The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 by Various

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What brings the eugenics movement into the Flatland category is not its
attitude toward the question of genius, or perhaps even of singularity,
but its attitude toward the life of mankind as a whole--if indeed it can
be said to have any attitude toward the life of mankind as a whole. The
profound elements of that life seem not to come at all within the range of
its contemplation. Of course this does not apply to everything that comes
from the eugenics camp, nor to every person that calls himself a eugenist.
But on the other hand it is by no means only of the crude projects of
half-educated reformers, or the outgivings of the prophets of our popular
magazines, that it _is_ true. The agitation has derived much of its
impetus, directly or indirectly, from the teachings of men of high
scientific eminence who have attacked the question without any apparent
realization of its deeper bearings on the whole character of human life.
This influence often comes in the shape of exhortations, or suggestions,
addressed to the public at a time when attention is centered upon some
conspicuous crime or some particular phase of evil in the community;
sweeping and radical regulation of the right of parenthood being urged as
necessary for the prevention of all such distressing phenomena. Thus,
after the attempted assassination of Mayor Gaynor, there was much talk of
a "national campaign for mental hygiene," which should have the effect of
"preventing Czolgoszes and Schranks." Its program was thus indicated by
one of the foremost professors of medicine in the United States:

Provision must be made for the birth of children whose brains
shall, so far as possible, be innately of good quality; this means
the denial of the privilege of parenthood to those likely to
transmit bad nervous systems to their offsprings.

What the carrying out of such a programme would mean to mankind at large,
how profoundly it would modify those ideas about life, those standards of
human dignity and human rights, which are so fundamental and so pervasive
that they are taken for granted without express thought in every act and
every feeling of all normal men and women--this does not seem ever to
trouble the mind of the devotee of universal regulation. He sees the
possibility of effecting a certain definite and measurable improvement;
that the means by which this is accomplished must fatally impair those
elemental conceptions of human life whose value transcends all
measurement, he has not the insight or the imagination to recognize. The
distinctions of social class, of wealth, of public honor, leave untouched
the equality of men in the fundamentals of human dignity. They do not go
to the vitals of self-respect; they do not interfere with a man's sense of
what is due to him, and what is due from him, in the primary relations of
life. If nature has been unkind to him in his physical or mental
endowments, he does not therefore feel in the least disqualified, as
regards his family, his friends, his neighbors, the stranger with whom he
chances to come into contact, from receiving the same kind of
consideration, in the essentials of human intercourse, that is accorded to
those who are more fortunate; nor does he feel in any respect absolved
from the duty of playing the full part of a man. Under the regime of
medical classification--and the "mental hygiene" programme can mean
nothing less than that--all this would disappear. Some men would be men,
others would be something less. It is true that, so far as regards the
imbecile, the insane, and the criminal, such a state of things obtains as
it is; but this stands wholly apart from the general life of the race, and
has no influence whatever on the habitual feelings and experiences of
human beings. The normal life of mankind is shot through and through with
the idea that a man's a man; all that is highest in feeling and conduct is
closely bound up with it. Lessen its sway over our feelings and thoughts
and instincts, and how much benefit in the shape of "preventing Czolgoszes
and Schranks" would be required to compensate for the loss in nobleness,
in depth, which human life would suffer?

* * * * *

The prohibition movement belongs, in the main, to a wholly different order
of things. The fight against the evils of drink, as it has been carried on
for a century or more, has been animated by a moral fervor which classes
it rather with the fight against slavery, or with the great revivals of
religion, than with those movements which owe their origin to a
calculating and cold-blooded perfectionism. Its leaders have been fired
with the ardor of a war directed against a devastating monster, to whose
ravages was to be ascribed a large part of the misery and wickedness that
afflict mankind. It is true that the economic and physiological aspects of
the drink question were not ignored; the total-abstinence men were glad
enough to have this second string to their bow. But the real fight was not
against alcohol as one of many things concerning which the habits of men
are more or less unwise; it was a fight against the Demon Rum, the ally of
all the powers of darkness. The plea of the moderate drinker was rejected
with scorn, not because there was any objection to moderate drinking in
itself, but because total abstinence was the only true preventive of
drunkenness, and drunkenness must be stamped out if mankind was to be
saved. The moderate drinker was censured not because he was wasting his
money, or failing to "conserve his efficiency," but because for the sake
of a trivial self-indulgence he was giving countenance to a practice which
was consigning millions of his fellow men to wretchedness in this world
and to everlasting damnation in the next.

