Herbert Wells - Mankind in the Making

I submit that such a mammoth municipality as this will be, on the one hand, an enormously more efficient substitute for your present little local government bodies, and on the other hand, will be able to take over a considerable proportion of the detailed work and a considerable proportion of the detailed machinery, of your overworked and too extensive central machinery, your local government board, education department, and board of trade. It will be great enough and fine enough to revive the dying sentiment of local patriotism, and it will be a body that will appeal to the ambition of the most energetic and capable men in the community. They will be picked men, to a much greater extent than are your guardians, your urban district councillors and town councillors and so on, at present, because there will be perhaps a hundred or a couple of hundred of them in the place of many thousands. And I venture to think that in such a body you may confidently hope to find a collective intelligence that may be pitted against any trust or board of directors the world is likely to produce.

I suggest this body as a sort of concrete sample of the thing I have in mind. I am quite open to hear and accept the most far-reaching modification of this scheme; it is the idea of the scale that I wish particularly to enforce. Municipalize on this scale, I would say, and I am with you altogether. Here is something distinctly and clearly subserving that making of mankind upon which all sane social and political proposals must ultimately base themselves. But to put more power, and still more power in the hands of these petty little administrative bodies that we have to-day, is, I submit, folly and darkness. If the existing areas are to remain the same, then, on the whole, my vote is against municipal trading, and on the whole, with regard to light, to tramways and communications, to telephones, and indeed to nearly all such public services, I would prefer to see these things in the hands of companies, and I would stipulate only for the maximum publicity for their accounts and the fullest provision for detailed regulation through the Board of Trade.

Published by Harper Bros.

Nature, vol. lxv. (1901-2), p. 326, and reprinted in the Smithsonian Report for 1902

The Meditations of M. A. Antoninus , ix. 40.

Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung.

The Republic , Bk. V.

Nature , vol. lxiv. p. 659.

This idea of attempting to define the elements in inheritance, although it is absent from much contemporary discussion, was pretty evidently in mind in the very striking researches of the Abbé Mendel to which Mr. Bateson—with a certain intemperance of manner—has recently called attention. (Bateson, Mendel's Principles of Heredity , Cambridge University Press, 1902.)

No doubt the home of the criminal and social failure is generally disastrous to the children born into it. That is a question that will be fully dealt; with in a subsequent paper, and I note it here only to point out that it is outside our present discussion, which is concerned not with the fate of children born into the world, but with the prior question whether we may hope to improve the quality of the average birth by encouraging some sorts of people to have children and discouraging or forbidding others. It is of vital importance to keep these two questions distinct, if we are to get at last to a basis for effective action.

Since the above was written, a correspondent in Honolulu has called my attention to a short but most suggestive essay by Doctor Harry Campbell in the Lancet , 1898, ii., p. 678. He uses, of course, the common medical euphemism of "should not marry" for "should not procreate," and he gives the following as a list of "bars to marriage": pulmonary consumption, organic heart disease, epilepsy, insanity, diabetes, chronic Bright's disease, and rheumatic fever. I wish I had sufficient medical knowledge to analyze that proposal. He mentions inherited defective eyesight and hearing also, and the "neurotic" quality, with which I have dealt in my text. He adds two other suggestions that appeal to me very strongly. He proposes to bar all "cases of non-accidental disease in which life is saved by the surgeon's knife," and he instances particularly, strangulated hernia and ovarian cyst. And he also calls attention to apoplectic breakdown and premature senility. All these are suggestions of great value for individual conduct, but none of them have that quality of certainty that justifies collective action.

If at any time certainties should replace speculations in the field of inheritance, then I fancy the common-sense of humanity will be found to be in favour of the immediate application of that knowledge to life.

It has been pointed out to me by my friend, Mr. Graham Wallas, that although the State may not undertake any positive schemes for selective breeding in the present state of our knowledge, it can no more evade a certain reaction upon these things than the individual can evade a practical solution. Although we cannot say of any specific individual that he or she is, or is not, of exceptional reproductive value to the State, we may still be able, he thinks, to point out classes which are very probably, as a whole, good reproductive classes, and we may be able to promote, or at least to avoid hindering, their increase. He instances the female elementary teacher as being probably, as a type, a more intelligent and more energetic and capable girl than the average of the stratum from which she arises, and he concludes she has a higher reproductive value—a view contrary to my argument in the text that reproductive and personal value are perhaps independent. He tells me that it is the practice of many large school boards in this country to dismiss women teachers on marriage, or to refuse promotion to these when they become mothers, which is, of course, bad for the race if personal and reproductive value are identical. He would have them retain their positions regardless of the check to their efficiency maternity entails. This is a curiously indirect way towards what one might call Galtonism. Practically he proposes to endow mothers in the name of education. For my own part I do not agree with him that this class, any more than any other class, can be shown to have a high reproductive value—which is the matter under analysis in this paper— though I will admit that an ex-teacher will probably do infinitely more for her children than if she were an illiterate or untrained woman. I can only reiterate my conviction that nothing really effective can be organized in these matters until we are much clearer than we are at present in our ideas about them, and that a public body devoted to education has no business either to impose celibacy, or subsidize families, or experiment at all in these affairs. Not only in the case of elementary teachers, but in the case of soldiers, sailors, and so on, the State may do much to promote or discourage marriage and offspring, and no doubt it is also true, as Mr. Wallas insists, that the problems of the foreign immigrant and of racial intermarriage, loom upon us. But since we have no applicable science whatever here, since there is no certainty in any direction that any collective course may not be collectively evil rather than good, there is nothing for it, I hold, but to leave these things to individual experiment, and to concentrate our efforts where there is a clearer hope of effective consequence. Leave things to individual initiative and some of us will, by luck or inspiration, go right; take public action on an insufficient basis of knowledge and there is a clear prospect of collective error. The imminence of these questions argues for nothing except prompt and vigorous research.