Gonorrhoea is a still commoner disease than syphilis; how common it is very difficult to say. It is also an older disease, for the ancient Egyptians knew it, and the Biblical King Esarhaddon of Assyria, as the records of his court show, once caught it. It seems to some people no more serious than a common cold, yet it is able to inflict much prolonged misery on its victims, while on the race its influence in the long run is even more deadly than that of syphilis, for gonorrhoea is the chief cause of sterility in women, that is to say, in from 30 to 50 per cent. of such cases, while of cases of sterility in men (which form a quarter to a third of the whole) gonorrhoea is the cause in from 70 to 90 per cent. The inflammation of the eyes of the new-born leading to blindness is also in 70 per cent. cases due to gonorrhoea in the mother, and this occurs in over six per 1,000 births.

Three years ago a Royal Commission was appointed to investigate the best methods of controlling venereal disease, as small-pox, typhus, and to a large extent typhoid, have already been controlled. The Commission was well composed, not merely of officials and doctors, but of experienced men and women in various fields, and the final Report is signed by all the members, any difference of opinion being confined to minor points (which it is unnecessary to touch on here) and to two members only. The recommendations are conceived in the most practical and broad-minded spirit. They are neither faddy nor goody-goody. Some indeed may wish that they had gone further. The Commission leave over for later consideration the question of notifying venereal disease as other infectious diseases are notified, and there is no recommendation for the provision of preventive methods against infection for use before intercourse, such as are officially favoured in Germany. But at both these points the Commissioners have been wise, for they are points to which sections of public opinion are still strongly hostile.[4] As they stand, the recommendations should carry conviction to all serious and reasonable persons. Already, indeed, the Government, without opposition, has expressed its willingness to undertake the financial burden which the Commission would impose on it.

The main Recommendations made by the Commission, if we put aside the suggestions for obtaining a more exact statistical knowledge, may be placed under the heads of Treatment and Prevention. As regards the first, it is insisted that measures should be taken to render the best modern treatment, which should be free to all, readily available for the whole community, in such a way that those affected will have no hesitation in taking advantage of the facilities thus offered. The means of treatment should be organised by County Councils and Boroughs, under the Local Government Board, which should have power to make independent arrangements when the local authorities fail in their duties. Institutional treatment should be provided at all general hospitals, special arrangements made for the treatment of out-patients in the evenings, and no objection offered to patients seeking treatment outside their own neighbourhoods. The expenditure should be assisted by grants from Imperial Funds to the extent of 75 per cent. It may be added that, however heavy such expenditure may be, an economy can scarcely fail to be effected. The financial cost of venereal disease to-day is so vast as to be beyond calculation. It enters into every field of life. It is enough merely to consider the significant little fact that the cost of educating a deaf child is ten times as great as that of educating an ordinary child.

Under the head of Prevention we may place such a suggestion as that the existence of infective venereal disease should constitute legal incapacity for marriage, even when unknown, and be a sufficient cause for annulling the marriage at the discretion of the court. But by far the chief importance under this head is assigned by the Commission to education and instruction. We see here the vindication of those who for years have been teaching that the first essential in dealing with venereal disease is popular enlightenment. There must be more careful instruction—"through all types and grades of education"—on the sexual relations in regard to conduct, while further instruction should be provided in evening continuation schools, as well as factories and works, with the aid of properly constituted voluntary associations.

These are sound and practical recommendations which, as the Government has realised, can be put in action at once. A few years ago any attempt to control venereal disease was considered by many to be almost impious. Such disease was held to be the just visitation of God upon sin and to interfere would be wicked. We know better now. A large proportion of those who are most severely struck by venereal disease are new-born children and trustful wives, while a simple kiss or the use of towels and cups in common has constantly served to spread venereal disease in a family. Even when we turn to the commonest method of infection, we have still to remember that we are dealing largely with inexperienced youths, with loving and trustful girls, who have yielded to the deepest and most volcanic impulse of their natures, and have not yet learnt that that impulse is a thing to be held sacred for their own sakes and the sake of the race. In so far as there is sin, it is sin which must be shared by those who have failed to train and enlighten the young. A Pharisaic attitude is not only highly mischievous in its results, but is here altogether out of place. Much harm has been done in the past by the action of Benefit Societies in withholding recognition and treatment from venereal disease.

It is evident that this thought was at the back of the minds of those who framed these wise recommendations. We cannot expect to do away all at once with the feeling that venereal disease is "shameful." It may not even be desirable. But we can at least make clear that, in so far as there is any shame, it must be a question between the individual and his own conscience. From the point of view of science, syphilis and gonorrhoea are just diseases, like cancer and consumption, the only diseases with which they can be compared in the magnitude and extent of their results, and therefore it is best to speak of them by their scientific names, instead of trying to invent vague and awkward circumlocutions. From the point of view of society, any attitude of shame is unfortunate, because it is absolutely essential that these diseases should be met in the open and grappled with methodically and thoroughly. Otherwise, as the Commission recognises, the sufferer is apt to become the prey of ignorant quacks whose inefficient treatment is largely responsible for the development of the latest and worst afflictions these diseases produce when not effectually nipped in the bud. That they can be thus cut short—far more easily than consumption, to say nothing of cancer—is the fact which makes it possible to hope for a conquest over venereal disease. It is a conquest that would make the whole world more beautiful and deliver love from its ugliest shadow. But the victory cannot be won by science alone, not even in alliance with officialdom. It can only be won through the enlightened co-operation of the whole nation.

[1] The increase of venereal disease during the Great War has been noted alike in Germany, France, and England. Thus, as regards France, Gaucher has stated at the Paris Academy of Medicine (Journal de Medicine, May 10th, 1916) that since mobilisation syphilis had increased by nearly one half, alike among soldiers and civilians; it had much increased in quite young people and in elderly men. In Germany, Neisser, a leading authority, states (Deutsche Medizinische Wochenschrift, 14th Jan., 1915) that the prevalence of venereal disease is much greater than in the war of 1870, and that "every day many thousands, not to say tens of thousands, of otherwise able-bodied men are withdrawn from the service on this account."

[2] The chief is Iwan Bloch who, in his elaborate work, Der Ursprung der Syphilis (2 vols., 1901, 1911), has fully investigated the evidence.

[3] N. Bishop Harman, "The Influence of Syphilis on the Chances of Progeny," British Medical Journal, Feb. 5th, 1916.

[4] It is true that in my book, Sex in Relation to Society (Ch. VIII.) I have stated my belief that notification, as in the case of other serious infectious diseases, is the first step in the conquest of venereal disease. I still think it ought to be so. But a yet more preliminary step is popular enlightenment as to the need for such notification. The recommendations seem to me to go as far as it is possible to go at the moment in English-speaking countries without producing friction and opposition. In so far as they are carried out the recommendations will ensure the necessary popular enlightenment.



XII

THE NATIONALISATION OF HEALTH

It was inevitable that we should some day have to face the problem of medical reorganisation on a social basis. Along many lines social progress has led to the initiation of movements for the improvement of public health. But they are still incomplete and imperfectly co-ordinated. We have never realised that the great questions of health cannot safely be left to municipal tinkering and the patronage of Bumbledom. The result is chaos and a terrible waste, not only of what we call "hard cash," but also of sensitive flesh and blood. Health, there cannot be the slightest doubt, is a vastly more fundamental and important matter than education, to say nothing of such minor matters as the post office or the telephone system. Yet we have nationalised these before even giving a thought to the Nationalisation of Health.

At the present day medicine is mainly in the hands, as it was two thousand years ago, of the "private practitioner." His mental status has, indeed, changed. To-day he is submitted to a long and arduous training in magnificently equipped institutions; all the laboriously acquired processes and results of modern medicine and hygiene are brought within the student's reach. And when he leaves the hospital, often with the largest and noblest conception of the physician's place in life, what do we do with him? He becomes a "private practitioner," which means, as Duclaux, the late distinguished Director of the Pasteur Institute, put it, that we place him on the level of a retail grocer who must patiently stand behind his counter (without the privilege of advertising himself) until the public are pleased to come and buy advice or drugs which are usually applied for too late to be of much use, and may be thrown away at the buyer's good pleasure, without the possibility of any protest by the seller. It is little wonder that in many cases the doctor's work and aims suffer under such conditions; his nature is subdued to what it works in; he clings convulsively to his counter and its retail methods.

