In this sense such a phrase as the National Exchequer begins to take on a new meaning, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer loses every whit of his importance, except in so far as his proceedings tend towards, or away from, the production and recognition of human worth. He plays with money, whereas the Chancellor of the real Exchequer would work for life.
The facts of childhood to-day.—But since human life is discontinuous, since three times in a century the essential wealth of nations is reduced to dust, and raised again from helpless infancy, our urgent business is with the children of the nation. What, then, in general, are the facts of the National Exchequer thus conceived?
We find that, so far as ordinary physical health is concerned, the majority of human babies—including, for instance, so-called Anglo-Saxon babies—are physically healthy at birth. On the other hand, a certain proportion are as definitely and obviously unhealthy at the very start as the more fortunate majority are healthy. If certain influences, such as alcohol and some few diseases, have been in operation, the babies may be already doomed—not national wealth, but national illth. In the absence of these pernicious factors, there is, on the whole, physical fitness. The ratio is perhaps as ninety to ten per cent.
Here then, is, on the whole, a ceaseless supply of essential wealth; physically, at any rate, of good enough quality. As every one knows, or should know, the greater part of it we immediately proceed to deface and destroy. Our mouths are full of argument concerning the principles of what we are pleased to conceive as political economy. The principles of vital economy we do not enquire into but outrage and defy at every turn. So horribly and wastefully are we misguided that in point of fact we actually destroy altogether the greater number, not of all the children merely, but even of the fit and healthy children; and it may forcibly be argued that, before any one proceeds to attempt any choice amongst the children, as to which shall in their turn become parents and which shall not, it would be well, apart from any question of discrimination, to revise radically the methods which at present permit this wholesale destruction. Whilst we kill outright by hundreds of thousands every year, we damage for life far more, including a very large proportion of those who, as things at present are, will in their turn become the parents who alone are the makers of the real wealth of nations. If this destructive process had the effect which common notions of heredity would lead us to expect, then most certainly not merely would Britain, for instance, be doomed, but the very name would long ago have become “one with Nineveh and Tyre.” But though this destructive process (which it is best to describe as resulting in deterioration rather than degeneration) has been long continued, and though, in consequence of the great economic changes of last century and the rush into the cities with their over-crowding, it is perhaps more disastrous now than ever before: yet it remains true that most of the babies born in the slums are splendid little specimens of humanity—so far as physique is concerned—bearing no marks of degeneration to correspond with the deterioration of their parents. In a word, heredity works—the racial poisons apart, as we shall see—so that each generation gets a fresh start. If there be no process of selection, each new generation begins where its predecessor began and is as a whole neither worse nor better, whether physically or psychically.
Eugenics and infant mortality.—In the face of the foregoing, which merely outlines the appalling indictment that ought to be framed against civilisation for its treatment of its children, it is evidently incumbent upon us to answer the objector who should say that the whole purpose and argument of our present enquiry is premature, and that surely our first business should be not to propose any novel and revolutionary doctrine as to the choice of parents and of children, but rather to stop this child slaughter and child damage—in other words, that we should devote ourselves rather, not to providing children with a good heredity, but to providing them with a good environment, it being only too demonstrable that the environment we at present provide for the great majority of them is deadly and abominable in the extreme. This argument is all the stronger because most of the children are admittedly fit physically at birth. It would seem as if there were little to complain of in their heredity, whilst there is certainly almost everything to complain of in their environment.
If this objection is to be met at all, we must be most careful and serious in our going. Whatever conclusions we come to we must at any rate be sure that we do not impugn or deny the instant, immediate and constant law of love which declares that there can be no adequate ideal short of doing our best for all children, once they are born—nay, more, from the very moment, months before, at which their individual history starts. Whoso suggests that, as a present and immediate policy, it is not right to care for all children, healthy or diseased, welcome or unwelcome, nurseried in Park Lane or in the slums, may have plausible and even so-called eugenic arguments on his side, but his proposal is essentially immoral and therefore essentially false. For all children actually in being—whether they await or have passed the particular moment of birth—it is our duty, ideal and real, to do our utmost. The believer in the principle of race-culture or eugenics—whom I shall hereafter, as for some years past, call the eugenist—may believe that it would have been better had some of these children never been born; he may believe that, in the present unorganised state of society, in the present dethroned state of motherhood, it were vastly better had many even of the healthy majority never been born. He may be convinced that, since so many of them will certainly die, failing our feeble efforts to save childhood, their birth is a misfortune: but on no terms and for no objects whatever does, or can, the eugenist propose that any of these children, even though from the moment of birth they be riddled with disease, should be allowed to die. Though some will say that the keeping alive of diseased children, or even of many children at first healthy, is a disaster, I maintain that no such question of choice, selection or discrimination can find any warrant in any form of morality—eugenic or other—from the moment at which the child in question began its individual existence. Those of us who advocate the eugenic idea must be perpetually on our guard against the insidious alliance of any who, agreeing with our premises, declare that it is a mistake, for instance, to prosecute a campaign against infant mortality. I myself have had a share—by a continuous propaganda started in 1902—in making this last a publicly recognised question, whilst, on the other hand, I have done my best to popularise the idea of eugenics. Let me repeat here what I have already said elsewhere: that I strenuously repudiate any suggestion that the eugenic end is legitimately or effectively to be served by permitting the infant mortality to continue. The distinguished Egyptologist, Professor Flinders Petrie, in his recent book Janus in Modern Life, describes as follows the results of the present crusade against infant mortality, as he conceives them:—“We must agree that it would be of the lower or lowest type of careless, thriftless, dirty, and incapable families that the increase [of surviving children] would be obtained. Is it worth while to dilute our increase of population by ten per cent. more of the most inferior kind? Will England be stronger for having one-thirtieth more, and that of the worst stock, added to the population every year? This movement is doing away with one of the few remains of natural weeding out of the unfit that our civilisation has left to us. And it will certainly cause more misery than happiness in the course of a century.”
Here, plainly, is a serious argument. We are bound to sympathise with its underlying assumption, viz., that not all babies are such as we can desire to carry on the race. Still more must we sympathise with any author whatever who has imagination and foresight enough to write anywhere, on any subject, wrongly or rightly, such a sentence as “and it will certainly cause more misery than