The outbreak of the First World War gave an undeniable cogency to the prevailing intellectual and public concern with eugenic theories. Discussion initially evolved around the notion of "national efficiency" which had been raised fifteen years earlier following the devastating early military defeats of the British armies during the Boer War. It had then been found that three out of every four men attempting to enlist in Manchester were rejected as medically unsound and Benjamin Rowntree had estimated that half of England’s workforce was unfit for military service (1). The dysgenic effects of war were argued at length by David Starr Jordan, a biologist who had been elected President of the new and prestigious Stanford university in California, in a series of books which were republished in England and taken up by Havelock Ellis and the eugenics movement (2). War was a eugenic disaster because it eliminated the "brightest and best"; it caused reverse selection and racial decline; after wars nations bred from inferior stock - those left at home.

This process, English eugenicists saw, was exacerbated by voluntary enlistment because, as the Regius Professor of Natural History maintained, "the most chivalrous, virile and courageous young men" would be the first to take up arms and their annihilation would result not only in "maternal depression" (i.e. low fertility) in women of their class but the subsequent over-production of "under-average types" with consequent "race impoverishment" (3). Major Leonard Darwin conceded that though conscription - which was not introduced until 1916 (4) - would cause "casualty lists to be more nearly representative of a random sample of the population" it would not wholly eliminate the dysgenic effects of war since the medically unfit would still be left behind. He suggested that older men should be called up first leaving younger men to build up the nation’s stock after the war (5).

What for the eugenicists was initially a theoretical concern was, from the beginning to the end of the War, a poignant social reality as the death rolls reflected their disproportionate toll on the men of promise. In the course of the war "casualties were about three times heavier in proportion amongst junior officers than with common soldiers... Asquith lost his eldest son; Law lost two sons" (6). Following the death in action of his Oxford room mate and two of his cousins in 1915, Harold Laski told Lansbury that "half the men you met in my room at Oxford have been killed and I wonder where we shall get the intellect for the next generation" (7). It was a question which would be asked time and again in parliament, in the press and in the medical journals and which would haunt the public conscience during the years ahead, not least amongst those who returned from the War. Attlee, Eden and Macmillan all reveal in their memoirs how their political attitudes were influenced by their experience in the trenches and how they regarded themselves as spokesmen for the aspirations of a generation no longer there to speak for itself.

The Eugenics Society, throughout its history anxious to combine theory and practice, responded with a scheme of action about which surprisingly little has been written. Enlisting the help of the heads of a number of professional bodies it established, soon after the outbreak of war, its own Professional Classes War Relief Council. It persuaded J. Pierpoint Morgan to make available his two houses at 13 and 14 Princes Gate which the Society equipped and staffed as a fully functioning seventeen-bed maternity nursing home for the wives of officers to assure the best of care for their genetically valuable offspring. In the first two years of its operation "some 242 children of former doctors, lawyers, university teachers and other race heroes were born" at Princes Gate (8).

A further practical involvement of the Eugenics Society unfortunately brought about its severance from those members of the Malthusian League, notably the Drysdales, who had been active in the Society’s formation and supportive of its work since 1908. This was National Baby Week when, in July 1917, the Society and a number of other organisations mounted public lectures, exhibitions and meetings in London and elsewhere to direct attention to maternal and infant welfare and to publicise the need for voluntary motherhood. These mildly pro-natalist activities were an affront to the Malthusians (National Baby Week was an "atrocity" (9)) whose rigid ideology explained, and was in turn confirmed by, every aspect of the War. War was a biological check on swarming world populations and this War was a direct outcome of the expansionist needs of the high birth-rate nations of central and eastern Europe which, having threatened the peace of Europe for decades, could no longer contain their explosive tensions. Birth-rates were also a clear predictor of military efficiency; in 1917 J. M. Robertson proclaimed that "those nations with the longest-attained decline in the birth rate... have held like iron on the Western Front. The Central Powers, relying on population, have failed... after the first rush", Russia "with the largest population and the highest birth-rate of all, has shown the least power of concerted effort, military, financial, moral and administrative" (10). And victory, when it came, represented the triumph of the low birth-rate countries over their high birth-rate enemies. "Had it not been for the spread of birth control among the finer races, and among the better types in those races", declared Bessie Drysdale, "democracy would have gone down in the dust before Germany’s false goals and awful military power" (11). Criticising the rigidity of the neo-Malthusian stance, and in particular the League’s moratorium on childbirth until the cessation of hostilities, James Marchant expressed contempt for the notion that "democracy could become aristocratised by using the cradle for firewood" (12). The neo-Malthusians, with characteristically self-confident logic, replied that war babies could be of no military use during the conflict and economically could only consume and not produce.

If the Malthusians were intellectually secure in their simple ideology, the evolutionists within the eugenics movement displayed more varied responses to the War. Those extreme social Darwinists for whom the nation state was the unit of competitive social evolution saw war as a continuance of Natural Selection. "Military vigour", snarled Homer Lea, "constitutes the strength of nations" whilst the Egyptologist, W. M. Flinders Petrie, who saw no human advance without conflict declared "Man must strive with Nature or with man if he is not to fall back and degenerate" (13).

