The Pivot of Civilization

M >> Margaret Sanger >> The Pivot of Civilization


The problem of human heredity is now seen to be infinitely more complex
than imagined by Galton and his followers, and the optimistic hope of
elevating Eugenics to the level of a religion is a futile one. Most of
the Eugenists, including Professor Karl Pearson and his colleagues of
the Eugenics Laboratory of the University of London and of the biometric
laboratory in University College, have retained the age-old point
of view of "Nature vs. Nurture" and have attempted to show the
predominating influence of Heredity AS OPPOSED TO Environment. This
may be true; but demonstrated and repeated in investigation after
investigation, it nevertheless remains fruitless and unprofitable from
the practical point of view.

We should not minimize the great outstanding service of Eugenics for
critical and diagnostic investigations. It demonstrates, not in terms of
glittering generalization but in statistical studies of investigations
reduced to measurement and number, that uncontrolled fertility is
universally correlated with disease, poverty, overcrowding and the
transmission of hereditable taints. Professor Pearson and his associates
show us that "if fertility be correlated with anti-social hereditary
characters, a population will inevitably degenerate."

This degeneration has already begun. Eugenists demonstrate that
two-thirds of our manhood of military age are physically too unfit
to shoulder a rifle; that the feeble-minded, the syphilitic, the
irresponsible and the defective breed unhindered; that women are driven
into factories and shops on day-shift and night-shift; that children,
frail carriers of the torch of life, are put to work at an early
age; that society at large is breeding an ever-increasing army of
under-sized, stunted and dehumanized slaves; that the vicious circle of
mental and physical defect, delinquency and beggary is encouraged,
by the unseeing and unthinking sentimentality of our age, to populate
asylum, hospital and prison.

All these things the Eugenists sees and points out with a courage
entirely admirable. But as a positive program of redemption, orthodox
Eugenics can offer nothing more "constructive" than a renewed "cradle
competition" between the "fit" and the "unfit." It sees that the
most responsible and most intelligent members of society are the less
fertile; that the feeble-minded are the more fertile. Herein lies the
unbalance, the great biological menace to the future of civilization.
Are we heading to biological destruction, toward the gradual but certain
attack upon the stocks of intelligence and racial health by the sinister
forces of the hordes of irresponsibility and imbecility? This is not
such a remote danger as the optimistic Eugenist might suppose. The
mating of the moron with a person of sound stock may, as Dr. Tredgold
points out, gradually disseminate this trait far and wide until it
undermines the vigor and efficiency of an entire nation and an entire
race. This is no idle fancy. We must take it into account if we wish to
escape the fate that has befallen so many civilizations in the past.

"It is, indeed, more than likely that the presence of this impairment
in a mitigated form is responsible for no little of the defective
character, the diminution of mental and moral fiber at the present day,"
states Dr. Tredgold.(2) Such populations, this distinguished authority
might have added, form the veritable "cultures" not only for contagious
physical diseases but for mental instability and irresponsibility also.
They are susceptible, exploitable, hysterical, non-resistant to external
suggestion. Devoid of stamina, such folk become mere units in a mob.
"The habit of crowd-making is daily becoming a more serious menace to
civilization," writes Everett Dean Martin. "Our society is becoming
a veritable babel of gibbering crowds."(3) It would be only the
incorrigible optimist who refused to see the integral relation between
this phenomenon and the indiscriminate breeding by which we recruit our
large populations.

The danger of recruiting our numbers from the most "fertile stocks" is
further emphasized when we recall that in a democracy like that of the
United States every man and woman is permitted a vote in the government,
and that it is the representatives of this grade of intelligence who may
destroy our liberties, and who may thus be the most far-reaching peril
to the future of civilization.

"It is a pathological worship of mere number," writes Alleyne Ireland,
"which has inspired all the efforts--the primary, the direct election
of Senators, the initiative, the recall and the referendum--to cure the
evils of mob rule by increasing the size of the mob and extending its
powers."(4)

Equality of political power has thus been bestowed upon the lowest
elements of our population. We must not be surprised, therefore, at
the spectacle of political scandal and graft, of the notorious and
universally ridiculed low level of intelligence and flagrant stupidity
exhibited by our legislative bodies. The Congressional Record mirrors
our political imbecility.