The fact is—and it is a fact that is slowly becoming apparent to all—that the private practice of medicine is out of date. It fails to answer the needs of our time. There are various reasons why this should be the case, but two are fundamental. In the first place, medicine has outgrown the capacity of any individual doctor; the only adequate private practitioner must have a sound general knowledge of medicine with an expert knowledge of a dozen specialties; that is to say, he must give place to a staff of doctors acting co-ordinately, for the present system, or lack of system, by which a patient wanders at random from private practitioner to specialist, from specialist to specialist ad infinitum, is altogether mischievous. Moreover, not only is it impossible for the private practitioner to possess the knowledge required to treat his patients adequately: he cannot possess the scientific mechanical equipment nowadays required alike for diagnosis and treatment, and every day becoming more elaborate, more expensive, more difficult to manipulate. It is installed in our great hospitals for the benefit of the poorest patient; it could, perhaps, be set up in a millionaire's palace, but it is hopelessly beyond the private practitioner, though without it his work must remain unsatisfactory and inadequate.[1] In the second place, the whole direction of modern medicine is being changed and to an end away from private practice; our thoughts are not now mainly bent on the cure of disease but on its prevention. Medicine is becoming more and more transformed into hygiene, and in this transformation, though the tasks presented are larger and more systematic, they are also easier and more economical. These two fundamental tendencies of modern medicine—greater complexity of its methods and the predominantly preventive character of its aims—alone suffice to render the position of the private practitioner untenable. He cannot cope with the complexity of modern medicine; he has no authority to enforce its hygiene.

The medical system of the future must be a national system co-ordinating all the conditions of health. At the centre we should expect to find a Minister of Health, and every doctor of the State would give his whole time to his work and be paid by salary which in the case of the higher posts would be equal to that now fixed for the higher legal offices, for the chief doctor in the State ought to be at least as important an official as the Lord Chancellor. Hospitals and infirmaries would be alike nationalised, and, in place of the present antagonism between hospitals and the bulk of the medical profession, every doctor would be in touch with a hospital, thus having behind him a fully equipped and staffed institution for all purposes of diagnosis, consultation, treatment, and research, also serving for a centre of notification, registration, preventive and hygienic measures. In every district the citizen would have a certain amount of choice as regards the medical man to whom he may go for advice, but no one would be allowed to escape the medical supervision and registration of his district, for it is essential that the central Health Authority of every district should know the health conditions of all the inhabitants of the district. Only by some such organised and co-ordinated system as this can the primary conditions of Health, and preventive measures against disease, be genuinely socialised.

These views were put forward by the present writer twenty years ago in a little book on The Nationalisation of Health, which, though it met with wide approval, was probably regarded by most people as Utopian. Since then the times have moved, a new generation has sprung up, and ideas which, twenty years ago, were brooded over by isolated thinkers are now seen to be in the direct line of progress; they have become the property of parties and matters of active propaganda. Even before the introduction of State Insurance Professor Benjamin Moore, in his able book, The Dawn of the Health Age, anticipating the actual march of events, formulated a State Insurance Scheme which would lead on, as he pointed out, to a genuinely National Medical Service, and later, Dr. Macilwaine, in a little book entitled Medical Revolution, again advocated the same changes: the establishment of a Ministry of Health, a medical service on a preventive basis, and the reform of the hospitals which must constitute the nucleus of such a service. It may be said that for medical men no longer engaged in private practice it is easy to view the disappearance of private practice with serenity; but it must be added that it is precisely that disinterested serenity which makes possible also a clear insight into the problems and a wider view of the new horizons of medicine. Thus it is that to-day the dreamers of yesterday are justified.

The great scheme of State Insurance was certainly an important step towards the socialisation of medicine. It came short, indeed, of the complete Nationalisation of Health as an affair of State. But that could not possibly be introduced at one move. Apart even from the difficulty of complete reorganisation, the two great vested interests of private medical practice on the one hand and Friendly Societies on the other would stand in the way. A complicated transitional period is necessary, during which those two interests are conciliated and gradually absorbed. It is this transitional period which State Insurance has inaugurated. To compare small things to great—as we may, for the same laws run all through Nature and Society—this scheme corresponds to the ancient Ptolomaean system of astronomy, with its painfully elaborate epicycles, which preceded and led on to the sublime simplicity of the Copernican system. We need not anticipate that the transitional stage of national insurance will endure as long as the ancient astronomy. Professor Moore estimated that it would lead to a completely national medical service in twenty-five years, and since the introduction of that method he has, too optimistically, reduced the period to ten years. We cannot reach simplicity at a bound; we must first attempt to systematise the recognised and established activities and adjust them harmoniously.

The organised refusal of the medical profession at the outset to carry on, under the conditions offered, the part assigned to it in the great National Insurance scheme opened out prospects not clearly realised by the organisers. No doubt its immediate aspects were unfortunate. It not only threatened to impede the working of a very complex machine, but it dismayed many who were not prepared to see doctors apparently taking up the position of the syndicalists, and arguing that a profession which is essential to the national welfare need not be carried out on national lines, but can be run exclusively by itself in its own interests. Such an attitude, however, usefully served to make clear how necessary it is becoming that the extension of medicine and hygiene in the national life should be accompanied by a corresponding extension in the national government. If we had had a Council of National Health, as well as of National Defence, or a Board of Health as well as a Board of Trade, a Minister of Health with a seat in the Cabinet, any scheme of Insurance would have been framed from the outset in close consultation with the profession which would have the duty of carrying it out. No subsequent friction would have been possible.

Had the Insurance scheme been so framed, it is perhaps doubtful whether it would have been so largely based on the old contract system. Club medical practice has long been in discredit, alike from the point of view of patient and doctor. It furnishes the least satisfactory form of medical relief for the patient, less adequate than that he could obtain either as a private patient or as a hospital patient. The doctor, on his side, though he may find it a very welcome addition to his income, regards Club practice as semi-charitable, and, moreover, a form of charity in which he is often imposed on; he seldom views his club patients with much satisfaction, and unless he is a self-sacrificing enthusiast, it is not to them that his best attention, his best time, his most expensive drugs, are devoted. To perpetuate and enlarge the club system of practice and to glorify it by affixing to it a national seal of approval, was, therefore, a somewhat risky experiment, not wisely to be attempted without careful consultation with those most concerned.

Another point might then also have become clear: the whole tendency of medicine is towards a recognition of the predominance of Hygiene. The modern aim is to prevent disease. The whole national system of medicine is being slowly though steadily built up in recognition of the great fact that the interests of Health come before the interests of Disease. It has been an unfortunate flaw in the magnificent scheme of Insurance that this vital fact was not allowed for, that the old-fashioned notion that treatment rather than prevention is the object of medicine was still perpetuated, and that nothing was done to co-ordinate the Insurance scheme with the existing Health Services.

It seems probable that in a Service of State medical officers the solution may ultimately be found. Such a solution would, indeed, immensely increase the value of the Insurance scheme, and, in the end, confer far greater benefits than at present on the millions of people who would come under its operation. For there can be no doubt the Club system is not only unscientific; it is also undemocratic. It perpetuates what was originally a semi-charitable and second-rate method of treatment of the poorer classes. A State medical officer, devoting his whole time and attention to his State patients, has no occasion to make invidious distinctions between public and private patients.

A further advantage of a State Medical Service is that it will facilitate the inevitable task of nationalising the hospitals, whether charitable or Poor-law. The Insurance Act, as it stands, opens no definite path in this direction. But nowadays, so vast and complicated has medicine become, even the most skilful doctor cannot adequately treat his patient unless he has a great hospital at his back, with a vast army of specialists and research-workers, and a manifold instrumental instalment.

A third, and even more fundamental, advantage of a State Medical Service is that it would help to bring Treatment into touch with Prevention. The private practitioner, as such, inside or outside the Insurance scheme, cannot conveniently go behind his patient's illness. But the State doctor would be entitled to ask: Why has this man broken down? The State's guardianship of the health of its citizens now begins at birth (is tending to be carried back before birth) and covers the school life. If a man falls ill, it is, nowadays, legitimate to inquire where the responsibility lies. It is all very well to patch up the diseased man with drugs or what not. But at best that is a makeshift method. The Consumptive Sanatoriums have aroused enthusiasm, and they also are all very well. But the Charity Organisation Society has shown that only about 50 per cent. of those who pass through such institutions become fit for work. It is not more treatment of disease that we want, it is less need for treatment. And a State Medical Service is the only method by which Medicine can be brought into close touch with Hygiene.

The present attitude of the medical profession sometimes strikes people as narrow, unpatriotic, and merely self-interested. But the Insurance Act has brought a powerful ferment of intellectual activity into the medical profession which in the end will work to finer issues. A significant sign of the times is the establishment of the State Medical Service Association, having for its aim the organisation of the medical profession as a State Service, the nationalisation of hospitals, and the unification of preventive and curative medicine. To many in the medical profession such schemes still seem "Utopian"; they are blind to a process which has been in ever increasing action for more than half a century and which they are themselves taking part in every day.

[1] The result sometimes is that the ambitious doctor seeks to become a specialist in at least one subject, and instals a single expensive method of treatment to which he enthusiastically subjects all his patients. This would be comic if it were not sometimes rather tragic.



