Improving the Breed

The British Eugenics Society, founded in Edwardian days, is a group of 500 peers, schoolteachers, scientists and other earnest people devoted to encouraging "the better members of the community to have more children, and the worse to have less." To date, the society has largely stressed the second half of its program. It flatters itself that it has had considerable success in this phase of improving the British breed, e.g., passage of a 1913 law prohibiting marriage for mental defectives, increased use of contraceptives by slum-dwelling Britons. Last week in London, Cambridge Physicist Sir Charles Galton Darwin, 67, the society's leader and one of its impressive testimonials (as the fit, surviving grandson of Charles Darwin, cousin of pioneer Eugenicist Sir Francis Galton), decided that the time had come to increase the quantity of England's quality.

Figuring out which families to encourage, confessed Physicist Darwin, is a discouraging problem. "The breed of race horses has been improved indeed to a remarkable degree . . . We would like to do the same for humanity, but it is a very difficult business deciding what human beings have won the race of life, whereas it is fairly easy to see which people can be classified in ending last." The society's answer: a hand-picked cross section of England's most promising schoolchildren, aged 8 to 13, who are endowed with exceptional scholastic ability, good fellowship and fondness for sport.

Parents of the promising will answer six pages of confidential questions, e.g., on pedigrees, education and other offspring. In the ideal future, the society hopes, parents of the very best pupils will be encouraged to have more of the same, and will get special government grants. On persuading bright boys to marry the right, bright girls, the society is wisely noncommittal: "We hope such pupils will make promising families of their own some day."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.