NOTES 59* 



l 



the movement is not likely to continue to prosper so far as the 

 British Empire is concerned. 



Eugenics and War 



In the Times of October 15, Prof. Carl Pearson published 

 an important letter on the position of eugenics as a science, in 

 which he criticised the present tendency to publish premature 

 theorems upon this subject. He admitted that Sir Francis 

 Galton thought that progress towards increased race efficiency 

 should be made by two routes, namely (1) by the scientific 

 study of heredity and environment as they bore on racial 

 development, and (2) by a popular movement emphasising the 

 importance of these factors in national welfare and urging their 

 proper appreciation by legislators and social reformers. Prof. 

 Pearson now thinks that the latter line of work is being rather 

 overdone. Eugenics, he thinks, " has become a subject for 

 buffoonery on the stage and in the cheap press," and he adds 

 that " eugenics is rapidly developing into a topic for the poseur,. 

 the Kongressbummler and paragraphist " ; and he gives instances 

 of fallacious dogmas which are being put about. His warning 

 is a timely one — especially in view of such a " Criticism of 

 Eugenics " as is given by A. M. Carr-Saunders in the October 

 number of the Eugenics Review. Indeed, the same number of 

 the Eugenics Review contains an address on the Eugenics of War 

 by Chancellor Dr. David Starr Jordan of Stamford Universit}',. 

 U.S.A., to which Prof. Carl Pearson's criticism appears to be 

 most pertinently applicable. 



Chancellor Jordan's position is that "the effect of war on 

 nations is to spoil the breed, by the very simple process of the 

 reversion of selection . . . because the result of it would be that 

 the nations would breed from inferior stock, that the strong men 

 would be destroyed, or kept from marriage, and those at home — 

 those that war could not use — would be the parents of the next 

 generation " — an opinion which he attributes to Benjamin 

 Franklin. " If," he says, " a nation has destroyed its bravest, its 

 most courageous, its most soldierly men, it will cease to breed 

 that kind of man. If a nation destroys its men who are over six 

 feet high, in time it will not have many men who will reach that 

 stature." Thus, he argues, war must be disastrous to a nation 

 which indulges in that business — which many of the philanthro- 