XIII

EUGENICS AND GENIUS

The cry is often heard to-day from those who watch with disapproval the efforts made to discourage the reckless procreation of the degenerate and the unfit: You are stamping out the germs of genius! It is widely held that genius is a kind of flower, unknown to the horticulturist, which only springs from diseased roots; make the plant healthily sound and your hope of blossoms is gone, you will see nothing but leaves. Or, according to the happier metaphor of Lombroso, the work of genius is an exquisite pearl, and pearls are the product of an obscure disease. To the medical mind, especially, it has sometimes been, naturally and properly no doubt, a source of satisfaction to imagine that the loveliest creations of human intellect may perhaps be employed to shed radiance on the shelves of the pathological museum. Thus we find eminent physicians warning us against any effort to decrease the vigour of pathological processes, and influential medical journals making solemn statements in the same sense. "Already," I read in a recent able and interesting editorial article in the British Medical Journal, "eugenists in their kind enthusiasm are threatening to stamp out the germs of possible genius."

Now it is quite easy to maintain that the health, happiness, and sanity of the whole community are more precious even than genius. It is so easy, indeed, that if the question of eugenics were submitted to the Referendum on this sole ground there can be little doubt what the result would be. There are not many people, even in the most highly educated communities, who value the possibility of a new poem, symphony, or mathematical law so highly that they would sacrifice their own health, happiness, and sanity to retain that possibility for their offspring. Of course we may declare that a majority which made such a decision must be composed of very low-minded uncultured people, altogether lacking in appreciation of pathology, and reflecting no credit on the eugenic cause they supported; but there can be little doubt that we should have to admit their existence.

We need not hasten, however, to place the question on this ground. It is first necessary to ascertain what reason there is to suppose that a regard for eugenic considerations in mating would tend to stamp out the germs of genius. Is there any reason at all? That is the question I am here concerned with.

The anti-eugenic argument on this point, whenever any argument is brought forward, consists in pointing to all sorts of men of genius and of talent who, it is alleged, were poor citizens, physical degenerates the prey of all manner of constitutional diseases, sometimes candidates for the lunatic asylum which they occasionally reached. The miscellaneous data which may thus be piled up are seldom critically sifted, and often very questionable, for it is difficult enough to obtain any positive biological knowledge concerning great men who died yesterday, and practically impossible in most cases to reach an unquestionable conclusion as regards those who died a century or more ago. Many of the most positive statements commonly made concerning the diseases even of modern genius are without any sure basis. The case of Nietzsche, who was seen by some of the chief specialists of the day, is still really quite obscure. So is that of Guy de Maupassant. Rousseau wrote the fullest and frankest account of his ailments, and the doctors made a post-mortem examination. Yet nearly all the medical experts—and they are many—who have investigated Rousseau's case reach different conclusions. It would be easy to multiply indefinitely the instances of great men of the past concerning whose condition of health or disease we are in hopeless perplexity.

This fact is, however, one that, as an argument, works both ways, and the important point is to make clear that it cannot concern us. No eugenic considerations can annihilate the man of genius when he is once born and bred. If eugenics is to stamp out the man of genius it must do so before he is born, by acting on his parents.

Nor is it possible to assume that if the man of genius, apart from his genius, is an unfit person to procreate the race, therefore his parents, not possessing any genius, were likewise unfit to propagate. It is easy to find persons of high ability who in other respects are unfit for the ends of life, ill-balanced in mental or physical development, neurasthenic, valetudinarian, the victims in varying degrees of all sorts of diseases. Yet their parents, without any high ability, were, to all appearance, robust, healthy, hard-working, commonplace people who would easily pass any ordinary eugenic tests. We know nothing as to the action of two seemingly ordinary persons on each other in constituting heredity, how hypertrophied intellectual aptitude comes about, what accidents, normal or pathological, may occur to the germ before birth, nor even how strenuous intellectual activity may affect the organism generally. We cannot argue that since these persons, apart from their genius, were not seemingly the best people to carry on the race, therefore a like judgment should be passed on their parents and the germs of genius thus be stamped out.

We only arrive at the crucial question when we ask: Have the characters of the parents of men of genius been of such an obviously unfavourable kind that eugenically they would nowadays be dissuaded from propagation, or under a severe regime of compulsory certificates (the desirability of which I am far indeed from assuming) be forbidden to marry? Have the parents of genius belonged to the "unfit"? That is a question which must be answered in the affirmative if this objection to eugenics has any weight. Yet so far as I know, none of those who have brought forward the objection have supported it by any evidence of the kind whatever. Thirty years ago Dr. Maudsley dogmatically wrote: "There is hardly ever a man of genius who has not insanity or nervous disorder of some form in his family." But he never brought forward any evidence in support of that pronouncement. Nor has anyone else, if we put aside the efforts of more or less competent writers—like Lombroso in his Man of Genius and Nisbet in his Insanity of Genius—to rake in statements from all quarters regarding the morbidities of genius, often without any attempt to authenticate, criticise, or sift them, and never with any effort to place them in due perspective.[1]

It so happens that, some years ago, with no relation to eugenic considerations, I devoted a considerable amount of attention to the biological characters of British men of genius, considered, so far as possible, on an objective and impartial basis.[2] The selection, that is to say, was made, so far as possible, without regard to personal predilections, in accordance with certain rules, from the Dictionary of National Biography. In this way one thousand and thirty names were obtained of men and women who represent the flower of British genius during historical times, only excluding those persons who were alive at the end of the last century. What proportion of these were the offspring of parents who were insane or mentally defective to a serious extent?

If the view of Maudsley—that there is "hardly ever" a man of genius who is not the product of an insane or nervously-disordered stock—had a basis of truth, we should expect that in one or other parents of the man of genius actual insanity had occurred in a very large proportion of cases; 25 per cent. would be a moderate estimate. But what do we find? In not 1 per cent. can definite insanity be traced among the parents of British men and women of genius. No doubt this result is below the truth; the insanity of the parents must sometimes have escaped the biographer's notice. But even if we double the percentage to escape this source of error, the proportion still remains insignificant.

There is more to be said. If the insanity of the parent occurred early in life, we should expect it to attract attention more easily than if it occurred late in life. Those parents of men of genius falling into insanity late in life, the critic may argue, escape notice. But it is precisely to this group to which all the ascertainably insane parents of British men of genius belong. There is not a single recorded instance, so far as I have been able to ascertain, in which the parent had been definitely and recognisably insane before the birth of the distinguished child; so that any prohibition of the marriage of persons who had previously been insane would have left British genius untouched. In all cases the insanity came on late in life, and it was usually, without doubt, of the kind known as senile dementia. This was so in the case of the mother of Bacon, the most distinguished person in the list of those with an insane parent. Charles Lamb's father, we are told, eventually became "imbecile." Turner's mother became insane. The same is recorded of Archbishop Tillotson's mother and of Archbishop Leighton's father. This brief list includes all the parents of British men of genius who are recorded (and not then always very definitely) as having finally died insane. In the description given of others of the parents of our men of genius it is not, however, difficult to detect that, though they were not recognised as insane, their mental condition was so highly abnormal as to be not far removed from insanity. This was the case with Gray's father and with the mothers of Arthur Young and Andrew Bell. Even when we allow for all the doubtful cases, the proportion of persons of genius with an insane parent remains very low, less than 2 per cent.

Senile dementia, though it is one of the least important and significant of the forms of insanity, and is entirely compatible with a long and useful life, must not, however, be regarded, when present in a marked degree, as the mere result of old age. Entirely normal people of sound heredity do not tend to manifest signs of pronounced mental weakness or abnormality even in extreme old age. We are justified in suspecting a neurotic strain, though it may not be of severe degree. This is, indeed, illustrated by our records of British genius. Some of the eminent men of genius on my list (at least twelve) suffered before death from insanity which may probably be described as senile dementia. But several of these were somewhat abnormal during earlier life (like Swift) or had a child who became insane (like Bishop Marsh). In these and in other cases there has doubtless been some hereditary neurotic strain.

It is clearly, however, not due to any intensity of this strain that we find the incidence of insanity in men of genius, as illustrated, for example, by senile dementia, so much more marked than its incidence on their parents. There is another factor to be invoked here: convergent morbid heredity. If a man and a woman, each with a slight tendency to nervous abnormality, marry each other, there is a much greater chance of the offspring manifesting a severe degree of nervous abnormality than if they had married entirely sound partners. Now both among normal and abnormal people there is a tendency for like to mate with like. The attraction of the unlike for each other, which was once supposed to prevail, is not predominant, except within the sphere of the secondary sexual characters, where it clearly prevails, so that the ultra-masculine man is attracted to the ultra-feminine woman, and the feminine man to the boyish or mannish woman. Apart from this, people tend to marry those who are both psychically and physically of the same type as themselves. It thus happens that nervously abnormal people become mated to the nervously abnormal. This is well illustrated by the British men of genius themselves. Although insanity is more prevalent among them than among their parents, the same can scarcely be said of them in regard to their wives. It is notable that the insane wives of these men of genius are almost as numerous as the insane men of genius, though it rarely happens (as in the case of Southey) that both husband and wife go out of their minds. But in all these cases there has probably been a mutual attraction of mentally abnormal people.

