The War and Racial Progress

[From the Morning Post of London, July 2, 1915]

Major Leonard Darwin, in his presidential address on "Eugenics During and After the War" to the Eugenics Education Society at the Grafton Galleries yesterday, said that our military system seemed to be devised with the object of insuring that all who were defective should be exempt from risks, whilst the strong, courageous, and patriotic should be endangered. Men with noble qualities were being destroyed, whilst the unfit remained at home to become fathers of families, and this must deteriorate the natural qualities of the coming generations. The chances of stopping war were small, and we must consider how to minimize its evils. If conscription were adopted future wars would produce less injury to the race, because the casualty lists would more nearly represent a chance selection of the population; though whether a conscript army would ever fight as well as our men were doing in France was very doubtful. The injurious effects of the war on all useful sections of the community should be mitigated. Military training was eugenic if the men were kept with the colours only for short periods. Officers must, of course, be engaged for long periods, and amongst them the birth rate was very low. An increase of pay would be beneficial in this respect, but only if given in the form of an additional allowance for each living child. In the hope of increasing the birth rate attempts were likely to be made to exalt the "unmarried wife," a detestable term against which all true wives should protest. If a change in moral standards was demanded in the hope that an increase in the habit of forming irregular unions would result in an increase in the population, that plea entirely failed because the desired effect would not thus be produced. A special effort ought now to be made on eugenic as well as on other grounds to maintain the high standards of home life which had ever existed in our race, and which had been in large measure the basis of our social and racial progress in the past. If we did not now take some steps to insure our own racial progress being at least as rapid as that of our neighbours, and if our nation should in consequence cease in future to play a great part in the noble and eternal struggle for human advancement, then the fault would be ours.