The Social Context of Eugenic Thought

"Long before race-suicide becomes inevitable and imminent, a great variety of expedients will be introduced to raise the birth rate to or above the safety limit. Thus, in a general way, forewarned is forearmed."

F.C.S. Schiller, "Prophesy, Destiny and Population", Hibbert Journal, July 1937, p. 519.

The opening salvo for "adequate parenthood" was fired in the House of Lords on 10 November 1936 and followed up in the House of Commons on 10 February 1937 when Ronald Cartland moved that the decline of the population might well undermine the British Empire, Britain having "one of the lowest birth-rates of all countries for which records are kept" (1). Cartland’s motion echoed the general concern for imperial defence expressed by Victor Cazalet: "What a problem the growing populations of Italy and Germany entail. It looks as if we are boiling up for a frightful struggle with disastrous results to civilisation." (2) It also satisfied the imperialists who had supported a measure to extend the Empire Settlement Act until 1952 because the Australian birth rate was declining too and Mr. Menzies, then Attorney-General for Australia, wanted Australia to have a population of 20 millions by 1950 (3).

Taken up by the British Broadcasting Corporation in its most Reithian manner two months later, a series of talks were given on the subject by experts (4) in various fields which in turn attracted so much discussion that The Times described population as "one of the topics of the hour". (5) Intruding into the pages of the Hibbert Journal it elicited one of the last papers ever to be written by a pre-first world war eugenicist, from which the epigraph to this chapter was taken.

Lamenting that "no organised effort had yet been made to get the nation to realise these facts", the Chairman of the Council of the British Medical Association called for the four child family to become the norm if the existing population was to be maintained and sterile marriages offset (6).

Conversely, the Secretary of the Population Investigation Committee was "impressed with the number and excellence of the reasons why married couples should have few children." He saw "the reproductive impulse" as "coming to be a delicate thing, struggling against numerous checks and obstacles" and probably "incapable of effective resuscitation unless drastic changes for the better" were "introduced into our social and international life." (7).

These "numerous checks and obstacles" had been identified by the P.I.C. They ranged from the difficulty of obtaining domestic servants and the craze for amusements and pleasures to fear of another war, poor wages for working men, the pace of modern life, the "athleticism" of modern girls, the increase of homosexuality, the fears of dying in childbirth, the demoralising effects of congested urban life, to just plain selfishness (8).

The latter especially was seized upon by the Sunday Express when it described the newly elected Tory MP for Richmond as "married five years, no children". So stung was this MP (later to be Winston Churchill’s PPS and a father of three, born respectively in 1940, 1942 and 1944) that he commented, "couldn’t afford them; my wife was working." (9).

Yet allowing wives to work seemed the answer to other natalists who argued that if education authorities were to desist from retiring all women teachers who married, there would be fewer "lay nuns amongst our best marriagable material". This would help to improve the quality of the stock as it was "well known... that children of the manse and the schoolhouse" made "the best citizens." (10)

More ambitious efforts to help mothers were proposed by Duncan Sandys in seconding Ronald Cartland’s motion in the House of Commons. Extending Neville Chamberlain’s argument that "even a little help to those who were carrying on the race would not be wasted" (though his budgeting concessions to families in 1935 and 1936 were derisory), Sandys - much to the glee of Labour members - advocated pregnancy leave, child allowances, nursery schools and crèches, climaxing with the hope "that the desirability... of making attendance at state schools obligatory for rich and poor alike would be considered". "The Minister laughs", he exclaimed, "but I think it is a matter which deserves consideration. Not only would it encourage larger families, but would be a further step in the direction of equality of opportunities."

