274 Life and Letters of Francis Galton 



and it enforces the importance of the marriage covenant by directing serious attention to the 

 probable quality of the future offspring. It sternly forbids all forms of sentimental charity 

 that are harmful to the race, while it eagerly seeks opportunity for acts of personal kindness, 

 as some equivalent for the loss of what it forbids. It brings the tie of kinship into prominence 

 and strongly encourages love and interest in family and race. In brief, Eugenics is a virile creed, 

 full of hopefulness, and appealing to many of the noblest feelings of our nature." (p. 53.) 



Besides the two memoranda to which we have just referred, Francis Galton 

 presented a short paper entitled "Studies in National Eugenics," which was 

 appended to his "Marriage Restrictions." He refers to the appointment of 

 Mr Schuster to the Research Fellowship, and sketches out the various inquiries 

 which the new Eugenics Record Office might undertake. They form indeed 

 an excellent scheme for any laboratory proposing to undertake eugenic research. 

 Most of Galton 's problems still remain unsolved owing to the difficulty of 

 procuring accurate and adequate data, and they will remain so until the 

 public at large is willing first to fill in at all, and secondly to fill in veraciously 

 investigators' schedules, and until the State recognises how important it is 

 that school, asylum and prison should be treated as laboratories, where under 

 suitable regulations men of science may work*. 



As confirming Galton's view that probability is the basis of Eugenics we 

 may note that the bulk of his suggested problems demand the collection of 

 data and their statistical treatment. 



I. The first problem is the estimation of the average quality of offspring 

 from that of their parents and ancestry, and this covers questions of relative 

 fertility. Under this heading Galton includes genealogical work on (a) Gifted 

 Families ; (b) Capable Families ; (c) Degenerate Families ; (d) Extent of social 

 class interchanges, to what extent do "castes" rule in modern civilised 

 communities; and (e) Possibility of obtaining valuable eugenic data from 

 Insurance Office records. 



II. The Effects of Action by the State and by Public Institutions. Under 

 this heading we may deal with (a) Habitual Criminals, and the problems of 

 their origin and segregation ; (6) Feeble-minded and Insane, their origin and 

 the restriction of their reproduction ; (c) Grants for higher education, how far 

 these are advantageously used, and to what extent they might be employed 

 to encourage fertility in eugenic marriages; (d) Indiscriminate charity, 

 including out-door relief and perhaps we may now add "the dole." Have 

 they, as there is reason to believe, tendencies other than eugenic? 



III. What factors in religion, custom or law, and what social influences 

 tend to restrict eugenic marriages or reduce their fertility? 



IV. Heredity. "The facts after being collected are to be discussed for 

 improving our knowledge of the laws both of actuarial and physiological 

 heredity, the recent methods of advanced statistics being of course used " (p. 1 6). 

 Galton suggests two special problems of great interest: (i) Effect on offspring 



* Schoolmaster, medical officer and governor of prison have no time for statistical inquiries. 

 Too often on retirement they publish statements based merely on impressions, and none knows 

 better than the statistician how fatally inaccurate these may often be. 



