 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Eugenics and Other Evils by G. K. Chesterton. Introduction to the Reader. I publish these essays at the present time for a particular reason connected with the present situation, a reason which I should like briefly to emphasize and make clear. Though most of the conclusions, especially towards the end, are conceived with reference to recent events, the actual bulk or preliminary notes about the science of eugenics were written before the war. It was a time when this theme was the topic of the hour, when eugenic babies, not visibly very distinguishable from other babies, sprawled all over the illustrated papers, when the evolutionary fancy of Nietzsche was the new cry among the intellectuals, and when Mr. Bernard Shaw and others were considering the idea that to breed a man like a cart-horse was the true way to attain that higher civilization of intellectual magnanimity and sympathetic insight which may be found in cart-horses. It may therefore appear that I took the opinion too controversially, and it seems to me that I sometimes took it too seriously. But the criticism of eugenics soon expanded of itself into a more general criticism of a modern craze for scientific officialism and strict social organization. And then the hour came when I felt, not without relief, that I might well fling all my notes into the fire. The fire was a very big one and was burning up bigger things than such pedantic quackeries. And anyhow the issue itself was being settled in a very different style. Scientific officialism and organization in the state which had specialized in them had gone to war with the older cultures of Christendom. Either Prussianism would win and the protest would be hopeless, or Prussianism would lose and the protest would be needless. As the war advanced from poison gas to piracy against neutrals, it grew more and more plain that the scientifically organized state was not increasing in popularity. Whatever happened, no Englishman would ever again go nosing round the stinks of that low laboratory. So I thought all I had written irrelevant and put it out of my mind. I am greatly relieved to say that it is not irrelevant. It has gradually grown apparent to my astounded gaze that the ruling classes in England are still proceeding on the assumption that Prussia is a pattern for the whole world. If parts of my book are nearly nine years old, most of their principles and proceedings are a great deal older. They can offer us nothing but the same stuffy science, the same bullying bureaucracy, and the same terrorism by tenth-rate professors that have led the German Empire to its recent conspicuous triumph. For that reason, three years after the war with Prussia, I collect and publish these papers. Part One The False Theory Chapter One What Is Eugenics The wisest thing in the world is to cry out before you are hurt. It is no good to cry out after you are hurt, especially after you are mortally hurt. People talk about the impatience of the populace, but sound historians know that most tyrannies have been possible because men moved too late. It is often essential to resist a tyranny before it exists. It is no answer to say with distant optimism that the scheme is only in the air. A blow from a hatchet can only be parried while it is in the air. There exists today a scheme of action, a school of thought, as collective and unmistakable as any of those by whose grouping alone we can make any outline of history. It is as firm a fact as the Oxford Movement or the Puritans of the Long Parliament or the Jansenists or the Jesuits. It is a thing that can be pointed out. It is a thing that can be discussed. And it is a thing that can still be destroyed. It is called for convenience eugenics, and that it ought to be destroyed I propose to prove in these pages that follow. I know that it means very different things to different people. That is only because evil always takes advantage of ambiguity. I know it is praised with high professions of idealism and benevolence, with silver-tongued rhetoric about pure motherhood and a happier posterity. But that is only because evil is always flattered, as the theories were called the gracious ones. I know that it numbers many disciples whose intentions are entirely innocent and humane and who would be sincerely astonished at my describing it as I do. But that is only because evil always wins through the strength of its splendid dupes. And there has in all ages been a disastrous alliance between abnormal innocence and abnormal sin. Of these who are deceived, I shall speak, of course, as we all do of such instruments, judging them by the good they think they are doing and not by the evil which they really do. But eugenics itself does exist for those who have sense enough to see that ideas exist. And eugenics itself, in large quantities or small, coming quickly or coming slowly, urged from good motives or bad, applied to a thousand people or applied to three, eugenics itself is the thing no more to be bargained about than poisoning. It is not really difficult to sum up the essence of eugenics, though some of the eugenicists seem to be rather vague about it. The movement consists of two parts, a moral basis which is common to all and a scheme of social application which varies a good deal. For the moral basis it is obvious that man's ethical responsibility varies with his knowledge of consequences. If I were in charge of a baby, like Dr. Johnson in that Tower of Vision, and if the baby was ill through having eaten the soap, I might possibly send for a doctor. I might be calling him away from much more serious cases, from the bedside of babies whose diet had been far more deadly. But I should be justified. I could not be expected to know enough about his other patients to be obliged or even entitled to sacrifice to them the baby for whom I was primarily and directly responsible. Now the eugenic moral basis is this, that the baby for whom we are primarily and directly responsible is the babe unborn, that is, that we know or may come to know enough of certain inevitable tendencies in biology to consider the fruit of some contemplated union in that direct and clear light of conscience which we can now only fix on the other partner in that union. The one duty can conceivably be as definite or more definite than the other. The baby that does not exist can be considered even before the wife who does. Now it is essential to grasp that it is a comparatively new note in morality. Of course, same people always thought the aim of marriage was the procreation of children to the glory of God or according to the plan of nature. But whether they counted such children as God's reward for service or nature's premium on sanity, they always left the reward to God or the premium to nature as a less definable thing. The only person, and this is the point towards whom one could have precise duties was the partner in the process. Directly considering the partner's claims was the nearest one could get to indirectly considering the claims of posterity. If the woman of the harem sang praises of the hero as the Muslim mounted his horse, it was because this was the do of a man. If the Christian knight helped his wife off her horse, it was because this was the do of a woman. Definite and detailed do's of this kind they did not predicate of the babe unborn, regarding him in that agnostic and opportunistic light in which Mr. Brody regarded the hypothetical child of Miss Squeers. Thinking the sex relations healthy, they naturally hoped they would produce healthy children. But that was all. The Muslim woman doubtless expected Allah to send beautiful sons to an obedient wife. But she would not have allowed any direct vision of such sons to alter the obedience itself. She would not have said, I will now be a disobedient wife as the learned leech informs me that great prophets are often the children of disobedient wives. The knight doubtless hoped that the saints would help him to strong children. If he did all the duties of his station, one which might be helping his wife off her horse. But he would not have refrained from doing this because he had read in a book that a course of falling off horses often resulted in the birth of a genius. Both Muslim and Christian would have thought such speculations not only impious but utterly unpractical. I quite agree with them. But that is not the point here. The point here is that a new school believes eugenics against ethics and it is proved by one familiar fact that the heroisms of history are actually the crimes of eugenics. The eugenicist's books and articles are full of suggestions that non-eugenic unions should and may come to be regarded as we regard sins and we should really feel that marrying an invalid is a kind of cruelty to children. But history is full of the praises of people who have held sacred such ties to invalids. Of cases like those of Colonel Hutchinson and Sir William Temple who remained faithful to betrothals when beauty and health had been apparently blasted. And though the illnesses of Dorothy Osborn and Mrs. Hutchinson may not fall under the eugenic speculations, I do not know, it is obvious that they might have done so. And certainly it would not have made any difference to men's moral opinion of the act. I do not discuss here which morality I favor, but I insist that they are opposite. The eugenicist really sets up as saints the very men whom hundreds of families have called sneaks. To be consistent, they ought to put up statues to men who deserted their loves because of bodily misfortune with inscriptions celebrating the good eugenicist who on his fiance falling off a bicycle nobly refused to marry her or to the young hero who on hearing an uncle with Irisopilus magnanimously broke his word. What is perfectly plain is this that mankind have hitherto held the bond between man and woman so sacred and the effect of it on the children so incalculable that they have always admired the maintenance of honor more than the maintenance of safety. Doubtless they thought that even the children might be none the worse for not being the children of cowards and shirkers, but this was not the first thought, the first commandment. Briefly, we may say that while many moral systems have set restraints on sex almost as severe as any eugenicist could set, they have almost always had the character of securing the fidelity of the two sexes to each other and leaving the rest to God. To introduce an ethic which makes