Essays in Eugenics gathers seven pieces by Sir Francis Galton, the Victorian scientist who coined the word “eugenics” and spent his later career trying to make its study exact. The essays were written across roughly a decade and reprinted together by the Eugenics Education Society in London, with Galton’s preface explaining that they appear in chronological order to trace how his project grew from a private conviction into an organized movement. The book mixes lecture, statistical argument, and social proposal: heredity tables sit beside reflections on marriage customs and the fickleness of public opinion.
“The practice of Eugenics has already obtained a considerable hold on popular estimation, and is steadily acquiring the status of a practical question, and not that of a mere vision in Utopia.”
The Core Argument
Galton’s central claim is that human qualities—intelligence, character, physique—are inherited in measurable degrees, and that societies can therefore be studied and eventually steered the way breeders study and steer livestock. He insists this is not Utopian dreaming. The evidence, he argues, already justifies instructing the public authoritatively, even if more research is needed to fix the limits of what practical eugenics can achieve.
The mechanism he trusts is not law but opinion. Popular opinion, he writes, is the chief power that effects eugenic reform; its dictates sink so deep that people mistake them for innate personal convictions. Compare ideas across epochs and civilizations, he suggests, and you can separate what is truly innate from what is merely acquired. Advocates should move discreetly and claim no more efficacy than the future will confirm, lest a backlash follow.
Much of the argument is quantitative. Galton defines “normal-talent” as the probable error of a distribution and lays out tables showing how qualities spread across a population of ten thousand, comparing his classes to adult male stature and to Charles Booth’s classification of London poverty. He cites Karl Pearson’s work on the normal law of frequency and his own Hereditary Genius and Natural Inheritance as foundations. The point of all this arithmetic is to replace vague talk of “much” and “little” with “how much” and “how little”—precise figures on which action could rest.
Inside the Book
The Preface and the Case for Practical Eugenics
Galton opens the 1909 London edition by explaining why these essays appear in chronological order: the sequence itself is meant to trace how eugenics moved from speculation toward a practical program. His stated aims and methods, he complains, have often been misrepresented, and he wants the record set straight. The chief engine of reform, he insists, is popular opinion. Past moral revolutions prove what public sentiment can accomplish once it hardens into conviction, and the essay on restrictions in marriage shows the same force at work. Opinion shapes conduct so thoroughly that its dictates feel innate and personal, as though each person had arrived at them alone. Only by comparing convictions across epochs and civilizations can one separate what is truly innate from what is merely acquired. Advocates should therefore move discreetly and claim no more efficacy than the future will confirm, since overreach invites reaction. More investigation is needed to mark the limits of practical eugenics, but enough already exists to justify instructing the public with authority. He thanks the Editor of Nature, the Council of the Sociological Society, and the Clarendon Press for permission to reprint. The contents list seven essays, running from “The Possible Improvement of the Human Breed” to “Local Associations for Promoting Eugenics.”
The first essay, delivered as the Huxley lecture, treats human improvement under existing law and sentiment, drawing on Hereditary Genius and Natural Inheritance. Galton begins with the sheer variety of human character and faculty, compares it to the variation bred into domesticated animals, and invokes St. Matthew’s parable of the talents. He then explains the Normal Law of Frequency, citing Karl Pearson’s Darwin Medal work, while conceding that actual variations rarely fall into perfect symmetry. “Normal-talent” he defines as the probable error. Table I distributes qualities among 10,000 persons, with classes R through V above mediocrity and r through v below it, and he anchors the scheme in adult male stature: an average near five feet eight inches, a normal-talent band of about an inch and three-quarters, and a Class U reaching beyond six feet one and a quarter inches. He sets his classes beside Charles Booth’s London classification in Table II, runs through Booth’s classes A to H, and weighs the worth of children, citing Dr. Farr’s estimate of an Essex labourer’s baby at five pounds, before turning to how qualities descend through a population.