Now this remarkable thing about the present extraordinary manifestation of
growth and strength in the prohibition movement is that it is not in the
least due to a strengthening of this sentiment. On the contrary, it is
safe to say that feeling about drunkenness, about the drink evil in the
sense in which it was understood a generation ago, is far less intense
than it was then. The prohibition movement in its present stage is not the
old prohibition movement advancing to triumph through the onward march of
its proselyting zeal; of true prohibitionist zealots the number is
probably less, in proportion to the population, than it was forty years
ago. Its great accession of strength has come from the growth of that
order of ideas which is common to all the "efficiency" movements of the
time. And that growth helps it in two ways. On the one hand, to the little
army of crusaders against the Demon Rum there has come the accession of a
host of men who are not thinking about demons at all, but who calmly hold
that the world would be better off without drinking, and that this is an
all-sufficient reason for prohibiting it. And on the other hand, millions
of persons who, in former days would have cried out against this way of
improving the world--against the impairment of personal liberty and the
sacrifice of social enjoyment and social variety--have no longer the
courage of their convictions. The temper of the time is unfavorable to the
assertion of the value of things so incapable of numerical measurement.
Against the heavy battalions led by the statisticians, and the
experimental psychologists, and the efficiency experts, what chance is
there for successful resistance? On the opposing side can be rallied only
such mere irregulars as are willing to fight for airy nothings--for the
zest and colorfulness of life, for sociability and good fellowship, for
preserving to each man access to those resources of relaxation and
refreshment which, without injury to others, he finds conducive to his own
happiness.

* * * * *

It is hardly necessary to say that, in taking up these various movements,
no attempt has been made at anything like comprehensive discussion of
their merits. Whatever may be the balance between good and ill in any of
them, they all have in common one tendency that bodes danger to the
highest and most permanent interests of mankind; and it is with this alone
that I am concerned. What that tendency is has, I trust, been made
sufficiently clear; but it will perhaps be brought out more distinctly by
a consideration of the "Life Extension" propaganda more detailed and
specific than that given to the other three.

Conspicuous in the literature of this propaganda is the appeal to standard
modern practice in regard to machinery. "Those to whom the care of
delicate mechanical apparatus is entrusted," says the New York
Commissioner of Health, "do not wait until a breakdown occurs, but inspect
and examine the apparatus minutely, at regular intervals, and thus detect
the first signs of damage." "This principle of periodic inspection," says
the prospectus of the Life Extension Institute, "has for many years been
applied to almost every kind of machinery, except the most marvelous and
complex of all,--the human body." To find fault with the drawing of this
comparison, with the utilization of this analogy, would be foolish. That
many persons would be greatly benefited by submitting to these inspections
is certain; it is not impossible that they are desirable for most persons.
And the analogy of the inspection of machinery serves excellently the
purpose of suggesting such desirability. What is objectionable about its
use by the Life Extension propagandists is their evident complacent
satisfaction with the analogy as complete and conclusive. Yet nothing is
more certain than that, even from the strictly medical standpoint, it
ignores an essential distinction between the case of the man and the case
of the machine. The machine is affected only by the measures that may be
taken in consequence of the knowledge arising from the inspection; the man
is affected by that knowledge itself. Whether the possible physical harm
that may come to a man from having his mind disturbed by solicitude about
his health is important or unimportant in comparison with the good that is
likely to be done him by the following of the precautions or remedies
prescribed, is a question of fact to which the answer varies in every
individual case. It may be that in the great majority of cases the harm is
insignificant in comparison with the good. However that may be, the
question is there, and it is of itself fatal to the conclusiveness of the
_argumentum ex machina_. That this is not a captious criticism, that it is
based on substantial facts of life, ordinary experience sufficiently
attests; but it may not be amiss to point to a conspicuous contemporary
phenomenon which throws an interesting light on the matter. The Christian
Scientists regard the _ignoring_ of disease as the primary requisite for
health and longevity. That the Christian Science doctrine is a sheer
absurdity, no one can hold more emphatically than the present writer; but
it cannot be denied that in thousands of cases its acceptance has been of
physical benefit through its subjective effect upon the believer.
Personally, I would not purchase any benefit to my physical life at such
sacrifice of my intellectual integrity; I mention the point only by way of
accentuating the undisputed fact that the presence or absence of concern
about health may have a potent influence on one's bodily welfare.