the fidelity vary with some calculation about heredity is that rarest of all things a revolution that has not happened before. It is only right to say here though this matter should only be touched on, that many eugenicists would contradict this insofar as to claim that there was consciously eugenic reason for the horror of those unions which begin with the celebrated denial to man of the privilege of marrying his grandmother. Dr. Esar Steinmetz with that creepy simplicity of mind with which the eugenicist chilled the blood, remarks that we do not yet know quite certainly what were the motives for the horror of that horrible thing which is the agony of Oedipus. With entirely amiable intention I ask Dr. Esar Steinmetz to speak for himself. I know the motives for regarding a mother or sister as separate from other women nor have I reached them by any curious researches. I found them where I found an analogous aversion to eating a baby for breakfast. I found them in a rooted detestation in the human soul to liking a thing in one way when you already like it in another quite incompatible way. Now it is perfectly true that this aversion may have acted eugenically, and so had a certain ultimate confirmation and basis in the laws of procreation. But there really cannot be any eugenicist quite so dull as not to see that this is not a defense of eugenics, but a direct denial of eugenics. If something which has been discovered at last by the lamp of learning is something which has been acted on from the first by the light of nature, this so far as it goes is plainly not an argument for pestering people but an argument for letting them alone. If men did not marry their grandmothers when it was for all they knew a most eugenic habit, if we now know that they instinctively avoided scientific peril, that so far as it goes is a point in favor of letting people marry anyone they like. It is simply the statement that sexual selection or what Christians call falling in love is part of a man which in the rough and in the long run can be trusted. And that is the destruction of the whole of this science at a blow. The second part of the definition the persuasive or coercive methods to be employed I shall deal with more fully in the second part of this book but some such summary as the following may here be useful. Far into the unfathomable past of our race we find the assumption that the founding of a family is the personal adventure of a free man. Before slavery sank slowly out of sight under the new climate of Christianity it may or may not be true the slaves were in some sense bred like cattle valued as promising stock for labor. If it was so it was so in a much looser and vaguer sense than the breeding of the eugenicists. And such modern philosophers read into the old paganism a fantastic pride and cruelty which are wholly modern. It may be however that pagan slaves had some shadow of the blessings of the eugenicist's care. It is quite certain that the pagan freemen would have killed the first man that suggested it. I mean suggested it seriously for Plato was only a Bernard Shaw who unfortunately made his jokes in Greek. Among free men the law more often the creed most commonly of all the custom have laid all sorts of restrictions on sex for this reason or that but law and creed and custom have never concentrated heavily except upon fixing and keeping the family when once it had been made. The act of founding the family I repeat was an individual adventure outside the frontiers of the state. Our first forgotten ancestors left this tradition behind them and our own latest fathers and mothers a few generations ago would have thought us lunatics to be discussing it. The shortest general definition of eugenics on its practical side is that it does in a more or less degree propose to control some families at least as if they were families of pagan slaves. I shall discuss later the question of the people to whom this pressure may be applied and the much more puzzling question of what people will apply it is to be applied at the very least by somebody to somebody and that on certain calculations about breeding which are affirmed to be demonstrable so much for the subject itself. I say that this thing exists. I define it as closely as matters involving moral evidence can be defined. I call it eugenics. After that anyone chooses to say that eugenics is not the Greek for this I'm content to answer that chivalrous is not the French for horsie and that such controversial games are more horsie than chivalrous. End of Chapter 1 This is a LibraVox recording. All LibraVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibraVox.org Eugenics and Other Evils by G.K. Chesterton Part 1 The False Theory Chapter 2 The First Obstacles Now before I set about arguing these things there is a cloud of skirmishers of harmless and confused modern skeptics who ought to be cleared off or calmed down before we come to debate with the real doctors of the heresy. If I sum up my statement thus evidently means the control of some men over the marriage and unmarriage of others and probably means the control of the few over the marriage and unmarriage of the many, I shall first of all receive the sort of answers that float like skim on the surface of tea cups and talk. I may very well, roughly and rapidly divide these preliminary objectors into five sects whom I will call the euphemists, the causists, the autocrats, the precedentors, and the endeavors. When we have answered the immediate protestation of all these good, shouting, short-sighted people we can begin to do justice to those intelligence that are really behind the idea. Most eugenicists are euphemists. I mean merely that short words startle them while long words soothe them and they are utterly incapable of translating the one into the other. However, obviously they mean the same thing. Say to them the persuasive and even coercive powers of the citizen should enable him to make sure that the burden of longevity in the previous generation does not become disproportionate and intolerable, especially to the females. Say this to them and they will sway slightly to and fro like babies sent to sleep in cradles. Say to them, murder your mother and they sit up quite suddenly. Yet the two sentences in cold logic are exactly the same. Say to them it is not improbable that a period may arrive when narrow, if once useful distinction between the anthropoid homo and the other animals which has been modified on so many moral points may be modified also even in regard to the important question of the extension of human diet. Say this to them, and beauty born of murmuring sound will pass into their face. But say to them in a simple manly, hearty way. Let's eat a man, and their surprise is quite surprising. Yet the sentences say just the same thing. Now if anyone thinks these two instances extravagant, I will refer to two actual cases from the eugenic discussions. When Sir Oliver Lodge spoke of methods of the stud farm, many eugenicists exclaimed against the crudity of the suggestion. Yet long before that one of the ableist champions in the other interest had written, what nonsense this education is. Who could educate a racehorse or a greyhound? Which most certainly means either nothing or the human stud farm. Or again, when I spoke of people being married forcibly by the police, another distinguished eugenicist almost achieved high spirits in his hearty assurance that no such thing had ever come into their heads. Yet a few days later I saw eugenicist pronouncement to the effect that the state ought to extend its powers in this area. The state can only be that corporation which men permit to employ compulsion. And this area can only be the area of sexual selection. I mean somewhat more than an idle jest when I say that the policeman will generally be found in that area. But I willingly admit that the policeman who looks after weddings will be like the policeman who looks after wedding presents. He will be in plain clothes. I do not mean that a man in blue with a helmet will drag a briding groom to the altar. I do mean that nobody that man in blue is told to arrest will even dare to come near a church. Sir Oliver did not mean that men would be tied up in stables or in rooms. He meant that they would undergo a less of liberty which to men is even more infamous. He meant that the only formula important to eugenicists would be by Smith out of Jones. Such a formula is one of the shortest in the world and is certainly the shortest way with the euphemists. The next sect of superficial objectors is even more irritating. I have called them for immediate purposes of causists. Suppose I say I dislike this spread of cannibalism in the West End restaurants. Somebody is sure to say, well, after all Queen Eleanor when she sucked blood from her husband's arm was a cannibal. What is one to say to such people? One can only say, confine yourself to sucking poison blood from people's arms and I permit you to call yourself by the glorious title of cannibal. In this sense people say of eugenics. After all, whenever we discourage a schoolboy from marrying a mad negris with a humpback we are really eugenicists. Again one can only answer, confine yourself strictly to such schoolboys as are naturally attracted to humpback negrises and you may exult in the title of eugenist. All the more proudly, because that distinction will be rare. Maturely anyone's common sense must tell him that if eugenics dealt only with such extravagant cases it would be called common sense and not eugenics. The human race has excluded such absurdities for unknown ages and has never yet called it eugenics. You may call it flogging when you hit a choking gentleman on the back. You may call it torture when a man unfreezes his fingers at the fire. But if you talk like that a little longer you will cease to live among living men. If nothing but this mad minimum of accident were involved there would be no such thing as eugenic congress and certainly no such thing as this book. I had thought of calling the next sort of superficial people the idealists but I think this implies the humility towards impersonal good they hardly show. So I call them the autocrats. They are those who give us generally that every modern reform will work all right because they will be there to see where they will be and for how long they do not explain very clearly. I do not mind their looking forward to numberless lives in succession for that is the shadow of a human or divine hope. But