An underlying theme of the war poets, it has been pointed out, was (conscious or unconscious) imperialistic social Darwinism. In his introduction to the Penguin Book of First World War Poetry Jon Silkin quotes Geoffrey Matthews’ observation that Rupert Brooke’s war sonnets "are not war poems at all, except in the most accidental sense, but - to put it crudely - poems celebrating the export of English goods". Silkin refers (14) to the famous opening lines of Brooke’s "The Soldier" :

If I should die think only this of me:

That there’s some corner of a foreign field

That is forever England. There shall be

In that rich earth a richer dust concealed:

A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware...

and comments "this is as candidly imperialistic as Kipling, even if it is, less frankly, an inferior copy of Hardy’s ‘Drummer Hodge’" (written in the more jingoistic atmosphere of the Boer War):

Yet portion of that unknown plain

Will Hodge forever be:

His homely northern breast and brain

Grow to some Southern tree,

And strange-eyed constellations reign

His stars eternally.

The President of the Royal Anthropological Society, Sir Arthur Keith FRS, believed in "the evolutionary naturalness and necessity of war" and was subsequently to extend Luther Burbank’s horticultural metaphor to its ultimate limit in describing war as "Nature’s pruning hook" (15). Psycho-eugenic theories were also invoked to justify war as a fundamentally biological enterprise resting on the pugnacious instincts of man programmed into the human psyche, according to J. R. Angell, "during eons of evolution" (16). Raymond Pearl (whose name is memorialised in demography in the formula for measuring contraceptive failure rates) saw war as fulfilling a biological function in social evolution "analogous to that of mutation in physical inheritance" (17) thus anticipating the recent theories of socio-biology.

Others argued that military drill, discipline and training had racial benefits in that it produced superior human traits. Rudyard Kipling, Sir James Barr and Theodore Chambers, amongst others stressed this eugenic aspect of military life but theirs was a confused - a Lamarckian - evolutionism. More soundly evolutionist, in applying Darwin’s central mechanism of sexual selection, was the theory proposed by the Scottish doctor and science writer Ronald Campbell Macfie who maintained that male war deaths would create a vast surplus of women many of whom would be denied motherhood whilst the surviving men would select partners from that surplus according to eugenically desirable characteristics, "Nature (having) wisely arranged that men should be attracted by characters that imply capacity for motherhood". Because these traits are genetically transmitted "every war, therefore, will do something to set up evolutionary tendencies opposite to its own, brutal, truculent, anti-social spirit" (18).

One "brutal tendency" universally recognised as a serious dysgenic hazard was the spread of venereal disease in the armed forces. With one serviceman in five infected with gonorrhea, syphilis or other venereal infection (19) the threat to the unborn through the hereditable effect of untreated or ineffectively treated disease was alarming. When these facts were revealed by the Royal Commission in 1917 the issue of condoms to all troops was immediately given official approval and, as A.J.P. Taylor pointed out, "the free treatment of venereal disease was the sole innovation in ‘welfare’ directly attributable to the first World War" (20).

Three quarters of a million British servicemen were killed in the First World War (civilian deaths were relatively slight at less than 1,500); hardly a "lost generation". Nor did the War create "a million surplus women"; the 1921 Census revealed a ratio of 1,096 females to 1,000 males compared with 1,068 females to 1,000 males in 1911. Nevertheless, the widespread popular acceptance of these myths served to sustain a public confidence in eugenic theories which were to play an increased rôle in the analysis and interpretation of population events in the post-War decade.

References:

(1) Quoted by R. Soloway "Counting the Desperates: Race Deterioration in Edwardian England", Journal of Contemporary History 17:1 (1982) 137-64.

(2) David Starr Jordan, The Human Harvest: War’s Aftermath (1907), War and Waste (1914) and War and the Breed (1915). Despite Starr Jordan’s Galtonian credentials the latter book was given a hostile review by G. G. Coulton in the Eugenics Review in 1915 (Vol VII, pp 287-292.)

(3) J. Arthur Thomson, Eugenics Review, "Eugenics and War" Eugenics Review Vol VIII pp 1.14.

(4) A.J.P. Taylor, English History 1914 - 1945, Oxford 1965, pp. 55.

(5) Major Leonard Darwin, "Eugenics During and After the War", Eugenics Review, Vol III pp 91-106.

(6) A.J.P. Taylor, op cit, p. 120.

(7) I. Kraminick and B. Sheerman, Harold Laski: A Life on the Left, Hamish Hamilton 1993, p. 85.

(8) R. A. Soloway, Birth Control and the Population Question in England 1877-1930 1982, London, p. 173.

(9) Malthusian, October 1914, p. 75, quoted Soloway, ibid.

(10) Malthusian, Jan. 1917, p. 5, quoted Soloway, ibid.

(11) Malthusian, December 1918, p. 91, quoted Soloway, ibid.

(12) James Marchant Birth Rate and Empire (London 1917) p. 24.

(13) W. M. Flinders Petrie The Revolutions of Civilisation (London 1911).

(14) Jon Silkin, The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry, Allen Lane 1979.

(15) Quoted by Nancy Stepan "Nature’s Pruning Hook" in J.M.W. Bean (ed) The Political Culture of Modern Britain, London 1987, p.136.

(16) J. R. Angell, quoted by Paul Crook, Darwinism War and History, CUP 1994.

(17) Raymond Pearl Biology and War an article written in 1918 and published in Studies in Human Biology Baltimore 1924 pp 534-549.

(18) R. C. N Macfie, Evolutionary Consequences of War, quoted by Paul Crook, op cit.

(19) Report of the Royal Commission on Venereal Diseases (1916) Cmd 8189.

(20) A.J.P. Taylor op cit p. 121.

(21) Peter Simkins, Kitchener's Army: The Raising of the New Armies, 1914-1916, Manchester University Press, 1988, pp 120-1.