Although it is a still further digression from the main purpose of this
paper, I must permit myself a few words on another point relating to the
strictly medical claims of the plan of "universal periodic medical
examination." It is natural that its advocates say nothing about the
danger of errors in diagnosis; everybody knows that this danger exists,
but sensible men do not allow it to deter them from consulting a
physician; in this, as in other affairs of life, they do not cry for the
moon, but do the best they can. But it seems to be wholly overlooked by
the advocates of the propaganda of "universal periodic examination" that
the extent of this danger under present conditions affords no indication
at all of what it would be under the system they contemplate. Its cardinal
virtue, they constantly proclaim, would be the detection of the very
slightest indication of impairment: "The task before us is to discover the
first sign of departure from the normal physiological path, and promptly
and effectually to apply the brake." The consequence must necessarily be
that for one case of false alarm that occurs today there will be a score,
or a hundred, under the new regime. For, in the first place, the
individuals seeking advice will not be, as they now are in the main,
selected cases in which there is some antecedent presumption that there is
something wrong; and secondly, the examiner, bent upon the one great
object of overlooking nothing, however slight, will give warnings which,
whether technically justifiable or not, will in great numbers of cases
have a wholly unjustifiable significance to the mind of the subject. Who
shall say how many persons will thus be made to carry through life a
burden of solicitude about their health from which, if left to their own
devices, they would have been wholly free?

But it is not my design to find fault with this scheme as a matter of
medical benefit; if I have ventured to point out some drawbacks, it is
only by way of showing that, even from the strictly medical standpoint the
cult of uniformity, of standardization, of mechanical perfection, is not
free from fault. But the great objection against that attitude of mind
which is typified in the appeal to the analogy of machinery is far more
vital. Our only interest in a machine is that we shall get out of it as
much, and as exact, work as possible. Our interest in our bodies is not so
limited. We may deliberately choose to forego the maximum of mechanical
perfection for the sake of living our lives in a way more satisfactory to
us than a constant care for that perfection would permit. Even the most
ardent of health enthusiasts--unless he be an insane fanatic--draws the
line somewhere. What he forgets is that other people prefer to draw the
line somewhere else. They choose to run a certain amount of risk rather
than have their health on their minds. To compel--whether by legal means
or by social pressure--every man to take precautions concerning his own
body which he deliberately prefers not to take; to make impossible, in
this most intimate and personal of all human concerns, the various ways of
acting which the infinite varieties of temperament and desire may
dictate--this would be such an invasion of personal liberty, such a
suppression of individuality, as would strike us all as appalling, had we
not grown so habituated to the mechanical, the statistical, measurement of
human values--to the Flatland view of life.

