John Murray, 1911, pp. 194-5. These included F. S. Oliver, John Gough and Hugh Dawney. The former agreed to draft a memorandum and after wrestling with successive drafts, produced his famous Ordeal by Battle in 1915. This flushed from J M Robertson, under the pseudonym of ‘Roland’, a book on The Future of Militarism (1916), a plea for a system of collective security rather than a ‘balance of power’.

(28) Rider Haggard to Theodore Roosevelt, June 1912 quoted Lilias Rider Haggard, The Cloak that I Left, 1951, p. 188.

(29) “How I saw”, he exulted, “that all my long years of toil and attempting to solve the grave problems which lie at the root of the welfare of our country had not been without effect upon the minds of its rulers.” Nor, one might add, upon those who worried about the birth rate for seven years later he was appointed to the Birth Rate Commission and became a Vice-President of the Council of Public Morals. Morton Cohen, Rider Haggard, His Life and Works. Hutchinson, 1960, pp. 246-7, 255, 269.

(30) W. C. D and C. D. Whetham, The Family and the Nation: A Study in National Inheritance and Social Responsibility, Longmans Green & Co., 1909.

(31) C. W. Saleeby, Parenthood and Race Culture: An Outline of Eugenics, New York, Moffat, Yard, 1909.

(32) Kathleen Jones, Mental Health and Social Policy 1845-1859, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960, p. 64.