even a theosophist does not expect to be a vast number of people at once. And these people most certainly propose to be responsible for a whole movement after it has left their hands. Each man promises to be about a thousand policemen and if you ask them how this or that will work they will answer oh I would certainly insist on this or I would never go so far as that. As if they could return to this earth and do what no ghost has ever done quite successfully. Force men to forsake their sins. Of these it is enough to say that they do not understand the nature of a law any more than the nature of a dog. If you let loose a law it will do as a dog does. It will obey its own nature not yours. Such sense as you have put into the law or the dog will be fulfilled but you will not be able to fulfill a fragment of anything you have forgotten to put into it. Along with such idealist should go the strange people to think that you can consecrate and purify any campaign forever by repeating the names of the abstract virtues that its better advocates had in mind. These people will say so far from aiming at slavery the eugenicists are seeking true liberty. Liberty from disease and degeneracy etc. Or they will say we can assure Mr. Chesterton that the eugenicists have no intention of segregating the harmless. Justice and mercy are the very motto of to this kind of thing perhaps the shortest answer is this. Many of those who speak thus are agnostic or generally unsympathetic to official religion. Suppose one of them said the Church of England is full of hypocrisy. What would he think of me if I answered? I assure you that hypocrisy is condemned by every form of Christianity and is particularly repudiated in the prayer book. Suppose he said that the Church of Rome had been guilty of great cruelties. What would he think of me if I answered? The Church is expressly bound to meekness and charity and therefore cannot be cruel. This kind of people need not detain us long. Then there are others whom I may call the precedenters who flourish particularly in Parliament. They are best represented by the solemn official who said the other day he could not understand the clamour against the feeble-minded Bill as it only extended the principles of the old lunacy laws to which again one can only answer quite so. It only extends the principle of the lunacy laws to persons without a trace of lunacy. This lucid politician finds an old law let us say about keeping lepers in quarantine. He simply alters the word lepers to one-nosed people and says blandly that the principle is the same. Perhaps the weakest of all are those helpless persons whom I have called the endeavourers. The prize specimen of them was another MP who defended the same Bill as an honest attempt to deal with a great evil as if one had a right to degoon and enslave one's fellow citizens as a kind of chemical experiment in a state of reverent agnosticism about what would come out of it. But with this fatuous notion that one can deliberately establish the inquisition or the terror and then faintly trust the larger hope I shall have to deal more seriously in a subsequent chapter. It is enough to say here that the best thing the honest endeavourer could do would be to make an honest attempt to know what he is doing and not to do anything else until he has found out. Lastly, there is a class of controversialists, so hopeless and futile, that I have really failed to find a name for them. But whenever any one attempts to argue rationally for or against any existent and recognisable thing such as the eugenic class of legislation, there are always people who begin to chop hay about socialism and individualism and say, you object to all state interference. I am in favour of state interference. You are an individualist. I, on the other hand, etc. to which I can only answer with heartbroken patience that I am not an individualist but a poor, fallen, but baptized journalist who is trying to write a book about eugenists several of whom he has just met whereas he never met an individualist and is by no means certain he would recognize him if he did. In short, I do not deny but strongly affirm the right of the state to interfere to cure a great evil. I say that in this case it would interfere to create a great evil, and I am not going to be turned from the discussion of that direct issue to bottomless botherations about socialism and individualism or the relative advantages of always turning to the right and always turning to the left. And for the rest, there is undoubtedly an enormous mass of sensible rather thoughtless people whose rooted sentiment is that any deep change in our society must be in some way infinitely distant. They cannot believe that men in hats and coats like themselves can be preparing a revolution. All their Victorian philosophy has taught them that such transformations are always slow. Therefore, when I speak of eugenic revolution or the coming of the eugenic state they think of it as something like the time machine or looking backward. The thing that good or bad will have to fit itself into their great-great-grandchild who may be very different and may like it and who in any cases a rather distant relative. To all this I have to begin with a very short and simple answer. The eugenic state has begun. The first of the eugenic laws has already been adopted by the government of this country and passed with the applause of both parties through the dominant House of Parliament. This first eugenic law clears the ground and may be said to proclaim negative eugenics, but it cannot be defended and nobody has attempted to defend it except on the eugenic theory. I will call it the feeble-minded bill, both for brevity and because the description is strictly accurate. It is quite simply and literally a bill for incarcerating as madmen, those whom no doctor will consent to call mad. It is enough if some doctor or other may happen to call them weak-minded. Since there is scarcely any human being to whom this term has not been conversationally applied by his own friends and relatives on some occasion or other, unless his friends and relatives have been lamentably lacking in spirit, it can be clearly seen that this law, like the early Christian church to which, however, it presents points of dissimilarity, is a net drawing in all kinds. It must not be supposed that we have a stricter definition incorporated in the bill. Indeed, the first definition of feeble-minded in the bill was much looser and vaguer than today's feeble-minded itself. It is a piece of yawning idiocy about persons who, though capable of earning their living under favorable circumstances as if anyone could earn his living if circumstances were directly unfavorable to his doing so, are nevertheless incapable of managing their affairs with proper prudence. Which is exactly what all the world and his wife are saying about their neighbors all over the planet. But as an incapacity for any kind of thought is now regarded as statesmanship, there is nothing so very novel about such slavinly drafting. What is novel, and what is vital, is this, that the defense of this crazy coercion act is a eugenic defense. Yet not only openly said or urged, that the aim of the measure is to prevent any person whom these propagandists do not happen to think intelligent from having any wife or children. Every tramp who is sulky, every laborer who is shy, every rustic who is eccentric can quite easily be brought under such conditions as were designed for homicidal maniacs. That is the situation. And that is the point. England has forgotten the feudal state. It is in the last anarchy of the industrial state. There is much in Mr. Bellock's theory that it is approaching the servile state. It cannot at present get at the distributive state. It has almost certainly missed the socialist state. But we are already under the eugenist state. And nothing remains to pass but rebellion. End of Chapter 2 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Eugenics and Other Evils by G. K. Chesterton Part 1 The False Theory Chapter 3 Anarchy from Above A silent anarchy is eating out our society. I must pause upon the expression because the true nature of anarchy is mostly misapprehended. It is not in the least necessary that anarchy should be violent. Nor is it necessary that it should come from below. Government may grow anarchy as much as the people. The more sentimental sort of Tory uses the word anarchy as a use for rebellion. But he misses a most important intellectual distinction. Rebellion may be wrong and disastrous but even when rebellion is wrong it is never anarchy. When it is not self-defense it is usurpation. It aims at setting up a new rule in place of the old rule. And while it cannot be anarchy in essence because it has an aim it certainly cannot be anarchy for men must be organized when they fight. And the discipline in a rebel army has to be as good as the discipline in the royal army. This deep principle of distinction must be clearly kept in mind. Take for the sake of symbolism those two great spiritual stories which whether we count them myths or mysteries have so long bent the two hinges of all European morals. The Christian who is inclined to sympathize, generally with constituted authority will think of rebellion under the image of Satan, the rebel against God. But Satan, though a traitor, was not an anarchist. He claimed the crown of the cosmos and had he prevailed would have expected his rebel angels to give up rebelling. On the other hand the Christian whose sympathies are more generally with just self-defense among the oppressed will think rather of Christ himself defying the high priests and scorching the rich traders. But whether or no Christ was as some say a socialist he most certainly was not an anarchist. Christ, like Satan, claimed the throne. He set up a new authority against an old authority. But he set it up with positive commandments and a comprehensible scheme. In this light all medieval people indeed all people until a little while ago would have judged questions involving revolt. John Ball would have offered to pull down the government because it was a bad government, not because it was a government. Richard II would have blamed a bollingbrook not as a disturber of the peace but as a usurper. Anarchy, then, in the useful sense of the word is a thing utterly distinct from any rebellion, right or wrong. It is not necessarily angry. It is not in its first stages at least even necessarily painful. And, as