Well might a Labour member playfully offer him a membership card. For even Labour MP’s had to find fees for their own children, much less people with smaller incomes. So the Labour party supported the motion for an inquiry (11). One Labour MP feared that building societies would "in very few years be in Queer Street [sic] since they were planning for an enormous population which we know will never exist". (12)

Queerer still was the gerontophobic scenario issued soon after by the Population Investigation Committee, which forecast that by 2035 the over-60s would constitute 57.75 per cent of a total population of 4,500,000, but children under 15 only 2.96 per cent. This rapid change was likely, it thought, to accelerate with increasing rapidity after 1950 (13). Keynes also reminded The Eugenics Society that the growth of population was, with a given level of consumption and technical change, the source of capital. Since population had risen by 50 per cent in the fifty years before the war and the average level of consumption by 60 per cent, the prospect of a declining population meant that the problem would be to employ double the capital. This meant that either institutions and the distribution of wealth would have to be altered in a way which would cause a smaller proportion of income to be saved or that the rate of interest must be lowered enough to make profitable very large changes in techniques in the direction of consumption which involved a much larger use of capital in relation to output. And, as he confessed, there would be "many social and political forces to oppose the necessary change." (14).

Seen in the context of Blacker’s already quoted argument that "the reproductive impulse" was "incapable of effective resuscitation unless drastic changes for the better" were "introduced into our social and international life", this indicated a rise of a tide of sentiment that could only be called "biosocialism", i.e. state intervention to ensure the maintenance of the native population. For the only alternative to the native population generating its own replacements was for the state to lower the barriers to immigration.

A new policy of active encouragement of immigration of young artisans and more educated persons into Great Britain was advocated by Professor (later Sir) Arnold Plant on the basis of the past record of immigrants in developing industries and enriching the population. He said: "it may well be that in view of the imminent decline in just those age groups of the population that we can ill afford to lose, a change-over from assisted emigration to freer, if not assisted, immigration would now best serve the interests of this country." He actually compared the benefits from immigrant labour to "the introduction of labour-saving machinery in that it undercuts the wages of existing workers, but makes the produce more plentiful and increases resources for other production, thereby raising the general standards of life." (15) This was to be reinforced by George Orwell’s comment that "the overwhelming bulk of the British proletariat does not live in Britain but in Asia and Africa" where they really were low paid (16).

Noting the increase in immigration from 4,000 a year between 1927 and 1930 to 8,000 a year between 1933 and 1937, a contributor to the debate agreed that "the time is not far distant when Great Britain will have to consider seriously either a more liberal system of labour permits for aliens, or a freer system of naturalisation or both." If some sort of guidance on qualities needed were offered, R.S Walshaw concluded, "what has in some quarters been called an alien menace could very quickly be turned into an immense opportunity." (17)

The arithmetician of the democalypse whom everyone was quoting was quite categorical. "If no conspicuous immigration takes place", he concluded in a series of lectures at the University of London, "and fertility and mortality remain constant to the same extent... we shall soon witness in England, as in most other countries of Western Civilisation, a steady decrease in the population as a whole." So he urged people to realise that "a change in the population trend is under any circumstances a serious matter with far reaching consequences, good and bad... the frictions caused by unavoidable displacements and shifts will be most painful." (18)

His colleague, Lancelot Hogben, following what he described as the biological failure of capitalism, urged Socialists "to abandon their Malthusian mythologies" and face the question of "whether the pattern of sterility characteristic of declining capitalism" was "wholly a consequence of social agencies inherent in capitalism as such" or was "wholly a consequence of social agencies which could still operate under Socialism." (10) Hogben detected the advent of a state of affairs in which "the cultural barriers between the fertile and the infertile within one and the same social class" were "as acute as any pre-existing barriers between contiguous social classes." (20)

Hogben’s opinion that "any Government, Socialist or otherwise" would "have to face the task of raising fertility or accept a downhill retreat to racial extinction" was shared by the Conservative MP for Widnes, R. A. Pilkington who went so far as to wonder whether or not "our grandchildren would be rari nantes swimming in a sea of saffron." (21)

The latter possibility outraged even the veteran anti-imperialist Liberal - a father of four - who asked: "Are we therefore to deny that any inherent superiority of human values attaches to any of the civilised white peoples, and that it matters nothing if they decline in population and are displaced by the more prolific populations of Asia and Africa?" (22)

So convinced was he that "the quantative aspect of the population question" had "a proper and perhaps important place in any economy of human welfare" that he was prepared to see "a larger number of human beings living somewhat below that higher level which our ‘optimists’ desiderate, provided the lower level makes an adequate provision for the prime needs of life." (23)

But because births since 1933 had shown "a slight upward tendency", Sir Kingsley Wood - a man deeply involved in the insurance world - offered MP’s nine months later a Bill designed to collect more statistics about trends.