The Descent of Qualities and the Economy of Effort
Galton selects a single case for close analysis because it spares him the awkward conversions between female and male faculties. He assumes an ideal population: all marriages equally fertile, statistically identical across generations in numbers and qualities, with offspring who die before marriage age ignored and the slight numerical inequality of the sexes set aside. Each parentage yields one adult man and one adult woman. Table III, “Descent of Qualities in a Population,” lays out the conditions—parents always alike in class, population statistics unchanged, the Normal Law of Frequency holding throughout—and lists classes v through V with fathers and mothers per hundred and per ten thousand, then distributes sons and daughters by parental class. Agreement between fathers and sons, or mothers and daughters, is exact to the nearest whole percentage; the tiny discrepancies in ten-thousandths arise mainly because the classes are too few and too wide. The table can be read for fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, or parentages and filial couplets alike.
Three reference points organize the analysis: the mid-parental, genetic, and filial centres. When both parents are alike, the mid-parental centre coincides with either parent separately. The filial centre is where children disperse; the genetic centre occupies, in the parental series, the position the filial centre occupies in the filial series. Natural Inheritance is cited to prove that the genetic centre is always more mediocre than the parental centre, owing to ancestral influences, and that regression from parental to genetic centre for stature would be two-thirds under the assumed conditions. Converging lines stop at one-third of the distance. Parental class contents concentrate at the median axis, genetic centres sit where the converging lines halt, and filials disperse with a spread three-quarters that of parentages. Narrower classes and more decimals, Galton notes, would make the correspondence identical to the nearest ten-thousandth.
Under “Economy of Effort” he traces the V class in detail. Of its thirty-four or thirty-five sons, six come from V parentages, ten from U, ten from T, five from S, three from R, and none from below R. Lower classes score by quantity rather than quality: thirty-five V-class parents produce six V sons, while twenty-five hundred R-class fathers produce three. The richness of V-class produce relative to R-class runs as 143 to 1; for V children from U, T, and S parentages, the ratios are 3, 11½, and 55 to 1. Nearly half of V-class produce are V or U, and nearly three-quarters are V, U, or T. When both parents are V, quality rises sharply above the one-V-parent case: regression reaches twice as far back toward mediocrity, and filial spread becomes nine-tenths of parental instead of three-quarters. Table IV compares one V-parent, the other unknown, with two V-parents. The filial centre for one V-parent is 1·44; for two V-parents, 2·89; when both parents are T, 1·58. A gap of fully two divisions separates them, and single V parentage sits only a trifle nearer mediocrity than double T. To further marriages with a higher class on only one side, Galton concludes, would be bad economy.
Like to Like, Booth’s Class A, and the Selection of Talent
Intermarriage within each class, Galton argues, affects brain power in cultured families and shows itself even more starkly at the lowest social scale. Extracts from Booth describe Class A, the lowermost third of “v and below”: their life is that of savages, marked by extreme hardship and occasional excess; they produce battered street figures, beggars, and bullies; they render no useful service and create no wealth, often destroying it; they degrade whatever they touch. Booth thinks them perhaps incapable of improvement as individuals, though individuals of every sort exist in the mass. They bear a very small proportion to the rest of the population, or even to class B, with which they are mixed and sometimes hard to separate—barbarians, but only a handful. Booth hopes this class may become less hereditary, though it now appears hereditary to a considerable extent. Many familiar with these people say it would be an economy and a great benefit to segregate all habitual criminals under merciful surveillance and deny them the chance to produce offspring, abolishing a source of suffering for a future generation without unwarrantable hardship.