It is to this tendency in the parents of men of genius, leading to a convergent heredity, that we must probably attribute the undue tendency of the men of genius themselves to manifest insanity. Each of the parents separately may have displayed but a minor degree of neuropathic abnormality, but the two strains were fortified by union and the tendency to insanity became more manifest. This was, for instance, the case as regards Charles Lamb. The nervous abnormality of the parents in this case was less profound than that of the children, but it was present in both. Under such circumstances what is called the law of anticipation comes into play; the neurotic tendency of the parents, increased by union, is also antedated, so that definite insanity occurs earlier in the life of the child than, if it had appeared at all, it occurred in the life of the parent. Lamb's father only became weak-minded in old age, but since the mother also had a mentally abnormal strain, Lamb himself had an attack of insanity early in life, and his sister was liable to recurrent insanity during a great part of her life. Notwithstanding, however, the influence of this convergent heredity, it is found that the total insanity of British men and women of genius is not more, so far as can be ascertained—even when slight and dubious cases are included—than 4.2 per cent. That ascertainable proportion must be somewhat below the real proportion, but in any case it scarcely suggests that insanity is an essential factor of genius.

Let us, however, go beyond the limits of British genius, and consider the evidence more freely. There is, for instance, Tasso, who was undoubtedly insane for a good part of his life, and has been much studied by the pathologists. De-Gaudenzi, who has written one of the best psychopathological studies of Tasso, shows clearly that his father, Bernardo, was a man of high intelligence, of great emotional sensibility, with a tendency to melancholy as well as a mystical idealism, of somewhat weak character, and prone to invoke Divine aid in the slightest difficulty. It was a temperament that might be considered a little morbid, outside a monastery, but it was not insane, nor is there any known insanity among his near relations. This man's wife, Porzia, Tasso's mother, arouses the enthusiasm of all who ever mention her, as a creature of angelic perfection. No insanity here either, but something of the same undue sensitiveness and melancholy as in the father, the same absence of the coarser and more robust virtues. Moreover, she belonged to a family by no means so angelic as herself, not insane, but abnormal—malevolent, cruel, avaricious, almost criminal. The most scrupulous modern alienist would hesitate to deprive either Bernardo or Porzia of the right to parenthood. Yet, as we know, the son born of this union was not only a world-famous poet, but an exceedingly unhappy, abnormal, and insane man.

Let us take the case of another still greater and more famous man, Rousseau. It cannot reasonably be doubted that, at some moments in his life at all events, and perhaps during a considerable period, Rousseau was definitely insane. We are intimately acquainted with the details of the life and character of his relations and of his ancestry. We not only possess the full account he set forth at the beginning of his Confessions, but we know very much more than Rousseau knew. Geneva was paternal—paternal in the most severe sense—in scrutinising every unusual act of its children, and castigating every slightest deviation from the straight path. The whole life of the citizens of old Geneva may be read in Genevan archives, and not a scrap of information concerning the conduct of Rousseau's ancestors and relatives as set down in these archives but has been brought to the light of day. If there is any great man of genius whom the activities of these fanatical eugenists would have rendered impossible, it must surely have been Rousseau. Let us briefly examine his parentage. Rousseau's father was the outcome of a fine stock which for two generations had been losing something of its fine qualities, though without sinking anywhere near insanity, criminality, or pauperism. The Rousseaus still exercised their craft with success; they were on the whole esteemed; Jean-Jacques's father was generally liked, but he was somewhat unstable, romantic, with no strong sense of duty, hot-tempered, easily taking offence. The mother, from a modern standpoint, was an attractive, highly accomplished, and admirable woman. In her neighbours' eyes she was not quite Puritanical enough, high-spirited, independent, adventurous, fond of innocent gaiety, but a devoted wife when, at last, at the age of thirty, she married. More than once before marriage she was formally censured by the ecclesiastical authorities for her little insubordinations, and these may be seen to have a certain significance when we turn to her father; he was a thorough mauvais sujet, with an incorrigible love of pleasure, and constantly falling into well-deserved trouble for some escapade with the young women of Geneva. Thus on both sides there was a certain nervous instability, an uncontrollable wayward emotionality. But of actual insanity, of nervous disorder, of any decided abnormality or downright unfitness in either father or mother, not a sign. Isaac Rousseau and Susanne Bernard would have been passed by the most ferocious eugenist. It is again a case in which the chances of convergent heredity have produced a result which in its magnitude, in its heights and in its depths, none could foresee. It is one of the most famous and most accurately known examples of insane genius in history, and we see what amount of support it offers to the ponderous dictum concerning the insane heredity of genius.

Let us turn from insanity to grave nervous disease. Epilepsy at once comes before us, all the more significantly since it has been considered, more especially by Lombroso, to be the special disease through which genius peculiarly manifests itself. It is true that much importance here is attached to those minor forms of epilepsy which involve no gross and obvious convulsive fit. The existence of these minor attacks is, in the case of men of genius, usually difficult to disprove and equally difficult to prove. It certainly should not be so as regards the major form of epilepsy. Yet among the thousand and thirty persons of British genius I was only able to find epilepsy mentioned twice, and in both cases incorrectly, for the National Biographer had attributed it to Lord Herbert of Cherbury through misreading a passage in Herbert's Autobiography, while the epileptic fits of Sir W.R. Hamilton in old age were most certainly not true epilepsy. Without doubt, no eugenist could recommend an epileptic to become a parent. But if epilepsy has no existence in British men of genius it is improbable that it has often occurred among their parents. The loss to British genius through eugenic activity in this sphere would probably, therefore, have been nil.

Putting aside British genius, however, one finds that it has been almost a commonplace of alienists and neurologists, even up to the present day, to present glibly a formidable list of mighty men of genius as victims of epilepsy. Thus I find a well-known American alienist lately making the unqualified and positive statement that "Mahomet, Napoleon, Moliere, Handel, Paganini, Mozart, Schiller, Richelieu, Newton and Flaubert" were epileptics, while still more recently a distinguished English neurologist, declaring that "the world's history has been made by men who were either epileptics, insane, or of neuropathic stock," brings forward a similar and still larger list to illustrate that statement, with Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, the Apostle Paul, Luther, Frederick the Great and many others thrown in, though unfortunately he fails to tell us which members of the group he desires us to regard as epileptic. Julius Caesar was certainly one of them, but the statement of Suetonius (not an unimpeachable authority in any case) that Caesar had epileptic fits towards the close of his life is disproof rather than proof of true epilepsy. Of Mahomet, and St. Paul also, epilepsy is alleged. As regards the first, the most competent authorities regard the convulsive seizures attributed to the Prophet as perhaps merely a legendary attempt to increase the awe he inspired by unmistakable evidence of divine authority. The narrative of St. Paul's experience on the road to Damascus is very unsatisfactory evidence on which to base a medical diagnosis, and it may be mentioned that, in the course of a discussion in the columns of the British Medical Journal during 1910, as many as six different views were put forward as to the nature of the Apostle's "thorn in the flesh." The evidence on which Richelieu, who was undoubtedly a man of very fragile constitution is declared to be epileptic, is of the very slenderest character. For the statement that Newton was epileptic there is absolutely no reliable evidence at all, and I am quite ignorant of the grounds on which Mozart, Handel and Schiller are declared epileptics. The evidence for epilepsy in Napoleon may seem to carry slightly more weight, for there is that in the moral character of Napoleon which we might very well associate with the epileptic temperament. It seems clear that Napoleon really had at times convulsive seizures which were at least epileptoid. Thus Talleyrand describes how one day, just after dinner (it may be recalled that Napoleon was a copious and exceedingly rapid eater), passing for a few minutes into Josephine's room, the Emperor came out, took Talleyrand into his own room, ordered the door to be closed, and then fell down in a fit. Bourrienne, however, who was Napoleon's private secretary for eleven years, knew nothing about any fits. It is not usual, in a true epileptic fit, to be able to control the circumstances of the seizure to this extent, and if Napoleon, who lived so public a life, furnished so little evidence of epilepsy to his environment, it may be regarded as very doubtful whether any true epilepsy existed, and on other grounds it seems highly improbable.[3]

Of all these distinguished persons in the list of alleged epileptics, it is naturally most profitable to investigate the case of the latest, Flaubert, for here it is easiest to get at the facts. Maxime du Camp, a friend in early life, though later incompatibility of temperament led to estrangement, announced to the world in his Souvenirs that Flaubert was an epileptic, and Goncourt mentions in his Journal that he was in the habit of taking much bromide. But the "fits" never began until the age of twenty-eight, which alone should suggest to a neurologist that they are not likely to have been epileptic; they never occurred in public; he could feel the fit coming on and would go and lie down; he never lost consciousness; his intellect and moral character remained intact until death. It is quite clear that there was no true epilepsy here, nor anything like it.[4] Flaubert was of fairly sound nervous heredity on both sides, and his father, a distinguished surgeon, was a man of keen intellect and high character. The novelist, who was of robust physical and mental constitution, devoted himself strenuously and exclusively to intellectual work; it is not surprising that he was somewhat neurasthenic, if not hysterical, and Dumesnil, who discusses this question in his book on Flaubert, concludes that the "fits" may be called hysterical attacks of epileptoid form.

