APPLIED DARWINISM:

In July 1912 800 delegates met at the Hotel Cecil on the Strand in London for the First International Eugenics Congress. Some of the foremost figures of the day - including the former and future British prime ministers Arthur Balfour and Winston Churchill - were there. The delegates represented a wide spectrum of opinion. Not only right-wing racists but also liberals and socialists believed eugenic policies should be used to raise what they regarded as the low quality of sections of the population.

The Liberal founder of the welfare state, William Beveridge, wrote in 1906 that men "who through general defects" are unemployable should suffer "complete and permanent loss of all citizen rights - including not only the franchise but civil freedom and fatherhood". In Marriage and Morals (1929), Bertrand Russell, while criticising American states that had implemented involuntary sterilisation too broadly, defended enforcing it on people who were "mentally defective". In 1931 an editorial in this magazine endorsed "the legitimate claims of eugenics", stating they were opposed only by those "who cling to individualistic views of parenthood and family economics".

The timing of the 1912 congress may be significant. In May 1912 a private members' "Feeble-Minded Control Bill" was presented to the House of Commons. The bill aimed to implement the findings of a royal commission, published in the British Medical Journal in 1908, which recommended that "lunatics or persons of unsound mind, idiots, imbeciles, feeble-minded or otherwise should be afforded by the state such special protection as may be suited to their needs". The recommended measures included segregating hundreds of thousands of people in asylums and making marrying any of them a criminal offence. Curiously, the commission specified the number of people requiring this "protection" as being exactly 271,607.

The bill failed, partly as a result of intensive lobbying by the writer and Catholic apologist GK Chesterton of the Liberal MP Josiah Wedgewood. Despite continuing agitation by eugenicists, no law enabling involuntary sterilisation was ever passed in Britain. In 1913, however, parliament passed the Mental Deficiency Act, which meant "a defective" could be isolated in an institution under the authority of a Board of Control. The act remained in force until 1959.

Adam Rutherford, who reports these facts, writes that "though wildly popular across political divides...plenty of people vocally and publicly opposed the principles and the enactment of eugenics policies in the UK and abroad". This may be so, but very few of the active opponents of eugenics were progressive thinkers. During the high tide of eugenic ideas between the start of the 20th century and the 1930s, no leading secular intellectual produced anything comparable to Chesterton's Eugenics and Other Evils (1922), a powerful and witty polemic in which he argued for the worth of every human being.

By no means all Christians shared Chesterton's stance. As Rutherford points out, the dean of St Paul's Cathedral and professor of divinity at Cambridge, the Reverend WR Inge (1860-1954), wrote in favour of eugenic birth control, suggesting that "the urban proletariat may cripple our civilisation, as it destroyed that of ancient Rome".

While Christians were divided on eugenics, progressive thinkers were at one in supporting it. The only prominent counter-example Rutherford cites is HG Wells, whom he calls "a long-standing opponent of eugenics". Given the statements welcoming the extinction of non-white peoples in Wells's 1901 book Anticipations, this seems an oversimplified description.

Awkwardly for today's secular progressives, opposition to eugenics during its heyday in the West came almost exclusively from religious sources, particularly the Catholic Church. Eugenic ideas were disseminated everywhere, but few Catholic countries applied them. The only involuntary sterilisation legislation in Latin America was enacted in the state of Veracruz in Mexico in 1932. In Catholic Europe, Spain, Portugal and Italy passed no eugenic laws. By contrast, Norway and Sweden legalised eugenic sterilisation in 1934 and 1935, with Sweden requiring the consent of those sterilised only in 1976. In the US, more than 70,000 people were forcibly sterilised during the 20th century, with sterilisation without the inmates' consent being reported in female prisons in California up to 2014.

For the secular intelligentsia in the first three decades of the last century, eugenics - "the deliberate crafting of a society... by biological design", as Rutherford defines it - was a necessary part of any programme of human betterment. This was how eugenics was understood by the Victorian polymath Francis Galton (1822-1911), who invented the term, a conjunction of the Greek words for "good" and "offspring". Controlled breeding, aimed at raising the quality of the human beings who were born, was the path to the human good.

Tweet   @brothersjudd