* * * * *

What gives to these movements that I have been discussing the character
which I have been ascribing to them is not so much the specific things
which they severally aim to accomplish, but the spirit in which they are
carried on, and perhaps still more the spirit, or want of spirit, with
which they are met. It is not that a balance is falsely struck between the
benefit of the concrete, circumscribed, measurable improvement aimed at
and the injury done to some deeper, more pervading, and quite immeasurable
element or principle of life; it is that the balance is not struck at all.
The subtler, the less tangible, element is simply ignored. It was not
always so. It was not so in the last generation, or the generation before
that. The phenomenon is one that is closely bound up with the ruling
tendency of thought and action in all directions; it is not an accident of
this or that particular agitation. Perhaps in no direction is it more
convincingly manifested than in the prevailing tone of opinion, or at
least of publicly expressed opinion, in regard to the objects and ideals
of universities. That in the present state of the world's economic and
social development on the one hand, and of the various sciences on the
other, "service"--that is, service directly conducive to the general
good--should be regarded as one of the great objects of universities, is
altogether right; that it should be spoken of as their _only_ object,
which is the ruling fashion, is most deplorable. The object of a
university, said Mill, is to keep philosophy alive; yet it would go hard
with the present generation to point to any one more truly and profoundly
devoted to the service, the uplifting, of the masses of mankind than was
John Stuart Mill. Were he living he would recognize, as thoroughly as the
best efficiency man of them all, that the universities of today have
opportunities and duties which were undreamed of half a century ago. But
he would know, too, that in those activities which are directed to the
promotion of practical efficiency, the university is but one of many
agencies, and that if it were not doing the work some other means would be
found for supplying the demand. Its paramount value he would find now, as
he did then, in the service it renders not to the ordinary needs of the
community but to the higher intellectual interests and strivings of
mankind. That so few of us have the courage clearly to assert a position
even distantly approaching this--such a position as was mere matter of
course among university men in the last generation--is perhaps the most
significant of all the indications of our drift toward Flatland.

THE DISFRANCHISEMENT OF PROPERTY

I

It is Hawthorne, I think, who tells us that when he was a boy he used once
in a while to go down to the wharves in Salem, and lay his hand on the
rail of some great East India merchantman, redolent of spices, and thus
bring himself in actual touch with the mysterious orient. But there is
nothing strange in this: almost anything that we can feel or see may start
the flight of fancy, and open to us prophetic visions. This is even true
of such dry symbols as figures, for our journalists would never publish
statistics as they do, unless they knew that their readers liked to see
them. Travellers from other parts of the world have often laughed at our
fondness for revelling in the marvellous accounts of our material
dimensions, but they should remember that people who do not have a taste
for poetry may yet have a taste for romance, and that big figures do
appeal to the imagination.

It is true that there may be something portentous in bigness. "Tom" Reed,
as he was affectionately called, said many wise things in a jesting way.
At a certain crisis in our history he exclaimed: "I don't want Cuba and
Hawaii; I've got more country now than I can love." A foreigner might
suppose that our politicians had similarly become terror-stricken at the
extent of our wealth and the rate at which it was growing. They may well
give the impression that there has been created in the "money power," a
Frankenstein monster, the control of whose murderous propensities has put
them at their wit's end.

Figures are notorious liars; they may arouse emotion if looked at in any
light, but they must be looked at in many lights if we would get an
emotional effect that is truly worth while. Some very large figures
relating to Savings Banks have lately been published. The deposits in
these banks amount to over four and two-thirds billions of dollars, and
the number of separate accounts is about ten and two-thirds millions.
Savings deposits in all banks are about $7,000,000,000, the number of
accounts being 17,600,000. Probably the interest paid on the savings banks
deposits is 160 millions of dollars a year. I confess that these figures
give me much pleasure. I like to think that so many men have taken pains
to guard their wives and children against miserable want; that so many
women have to some extent made sure of their independence. It would not be
surprising to find that twelve millions of families, possibly half the
people of the country, were in this way protected against extreme penury.
Viewed in this light, the growth of wealth does not seem so terrible. One
might paraphrase Burke and say that such wealth as this loses half its
evil through losing all its grossness. Indeed one might go further and say
that if there were twice as much of this wealth, and every person in the
country had an interest in it, it would lose all of its evil.