I said before it is often entirely silent. Anarchy is that condition of mind or methods in which you cannot stop yourself. It is the loss of that self-control which can return to the normal. It is not an anarchy because men are permitted to begin uproar, extravagance, experiment, it is anarchy when people cannot end these things. It is not anarchy in the home if the whole family sits up all night on New Year's Eve. It is anarchy in the home if members of the family sit up later and later for months afterwards. It was not anarchy in the Roman villa when during the Saturnalia the slaves turned to masters or the masters slaves. It was from the slave owner's point of view anarchy if after the Saturnalia the slaves continued to behave in a Saturnalian manner. But it is historically evident that they did not. It is not anarchy to have a picnic but it is anarchy to lose all memory of meal times. It would, I think, be anarchy if as that disgusting suggestion of some we all took what we liked off the sideboard. That is the way swine would eat if swine had sideboards. They have no immovable feasts. They are uncommonly progressive, our swine. It is this inability to return within rational limits after a legitimate extravagance that is the really dangerous disorder. The modern world is like Niagara. It is magnificent but it is not strong. It is as weak as water like Niagara. The objection to a cataract is not that it is deafening or dangerous or even destructive. It is the belief that it can stop. Now it is plain that this sort of chaos can possess the powers that rule a society as easily as the society so ruled. And in modern England it is the powers that rule who are chiefly possessed by it, who are truly possessed by devils. The phrase in its sound old psychological sense is not too strong. The state has suddenly and quietly gone mad. And it cannot stop. Now it is perfectly plain that government ought to have and must have the same sort of right to use exceptional methods occasionally that the private householder has to have a picnic or to sit up all night on New Year's Eve. The state, like the householder, is saying if it can treat such exceptions as exceptions. Such desperate remedies may not even be right, but such remedies are indurable as long as admittedly desperate. Such cases, of course, are the communism of food in a besieged city, the official disavowal of an arrested spy, the subjection of a patch of civil life to a martial law, the cutting of communication in a plague, or that deepest degradation of the Commonwealth, the use of national soldiers, not against foreign soldiers but against their own brethren in revolt. Of these exceptions some are right and some are wrong, but all are right in so far as they are taken as exceptions. The modern world is insane. Not so much because it admits the abnormal as because it cannot recover the normal. We see this in the vague extension of punishments like imprisonment. Often the very reformers who admit that prison is bad for people form them by a little more of it. We see it in panic legislation that after the white slaves' scare when the torture of flogging was revived for all sorts of ill-defined and vague and variegated types of men, our fathers were never so mad even when they were torturers. They stretched the man out on the rack, they did not stretch the rack out as we are doing. When men went witch-burning they may have seen things everywhere, because their minds were fixed on witchcraft, but they did not see things to burn everywhere, because their minds were unfixed. While tying some very unpopular witch to the stake with the firm conviction that she was a spiritual tyranny and pestilence, they did not say to each other, a little burning is what my aunt Susan wants to cure her of back-biting, or some of these faggots would do your cousin James Good and teach four girls' affections. Now the name of all this is Enarchy. It not only does not know what it wants, but it does not even know what it hates. It multiplies excessively in the more American sort of English newspapers when this new sort of Englander burns a witch, the whole prairie catches fire. These people have not the decision and detachment of the doctrinal ages. They cannot do a monstrous action and still see it as monstrous. Whenever they make a stride they make a rut. They cannot stop their own thoughts though their thoughts are pouring into the pit. A final instance which can be sketched much more briefly can be found in this general fact that the definition of almost every crime has become more and more indefinite and spreads like a flattening and thinning cloud over larger and larger landscapes. Cruelty to children one would have thought was a thing about unmistakable, unusual, and appalling as parasite. In its application it has come to cover almost every negligence that can occur in a needy household. The only distinction is, of course, that these negligences are punished in the poor who generally can't help them and not in the rich who generally can. But that is not the point I am arguing just now. The point here is that a crime we all instinctively connect with Herod of Innocence has come precious near being attributable to Mary and Joseph when they lost their child in the temple. In the light of a fairly recent case the confessedly kind mother who was lately jailed because her confessedly healthy children had no water to wash in no one, I think, will call this an illegitimate literary exaggeration. Now this is exactly as if all the horror and heavy punishment attached in the simplest tribes to her aside could now be used against any son who had done any act that could colorably be supposed to have worried his father and so affected his health. Few of us would be safe. Another case out of hundreds is the loose extension of the idea of libel. Libel cases bear no more trace of the old and just anger against the man who bore false witness against his neighbor than cruelty cases do of the old and just horror of the parents that hated their own flesh. A libel case has become one of the sports of the less athletic rich. A variation on Baccarat, a game of chance. A music hall actress got damages for a song that was called vulgar, which is if I could find or imprison my neighbor for calling my handwriting Rococo. A politician got huge damages because he was said to have spoken to children in uniform, as if that seductive topic would corrupt their virtue like an indecent story. Sometimes libel is defined as anything calculated to hurt a man in his business, in which case any new tradesman calling himself a grocer slanders the grocer opposite. All this I say is anarchy, for it is clear that its exponents possess no power of distinction or sense of proportion by which they can draw the line of calling a woman a popular singer and calling her a bad lot or between charging a man with leading infants to protection and leading them to sin and shame. But the vital point to which to return is this, that it is not necessarily nor even specially an anarchy in the populace. It is an anarchy in the organ of government. It is the magistrates voice of the governing class who cannot distinguish between cruelty and homelessness. It is the judges and their very submissive special juries who cannot see the difference between opinion and slander. And it is the highly placed and highly paid experts who have brought in first eugenic law the feeble-minded bill thus showing that they can see no difference between a mad and a sane man. That, to begin with, is the historic atmosphere in which this thing it is a peculiar atmosphere and, luckily, not likely to last. Real progress bears the same relation to it that a happy girl laughing bears to a hysterical girl who cannot stop laughing. But I have described this atmosphere first because it is the only atmosphere in which such a thing as the eugenist legislation could be proposed among men. All other ages would have called it to some kind of logical account, however academic or narrow. The lowest softest in the Greek schools would remember enough of Socrates to force the eugenist to tell him, at least, whether Midas was segregated because he was curable or because he was incurable. The meanest Thomas of the medieval monasteries would have the sense to see that you cannot discuss a madman when you have not discussed a man. The most owlish Calvinist commentator in the seventeenth century would ask the eugenist to reconcile such Bible texts as derided fools with the other Bible texts that praised them. The dullest shopkeeper in Paris in 1790 would have asked what were the rights of man if they did not include the rights of the lover, the husband, and the father. It is only in our own London particular, as Mr. Guppy has said of the fog, that small figures can loom so large in the vapor and even mingle with quite different figures and have the appearance of a mob. But above all I have dwelt on the telescopic qualities in these twilight avenues because unless the reader realizes how elastic and unlimited they are he simply will not believe in the abominations we have to combat. One of those wise old fairy tales that come from nowhere and flourish everywhere tells how a man came to own a small magic machine like a coffee mill to find anything he wanted when he said one word and stopped when he said another. After performing marbles which I wish my conscience would let me put into this book for padding the mill was merely asked to grind a few grains of salt at an officer's mast on board ship. For salt is the type everywhere of small luxury and exaggeration and sailor's tales should be taken with a grain of it. The man remembered the word that started the salt mill and then touching the word that stopped that suddenly remembered that he forgot. The tall ship sank laden and sparkling to the top mast with salt like Arctic snows. But the mad mill was still grinding at the ocean bottom where all the men lay drowned and that, so says this fairy tale, is why the great waters about our world have a bitter taste. For the fairy tales knew that modern mystics don't. That one should not let loose either the supernatural or the natural. End of Chapter 3 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Eugenics and Other Evils by G. K. Chesterton Part 1 The False Theory Chapter 4 The Lunatic and the Law The modern evil, we have said, greatly turns on this. That people do not see that the exception proves the rule. Thus it may or may not be right to kill a murderer. But it can