Booth’s classification, however, did not help beyond classes higher than S in civic worth. Should a strong desire arise to discover young men of the V, W, or X order, Galton believes it could be done. In a great university, students compete in studies, athletics, and public meetings, and their characters become known to associates and tutors. Before any selection, acceptable definitions of civic worth would have to be framed in alternative terms, for worth takes many forms. The number of V, W, or X men a university could contribute annually must first be ascertained. In the general population, V stands to the remainder as 1 to 300, and W as 1 in 3000. Students are already somewhat selected, since the cleverest youths usually reach universities, and a high intellectual and physical level would be required for candidature. The limited number not automatically weeded out might be submitted to independent votes of fellow-students and tutors, whose ideals differ. This ordeal would reduce the possible winners to a very small number, from which an independent committee might make the final selection, guided by personal interviews and weighing all favourable points in family histories with appropriate hereditary weight, probably passing over unfavourable points unless they were notorious and flagrant, given the difficulty of establishing truth. Scientific societies have ample experience in such selections, medals included. Opportunities for selecting women are fewer.
Healthy Homes, Profit and Loss, and Existing Activities
Galton next weighs “healthy homes” and a “simple life” as influences that conduce to fertility and indirectly preserve lives to adult age. Zymotic disease, he observes, falls indiscriminately on weak and strong, so the weakest are not necessarily the ones who perish; healthier children would more likely become parents of healthy stock. The great danger to high civilizations, “our own” especially, is the drain from rural districts to large towns: migrants may produce large families, but these are believed to dwindle in later generations, so the towns sterilise rural vigour. Because hereditary fertility would be a reason for choosing the selected class, that class would respond more than others to such influences. He declines to appraise the combined strength of the six influences. If each added one-sixth to produce, offspring would double—possible, given the large families of colonists and rural districts, but a high estimate. A fairer approximation: the influences would cause X women to bear, on average, one adult son and one adult daughter beyond what they would otherwise have produced. The table of descent, applying to one son or daughter per couple, may be read as specifying net gain and its distribution; if the estimate seems too high, the results may be scaled down.
That outside influences should hasten the marrying age and make it customary for the best to marry the best is not absurd. The superficial objection—that young people’s fancies are incalculable and irresistible—is anticipated. Some cases are exceptional: a lady of a county family reported that her great aunt scandalised her domestic circle two generations earlier by falling in love with the undertaker at her father’s funeral and insisting on marrying him. Strange vagaries occur, yet social position, fortune, and frequent intercourse tell more in the long run than rootless sudden fancies. In a community deeply impressed with encouraging marriages between persons of equally high ability, social pressure would ensure notable success.
Under “Profit and Loss” the problem takes clear shape: a child of the X class would have been worth so much at birth, and one of each other grade likewise; a hundred X parentages can produce a net gain of a hundred adult sons and a hundred adult daughters, distributed among classes according to the standard table of descent. An actuary can estimate the total value of the prospective produce, and thus the sum legitimately spendable in favouring an X parentage. Clear statement of a problem, Galton remarks, is often more than halfway to solution; this one should be solvable between limiting values not too wide apart.
Leaving aside profitable expenditure, immense voluntary activities with nobler aims already exist. Annual voluntary contributions in the British Isles to public charities alone amount, on the lowest computation, to fourteen million pounds—a sum Sir H. Burdett asserts on good grounds is by no means the maximum obtainable. Other long-standing activities might be extended. Galton will not dwell on endowments of scholarships aimed at finding and educating the fittest youths for national work, but he refers to the wholesome practice, in all ages, of wealthy persons befriending poor but promising lads; many men owed their start in a successful life to such help. The relationship of befriender and befriended is hard to express in English without connoting more than intended; “patron” is odious. Recalling Dr. Johnson’s abhorrence of the patrons of his day, Galton consulted an early edition of the dictionary and was not disappointed: Johnson defines “patron” as “a wretch who supports with insolence and is repaid with flattery.” This is totally opposed to what is advocated—a kindly, honourable relation between a wealthy man who has made his position and a youth avowedly his equal in natural gifts but who has yet to make it, one in which each party may take pride, and which would become commoner if its value were more widely understood.
