Eugenics as a Creed and the Last Decade of Galton's Life 405 



These denunciations were called forth by letters to The Times, March 21 

 and 31, from Francis Galton and myself in regard to the reform of the House 

 of Lords. Galton drew attention to the fact that a distinction must be drawn 

 between the principles of primogeniture and of heredity. The latter does 

 not involve the former, and whereas a strong stirp may show an adequate 

 number of scions of marked ability, it does not follow that we shall catch 

 able legislators by sending eldest son after eldest son to the House of Lords. 

 My thesis was that the Upper House has been too often recruited by mere 

 plutocrats, by political failures, or by the sons of men who have not taken 

 the pains necessary to found or preserve an able stock — the mother of the 

 eldest son may have been the sister of a Cecil, or a chorus-girl. The House 

 of Lords wants more, rather than less of the hereditary principle. As Galton 

 put it : " There seems to be a regrettable amount of ignorance among our 

 legislators of the facts and statistical methods upon which Eugenics is based." 



In The Times of May 21 appeared a summary of the memoir on the 

 Children of Alcoholic Parents, issued by the Eugenics Laboratory, and on the 

 whole a favourable leader upon it. This led to an endless controversy, and 

 somewhat violent statements* on the part of those The Times termed "the 

 enthusiastic advocates of what they are pleased to call temperance." It is 

 not my intention here to renew old controversies but to account for the 

 feelings that were raised in Galton's mind with regard to the Eugenics 

 Education Society in the last year of his life. One of Galton's chief missions 

 in life had been to develop statistical theory, to obtain scientific measures of 

 variation and correlation and thus to ascertain whether differences between 

 classes were or were not significant. The development of his methods applied 

 to living forms, including man, had been termed " biometry," and solely 

 by means of such biometric or actuarial methods is it possible to answer many 

 social and medical problems. " General impressions are never to be trusted. 

 Unfortunately when they are of long standing they become fixed rules of life, 

 and assume a prescriptive right not to be questioned. Consequently those who 

 are not accustomed to original inquiry entertain a hatred and a horror of 

 statistics f." Rightly or wrongly the ideas conveyed in the above sentences 

 formed Galton's method and his conception of scientific research ; to contemn 

 them was to set at naught Galton himself. 



Our statistics were good for the purpose we had in view and there was 

 more than one series ; from them came indubitably for the relative health of 

 children of school age the result expressed in the words " the balance turns 

 as often in favour of the alcoholic as of the non-alcoholic parentage " — -in 

 short we were unable to state that by the time children reached the school 

 age, those of the alcoholic were less healthy than those of the temperate. 



The Chairman of the Eugenics Education Society, Mr Montague Crackan- 

 thorpe, wrote at once to The Times to state that the result was "contrary to 

 general experience" — but not a single datum did he bring forward. "General 



* It was confidently asserted that the staff of the Laboratory were " in the pay of the 

 brewers " ! 



t Galton : see our Vol. u, p. 297. 