only conceivably be right to kill a murderer because it is wrong to kill a man. If the hangman, having got his hand in, proceeded to hang friends and relatives to his taste and fancy, he would intellectually unhang the first man though the first man might not think so. Or thus again, if you say an insane man is irresponsible, you imply that a sane man is responsible. He is responsible for the insane man. And the attempt of the eugenics and other fatalists to treat all men as irresponsible is the largest and flattest folly in philosophy. The eugenist has to treat everybody, including himself as an exception to a rule that isn't there. The eugenists, as the first move, have extended the frontiers of the lunatic asylum. Let us take this as our definite starting point and ask ourselves what lunacy is and what its fundamental relation to human society. Now that raw juvenile skepticism that clogs all thought with catchwords may often be heard to remark that the mad are only the minority, the sane only the majority. There is a neat exactitude about such people's nonsense. They seem to miss the point by magic. The mad are not a minority because they are not a corporate body, and that is what their madness means. The sane are not a majority, but are mankind, and mankind as its name would seem to imply is a kind, not a degree. Insofar as the lunatic differs, he differs from all minorities and majorities in kind. The mad men who thinks he is a knife cannot go into partnership with the other who thinks he is a fork. There is no tristing place outside reason. There is no in on those wild roads that are beyond the world. The mad man is not he that defies the world. The saint, the criminal, the martyr, the cynic, the nihilist may all defy the world quite sanely. And even if such fanatics would destroy the world, the world owes them a strictly fair trial according to proof and public law. But the mad man is not the man who defies the world. He is the man who denies it. Suppose we are all standing around a field and looking at a tree in the middle of it. It is perfectly true that we all see it, as the decadents say, in infinitely different aspects. That is not the point. The point is that we all say it is a tree. Suppose, if you will, that we are all poets, which seems improbable, so that each of us could turn his aspect into a vivid image distinct from a tree. Suppose one says it looks like a green cloud, and another like a green fountain, and a third like a green dragon, and a fourth like a green cheese. The fact remains that they all say it looks like these things. It is a tree. Nor are any of the poets in the least mad because of any opinions they may form, however frenzied, about the function or future of the tree. A conservative poet may wish to clip the tree. A revolutionary poet may wish to burn it. An optimist poet may want to make it a Christmas tree, and hang candles on it. A pessimist poet may want to hang himself on it. None of these are mad because they are all talking about the same thing. But there is another man who is talking horribly about something else. There is a monstrous exception to mankind. Why he is so, we do not know. A new theory says it is heredity. An older theory says it is devils. But in any case the spirit of it is the spirit that denies. The spirit that really denies realities. This is the man who looks at the tree and does not say it looks like a lion, but says that it is a lamp post. I do not mean that all mad delusions are as concrete as this, though some are more concrete. Believing your own body is glass is a more daring denial of reality than believing a tree is a glass lamp at the top of a pole. But all true delusions have in them this unalterable assertion that what is not is. The difference between us and the maniac is not about how things look or how things ought to look, but about what they self evidently are. The lunatic does not say that he ought to be king. John's Warbeck might say that. He says he is king. The lunatic does not say he is as wise as Shakespeare. Bernard Shaw might say that. The lunatic says he is Shakespeare. The lunatic does not say he is divine in the same sense as Christ. Mr. R. J. Campbell would say that. The lunatic says he is Christ. In all cases the difference is a difference about what is there, not a difference touching what should be done about it. For this reason and for this alone the lunatic is outside public law. This is the abysmal difference between him and the criminal. The criminal admits the facts and therefore permits us to appeal to the facts. We can so arrange the facts around him that he may really understand that agreement is in his own interest. We can say to him, we will hang you on that tree or we will hang you on that tree. But if the man really thinks one tree is a lamppost and the other tree a Trafalgar square fountain we simply cannot treat with him at all. It is obviously useless to say do not steal apples from this lamppost or I will hang you on that fountain. If a man denies the facts there is no answer but to lock him up. He cannot speak our language. Not that varying verbal language which often misses fire even with us but that enormous alphabet of sun and moon and green grass and blue sky in which alone we meet and by which alone we can signal to each other. That unique man of genius George MacDonald described in one of his weird stories two systems of space coincident so that where I knew there was a piano standing in a drawing room you knew there was a rose bush growing in a garden. Something of this sort is in small or great affairs the matter with the madman. He cannot have a vote because he is the citizen of another country. He is a foreigner. Nay, he is an invader and an enemy for the city he lives in has been superimposed on ours. Now these two things are primarily to be noted in his case. First that we can only condemn him to a general doom because we only know his general nature. All criminals who do particular things for particular reasons things and reasons which however criminal are always comprehensible have been more and more tried for such separate actions under separate and suitable laws ever since Europe began to become a civilization and until the rare and recent reincursions of barbarisms as the indeterminate sentence. Of that I shall speak later. It is enough for this argument to point out the plain facts. It is the plain fact that every savage, every sultan, every outlawed baron, every brigand chief has always used this instrument of the indeterminate sentence which has been recently offered us as something highly scientific and humane. All these people in short being barbarians have always kept their captives captive until they, the barbarians chose to think the captives were in a fit frame of mind to come out. It is also the plain fact that all that has been called civilization or progress justice or liberty for nearly three thousand years has had the general direction of treating even the captives as a free man insofar as some clear case of some defined crime had to be shown against him. All law has meant allowing the criminal within some limits or other to argue with the law as Job was allowed or rather challenged to argue with God. But the criminal is among civilized men tried by one law for one crime for a perfectly simple reason that the motive of the crime like the meaning of the law is conceivable to the common intelligence. A man is punished especially as a burglar and not generally as a bad man because a man may be a burglar and in many other respects not be a bad man. The act of burglary is punishable because it is intelligible. But when acts are unintelligible we can only refer them to a general untrustworthiness and guard against them by a general restraint. If a man breaks into a house to get a piece of bread we can appeal to his reason in various ways. We can hang him for house breaking or again as has occurred to some daring thinkers we can give him a piece of bread. But if he breaks in let us say to steal the pairings of other people's fingernails then we are in a difficulty. We cannot imagine what he is going to do with them and therefore cannot easily imagine what he is going to do with him. If a villain comes in in cloak and mask and puts a little arsenic in the soup we can collar him and say to him distinctly you are guilty of murder and I will now consult the code of tribal law under which we live to see if this practice is not forbidden. But if a man in the same cloak and mask is found at midnight putting a little soda water in the soup what can we say? Our charge necessarily becomes a general one. We can only observe with a moderation almost amounting to weakness you seem to be the sort of person who will do this sort of thing and then we can lock him up. The principle of the indeterminate sentence is the creation of the indeterminate mind. It does apply to the incomprehensible creature the lunatic and it applies to nobody else. The second thing to be noted is this by the unanimity of sane men that we can condemn this man as utterly separate. If he says a tree is a lamp post he is mad but only because all other men say it is a tree. If some men thought it was a tree with a lamp on it and others thought it was a lamp post wreathed with branches and vegetation then it would be a matter of opinion and degree and he would not be mad but merely extreme. Certainly he would not be mad if nobody but a botanist could see it was a tree. Certainly his enemies might be madder than he if nobody but a lamp-lighter could see it was not a lamp post and similarly a man is not imbecile if only a eugenist thinks so. The question then raised would not be his sanity but the sanity of one botanist or one lamp-lighter or one eugenist. That which can condemn the abnormally foolish is not the abnormally clever which is obviously a matter in dispute. That which can condemn the abnormally foolish is the normally foolish. It is when he begins to say and do things that even stupid people do not say or do that we have a right to treat him as the exception and not the rule. It is only because we, none of us profess to be anything more than man that we have authority to treat him unless. Now the first principle behind eugenics becomes plain enough. It is the proposal that somebody or something should criticize men with the same superiority with which men criticize mad men. It might exercise this right with great moderation but I'm not here talking about the exercise but about the right. Its claim