Many degrees lie between mere befriendment and actual adoption, more or less effective in freeing capable youths from narrow circumstances, enabling girls to marry early and suitably, and securing favour for their offspring. Something in this direction is commonly half-unconsciously done by great landowners whose employments for man and wife, together with good cottages, go to exceptionally deserving couples. Because connection with a great, liberally managed estate is widely appreciated, there are usually more applicants than vacancies, so selection can be exercised; consequently the class of men on these properties is markedly superior to those elsewhere. It might become a point of honour, and an avowed object, for noble families to gather fine specimens of humanity around them, as they procure and maintain fine breeds of cattle, costly but repaying in satisfaction. Another existing form of princely benevolence might be extended to affect race improvement: provision to exceptionally promising young couples of healthy, convenient houses at low rentals. A continually renewed settlement of this kind can be imagined, free from the taint of patronage, analogous to colleges with self-elected fellowships and rooms for residence, becoming an exceedingly desirable residence for a specified time—as a good club attracts desirable candidates by its social advantages. The tone of the place would be higher for the high quality of its inmates, distinguished by energy, intelligence, health, self-respect, and mutual helpfulness.
Under “Prospects,” Galton admits it is pleasant to contrive Utopias; he has indulged in many, including a great society publishing intelligence and memoirs, holding yearly elections, administering large funds, establishing personal relations like a missionary society with its missionaries, keeping elaborate registers, and discussing them statistically with honest precision. But the first and pressing point is to thoroughly justify any crusade for race improvement. More unbiased scientific inquiry is wanted along the many roads hurriedly sketched.
Marriage Customs as Social Expediency
The text then announces a brief history of widely spread marriage customs, claiming that, with scant exceptions, they rest on social expediency rather than natural instincts, and citing Frazer’s Golden Bough, Westermarck’s History of Marriage, Huth’s Marriage of Near Kin, and Crawley’s Mystic Rose for further study. On monogamy, mankind cannot be labeled instinctively polygamous or monogamous; history suggests both conditions equally, and races, like individuals, vary in instinct. Polygamy may mean plural wives, or one principal wife plus secondary legitimate wives or other recognized connections. It is permitted by religion, custom, and law to at least half the world, though restricted by cost, domestic peace, and insufficient females. It holds firmly in the Moslem world, exists in modified forms in India and China, and accords with sentiments in much of negro Africa. It was customary in early Biblical days: Jacob’s twelve children had four simultaneous mothers—Leah, Rachel, Bilhah, and Zilpah. Later Jewish kings emulated neighboring potentates; Solomon and Rehoboam are cited.
A Memorandum on Proposed Eugenic Inquiries
Galton set out a programme of research he thought the new science required. At the top of the list stood a Biographical Index to Gifted Families, modelled on his own index of the near kinsfolk of Fellows of the Royal Society, restricted to creditable published facts while other material was reserved for statistics. Alongside it he wanted biographies of capable but unremarkable families, kept in manuscript with the option of publication, and biographies of families below average in health, mind, or physique — including the families of inmates of asylums, hospitals, and prisons — for statistical use only. Further projects covered the parentage and progeny of every social class and the insurance-office data suggested by Mr. Palin Egerton. Turning to the state, he proposed prolonged segregation of habitual criminals to check both their depredations and their low-class offspring; inquiries into whether aid to feeble-minded institutions encouraged marriage and childbearing; study of whether grants toward higher education carried a eugenic effect; and the observation that indiscriminate charity and out-door relief were notably non-eugenic. Other sections dealt with influences on marriage, with heredity — actuarial and physiological laws, and the study of Eurasians, the descendants of Hindu and English parents, as a test of Mendelian hypotheses — with literature, with co-operation, and with Eugenic certificates implying above-average constitution, physique, and mental capacity.