If the meetings with the Registrar-General over the drafting of the Population (Statistics) Bill strengthened the bonds between the Eugenics Society and P.E.P., the debates when Kingsley Wood’s measure reached the House of Commons in November revealed the suspicions of the Labour party over the "issue of issue". The childless Aneurin Bevan dismissed the proposed questionnaire as "nauseating cant": an attempt to persuade the country that they were really concerned about population figures. He warned MP’s that they might have won the vocal franchise but they were losing "the silent franchise". This he defined as "the decision not to bring children into the sort of society for which Hon. members opposite are responsible." As he tempestuously exclaimed:

"I have no children although my mother had 14, and one of the reasons why, unless things change considerably, and providence intervenes, I shall not have any children, is because my mother had 14." (24)

Speaking in the absence of all the eleven women Members on the second reading of the Population (Statistics) Bill in a House of Commons of which nearly a third were bachelors, Aneurin Bevan attacked the assumption of the bachelor Conservative Ronald Cartland (whose motion nine months earlier had precipitated the Bill) that the falling birth rate constituted "a danger to the maintenance of the British Empire". We know now that children were, in Nye Bevan’s words, "hostages to fortune". So he and his wife Jennie Lee agreed that "permanent ties were dangerous for these could make cowards of the best of us if torn between concern for dependants and situations in which we must be free to pursue our socialist objectives, whatever the personal consequences." (25)

The Sisyphian task of diagnosing and remedying the birth rate was for most people summed up by the licensed jester of the House, AP Herbert, in his attack (see box) on the questionnaire that the Population (Statistics) Bill would entail (20).

References:

1. W. J. Willcocks in W. G. K. Duncan and C.V. Jones (ed.), The Future of Immigration into Australia and New Zealand, Sydney, Angus and Robertson, 1937, p. 285.

2. R.R. James, Victor Cazalet, Hamish Hamilton, 1976, p. 166.

3. Duncan and Jones (ed.), op. cit., p. 119.

4. In T. H. Marshall et al., The Population Problem. The Experts and the Public, George Allen & Unwin, 1938. Marshall was the Interlocutor.

5. The Times, 17 April 1937.

6. Sir Henry Brackenbury in R. B. Cattell, J. Cohen and R. M. W. Travers, Human Affairs, Macmillan, 1937, p. 137.

7. C. P. Blacker in ibid., p. 120.

8. C. P. Blacker and D. V. Glass, Population and Fertility, P. I. C., 1937.

9. G. S. Harvie-Watt (b. 1903), Most of My Life, Springwood Books, 1980, pp. 278-9.

10. "Our Declining Population", Journal of Education, June 1937, p. 430.

11. Hansard 320, 10 February 1937, col. 325.

12. ibid., cols. 486, 498.

13. C.P. Blacker and D.V. Glass, The Future of Our Population, P.I.C., 1937.

14. J.M. Keynes, "Some Economic Consequences of a Declining Population", Eugenics Review XXIX (1937), pp. 1 - 5.

15. In T.H. Marshall (ed.), op. cit., p. 133.

16. "Not Counting Niggers" in Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (eds.) The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Secker & Warburg, 1968, i. p. 397.

17. R. S. Walshaw, "External Migration", Eugenics Review XXXI (1939-40) p. 46.

18. Robert R. Kuczynski, Population Movements, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1979.

19. Lancelot Hogben in G. D. H. Cole et al., What is Ahead of us?, George Allen & Unwin, 1937, p. 178.

20. ibid., p. 185.

21. Hansard 320, 10 February 1937, col. 502.

22. J.A. Hobson (b. 1858), Confessions of an Economic Heretic, George Allen & Unwin, 1938, p. 149.

23. ibid., p. 153.

24. Hansard 329, 20 November 1937, cols. 1775-6, 1759.

25. Jennie Lee (b. 1904), My Life with Nye, Jonathan Cape, 1980. pp. 100-1.

26. Hansard 329, 29 November 1937, cols. 1758-60.