certainly is to bring all human life under the lunacy laws. Now this is the first weakness to define who is to control whom. They cannot say by what authority they do these things. They cannot see the exception is different from the rule even when it is misrule. Even when it is an unruly rule. The sound sense in the old lunacy law was this. That you cannot deny that a man is a citizen until you are practically prepared to deny that he is a man. Men and only men can be the judges of whether he is a man but any private club of prigs can be judges of whether he ought to be a citizen. When once we step down from that tall and splintered peak of pure insanity we step on to a table-end where one man is not so widely different from another. Outside the exception what we find is the average and the practical legal shape of the quarrel is this. That unless the normal men have the right to expel the abnormal what particular sort of abnormal men have the right to expel the normal men. If sanity is not good enough what is there that is saner than sanity? Without any grip of the notion of a rule and an exception the general idea of judging people's heredity breaks down and is useless. For this reason that if everything is the result of a doubtful heredity self is the result of a doubtful heredity also. Let it judge not that it be not judged. Eugenist, strange to say have fathers and mothers like other people and our opinion about their fathers and mothers is worth exactly as much as their opinions about ours. None of the parents were lunatics and the rest is mere likes and dislikes. Suppose Dr. Saleyby had gone up to Byron and said, my lord, I perceive a clubfoot and inordinate passions. Such are the hereditary results of a profligate soldier marrying a hot-tempered woman. The poet might logically reply with characteristic lucidity and impropriety. Sir, I perceive you have a confused mind and an unphilosophic theory about other people's love affairs. Such are the hereditary delusions bred by a Syrian doctor marrying a Quaker lady from York. Suppose Dr. Carl Pearson had said to Saley, from what I see of your temperament you are running great risks in forming a connection with the daughter of a fanatic and eccentric like Godwin. Saley would be employing the strict rationalism of the older and stronger free thinkers if he answered. From what I observe of your mind you are rushing on destruction in marrying the great niece of an old corpse of a courtier in Dillente like Samuel Rogers It is only opinion for opinion. Nobody can pretend that either Mary Godwin or Samuel Rogers was mad, and the general view a man may hold about the healthiness of inheriting their blood or type is simply the same sort of general view by which men do marry for love or liking. There is no reason to suppose that Dr. Carl Pearson is any better judge of a bridegroom than the bridegroom is of a bride. An objection may be anticipated here but it is very easily answered. It may be said that we do in fact call in medical specialists to settle whether a man is mad and that these specialists go by tentacle and even secret tests that cannot be known to the mass of men. It is obvious that this is true. It is equally obvious that it does not affect our argument. When we ask the doctor whether our grandfather is going mad by our own common human definition, we mean he is going to be a certain sort of person whom all men recognize when once he exists, that certain specialists can detect the approach of him before he exists does not alter the fact that it is of the practical and popular madman that we are talking and of him alone. The doctor merely sees certain fact potentially in the future while we with less information can only see it in the present. But his fact is our fact and everybody's fact or we should not bother about it at all. Here is no question of the doctor bringing an entirely new sort of person under coercion as in the people-minded bill. The doctor can say tobacco is death to you because the dislike of death can be taken for granted being a highly democratic institution and it is the same with the dislike of an indubitable exception called madness. The doctor can say Jones has that twitch in the nerves and he may burn down the house but it is not the medical detail we fear but the moral upshot. We should say let him twitch as long as he doesn't burn down the house. The doctor may say he has that look in his eyes and he may take the hatchet and brain you all but we do not object to the look in his eyes as such. We should say let him look how he likes as long as he does not look for the hatchet. Now the specialists are valuable for this particular and practical purpose of predicting the approach of enormous and admitted human calamities. Nobody but a fool would deny but that does not bring us one engineer to allowing them the right to define what is a calamity or to call things calamities which common sense does not call calamities. We call in the doctor to save us from death and death being admittedly an evil he has the right to administer the queerest and most recondent pill which he may think is a cure for all such menaces of death. He has not the right to administer death as the cure for all human ills and as he has no moral authority to enforce a new conception of happiness so he has no moral authority to enforce a new conception of sanity. He may know I am going mad for madness is an isolated thing like leprosy and I know nothing about leprosy but if he merely thinks my mind is weak I may happen to think the same of his. I often do. In short unless pilots are permitted to ram ships onto the rocks and then say that heaven is the only true harbor unless judges are to be allowed to let murderers loose and explain afterwards that the murderer had done good on the whole unless soldiers are to be allowed to lose battles and then point out that true glory is to be found in the valley of humiliation unless cashiers are to rob a bank in order to give it an advertisement or dentists to torture people to give them a contrast to their comforts unless we are prepared to let loose all these private fancies against the public and accepted meaning of life or safety or prosperity or pleasure then it is as plain as punches nose that no scientific man must be allowed to meddle with the public definition of madness we call him in to tell us where it is or when it is we could not do so if we had not ourselves settled what it is as I wish to confine myself in this chapter to the primary point of the plain existence of sanity and insanity I will not be let along any of the attractive paths that open here I shall endeavor to deal with them in the next chapter here I confine myself to a sort of summary suppose a man's throat has been cut quite swiftly and suddenly with a table knife at a small table where we sit the whole of civil law rests on the supposition that we are witnesses that we saw it and if we do not know about it who does now suppose all the witnesses fall into a quarrel about degrees of eyesight suppose one says he had brought his reading glasses instead of his usual glasses and therefore did not see the man fall across the table and cover it with blood suppose another says he could not be certain it was blood because a slight color blindness was hereditary in his family suppose a third says he cannot swear to the uplifted knife because his oculus tells him he is astigmatic and vertical lines do not affect him as do horizontal lines suppose another says that dots often have danced before his eyes in very fantastic combinations many of which were very like one gentleman cutting another gentleman's throat at dinner all these things refer to real experiences there is such a thing as myopia there is such a thing as color blindness there is such a thing as astigmatism there is such a thing as a shifting shapes swimming before the eyes but what should we think of a whole dinner party that could nothing except these highly scientific explanations when found in company with a corpse I imagine there are only two things we could think either that they were all drunk or they were all murderers and if there is an exception if there were one man at table who was admittedly blind should we not give him the benefit of the doubt should we not honestly feel that he was the exception that proved the rule the very fact that he could not have seen would have reminded us that other men must have seen the very fact that he had no eyes must remind us of eyes a man can be blind a man can be dead a man can be mad but the comparison is necessarily weak after all for it is the essence of madness to be unlike anything else in the world which is perhaps why so many men wiser than we have traced it to another lastly the literal maniac is different from all other persons in dispute in this vital respect that he is the only person whom we can with a final lucidity declare that we do not want he is almost always miserable himself and he always makes others miserable but this is not so with the mere invalid the eugenist would probably answer all my examples by taking the case of marrying into a family with consumption or some such disease which they are fairly sure is hereditary and ask whether such cases at least are not clear cases for eugenic intervention permit me to point out to them that they once more make a confusion of thought the sickness or soundness of a consumptive may be a clear and calculable matter the happiness or unhappiness of a consumptive is quite another matter and is not calculable at all what is the good of telling people that if they marry for love they may be punished by being the parents of Keats or the parents of Stevenson Keats died young but he had more pleasure in a minute than a eugenist gets in a month Stevenson had lung trouble and it may for all I know have been perceptible to the eugenic eye even a generation before but who would perform that illegal operation the stopping of Stevenson intercepting a letter bursting with good news confiscating a hamper full of presents and prizes pouring torrents of intoxicating wine into the sea all this is a faint approximation for the eugenic inaction of the ancestors of Steven this however is not the essential point with Stevenson it is not merely a case of the pleasure we get but of the pleasure he got if he had died without writing a line he would have had more red hot joy than is given to most men shall I say of him to whom I owe so much let the day perish wherein he was born shall I pray