First steps towards eugenic reform / by Leonard Darwin.

  • Darwin, Leonard, 1850-1943.
Date:
[between 1910 and 1919?]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: First steps towards eugenic reform / by Leonard Darwin. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    sufficiently distinct to be discussed separately in the investigation of this social problem. There are, in the first place, those mis¬ fortunes, using the word in its widest sense, which are due to the inherent or inborn defects of the slum dweller himself; mis¬ fortunes which indicate, in fact, that those who suffer from them may as a class be described as the naturally unfit. Then, in the second place, there are those misfortunes—and here the word is used in its more literal meaning—which are in no way due to the innate qualities of those smitten by them; misfortunes such as an accident affecting life or limb, or a bad start in life due to no fault or inherent defect in the parents. And the point here to note concerning those singled out from the rest of the community by the results of this second type of misfortune-—the class that may perhaps be described as the unlucky—is that their children will certainly be not more likely than the average child to suffer from the same misfortunes as those which in each case im¬ poverished the parents. On the other hand, as regards the first mentioned class, here called the naturally unfit,—a class includ¬ ing criminals, drunkards, invalids, wastrels, and all those charac¬ terised by a marked want of self-control—their children will certainly in many cases be especially liable to suffer from the same kind of defects as those which were influential in degrad¬ ing their parents. Now, if we look the facts of life fearlessly in the face, surely it must be evident that the naturally unfit will always tend to fall from the richer into the poorer strata of society; that, whenever the same defect recurs in the second and third generation, any previously acquired wealth will, as a rule, disappear; and that in this way in many cases the descen¬ dants of those first afflicted with any hereditary defect will find themselves forced into the slums or the workhouse. On the other hand, the children or the grandchildren of the merely unlucky, who are not especially liable to be hindered in their careers by any inherent defects, will generally escape this state of degradation by rising by their own exertions from whatever may have been the depths of poverty into which their parents had sunk. Is it not certain, therefore, that the lower we look in the scale of the classes of the community, if measured by the degrees of their poverty, the smaller will be the proportion of the