All of these dangers and menaces are acutely realized by the Eugenists;
it is to them that we are most indebted for the proof that reckless
spawning carries with it the seeds of destruction. But whereas the
Galtonians reveal themselves as unflinching in their investigation and
in their exhibition of fact and diagnoses of symptoms, they do not on
the other hand show much power in suggesting practical and feasible
remedies.

On its scientific side, Eugenics suggests the reestabilishment of
the balance between the fertility of the "fit" and the "unfit." The
birth-rate among the normal and healthier and finer stocks of humanity,
is to be increased by awakening among the "fit" the realization of the
dangers of a lessened birth-rate in proportion to the reckless breeding
among the "unfit." By education, by persuasion, by appeals to racial
ethics and religious motives, the ardent Eugenist hopes to increase the
fertility of the "fit." Professor Pearson thinks that it is especially
necessary to awaken the hardiest stocks to this duty. These stocks,
he says, are to be found chiefly among the skilled artisan class, the
intelligent working class. Here is a fine combination of health and
hardy vigor, of sound body and sound mind.

Professor Pearson and his school of biometrics here ignore or at least
fail to record one of those significant "correlations" which form the
basis of his method. The publications of the Eugenics Laboratory all
tend to show that a high rate of fertility is correlated with extreme
poverty, recklessness, deficiency and delinquency; similarly, that
among the more intelligent, this rate of fertility decreases. But the
scientific Eugenists fail to recognize that this restraint of fecundity
is due to a deliberate foresight and is a conscious effort to
elevate standards of living for the family and the children of the
responsible--and possibly more selfish--sections of the community. The
appeal to enter again into competitive child-bearing, for the benefit
of the nation or the race, or any other abstraction, will fall on deaf
ears.

Pearson has done invaluable work in pointing out the fallacies and the
false conclusions of the ordinary statisticians. But when he attempts to
show by the methods of biometrics that not only the first child but
also the second, are especially liable to suffer from transmissible
pathological defects, such as insanity, criminality and tuberculosis,
he fails to recognize that this tendency is counterbalanced by the high
mortality rate among later children. If first and second children reveal
a greater percentage of heritable defect, it is because the later born
children are less liable to survive the conditions produced by a large
family.

In passing, we should here recognize the difficulties presented by the
idea of "fit" and "unfit." Who is to decide this question? The grosser,
the more obvious, the undeniably feeble-minded should, indeed, not only
be discouraged but prevented from propagating their kind. But among the
writings of the representative Eugenists one cannot ignore the distinct
middle-class bias that prevails. As that penetrating critic, F. W.
Stella Browne, has said in another connection, "The Eugenics Education
Society has among its numbers many most open-minded and truly
progressive individuals but the official policy it has pursued for years
has been inspired by class-bias and sex bias. The society laments with
increasing vehemence the multiplication of the less fortunate classes at
a more rapid rate than the possessors of leisure and opportunity. (I do
not think it relevant here to discuss whether the innate superiority of
endowment in the governing class really is so overwhelming as to justify
the Eugenics Education Society's peculiar use of the terms `fit' and
`unfit'!) Yet it has persistently refused to give any help toward
extending the knowledge of contraceptives to the exploited classes.
Similarly, though the Eugenics Review, the organ of the society,
frequently laments the `selfishness' of the refusal of maternity by
healthy and educated women of the professional classes, I have yet
to learn that it has made any official pronouncement on the English
illegitimacy laws or any organized effort toward defending the unmarried
mother."

This peculiarly Victorian reticence may be inherited from the founder of
Eugenics. Galton declared that the "Bohemian" element in the Anglo-Saxon
race is destined to perish, and "the sooner it goes, the happier for
mankind." The trouble with any effort of trying to divide humanity
into the "fit" and the "unfit," is that we do not want, as H. G. Wells
recently pointed out,(5) to breed for uniformity but for variety. "We
want statesmen and poets and musicians and philosophers and strong
men and delicate men and brave men. The qualities of one would be the
weaknesses of the other." We want, most of all, genius.

