Eugenics as a Creed and the Last Decade of Galton's Life 363 



couple of lectures, but I asked its Council the sole favour of leaving us alone, 

 as we were quite ready to leave them. Not till certain members of its 

 Council, not content with asserting the futility of the actuarial or statistical 

 method of attacking eugenic problems, began to hint that we were wasting 

 Galton's gift to the University did it appear to me necessary to make any 

 reply to such ill-informed criticism*. But there is little doubt that the 

 endeavour to make Eugenics a science in the academic sense — to build up 

 a special technique for it and fix in a vaguely circumscribed field a defined 

 area for cultivation — was much hampered by the action of successive 

 officers f and members of the Eugenics Education Society. It is conceivable 

 that Galton's attempt to appoint for the Laboratory and the Society 

 separate spheres of action as indicated in the " Foreword " just cited did on 

 the whole more harm than good ; nobody likes to be told, however true it 

 may be, that he is incapable — without training — of doing the higher type of 

 work. Be this as it may, Galton in the last two years of his life was— to use 

 a mild word — saddened by the attitude of certain members of the Eugenics 

 Education Society. I recognised myself that the staff of the Laboratory had 

 laboured hard and done good work. I knew that neither they nor myself 

 were biased in one way or the other in such problems as those of the relative 

 effect of inheritance and of environment, of the influence of parental alcoholism 

 on the health and mentality of school-children, of the inheritance or non- 

 inheritance of the tuberculous diathesis, or of mental defect and insanity. 

 We simply desired to reach the truth by applying appropriate scientific 

 methods to such data as were available. The only prejudice permitted in the 

 laboratory was the distrust of all preconceived opinions and the doubt of 

 statements based merely on impressions. Once, however, we had ascertained 

 the conclusions flowing from our data we were not prepared to surrender them 

 because they clashed with the largely sentimental notions of those who had 

 not closely studied these problems. I knew Francis Galton was with us in 

 these points, but I think our opponents were less aware of it, nor to this day 

 have they realised that he was so doubtful of the manner in which the 

 Eugenics Education Society was being conducted, that in December 1910 

 when he asked my advice, a word from me — not spoken — would have led 

 to his retirement from the Society J. It is necessary to make these remarks 

 or the letters of 1909-1910 would be unintelligible. 



(iii) A preface to W. Palin and Ethel M. Elderton's Primer of Statistics. 

 This little book was written to carry out Francis Galton's conception of a 

 series of "object lessons" in elementary statistics as shadowed forth in the 



* When, many years after Galton's death, we had at last saved enough from the scant 

 publishing funds of the Laboratory to venture on a journal — Annals of Eugenics — in which to 

 issue our researches, we were virtually accused by an official of the Society in its Eugenics Review 

 of having neglected this duty far too long ! 



t One President of the Society recently organised a petition of its members to the governing 

 body of another department of the University requesting that they should institute a second 

 professorship of Eugenics ! 



\ See my remarks on influencing the judgment of men of genius even when they are old on 

 pp. 408 and 412 of this volume. 



46—2 