It may well be that we have in Flaubert's case a clue to the "epilepsy" of the other great men who in this matter are coupled with him. They were nearly all persons of immense intellectual force, highly charged with nervous energy; they passionately concentrated their energy on the achievement of life tasks of enormous magnitude, involving the highest tension of the organism. Under such conditions, even in the absence of all bad heredity or of actual disease, convulsive discharges may occur. We may see even in healthy and sound women that occasionally some physiological and unrelieved overcharging of the organism with nervous energy may result in what is closely like a hysterical fit, while even a violent fit of crying is a minor manifestation of the same tendency. The feminine element in genius has often been emphasised, and it may well be that under the conditions of the genius-life when working at high pressure we have somewhat similar states of nervous overcharging, and that from time to time the tension is relieved, naturally and spontaneously, by a convulsive discharge. This, at all events, seems a possible explanation.

It is rather strange that in these recklessly confident lists of eminent "epileptics" we fail to find the one man of distinguished genius whom perhaps we are justified in regarding as a true epileptic. Dostoievsky appears to have been an epileptic from an early age; he remained liable to epileptic fits throughout life, and they plunged him into mental dejection and confusion. In many of his novels we find pictures of the epileptic temperament, evidently based on personal experience, showing the most exact knowledge and insight into all the phases of the disease. Moreover, Dostoievsky in his own person appears to have displayed the perversions and the tendency to mental deterioration which we should expect to find in a true epileptic. So far as our knowledge goes, he really seems to stand alone as a manifestation of supreme genius combined with epilepsy. Yet, as Dr. Loygue remarks in his medico-psychological study of the great Russian novelist, epilepsy only accounts for half of the man, and leaves unexplained his passion for work; "the dualism of epilepsy and genius is irreducible."

There is one other still more recent man of true genius, though not of the highest rank, who may possibly be counted as epileptic: Vincent van Gogh, the painter.[5] A brilliant and highly original artist, he was a definitely abnormal man who cannot be said to have escaped mental deterioration. Simple and humble and suffering, recklessly sacrificing himself to help others, always in trouble, van Gogh had many points of resemblance to Dostoievsky. He has, indeed, been compared to the "Idiot" immortalised by Dostoievsky, in some aspects an imbecile, in some aspects a saint. Yet epilepsy no more explains the genius of van Gogh than it explains the genius of Dostoievsky.

Thus the impression we gain when, laying aside prejudice, we take a fairly wide and impartial survey of the facts, or even when we investigate in detail the isolated facts to which significance is most often attached, by no means supports the notion that genius springs entirely, or even mainly, from insane and degenerate stocks. In some cases, undoubtedly, it is found in such stocks, but the ability displayed in these cases is rarely, perhaps never, of any degree near the highest. It is quite easy to point to persons of a certain significance, especially in literature and art, who, though themselves sane, possess many near relatives who are highly neurotic and sometimes insane. Such cases, however, are far from justifying any confident generalisations concerning the intimate dependence of genius on insanity.

We see, moreover, that to conclude that men of genius are rarely or never the offspring of a radically insane parentage is not to assume that the parents of men of genius are usually of average normal constitution. That would in any case be improbable. Apart from the tendency to convergent heredity already emphasised, there is a wider tendency to slight abnormality, a minor degree of inaptness for ordinary life in the parentage of genius. I found that in 5 per cent. cases (certainly much below the real mark) of the British people of genius, one parent, generally the father, had shown abnormality from a social or parental point of view. He had been idle, or extravagant, or restless, or cruel, or intemperate, or unbusinesslike, in the great majority of these cases "unsuccessful." The father of Dickens (represented by his son in Micawber), who was always vainly expecting something to turn up, is a good type of these fathers of genius. Shakespeare's father may have been of much the same sort. George Meredith's father, again, who was too superior a person for the outfitting business he inherited, but never succeeded in being anything else, is another example of this group of fathers of genius. The father in these cases is a link of transition between the normal stock and its brilliantly abnormal offshoot. In this transitional stage we see, as it were, the stock reculer pour mieux sauter, but it is in the son that the great leap is made manifest.

This peculiarity will serve to indicate that in a large proportion of cases the parentage of genius is not entirely sound and normal. We must dismiss absolutely the notion that the parents of persons of genius tend to exhibit traits of a grossly insane or nervously degenerate character. The evidence for such a view is confined to a minute proportion of cases, and even then is usually doubtful. But it is another matter to assume that the parentage of genius is absolutely normal, and still less can we assert that genius always springs from entirely sound stocks. The statement is sometimes made that all families contain an insane element. That statement cannot be accepted. There are many people, including people of a high degree of ability, who can trace no gross mental or nervous disease in their families, unless remote branches are taken into account. Not many statistics bearing on this point are yet available. But Jenny Roller, in a very thorough investigation, found at Zurich in 1895 that "healthy" people had in 28 per cent. cases directly, and in 59 per cent. cases indirectly and altogether, a neuropathic heredity, while Otto Diem in 1905 found that the corresponding percentages were still higher—33 and 69. It should not, therefore, be matter for surprise if careful investigation revealed a traceable neuropathic element at least as frequent as this in the families which produce a man of genius.

It may further, I believe, be argued that the presence of a neuropathic element of this kind in the ancestry of genius is frequently not without a real significance. Aristotle said in his Poetics that poetry demanded a man with "a touch of madness," though the ancients, who frequently made a similar statement to this, had not our modern ideas of neuropathic heredity in their minds, but merely meant that inspiration simulated insanity. Yet "a touch of madness," a slight morbid strain, usually neurotic or gouty, in a preponderantly robust and energetic stock, seems to be often of some significance in the evolution of genius; it appears to act, one is inclined to think, as a kind of ferment, leading to a process out of all relation to its own magnitude. In the sphere of literary genius, Milton, Flaubert, and William Morris may help to illustrate this precious fermentative influence of a minor morbid element in vitally powerful stocks. Without some such ferment as this the energy of the stock, one may well suppose, might have been confined within normal limits; the rare and exquisite flower of genius, we know, required an abnormal stimulation; only in this sense is there any truth at all in Lombroso's statement that the pearl of genius develops around a germ of disease. But this is the utmost length to which the facts allow us to go in assuming the presence of a morbid element as a frequent constituent of genius. Even then we only have one of the factors of genius, to which, moreover, undue importance cannot be attached when we remember how often this ferment is present without any resultant process of genius. And we are in any case far removed from any of those gross nervous lesions which all careful guardianship of the race must tend to eliminate.

Thus we are brought back to the point from which we started. Would eugenics stamp out genius? There is no need to minimise the fact that a certain small proportion of men of genius have displayed highly morbid characters, nor to deny that in a large proportion of cases a slightly morbid strain may with care be detected in the ancestry of genius. But the influence of eugenic considerations can properly be brought to bear only in the case of grossly degenerate stocks. Here, so far as our knowledge extends, the parentage of genius nearly always escapes. The destruction of genius and its creation alike elude the eugenist. If there is a tendency in modern civilisation towards a diminution in the manifestations of genius—which may admit of question—-it can scarcely be due to any threatened elimination of corrupt stocks. It may perhaps more reasonably be sought in the haste and superficiality which our present phase of urbanisation fosters, and only the most robust genius can adequately withstand.

[1] A Danish alienist, Lange, has, however, made an attempt on a statistical basis to show a connection between mental ability and mental degeneracy. (F. Lange, Degeneration in Families, translated from the Danish, 1907). He deals with 44 families which have provided 428 insane or neuropathic persons within a few generations, and during the same period a large number also of highly distinguished members, Cabinet ministers, bishops, artists, poets, etc. But Lange admits that the forms of insanity found in these families are of a slight and not severe character, while it is clear that the forms of ability are also in most cases equally slight; they are mostly "old" families, such as naturally produce highly-trained and highly placed individuals. Moreover, Lange's methods and style of writing are not scientifically exact, and he fails to define precisely what he means by a "family." His investigation indicates that there is a frequent tendency for men of ability to belong to families which are not entirely sound, and that is a conclusion which is not seriously disputed.

[2] Havelock Ellis, A Study of British Genius, 1904.

[3] Dr. Cabanes (Indiscretions de l'Histoire, 3rd series) similarly concludes that, while in temperament Napoleon may be said to belong to the epileptic class, he was by no means an epileptic in the ordinary sense. Kanngiesser (Prager Medizinische Wochenschrift, 1912, No. 27) suggests that from his slow pulse (40 to 60) Napoleon's attacks may have originated in the heart and vessels.