that the stars of the twilight therefore be dark and it not be numbered among the days of the year because it shut up not the doors of this mother's womb I respectfully decline like Job I will put my hand upon my mouth End of Chapter 4 This is a Libra Box recording All Libra Box recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibraVox.org Eugenics and Other Evils by G. K. Chesterton Part 1 The False Theory Chapter 5 The Flying Authority It happened one day that an atheist and a man were standing together on a doorstep and the atheist said it is raining to which the man replied which question was the beginning of a violent quarrel and a lasting friendship I will not touch upon any heads in the dispute which doubtless included Jupiter, Pluvus and the neuter gender Pantheism, Noah's Ark Macintoshes and the passive mood but I will record the one point upon which the two persons emerged in some agreement it was that there is such a thing as an atheistic literary style that materialism may appear in the mere diction of a man though he be speaking of clocks or cats or anything quite remote from theology the mark of the atheistic style is that it instinctively chooses the word which suggests that things are dead things that things have no souls thus they will not speak of waging war which means willing it they speak of the outbreak of war as if all the guns blew up without the man touching them thus those socialists that are atheists will not call their international sympathy they will call it solidarity as if the poor men of France and Germany were physically stuck together like dates in a grocery shop the same Marxian socialists are accused of cursing the capitalists inordinately but the truth is that they let the capitalists off much too easily for instead of saying that employers pay less wages which might pin the employers to some moral responsibility they insist on talking about the rise and fall of wages as if a vast silver sea of sixpences and shillings was always going up and down automatically like the real sea at Margate thus they will not speak of reform but of development and they spoil their one honest and virile phrase the class war by talking of it as no one in his wits can talk of a war and finish and final result as one calculates the coming of Christmas day or the taxes thus lastly as we shall see touching our special subject matter here the atheist style in letters always avoids talking of love or lust which are things alive and calls marriage or concupinage the relations of the sexes as if a man and a woman were two wooden objects standing at a certain angle and attitude to each other in a table in a chair now the same anarchic mystery that clings around the phrase el plit clings around the phrase ill fought in English it is generally represented by the passive mood and grammar and the eugenist and their like deal especially in it they are as passive in their statements as they are active in their experiments their sentences always enter tale first and have no subject like animals without heads or the doctor should cut off his leg or the policeman should color that man it is always such limbs should be amputated or such men would be under restraint Hamlet said I should have fatted all the region kites with this slaves awful the eugenist would say the region kites should if possible be fattened and the awful of this slave is available for the dietetic experiment Lady Macbeth said give me the daggers I'll let these bowels out the eugenist would say in such cases the bowels should etc do not blame me for the repulsiveness of the comparisons I have searched English literature for the most decent parallels to eugenist language the formless god that broons over the east is called Aum the formless god who has begun to brood over the west is called Aum but here we must make a distinction on his French and the French have a right to use it because they are a democracy when a Frenchman says one he does not mean himself but the normal citizen he does not mean merely one but one and all on Neuquet Saperol does not mean no bless a bleach or I am the Duke of Billingsgate and must keep my word it means one has a sense of honor as one has a backbone and this whether possible or no is the purest ambition of the republic but when the eugenists say conditions must be altered or ancestry should be investigated or what not it seems clear that they do not mean that the democracy must do it whatever else they may mean they do not mean that any man not evidently mad may be trusted with these tests and rearrangements as the French democratic system with a vote or a farm or the control of a family that would mean that Jones and Brown being both ordinary men would set about arranging each other's marriages and this state of affairs would seem a little elaborate and it might occur even to the eugenic mind that if Jones and Brown are quite capable of arranging each other's marriages it is just possible that they might be capable of arranging their own this dilemma which applies simply a case applies equally to any wide and sweeping system of eugenist voting for though it is true that the community can judge more dispassionately than a man can judge in his own case this particular question of the choice of a wife is so full of disputable shades in every conceivable case that it is surely obvious that almost any democracy would simply vote the thing out of the sphere of voting as they would any proposal of police interference in the choice of walking weather or of children's names I should not like to be the politician who should propose a particular instance of eugenics to be voted on by the French people democracy dismissed it is here hardly needful to consider the other old models modern scientists will not say that George III in his lucid interval should settle who is mad or that the aristocracy that introduced Gout shall supervise the diet I hold it clear therefore if anything is clear about the business that the eugenists do not merely mean that the mass of common men should settle each other's marriages between them the question remains therefore whom do they instinctively trust when they say this or that ought to be done what is this flying and evanescent authority that vanishes whenever we seek to fix it who is the man who is the lost subject that governs the eugenist verb in a large number of cases I think we can simply say that the individual eugenist means himself and nobody else indeed one eugenist Mr. A. H. Huth actually had a sense of humor and admitted this he thinks a great deal of good could be done with a surgical knife if we would only turn him loose with one and this may be true a great deal of good could be done with a loaded revolver in the hands of a judicious student of human nature but it is imperative that the eugenist should perceive that on that principle we can never get beyond the perfect balance of different sympathies and antipathies I mean that I should differ from Dr. Salibi or Dr. Carl Pearson not only in a vast majority of individual cases but in a vast majority of cases in which they were bound to admit that such a difference was natural and reasonable the chief victim of these famous doctors would be yet more famous doctor that imminent though unpopular practitioner Dr. Fell to show that such rational and serious differences do exist I will take one instance from that bill which proposed to protect families and the public generally from the burden of feeble minded persons now even if I could share the eugenist contempt for human rights even if I could start gaily on the eugenic campaign I should not begin by removing feeble minded persons I have known as many families in as many classes as most men and I cannot remember meeting any very monstrous human suffering arising out of the presence of such insufficient and negative types there seem to be comparatively few of them and those few by no means the worst burdens upon domestic happiness I do not hear of them often I do not hear them doing much more harm than good and in the few cases I know well they are not only regarded with human affection but can be put to certain limited forms of human use even if I were a eugenist then I should not personally elect to waste my time locking up the feeble minded the people I should lock up would be the strong minded I have known hardly any cases of mere mental weakness making a family a failure I have known eight or nine cases of violent and exaggerated force of character making a family a hell if the strong minded could be segregated it would quite certainly be better for their friends and families and if there is really anything in heredity it would be better for posterity too for the kind of egoist I mean is a mad man in a much more plausible sense than the mere harmless deficient and to hand on the horrors of his anarchic and insatiable temperament is a much graver responsibility than to leave a mere inheritance of childishness I would not arrest such tyrants because I think that even moral tyranny in a few homes is better than a medical tyranny turning the state into a madhouse I would not segregate them because I respect a man's free will in his front door and his right to be tried by his peers but since free will is believed by Eugenists no more than by Calvinists since front doors are respected by Eugenists no more than by housebreakers and since the habeas corpus is about as sacred to Eugenists as it would be to King John why do not they bring light and peace into so many human homes by removing a demoniac from each of them why do not the promoters of the feeble minded bill call at the many grand houses in town or country mayors notoriously are why do they not knock at the door and take the bad squire away why do they not ring the bell and remove the dipsomaniac prize fighter I do not know and there is only one reason I can think of which must remain a matter of speculation when I was at school the kind of boy who liked teasing half wits was not the sort that stood up to bullies that however it may be does not concern my argument I mention the case of the strong minded variety of the monstrous merely to give one out of the hundred cases of the instant divergence of individual opinions the moment we begin to discuss who is fit or unfit to propagate if Dr. Salibi and I were sitting out on a segregating trip together we should separate at the very door and if he had a thousand doctors with him by different ways everyone who is known as many kind and capable doctors as I have