Proscription on Galtonian lines would tend to eliminate many of the
great geniuses of the world who were not only "Bohemian," but actually
and pathologically abnormal--men like Rousseau, Dostoevsky, Chopin, Poe,
Schumann, Nietzsche, Comte, Guy de Maupassant,--and how many others?
But such considerations should not lead us into error of concluding that
such men were geniuses merely because they were pathological specimens,
and that the only way to produce a genius is to breed disease and
defect. It only emphasizes the dangers of external standards of "fit"
and "unfit."

These limitations are more strikingly shown in the types of so-called
"eugenic" legislation passed or proposed by certain enthusiasts.
Regulation, compulsion and prohibitions affected and enacted by
political bodies are the surest methods of driving the whole problem
under-ground. As Havelock Ellis has pointed out, the absurdity and even
hopelessness of effecting Eugenic improvement by placing on the statute
books prohibitions of legal matrimony to certain classes of people,
reveal the weakness of those Eugenists who minimize or undervalue the
importance of environment as a determining factor. They affirm that
heredity is everything and environment nothing, yet forget that it is
precisely those who are most universally subject to bad environment who
procreate most copiously, most recklessly and most disastrously. Such
marriage laws are based for the most part on the infantile assumption
that procreation is absolutely dependent upon the marriage ceremony,
an assumption usually coupled with the complementary one that the only
purpose in marriage is procreation. Yet it is a fact so obvious that it
is hardly worth stating that the most fertile classes who indulge in the
most dysgenic type of procreating--the feeble-minded--are almost totally
unaffected by marriage laws and marriage-ceremonies.

As for the sterilization of habitual criminals, not merely must we
know more of heredity and genetics in general, but also acquire
more certainty of the justice of our laws and the honesty of their
administration before we can make rulings of fitness or unfitness merely
upon the basis of a respect for law. On this point the eminent William
Bateson writes:(6) "Criminals are often feeble-minded, but as regards
those that are not, the fact that a man is for the purposes of Society
classified as a criminal, tells me little as to his value, still less
as to the possible value of his offspring. It is a fault inherent in
criminal jurisprudence, based on non-biological data, that the law must
needs take the nature of the offenses rather than that of the offenders
as the basis of classification. A change in the right direction has
begun, but the problem is difficult and progress will be very slow.... We
all know of persons convicted, perhaps even habitually, whom the
world could ill spare. Therefore I hesitate to proscribe the criminal.
Proscription... is a weapon with a very nasty recoil. Might not some
with equal cogency proscribe army contractors and their accomplices,
the newspaper patriots? The crimes of the prison population are petty
offenses by comparison, and the significance we attach to them is a
survival of other days. Felonies may be great events, locally, but they
do not induce catastrophies. The proclivities of the war-makers are
infinitely more dangerous than those of the aberrant beings whom from
time to time the law may dub as criminal. Consistent and portentous
selfishness, combined with dulness of imagination is probably just as
transmissible as want of self-control, though destitute of the amiable
qualities not rarely associated with the genetic composition of persons
of unstable mind."

In this connection, we should note another type of "respectable"
criminality noted by Havelock Ellis: "If those persons who raise the cry
of `race-suicide' in face of the decline of the birth-rate really had
the knowledge and the intelligence to realize the manifold evils which
they are invoking, they would deserve to be treated as criminals."

Our debt to the science of Eugenics is great in that it directs our
attention to the biological nature of humanity. Yet there is too great
a tendency among the thinkers of this school, to restrict their ideas
of sex to its expression as a purely procreative function. Compulsory
legislation which would make the inevitably futile attempt to prohibit
one of the most beneficent and necessary of human expressions, or
regulate it into the channels of preconceived philosophies, would reduce
us to the unpleasant days predicted by William Blake, when

"Priests in black gowns will be walking their rounds And binding with
briars our joys and desires."