[4] Genuine epilepsy usually comes on before the age of twenty-five; it very rarely begins after twenty-five, and never after thirty. (L.W. Weber, Muenchener Medizinische Wochenschrift, July 30th and Aug. 6th, 1912.) In genuine epilepsy, also, loss of consciousness accompanies the fits; the exceptions to this rule are rare, though Audenino, a pupil of Lombroso, who sought to extend the sphere of epilepsy, believes that the exceptions are not so rare as is commonly supposed (Archivio di Psichiatria, fasc. VI., 1906). Moreover, true epilepsy is accompanied by a progressive mental deterioration which terminates in dementia; in the Craig Colony for Epileptics of New York, among 3,000 epileptics this progressive deterioration is very rarely absent (Lancet, March 1st, 1913); but it is not found in the distinguished men of genius who are alleged to be epileptic. Epileptic deterioration has been elaborately studied by MacCurdy, Psychiatric Bulletin, New York, April, 1916.

[5] See, e.g., Elizabeth du Quesne van Gogh, Personal Recollections of Vincent van Gogh, p. 46. These epileptic attacks are, however, but vaguely mentioned, and it would seem that they only appeared during the last years of the artist's life.



XIV

THE PRODUCTION OF ABILITY

The growing interest in eugenics, and the world-wide decline in the birth-rate, have drawn attention to the study of the factors which determine the production of genius in particular and high ability in general. The interest in this question, thus freshly revived and made more acute by the results of the Great War, is not indeed new. It is nearly half a century since Galton wrote his famous book on the heredity of genius, or, as he might better have described the object of his investigation, the heredity of ability. At a later date my own Study of British Genius collectively summarised all the biological data available concerning the parentage and birth of the most notable persons born in England, while numerous other studies might also be named.

Such investigations are to-day acquiring a fresh importance, because, while it is becoming realised that we are gaining a new control over the conditions of birth, the production of children has itself gained in importance. The world is no longer bombarded by an exuberant stream of babies, good, bad, and indifferent in quality, with Mankind to look on calmly at the struggle for existence among them. Whether we like it or not, the quantity is relatively diminishing, and the question of quality is beginning to assume a supreme significance. What are the conditions which assure the finest quality in our children?

A German scientist, Dr. Vaerting, of Berlin, published on the eve of the War a little book on the most favourable age in parents for the production of children of ability (Das guenstigste elterliche Zeugungsalter).[1] He approaches the question entirely in this new spirit, not as a merely academic topic of discussion, but as a practical matter of vital importance to the welfare of society. He starts with the assertion that "our century has been called the century of the child,"[2] and for the child all manner of rights are now being claimed. But the prime right of all, the right of the child to the best ability that his parents are able to transmit to him, is never even so much as considered. Yet this right is the root of all children's rights. And when the mysteries of procreation have been so far revealed as to enable this right to be won, we shall, at the same time, Dr. Vaerting adds, renew the spiritual aspect of the nations.

The most easily ascertainable and measurable factor in the production of ability, and certainly a factor which cannot be without significance, is the age of the parents at the child's birth. It is this factor with which Vaerting is mainly concerned, as illustrated by over one hundred German men of genius concerning whom he has been able to obtain the required data. Later on, he proposes to extend the inquiry to other nations.

Vaerting finds—and this is probably the most original, though, as we shall see, not the most unquestionable of his findings—that the fathers who are themselves of no notable intellectual distinction have a decidedly more prolonged power of procreating distinguished children than is possessed by distinguished fathers. The former, that is to say, may become the fathers of eminent children from the period of sexual maturity up to the age of forty-three or beyond. When, however, the father is himself of high intellectual distinction, Vaerting finds that he was nearly always under thirty, and usually under twenty-five years of age at his distinguished son's birth, although the proportion of youthful fathers in the general population is relatively small. The eleven youngest fathers on Vaerting's list, from twenty-one to twenty-five years of age, were (with one exception) themselves more or less distinguished, while the fifteen oldest, from thirty-nine to sixty years of age, were all without exception undistinguished. Among these sons are to be found much greater names (Goethe, Bach, Kant, Bismarck, Wagner, etc.) than are to be found among the sons of young and more distinguished fathers, for here there is only one name (Frederick the Great) of the same calibre. The elderly fathers belonged to large cities and were mostly married to wives very much younger than themselves. Vaerting notes that the most eminent geniuses have most frequently been the sons of fathers who were not engaged in intellectual avocations at all, but earned their livings as simple craftsmen. He draws the conclusion from these data that strenuous intellectual energy is much more unfavourable than hard physical labour to the production of ability in the offspring. Intellectual workers, therefore, he argues, must have their children when young, and we must so modify our social ideals and economic conditions as to render this possible. That the mother should be equally young is not, he holds, necessary; he finds some superiority, indeed, provided the father is young, in somewhat elderly mothers, and there were no mothers under twenty-three. The rarity of genius among the offspring of distinguished parents is attributed to the unfortunate tendency to marry too late, and Vaerting finds that the distinguished men who marry late rarely have any children at all. Speaking generally, and apart from the production of genius, he holds that women have children too early, before their psychic development is completed, while men have children too late, when they have already "in the years of their highest psychic generative fitness planted their most precious seed in the mud of the street."

The eldest child was found to have by far the best chance of turning out distinguished, and in this fact Vaerting finds further proof of his argument. The third son has the next best chance, and then the second, the comparatively bad position of the second being attributed to the too brief interval which often follows the birth of the first child. He also notes that of all the professions the clergy come beyond comparison first as the parents of distinguished sons (who are, however, rarely of the highest degree of eminence), lawyers following, while officers in the army and physicians scarcely figure at all. Vaerting is inclined to see in this order, especially in the predominance of the clergy, the favourable influence of an unexhausted reserve of energy and a habit of chastity on intellectual procreativeness. This is one of his main conclusions.

It so happens that in my own Study of British Genius, with which Dr. Vaerting was unacquainted when he made his first investigation, I dealt on a larger scale, and perhaps with somewhat more precise method, with many of these same questions as they are illustrated by English genius. Vaerting's results have induced me to re-examine and to some extent to manipulate afresh the English data. My results, like Dr. Vaerting's, showed a special tendency for genius to appear in the eldest child, though there was no indication of notably early marriage in the parents.[3] I also found a similar predominance of the clergy among the fathers and a similar deficiency of army officers and physicians. The most frequent age of the father was thirty-two years, but the average age of the father at the distinguished child's birth was 36.6 years, and when the fathers were themselves distinguished their age was not, as Vaerting found in Germany, notably low at the birth of their distinguished sons, but higher than the general average, being 37.5 years. There have been fifteen distinguished English sons of distinguished fathers, but instead of being nearly always under thirty and usually under twenty-five, as Vaerting found in Germany, the English distinguished father has only five times been under thirty and among these five only twice under twenty-five. Moreover, precisely the most distinguished of the sons (Francis Bacon and William Pitt) had the oldest fathers and the least distinguished sons the youngest fathers.

I made some attempt to ascertain whether different kinds of genius tend to be produced by fathers who were at different periods of life. I refrained from publishing the results as I doubted whether the numbers dealt with were sufficiently large to carry any weight. It may, however, be worth while to record them, as possibly they are significant. I made four classes of men of genius: (1) Men of Religion, (2) Poets, (3) Practical Men, and (4) Scientific Men and Sceptics. (It must not, of course, be supposed that in this last group all the scientific men were sceptics, or all the sceptics scientific.) The average age of the fathers at the distinguished son's birth was, in the first group, 35 years, in the second and third groups 37 years, and in the last group 40 years. (It may be noted, however, that the youngest father of all in the history of British genius, aged sixteen, produced Napier, who introduced logarithms.) It is difficult not to believe that as regards, at all events, the two most discrepant groups, the first and last, we here come on a significant indication. It is not unreasonable to suppose that in the production of men of religion, in whose activity emotion is so potent a factor, the youthful age of the father should prove favourable, while for the production of genius of a more coldly intellectual and analytic type more elderly fathers are demanded. If that should prove to be so, it would become a source of happiness to religious parents to have their children early, while irreligious persons should be advised to delay parentage. It is scarcely necessary to remark that the age of the mothers is probably quite as influential as that of the fathers. Concerning the mothers, however, we always have less precise information. My records, so far as they go, agree with Vaerting's for German genius, in indicating that an elderly mother is more likely to produce a child of genius than a very youthful mother. There were only fifteen mothers recorded under twenty-five years of age, while thirteen were over thirty-nine years; the most frequent age of the mothers was twenty-seven. On all these points we certainly need controlling evidence from other countries. Thus, before we insist with Vaerting that an elderly mother is a factor in the production of genius, we may recall that even in Germany the mothers of Goethe and Nietzsche were both eighteen at their distinguished sons' birth. A rule which permits of such tremendous exceptions scarcely seems to bear the strain of emphasis.