knows that the ableist and sanest of them have a tendency to possess some little hobby or half discovery of their own as that oranges are bad for children or that trees are dangerous in gardens or that many more people ought to wear spectacles it is asking too much of human nature to expect them not to cherish that scraps of originality in a hard, dull, and often heroic trade but the inevitable result of it as exercised by the individual Salibis would be that each man would have his favorite kind of idiot each doctor would be mad on his own madman one would have his eye on devotional curates another would want her about collecting obstreperous majors a third would be the terror of animal loving spinsters who would flee with all their cats for him short of sheer literal anarchy therefore it seems plain that the eugenist must find some authority other than his own implied personality he must once and for all learn the lesson which is hardest for him and me and for all our fallen race the fact that he is only himself we now pass from mere individual men who obviously cannot be trusted by an individual medical man with such despotism over their neighbors and we come to consider whether the eugenists have at all clearly traced any more imaginal public authority any apparatus of great experts or great examinations to which such risks of tyranny could be trusted they are not very precise about this either indeed the great difficulty I have throughout in considering what are the eugenist's proposals they do not seem to know themselves some philosophic attitude which I cannot myself connect with human reason seems to make them actually proud of the dimness of their definitions and the uncompleteness of their plans the eugenic optimism seems to partake generally of the nature of that dazzled and confused confidence so common in private theatricals that it will be all right on the night they have all the ancient despotism but none of the ancient dogmatism if they are ready to reproduce the secrecies and cruelties of the Inquisition at least we cannot accuse them of offending us with any of that close and complicated thought that erred in exact logic which narrowed the minds of the Middle Ages they have discovered how to combine the hardening of the hearts with the sympathetic softening of the head nevertheless there is one large though vague idea of the eugenist which is an idea and which we reach when we reach this problem of a more general supervision it was best presented perhaps by the distinguished doctor who wrote the article on these matters in that composite book which Mr. Wells edited and called The Great State he said that the doctor should no longer be a mere plasterer of paltry maladies but should be in his own words the health advisor of the community the same can be expressed with even more point and simplicity in the proverb that prevention is better than cure commenting on this I said that it amounted to treating all people who are well as if they were ill this the writer admitted to be true only adding that everyone is ill to which I rejoined that if everyone is ill the health advisor is ill too and therefore cannot know how to cure that minimum of illness this is the fundamental fallacy in the whole business of preventive medicine prevention is not better than cure cutting off a man's head is not better than curing his headache it is not even better than failing to cure it it is the same if a man is in revolt even a morbid revolt take the heart out of him by slavery it is not better than leaving the heart in him even if you leave it a broken heart prevention is not only not better than cure prevention is even worse than disease prevention means being an invalid for life with the extra exasperation of being quite well I will ask God but certainly not man to prevent me in all my doings but the decisive and discussable form of this is well summed up in that phrase about a health advisor of society I am sure that those who speak thus have something in their minds larger and more illuminating than the other two propositions we have considered they do not mean that all citizens should decide which would mean merely the present vague and dubious balance they do not mean that all medical men should decide which would mean a much more unbalanced vision they mean that a few men might be found who had a consistent scheme and vision of a healthy nation as Napoleon had a consistent scheme and vision of an army it is cold anarchy to say that all men are to meddle in all men's marriages it is cold anarchy to say that any doctor may seize and segregate anyone he likes but it is not anarchy to say that a few great hygienists might enclose or limit the life of all citizens as nurses do with a family of children it is not anarchy it is tyranny but tyranny is a workable thing when we ask by what process which men could be certainly chosen we are back again on the old dilemma of despotism which means a man or democracy which means men or aristocracy which means favoritism but as a vision the thing is plausible and even rational it is rational and it is wrong it is wrong quite apart from the suggestion that an expert on health cannot be chosen it is wrong because an expert on health cannot exist an expert on disease can exist for the very reason we have already considered in the case of madness because experts can only arise out of exceptional things a parallel with any of the other learned professions will make the point plain if I am prosecuted for trespass I will ask my solicitor which of the local lanes I am forbidden to walk in but if my solicitor and my case were so elated that he insisted on settling what lanes I should walk in if he asked me to let him map out all of my country walks because he was the perambulatory advisor of the community then that solicitor would solicit in vain if he will insist on walking behind me through woodland ways pointing out with his walking stick likely avenues and attractive shortcuts I shall turn on him with passion sir I pay you to know one particular puzzle in Latin and Norman French which they call the law of England and you do know the law of England I have never had any earthly reason to suppose that you know England if you did you would leave a man alone when he was looking at it as are the limits of the lawyer's special knowledge about walking so are the limits of the doctors if I fall over the stump of a tree and break my leg as is likely enough I shall say to the lawyer please go and fetch the doctor I shall do it because the doctor really has a larger knowledge of a narrower area there are only a certain number of ways in which a leg can be broken I know none of them and he knows all of them there is such a thing as being a specialist in broken legs there is no such thing as being a specialist in legs when unbroken legs are a matter of taste if the doctor has really mended my leg he may merit a colossal equestrian statue on the top of an eternal tower of brass but if the doctor has really mended my leg he has no more rights over it he must not come and teach me how to walk because he and I learnt that in the same school in the nursery and there is no more abstract likelihood of the doctor walking more elegantly than I do than there is of the barber or the bishop or the burglar walking more elegantly than I do there cannot be a general specialist the specialist can have no kind of authority unless he has avowedly limited his range there cannot be such a thing as the health advisor of the community because there cannot be such a thing as one who specializes in the universe thus when Dr. Saleyby says that a young man about to be married should be obliged to produce his health book the expression is neat but it does not convey the real respect in which the two things agree and in which they differ to begin with of course there is a great deal too much of the bank book for the sanity of our commonwealth and it is highly probable that the health book as conducted in modern conditions would rapidly become as timid as snobbish and as sterile as the money side of marriage has become in the moral atmosphere of modernity the poor and the honest would probably get as much the worst of it if we fought with health books as they do when we fight with bank books but that is a more general matter the real point is in the difference between the two the difference is in this vital fact that a moneyed man generally thinks about money whereas a healthy man does not think about health if the strong young man cannot produce his health book it is for the perfectly simple reason that he has not got one he can mention some extraordinary malady he has but every man of honor is expected to do that now whatever may be the decision that follows on the knowledge health is simply nature and no naturalist ought to have the impudence to understand it health one may say is God and no agnostic has any right to claim his acquaintance must mean among other things that mystical and multitudinous balance of all things by which they are at least able to stand up straight and endure and any scientist who pretends to have exhausted this subject of ultimate sanity I will call the lowest of religious fanatics I will allow him to understand the mad man for the mad man is an exception but if he says he understands the same man then he says he has the secret creator for whenever you and I feel fully sane we are quite incapable of naming the elements that make up that mysterious simplicity we can no more analyze such peace in the soul that we can conceive in our heads the whole enormous and dizzy equilibrium by which out of suns roaring like infernos and heavens toppling like precipices he has hanged the world upon nothing we conclude therefore that unless eugenic activity be restricted to monstrous things like mania there is no constituted or constitutable authority that can really overrule men in a matter in which they are so largely on a level in the matter of fundamental human rights nothing can be above man except God an institution claiming to come from God might have such authority but this is the last claim the eugenicists are likely to make one cast or one profession seeking to rule men in such matters is like a man's right eye claiming to rule him or his left leg to run away with him it is madness we now pass on to consider whether there is really anything in the way of eugenics to be done which such cheerfulness as we may possess after discovering there is nobody to do it the end of chapter 5