To young people, this is all dry enough. They like to think of spending
money, not of saving it. But it is not at all dry to their elders. It is
what St. Beuve said of literary enjoyment, a "pure delice du gout et du
coeur dans la maturite." It is a "Pleasure of the Imagination" that can be
appreciated only by those like the old Scottish lawyer, who justified his
penurious prudence by saying that he had shaken hands with poverty up to
the elbow when he was young, and had no intention to renew the
acquaintance. We have not, at least in the Northern part of our country,
had the terrible experiences of the people of Europe, who are even now
hiding their money in a vague apprehension of danger, inherited from
centuries of rapine; but there are few of those who have given hostages to
fortune who have not had many hours, and even years, of distressing
anxiety concerning the future of their families. The greater the provision
made against this heart-corroding care by a people, the happier should
that people be.

It seems so unselfish a luxury to revel in these comfortable statistics,
that one is tempted to broaden his vision, and take in the four or five
billions of assets heaped up by the six or seven millions of people who
have insured their lives, and the one hundred and fifty or two hundred
millions of dollars paid out yearly to lighten the distress attending the
death of husbands and fathers of families,--to say nothing of a much
greater sum repaid policy-holders. In many cases, happily, death causes no
actual want; but against these cases we may offset the stupendous number
of policies insuring against industrial accidents, possibly twenty-five
millions of them, representing one quarter of the people of the
country--for we may be sure that there are few payments made under these
policies that do not actually alleviate suffering. We have here a colossal
aggregate of altruism on the part of the policy-holders, an intangible
national asset grander than all the material wealth which it represents;
for the sordid element in all these savings is necessarily small. There is
a point in the old story of the gambler on the Mississippi steamboat who
listened attentively to the persuasive arguments of a life-insurance
agent; he "allowed" that he was willing to bet on almost any kind of game,
but declined to take a hand in one where he had to die to win. It is
painful to think of the infinity of petty economies, of all the grievous
deprivations, the positive hardships, undergone in so many millions of
families, day by day, and year by year, to secure these policies of
insurance; but, as Plato said, "the good is difficult." There is no
heroism where there is no self-sacrifice. Whoever is disquieted by the
growth of "materialism" may be relieved by reflecting that when so many
millions of people are denying themselves present enjoyments in order that
others may be spared pain in the future, there is such a leaven of high
motive among us as may leaven the whole lump.

* * * * *

It would be easy to keep on in this exalted strain, but perhaps it is a
little too much in the style of a life-insurance advertisement. We may
correct any such impression, by changing our point of view. When we
consider the difficulties and the hindrances in the way of laying up these
savings, while the moral effect of the self-sacrifice hitherto involved is
enhanced, the question comes up whether this altruistic exertion can be
maintained in the future. How many of the ten millions of depositors in
the savings banks have considered that their rulers at Washington give
away every year in military pensions a sum equal to all, and more than
all, the income earned by the four billions of dollars in the banks? When
after many years, it seemed that this burden might at last begin to be
lightened, it was suddenly increased by the last Congress perhaps thirty
millions a year. Why should so many people scrimp, year in and year out,
when the equivalent of all the toil and all the self-denial is thus swept
away?

Senator Aldrich has told the country that its affairs could be carried on
for three hundred millions of dollars a year less than it now pays. He is
a very competent witness, and no one has contradicted him. If the attempt
had been made, he could perhaps have shown--he could certainly show
now--that three hundred millions was an understatement. But this sum is
nearly equal to the income earned by the investments of all the savings
banks and all the life-insurance companies of the country. If our rulers
had borrowed ten billions of dollars at three per cent. and had wasted it
all, the country would be financially about where it is now. They have not
borrowed this ten billions of dollars, but if Mr. Aldrich is right, they
are spending the interest on it. They have in effect mortgaged the wealth
of the people to the extent of all their deposits in the savings banks,
and all their investments in life-insurance companies, and are wasting the
income of these funds faster than it is earned. If anyone thinks this is
stating the case too strongly, he may add the waste of our state and
municipal rulers to that of those at Washington, and Mr. Aldrich's figure
will seem moderate enough.

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