It must always be remembered that while the study of genius is highly interesting, and even, it is probable, not without significance for the general laws of heredity, we must not too hastily draw conclusions from it to bear on practical questions of eugenics. Genius is rare and abnormal; laws meant to apply to the general population must be based on a study of the general population. Vaerting, who is alive to the practical character which such problems are to-day assuming, realises how inadequate it is to confine our study to genius. Marro, in his valuable book on puberty, some years ago brought forward interesting data showing the result of the age of the parents on the moral and intellectual characters of school-children in North Italy. He found that children with fathers below twenty-six at their birth showed the maximum of bad conduct and the minimum of good; they also yielded the greatest proportion of children of irregular, troublesome, or lazy character, but not of really perverse children who were equally distributed among fathers of all ages. The largest number of cheerful children belonged to young fathers, while the children tended to become more melancholy with ascending age of the fathers. Young fathers produced the largest proportion of intelligent, as well as of troublesome children, but when the very exceptionally intelligent children were considered separately they were found to be more usually the offspring of elderly fathers. As regards the mothers, Marro found that the children of young mothers (under twenty-one) are superior, both as regards conduct and intelligence, though the more exceptionally intelligent children tended to belong to more mature mothers. When the parents were both in the same age-group the immature and the elderly groups tended to produce more children who were unsatisfactory, both as regards conduct and intelligence, than the intermediate group.[4]

But we need to have such inquiries made on a more wholesale and systematic scale. They are no longer of a merely speculative character. We no longer regard children as the "gifts of God," flung into our helpless hands; we are beginning to realise that the responsibility is ours to see that they come into the world under the best conditions, and at the moments when their parents are best fitted to produce them. Vaerting proposes that it should be the business of all school authorities to register the ages of the pupils' parents. This is scarcely a provision to which even the most susceptible parent could reasonably object, though there is no cause to make the declaration compulsory where a "conscientious" objection existed, and in any case the declaration would not be public. It would be an advantage—though this might be more difficult to obtain—to have the date of the parents' marriage, and of the birth of previous children, as well as some record of the father's standing in his occupation. But even the ages of the parents alone would teach us much when correlated with the school position of the pupil in intelligence and in conduct. It is quite true that there are unavoidable fallacies. We are not, as in the case of genius, dealing with people whose life-work is complete and open to the whole world's examination. The good and clever child is not necessarily the forerunner of the first-class man or woman; and many capable and successful men have been careless in attendance at lectures and rebellious to discipline. Moreover, the prejudice and limitations of the teachers have also to be recognised. Yet when we are dealing with millions most of these fallacies would be smoothed out. We should be, once for all, in a position to determine authoritatively the exact bearing of one of the simplest and most vital factors of the betterment of the race. We should be in possession of a new clue to guide us in the creation of the man of the coming world. Why not begin to-day?

[1] He has further discussed the subject in Die Neue Generation, Aug.-Nov., 1914, and in a more recent (1916) pamphlet which I have not seen.

[2] The reference is to The Century of the Child, by Ellen Key, who writes (English translation, p. 2): "My conviction is that the transformation of human nature will take place, not when the whole of humanity becomes Christian, but when the whole of humanity awakens to the consciousness of the 'holiness of generation.' This consciousness will make the central work of Society the new race, its origin, its management, and its education; about these all morals, all laws, all social arrangements will be grouped."

[3] It is not only ability, but idiocy, criminality and many other abnormalities which specially tend to appear in the first-born. The eldest-born represents the point of greatest variation in the family, and the variation thus yielded may be in either direction, useful or useless, good or bad. See, e.g., Havelock Ellis, A Study of British Genius, pp. 117-120. Soeren Hansen, "The Inferior Quality of the First-born Children," Eugenics Review, Oct., 1913.

[4] Marro, La Puberta (French translation La Puberte), Ch. XI.



XV

MARRIAGE AND DIVORCE

We contemplate our marriage system with satisfaction. We remember the many unquestionable evidences in favour of it, and we marvel that it so often proves a failure. For while we remember the evidence in favour of it, we forget the evidence against it, and we overlook the important fact that our favourable evidence is largely based on the vision of an abstract or idealised monogamy which fails to correspond to the detailed and ever varying system which in practice we cherish. We point to the fact that monogamic marriage has probably flourished throughout the history of the world, that it exists among savages, even among animals, but we fail to observe how far that monogamy differs from ours, even assuming that our monogamy is a real monogamy and not a disguised polygamy, especially in the fact that it is a free union and only subject to the inherent penalties that follow its infraction, not to external penalties. Ours is not free; our faith in its natural virtues is not quite so firm as we assert; we are always meddling with it and worrying over its health and anxiously trying to bolster it up. We are not by any means willing to let it rest on the sanction of its own natural or divine laws. Our feeling is, as James Hinton used ironically to express it: "Poor God with no one to help Him!"

The fact is that when we compare our civilised marriage system with marriage as it exists in Nature, we fail to realise a fundamental distinction. Our marriage system is made up of two absolutely different elements which cannot blend. On the one hand, it is the manifestation of our deepest and most volcanic impulses. On the other hand, it is an elaborate web of regulations—legal, ecclesiastical, economic—which is to-day quite out of relation to our impulses. On the one hand, it is a force which springs from within; on the other hand, it is a force which presses on us from without.[1] One says broadly that these two elements of marriage, as we understand it, are out of relation to each other. But there is an important saving qualification to be made. The inner impulse is not without law, and the external pressure is not without an ultimate basis of nature. That is to say, that under free and natural conditions the inner impulse tends to develop itself, not licentiously but with its own order and restraints, while, on the other hand, our inherited regulations are largely the tradition of ancient attempts to fix and register that natural order and restraint. The disharmony comes in with the fact that our regulations are traditional and ancient, not our own attempts to fix and register the natural order but inextricably mixed up with elements that are entirely alien to our civilised habits of life. Whatever our attitude towards mediaeval Canon Law may be—whether reverence or indifference or disgust—it yet holds us and is ingrained into our marriage system to-day. Canon Law was a good and vital thing under the conditions which produced it. The survival of Canon Law to-day, with the antiquated and ascetic conception of the subordination of women associated with it, is the chief reason why we in the twentieth century have not yet progressed so far towards a reasonable system of marriage as the Romans had reached on the basis of their law, nearly two thousand years ago.[2] Marriage is conditioned both by inner impulse and outward pressure. But a healthy impulse bears within it an order and restraint of its own, while a truly moral outward pressure is based, not on the demands of mediaeval days, but on the demands of our own day.

How far this is from being the case yet we find well illustrated by our divorce methods. All our modern culture favour a sense of the sacredness of the sexual relations; we cherish a delicate reserve concerning all the intimacies of personal relationship. But when the magic word "Divorce" is uttered we fling all our civilisation to the winds, and in the desecrated name of Law we proceed to an inquisition which scarcely differs at all from those public tests of mediaeval law-courts which now we dare not venture even to put into words.

It is true that we are not bound to be consistent when it is an advantage to be inconsistent. And if there were a method in our madness it would be justified. But there is no method. From first to last the history of divorce (read it, for instance, in Howard's Matrimonial Institutions) is an ever shifting record of cruel blunders and ridiculous absurdities. Divorce began in modern times in flagrant injustice to one of the two partners, the wife, and it has ended—if we may hope that the end is approaching—in imbecilities that to future ages will be incredible. For no legal jargon has ever been invented that will express the sympathies and the antipathies of human relationship; they even escape the subtlest expression. Law-makers have tortured their brains to devise formulas which will cover the legitimate grounds for divorce. How vain their efforts are is sufficiently shown by the fact that by no chance can they ever agree on their formulas, and that they are changing them constantly with feverish haste, dimly realising that they are but the antiquated representatives of mediaevalism, and that soon their occupation will be gone for ever.

The reasons for the making or the breaking of human relationships can never be formulated. The only result of such legal formulas is that they bring law into contempt because they have to be ingeniously and methodically cheated in order to adapt them in any degree to civilised human needs. Thus such laws not only degrade the name of Law, but they degrade the whole community which tolerates them. There is only one ultimate reason for either marriage or divorce, and that is that the two persons concerned consent to the marriage or consent to the divorce. Why they consent is no concern of any third party, and, maybe, they cannot even put it into words.

At the same time, let us not forget, marriage and divorce are a very real concern of the State, and law cannot ignore either. It is the business of the State to see to it that no interests are injured. The contract of marriage and the contract of divorce are private matters, but it is necessary to guard that no injury is thereby done to either of the contracting persons, or to third parties, or to the community as a whole. The State may have a right to say what persons are unfit for marriage, or at all events for procreation; the State must take care that the weaker party is not injured; the State is especially bound to watch over the interests of children, and this involves, in the best issue, that each child shall have two effective parents, whether or not those parents are living together. A large scope—we are beginning to recognise—must be left alike to freedom of marriage and freedom of divorce, but the State must mark out the limits within which that freedom is exercised.