Eugenics is chiefly valuable in its negative aspects. It is "negative
Eugenics" that has studied the histories of such families as the Jukeses
and the Kallikaks, that has pointed out the network of imbecility and
feeble-mindedness that has been sedulously spread through all strata
of society. On its so-called positive or constructive side, it fails to
awaken any permanent interest. "Constructive" Eugenics aims to arouse
the enthusiasm or the interest of the people in the welfare of the world
fifteen or twenty generations in the future. On its negative side it
shows us that we are paying for and even submitting to the dictates of
an ever increasing, unceasingly spawning class of human beings who never
should have been born at all--that the wealth of individuals and of
states is being diverted from the development and the progress of human
expression and civilization.

While it is necessary to point out the importance of "heredity" as
a determining factor in human life, it is fatal to elevate it to the
position of an absolute. As with environment, the concept of heredity
derives its value and its meaning only in so far as it is embodied
and made concrete in generations of living organisms. Environment and
heredity are not antagonistic. Our problem is not that of "Nature vs.
Nurture," but rather of Nature x Nurture, of heredity multiplied by
environment, if we may express it thus. The Eugenist who overlooks the
importance of environment as a determining factor in human life, is as
short-sighted as the Socialist who neglects the biological nature of
man. We cannot disentangle these two forces, except in theory. To the
child in the womb, said Samuel Butler, the mother is "environment." She
is, of course, likewise "heredity." The age-old discussion of "Nature
vs. Nurture" has been threshed out time after time, usually fruitlessly,
because of a failure to recognize the indivisibility of these biological
factors. The opposition or antagonism between them is an artificial and
academic one, having no basis in the living organism.

The great principle of Birth Control offers the means whereby the
individual may adapt himself to and even control the forces of
environment and heredity. Entirely apart from its Malthusian aspect or
that of the population question, Birth Control must be recognized, as
the Neo-Malthusians pointed out long ago, not "merely as the key of the
social position," and the only possible and practical method of human
generation, but as the very pivot of civilization. Birth Control which
has been criticized as negative and destructive, is really the greatest
and most truly eugenic method, and its adoption as part of the program
of Eugenics would immediately give a concrete and realistic power to
that science. As a matter of fact, Birth Control has been accepted by
the most clear thinking and far seeing of the Eugenists themselves as
the most constructive and necessary of the means to racial health.(7)

(1) Galton. Essays in Eugenics, p. 43.

(2) Eugenics Review, Vol. XIII, p. 349.

(3) Cf. Martin, The Behavior of Crowds, p. 6.

(4) Cf. Democracy and the Human Equation. E. P. Dutton &
Co., 1921.

(5) Cf. The Salvaging of Civilization.

(6) Common Sense in Racial Problems. By W. Bateson, M. A.
A., F. R. S.

(7) Among these are Dean W. R. Inge, Professor J. Arthur
Thomson, Dr. Havelock Ellis, Professor William Bateson,
Major Leonard Darwin and Miss Norah March.




CHAPTER IX: A Moral Necessity

I went to the Garden of Love,
And saw what I never had seen;
A Chapel was built in the midst,
Where I used to play on the green.

And the gates of this Chapel were shut,
And "Thou shalt not" writ over the door;
So I turned to the Garden of Love
That so many sweet flowers bore.

And I saw it was filled with graves,
And tombstones where flowers should be;
And priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,
And binding with briars my joys and desires.

--William Blake

Orthodox opposition to Birth Control is formulated in the official
protest of the National Council of Catholic Women against the resolution
passed by the New York State Federation of Women's Clubs which favored
the removal of all obstacles to the spread of information regarding
practical methods of Birth Control. The Catholic statement completely
embodies traditional opposition to Birth Control. It affords a striking
contrast by which we may clarify and justify the ethical necessity for
this new instrument of civilization as the most effective basis for
practical and scientific morality. "The authorities at Rome have again
and again declared that all positive methods of this nature are immoral
and forbidden," states the National Council of Catholic Women. "There
is no question of the lawfulness of birth restriction through abstinence
from the relations which result in conception. The immorality of Birth
Control as it is practised and commonly understood, consists in the
evils of the particular method employed. These are all contrary to the
moral law because they are unnatural, being a perversion of a natural
function. Human faculties are used in such a way as to frustrate the
natural end for which these faculties were created. This is always
intrinsically wrong--as wrong as lying and blasphemy. No supposed
beneficial consequence can make good a practice which is, in itself,
immoral....