In his reply to the discussion Galton thanked Dr. Haddon, Dr. Mott, Mr. Crawley, and Dr. Westermarck, noted the twenty-six printed contributions, and worked through the points raised: certificates, breeding for points, the “residue” or regression toward mediocrity, and the passion of love, where he distinguished a slight inclination from falling thoroughly in love. He closed on eugenics as a factor in religion, presenting it as a virile creed founded on directed evolution. The Herbert Spencer Lecture then opened with his recollections of Spencer at the Athenaeum Club and with the history of the word “Eugenics,” coined in Human Faculty in 1883, and citing Keats’s Hyperion.
The Slow Growth of a Science
Galton had long held that men may be the chief, perhaps the only, executives on earth — detached on active service, possessed of a possibly illusory free will, and in some way accountable for success or failure in furthering obscure ends. The instructions were obscure, yet clear enough to justify interfering with the pitiless course of Nature when the goal could be reached by gentler, kindlier ways. Truest piety, he held, lies in action rather than in submissive acquiescence to Nature’s routine; the old belief that fixing lightning conductors to churches was impious had once been sincere and was now met with contempt.
Direct pursuit of eugenics attracted few investigators at first, being too far ahead of popular imagination. Galton waited and occupied himself with collateral problems, above all with measuring variously distributed faculties. The results appeared in Natural Inheritance in 1889, which proved more timely. Professor Karl Pearson greatly elaborated the methods and applied them to biometry; Professor Weldon of Oxford aided powerfully before his untimely death. A new science was created for biometry but equally applicable to eugenics, since their provinces overlap, and Biometrika appeared in 1901, Galton taking little more than a nominal part.
Appointed Huxley Lecturer before the Anthropological Institute in 1901, he titled his lecture “The possible improvement of the Human Breed under the existing conditions of Law and Sentiment.” The next important step was Karl Pearson’s Huxley Lecture of 1903, “The Laws of Inheritance in Man,” which contained a valuable compendium and a passage arguing that the nation was ceasing to breed intelligence as it had fifty or a hundred years before: the mentally better stock reproduced less, the less able and energetic more fertile; no wider education could raise hereditary weakness to hereditary strength; the only possible remedy was altering the relative fertility of good and bad stocks.
Founding the Eugenics Laboratory
Asked in 1904 by the newly formed Sociological Society, Galton contributed “Eugenics, its definition, aim and scope,” followed in 1905 by three memoirs — “Restrictions in Marriage,” “Studies in National Eugenics,” and “Eugenics as a factor in Religion” — published in the Society’s papers with comments by more than twenty authorities. With eugenics thus formally launched, he offered a small endowment to the University of London to found a Research Fellowship. It was cordially accepted, gaining recognition and a home in University College. Mr. Edgar Schuster became Research Fellow in 1905, and Galton acknowledged his care and his memoirs, part still unpublished.
As Schuster’s retirement approached, Galton and Professor Pearson consulted the University authorities and elaborated a reorganization scheme at the beginning of the year, one that showed vitality and endurance. Mr. David Heron, a Mathematical Scholar of St. Andrew’s, became Research Fellow; Miss Ethel Elderton, who had done excellent expert work from the beginning, was raised to Research Scholar; and the partial services of a trained computer were secured. Crucially, Karl Pearson undertook, at Galton’s urgent request, general supervision of the office’s work, which advancing age and infirmities now precluded Galton from giving. Pearson would treat it as an annexe to his adjacent biometric laboratory, since many eugenics studies could equally be carried on in either, using the same methods of precise analysis due to his mathematical skill and energy. The office now bore the name Eugenics Laboratory, temporarily at 88 Gower Street and by 1909 housed in the University buildings. “National Eugenics” was defined as the study of agencies under social control that may improve or impair the racial qualities of future generations, either physically or mentally. The Laboratory had begun publishing memoirs, and Galton rested satisfied it would prosper as an important centre of research.