The loosening hold of the State on marriage is by no means connected with any growing sense of the value of divorce. At the best, it is probable that divorce is merely a necessary evil. One of the chief reasons why we should seek to promote education in relation to sexual relationships and to inculcate the responsibilities of such relationships, so making the approach to marriage more circumspect, is in order to obviate the need for divorce. For divorce is always a confession of failure. Very often, indeed, it involves not only a confession of failure in one particular marriage but of failure for marriage generally. One notes how often the people who fail in a first marriage fail even more hopelessly in the second. They have chosen the wrong partners; but one suspects that for them all partners will prove the wrong partners. One sometimes hears nowadays that a succession of marriage relationships is desirable in order to develop character. But that depends on many things. It very much depends on what character there is to develop. A man may have relationships with a hundred women and develop much less character out of his experience, and even acquire a much less intimate knowledge of women, than the man who has spent his life in an endless series of adventures with one woman. It depends a good deal on the man and not a little on the woman.

Thus the work of marriage in the world must depend entirely on the nature of that world. A fine marriage system can only be produced by a fine civilisation of which it is the exquisite flower. Laws cannot better marriage; even education, by itself, is powerless, necessary as it is in conjunction with other influences. The love-relationships of men and women must develop freely, and with due allowance for the variations which the complexities of civilisation demand. But these relationships touch the whole of life at so infinite a number of points that they cannot even develop at all save in a society that is itself developing graciously and harmoniously. Do not expect to pluck figs from thistles. As a society is, so will its marriages be.

[1] It is this artificial and external pressure which often produces a revolt against marriage. The author of a remarkable paper entitled, "Our Incestuous Marriage," in the Forum (Dec., 1915), advocates a reform of social marriage customs "in conformance with the freedom-loving modern nature," and the introduction of "a fresh atmosphere for married life in which personality can be made to appear so sacred and free that marriage will be undertaken and borne as lightly and gracefully as a secret sin."

[2] See Sir James Donaldson, Woman: Her Position and Influence in Ancient Greece and Rome, 1907; also S.B. Kitchin's excellent History of Divorce, 1912; this author believes that the tendency in modern civilisation is to return to the simple principles of Roman law involving divorce by consent. See also Havelock Ellis, Sex in Relation to Society, Ch. X.



XVI

THE MEANING OF THE BIRTH-RATE

The history of educated opinion concerning the birth-rate and its interpretation during the past seventy years is full of interest. The actual operative factors—natural, pathological, economic, social, and educational—in raising or lowering the birth-rate, are numerous and complicated, and it is difficult to determine exactly how large a part each factor plays. But without determining that at all, it is still very instructive to observe the evolution of popular intelligent opinion concerning the significance of a high and a low birth-rate.

Popular opinion on this matter may be said to have passed through three stages. I am referring to Western Europe and more particularly to England and Germany, for it must be remembered that, in this matter, England and Germany are running a parallel course. England happens to be, on the whole, a little ahead, having reached its period of full expansion at a somewhat earlier period than Germany, but each people is pursuing the same course.

In the first stage—let us say about the middle of the last century and the succeeding thirty years—the popular attitude was one of jubilant satisfaction in a high and rising birth-rate. There had been an immense expansion of industry. The whole world seemed nothing but a great field for the energetic and industrial nations to exploit. Workers were needed to keep up with the expansion and to keep down wages to a rate which would make industrial expansion easy; soldiers and armaments were needed to protect the movements of expansion. It seemed to the more exuberant spirits that a vast British Empire, or a mighty Pan-Germany, might be expected to cover the whole world. France, with its low and falling birth-rate, was looked down at with contempt as a decadent country inhabited by a degenerate population. No attempts to analyse the birth-rate, to ascertain what are really the biological, social, and economic accompaniments of a high birth-rate, made any impression on the popular mind. They were drowned in the general shout of exultation.

That era of optimism was followed by a swift reaction. Towards 1880 the upward movement of the birth-rate began to be arrested; it soon began steadily to fall, as it is continuing to do to-day. In France it is falling slowly, in Italy more rapidly, in England and Prussia still more rapidly. As, however, the fall began earliest in France, the birth-rate is lower there than in the other countries named; for the same reason it is lower in England than in Prussia, although England stands in this respect at almost exactly the same distance from Prussia to-day as thirty years ago, the fall having occurred at the same rate in both countries. It is quite possible that in the future it may become more rapid in Prussia than in England, for the birth-rate of Berlin is lower than the birth-rate of London, and urbanisation is proceeding at a more rapid rate in Germany than in England.

The realisation of such facts as these produced a period of pessimism which marks the second stage in this evolution. The great movement of expansion, which seemed to promise so much to ambitious nations anxious for world-power, was being arrested. Moreover, it began to be realised that the rapid growth of a community was accompanied by phenomena which had not been foreseen by the enthusiasts of the first period of optimism. They had argued—not indeed verbally but in effect—that the higher the birth-rate the cheaper labour and lives would become, and the cheaper labour and lives were, the easier it would be for a nation with its industrial armies and its military armies to get ahead of other rival nations. But they had not realised that, with the growth of popular education in modern democratic states, cheap labour is no longer willing to play without protest this humble and suffering part in national progress. The workers of the nations began to declare, clearly or obscurely, as they were able, that they no longer intended to sell their labour and their lives so cheaply. The rising birth-rate of the middle of the nineteenth century coincided with, and to a large extent doubtless produced, the organisation of labour, trades unions, the political activity of the working classes, Socialism, as well as the extreme forms of Anarchism and Syndicalism. It was when these movements began to attain a high degree of organisation and power that the birth-rate began to decline. Thus the pessimists of the second period were faced by horrors on both sides. On the one hand, they saw that the ever-increasing rate of human production which seemed to them the essential condition of national, social, even moral progress, had not only stopped but was steadily diminishing. On the other hand, they saw that, even in so far as it was maintained, it involved, under modern conditions, nothing but social commotion and economic disturbance.

There are still many pessimists of this second period alive among us, and actively proclaiming their gospel of despair, alike in England and in Germany. But a new generation is growing up, and this question is now entering a third period. The new generation rejects alike the passive optimism of the first period and the passive pessimism of the second period. Its attitude is hopeful but it realises that mere hope is vain unless there is clear intellectual vision and unless there is individual and social action in accordance with that vision.

It is to-day beginning to be seen that the old notion of progress by means of reckless multiplication is vain. It can only be effected at a ruinous cost of death, disease, poverty, and misery. We see this in the past history of Western Europe, as we still see it in the history of Russia. Any progress effected along that line—if "progress" it can be called—is now barred, for it is absolutely opposed to those democratic conceptions which are ever gaining greater influence among us.

Moreover, we are now better able to analyse demographic phenomena and we are no longer satisfied with any crude statements regarding the birth-rate. We realise that they need interpretation. They have to be considered in relation to the sex-constitution and the age-constitution of the population, and, above all, they must be viewed in relation to the infant mortality-rate. The bad aspect of the French birth-rate is not so much its lowness as that it is accompanied by a high infantile mortality. The fact that the German birth-rate is higher than the English ceases to be a matter of satisfaction when it is realised that German infantile mortality is vastly greater than English. A high birth-rate is no sign of a high civilisation. But we are beginning to feel that a high infantile death-rate is a sign of a very inferior civilisation. A low birth-rate with a low infant death-rate not only produces the same increase in the population as a high birth-rate with the high death-rate, which always accompanies it (for there are no examples of, a high birth-rate with a low death-rate), but it produces it in a way which is far more worthy of our admiration in this matter than the way of Russia and China where opposite conditions prevail.[1]

It used to be thought that small families were immoral. We now begin to see that it was the large families of old which were immoral. The excessive birth-rate of the early industrial period was directly stimulated by selfishness. There were no laws against child-labour; children were produced that they might be sent out, when little more than babies, to the factories and the mines to increase their parents' incomes. The diminished birth-rate has accompanied higher moral transformation. It has introduced a finer economy into life, diminished death, disease, and misery. It is indirectly, and even directly, improving the quality of the race. The very fact that children are born at longer intervals is not only beneficial to the mother's health, and therefore to the children's general welfare, but it has been proved to have a marked and prolonged influence on the physical development of children.

Social progress, and a higher civilisation, we thus see, involve a reduced birth-rate and a reduced death-rate; the fewer the children born, the fewer the risks of death, disease, and misery to the children that are born. The fact that civilisation involves small families is clearly shown by the tendency of the educated and upper social classes to have small families. As the proletariat class becomes educated and elevated, disciplined to refinement and to foresight—as it were aristocratised—it also has small families. Civilisational progress is here in a line with biological progress. The lower organisms spawn their progeny in thousands, the higher mammals produce but one or two at a time. The higher the race the fewer the offspring.