"The evil results of the practice of Birth Control are numerous.
Attention will be called here to only three. The first is the
degradation of the marital relation itself, since the husband and wife
who indulge in any form of this practice come to have a lower idea of
married life. They cannot help coming to regard each other to a great
extent as mutual instruments of sensual gratification, rather than as
cooperators with the Creating in bringing children into the world. This
consideration may be subtle but it undoubtedly represents the facts.

"In the second place, the deliberate restriction of the family through
these immoral practices deliberately weakens self-control and the
capacity for self-denial, and increases the love of ease and luxury. The
best indication of this is that the small family is much more prevalent
in the classes that are comfortable and well-to-do than among those
whose material advantages are moderate or small. The theory of the
advocates of Birth Control is that those parents who are comfortably
situated should have a large number of children (SIC!) while the poor
should restrict their offspring to a much smaller number. This theory
does not work, for the reason that each married couple have their own
idea of what constitutes unreasonable hardship in the matter of bearing
and rearing children. A large proportion of the parents who are addicted
to Birth Control practices are sufficiently provided with worldly goods
to be free from apprehension on the economic side; nevertheless, they
have small families because they are disinclined to undertake the other
burdens involved in bringing up a more numerous family. A practice which
tends to produce such exaggerated notions of what constitutes hardship,
which leads men and women to cherish such a degree of ease, makes
inevitably for inefficiency, a decline in the capacity to endure and to
achieve, and for a general social decadence.

"Finally, Birth Control leads sooner or later to a decline in
population...." (The case of France is instanced.) But it is essentially
the moral question that alarms the Catholic women, for the statement
concludes: "The further effect of such proposed legislation will
inevitably be a lowering both of public and private morals. What the
fathers of this country termed indecent and forbade the mails to carry,
will, if such legislation is carried through, be legally decent. The
purveyors of sexual license and immorality will have the opportunity to
send almost anything they care to write through the mails on the plea
that it is sex information. Not only the married but also the unmarried
will be thus affected; the ideals of the young contaminated and lowered.
The morals of the entire nation will suffer.

"The proper attitude of Catholics... is clear. They should watch and
oppose all attempts in state legislatures and in Congress to repeal
the laws which now prohibit the dissemination of information concerning
Birth Control. Such information will be spread only too rapidly despite
existing laws. To repeal these would greatly accelerate this deplorable
movement.(1)"

The Catholic position has been stated in an even more extreme form
by Archbishop Patrick J. Hayes of the archdiocese of New York. In a
"Christmas Pastoral" this dignitary even went to the extent of declaring
that "even though some little angels in the flesh, through the physical
or mental deformities of their parents, may appear to human eyes
hideous, misshapen, a blot on civilized society, we must not lose
sight of this Christian thought that under and within such visible
malformation, lives an immortal soul to be saved and glorified for all
eternity among the blessed in heaven."(2)

With the type of moral philosophy expressed in this utterance, we
need not argue. It is based upon traditional ideas that have had the
practical effect of making this world a vale of tears. Fortunately such
words carry no weight with those who can bring free and keen as well as
noble minds to the consideration of the matter. To them the idealism of
such an utterance appears crude and cruel. The menace to civilization of
such orthodoxy, if it be orthodoxy, lies in the fact that its powerful
exponents may be fore a time successful not merely in influencing
the conduct of their adherents but in checking freedom of thought and
discussion. To this, with all the vehemence of emphasis at our command,
we object. From what Archbishop Hayes believes concerning the future
blessedness in Heaven of the souls of those who are born into this world
as hideous and misshapen beings he has a right to seek such consolation
as may be obtained; but we who are trying to better the conditions of
this world believe that a healthy, happy human race is more in keeping
with the laws of God, than disease, misery and poverty perpetuating
itself generation after generation. Furthermore, while conceding to
Catholic or other churchmen full freedom to preach their own doctrines,
whether of theology or morals, nevertheless when they attempt to carry
these ideas into legislative acts and force their opinions and codes
upon the non-Catholics, we consider such action an interference with the
principles of democracy and we have a right to protest.