Probability as the Foundation
Eugenics, Galton insisted, seeks quantitative results — not vague “much” or “little,” but “how much” or “how little” in precise figures. Suppose a class A is afflicted with a specified degeneracy and class B is its offspring. When A‘s grade is very low, the average B will fall below par and be mischievous; but how mischievous? That is answerable once the facts are collected. A second question follows: how trustworthy is a forecast from averages when applied to individuals? The average mischief per B individual is M; individual mischiefs differ from M by amounts whose average is D, the measure of untrustworthiness. A smaller D means a more precise forecast and stronger justification for drastic measures, consonant with feeling, if the forecast were infallible. A large D signifies uncertainty and risk, faced through a sentiment akin to “It is better that many guilty should escape than that one innocent person should suffer.” But that is not the sentiment guiding natural selection, and it is dangerous to yield far to it. A thorough investigation, even of one grade and form of degeneracy, would be serious: masses of trustworthy material collected with difficulty, treated skilfully by methods few can employ. Extended inquiry into the good or evil done to the State by the offspring of many classes implies huge work occupying eugenics laboratories indefinitely.
Under “Object Lessons in the Methods of Biometry,” Galton proposed to set out the fundamental principles of probability concerned in biometry and eugenics. Most ordinary persons knew nothing of them, and that ignorance obstructed eugenics. He acknowledged that his compressed treatment might have been tedious, but trusted it showed that a brief course, richly illustrated with diagrams and objects to handle, would acceptably introduce the newer methods used in biometry and eugenics; read leisurely by experts in printed form, it would guide them in elaborating details.
The Influence of Collective Truths upon Individual Conduct
Probability, based on variations, yields exact results and a solid foundation for action, but human action is a superstructure entered by emotion, guided less by certainties and probabilities than by assurance. Assurance derives from sure, an abbreviation of secure — se-cura, without misgiving — a contented attitude of mind dependent on custom, prejudice, or other unreasonable influences that reformers must overcome and sometimes exploit. Humans rarely find their way by pure reason, peering instead through coloured and distorting glasses. Locke is said to confound certainty with assurance in his description of how men are guided in daily affairs: man would be at a great loss with only certain knowledge to direct him, since it is short and scanty; he who will not eat until it is demonstrated that his food will nourish him, or stir until he infallibly knows his business will succeed, will sit still and perish.
Society is a highly complex organism with its own consciousness, caring only for itself, establishing regulations and customs for collective advantage and creating a code of opinions to subserve that end. Its power over the individual, on any obvious particular it emphasizes, is hard to over-rate. Galton trusted that one future particular would be the practice of eugenics; otherwise the influence of collective truths on individual conduct is deplorably weak, as the quoted lines have it: others’ follies teach us not, nor much their wisdom teaches, but chief of solid worth is what our own experience preaches.
Professor Westermarck, among many remarks Galton fully concurred with, aptly stated the obstacle preventing individuals from perceiving eugenics’ importance: “the prevalent opinion that almost anybody is good enough to marry is chiefly due to the fact that in this case, cause and effect, marriage and the feebleness of the offspring, are so distant from each other that the near-sighted eye does not distinctly perceive the connexion between them.”
Public Opinion as the Tyrant
The enlightenment of individuals is a necessary preamble to practical eugenics, but social opinion is the tyrant by whose praise or blame eugenic principles may hereafter influence individual conduct. Public opinion may be easily directed into different channels by opportune pressure. A common conviction that change in some codes of conduct would be impossible, because of the shock the idea gives to present ideas, resembles lovers’ conviction that their present sentiments will endure forever. Conviction — that very assurance — is proved by reiterated experience to be a highly fallacious guide. Love is notoriously fickle despite lovers’ fervent, genuine protestations, and so is public opinion. Galton had given a list of extraordinary variations of public opinion regarding restrictions on freedom of marriage at various times and places. Much could be added, but he would not now discuss public opinion’s effects on so serious a question.
He took instead a smaller instance, occurring before most persons’ recollections reach but which he vividly recalled: hair on the face of male adults. When he was young, it was an unpardonable offence for any English person other than a cavalry officer, or perhaps someone of high social rank, to wear a moustache. Foreigners did so and were tolerated; otherwise assuming a moustache was in popular opinion worse than wicked — atrociously bad style. Then came the Crimean War and the winter of Balaclava, during which it was cruel to compel infantry to shave every morning. Their beards grew, breaking a long-established custom. On the army’s return to England the fashion of beards spread among the laity but stopped short of the clergy. These soon showed dissatisfaction, saying the beard was a sign of manliness that ought not to be suppressed, and at length the moment arrived. A distinguished clergyman, happily still living, “bearded” his Bishop on a critical occasion. The Bishop yielded without protest, and forthwith hair began to sprout in a thousand pulpits where it had never appeared before within the memory of man.
It would be no small shock to public sentiment if athletes in running public races stripped themselves stark naked, yet that custom was rather suddenly introduced into Greece. Plato says that not long ago the Greeks were of the opinion, still generally received among barbarians, that the sight of a naked man was ridiculous and improper, and when first the Cretans and the Lacedaemonians introduced naked exercises, the wits of that day might have ridiculed them. Thucydides likewise refers to the same change as occurring “quite lately.”
Public opinion, Galton concluded, is commonly far in advance of private morality, because society as a whole keenly appreciates acts tending to its advantage and condemns those that do not. It applauds acts of heroism that perhaps not one applauder would emulate. It is instructive to observe cases where public opinion’s benevolence has outstripped the Law — which, for example, takes no notice of acts enshrined in the parable of the good Samaritan. A man on his journey was robbed, wounded, and left — and there the text breaks off, leaving the reader at the edge of the parable, with the argument for a eugenic conscience resting on the ground Galton had prepared: that what society praises and blames will, in the end, decide what manner of children the future inherits.
Key Ideas
The normal law of frequency and the class table. Galton sorts a population into classes running from V down through R above mediocrity and r through v below it, then shows how sons and daughters distribute themselves by parental class. The agreement between parents and children, he notes, is exact to the nearest whole percentage; discrepancies in ten-thousandths come mainly from classes being too few and wide.
Regression toward mediocrity. Drawing on Natural Inheritance, Galton argues the “genetic centre” of a family is always more mediocre than the parental centre, because ancestral influences pull it back. Under his assumed conditions, regression from parental to genetic centre for stature would be two-thirds of the distance. This is the “residue” he returns to in his reply to discussion—the tendency of exceptional parents to produce less exceptional children.
Marriage of like to like. Intermarriage within a class affects brain power in cultured families and matters even more at the bottom of the social scale. Galton’s tables show that when both parents are of the highest class, quality is greatly superior to a match with only one such parent: the filial centre for one V-parent is 1·44, for two V-parents 2·89. Single V parentage, he concludes, is only a trifle nearer mediocrity than double T—so it would be bad economy to further marriages with a higher class on only one side.
Economy of effort. Tracing the V class through the table, Galton finds that of its thirty-four or thirty-five sons, six come from V parentages, ten from U, ten from T, five from S, three from R, and none from below R. Lower classes score by quantity rather than quality: 2,500 R-class fathers produce three V sons, while thirty-five V-class parents produce six. The richness in produce of V-class parentages to R-class is as 143 to 1.
Eugenics as a factor in religion. Galton presents eugenics as a virile creed founded on directed evolution, arguing that truest piety lies in action rather than submissive acquiescence to Nature’s routine. He compares the old belief that attaching lightning conductors to churches was impious—a view now met with contempt.
Probability as the foundation. The Herbert Spencer Lecture argues that eugenics seeks quantitative results, and that a forecast from averages must be judged by how widely individuals vary around that average. Where the measure of untrustworthiness is small, drastic measures consonant with feeling are justified; where it is large, the risk of error grows, and the sentiment “better that many guilty escape than that one innocent suffer” takes hold—a sentiment Galton warns is dangerous to yield to far, since it is not the sentiment guiding natural selection.
Assurance versus certainty. Human action, Galton observes, is guided less by certainties and probabilities than by assurance—a word he derives from sure, an abbreviation of secure, meaning a contented attitude of mind resting on custom and prejudice. Locke, he notes, is said to confound certainty with assurance when describing how men are guided in daily affairs.
Themes
The book’s deepest subject is the gap between knowledge and conduct. Galton can demonstrate inheritance statistically, yet he knows that statistics rarely move people. Society, he writes, is a highly complex organism with its own consciousness, caring only for itself, establishing regulations and customs for collective advantage and creating a code of opinions to serve that end. Its power over the individual on any particular it chooses to emphasize is hard to over-rate.
Westermarck supplies the obstacle in a phrase Galton quotes with approval: the prevalent opinion that almost anybody is good enough to marry persists because cause and effect—marriage and the feebleness of offspring—lie so far apart that the “near-sighted eye” cannot see the connection. Enlightenment of individuals is a necessary preamble, but social opinion is the tyrant by whose praise or blame eugenic principles may eventually influence conduct.
Running beneath this is a meditation on how malleable that tyrant is. Galton recalls a list of extraordinary variations in public opinion about restrictions on marriage across times and places, then offers a smaller instance from his own memory: the moustache. When he was young, it was an unpardonable offence for any Englishman outside the cavalry, or perhaps high social rank, to wear one. Then came the Crimean winter, when it was cruel to make infantry shave every morning; the beards grew, the custom broke, and after the army returned the fashion spread among the laity—stopping short of the clergy, until a distinguished clergyman “bearded” his bishop on a critical occasion. The bishop yielded without protest, and hair sprouted in a thousand pulpits. He adds the Greek athletes who stripped naked to race, a custom Plato and Thucydides both treat as a recent and once-ridiculous innovation.
The essays also carry a quieter theme of institutional patience. Galton describes waiting decades for his subject to become timely, occupying himself with collateral problems, watching Natural Inheritance find its audience, then the founding of a Research Fellowship at the University of London, the arrival of Edgar Schuster, and the later reorganization that brought David Heron and Ethel Elderton into the Eugenics Laboratory under Karl Pearson’s general supervision. He defines “National Eugenics” as the study of agencies under social control that may improve or impair the racial qualities of future generations, physically or mentally—a definition that places the whole enterprise squarely within the reach of ordinary social arrangements.
Why It Matters
The book is a primary document of an idea that would go on to terrible consequences, and reading it in Galton’s own measured, table-laden prose is part of its value. Here is eugenics before the legislation, before the coercion—presented as a matter of voluntary marriage choices, charitable endowments, healthy cottages at low rents, and the slow education of public sentiment. Galton’s proposals include befriending promising youths, gathering fine specimens of humanity around great estates as breeders maintain fine cattle, and a continually renewed settlement of healthy young couples free from the taint of patronage.
He also shows the movement’s own anxieties. He worries that advocates will overclaim and provoke reaction. He worries that indiscriminate charity and out-door relief are notably non-eugenic. He proposes prolonged segregation of habitual criminals to restrict both depredations and low-class offspring, and asks whether aid to feeble-minded institutions promotes marriage and offspring. He notes that the great danger to high civilizations is the drain from rural districts to large towns, since the towns sterilize rural vigour.
For a reader today, the essays are instructive less as a program than as a case study in how scientific authority, statistical confidence, and social anxiety can combine. Galton’s tables are careful; his assumptions about what counts as “civic worth” are not examined with the same rigor. The book ends where it began—on the problem of moving people, since public opinion is commonly far in advance of private morality, applauding acts of heroism that not one applauder would emulate, and taking no notice of acts enshrined in the parable of the good Samaritan.
