Transcriber's Note:
Inconsistent hyphenation in the original document has been preserved.
Link to the Index added to the Table of Contents for the benefit of the reader.
Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.For a complete list, please see the end of this document.
I publish these essays at the present time for a particular reasonconnected with the present situation; a reason which I should likebriefly to emphasise and make clear.
Though most of the conclusions, especially towards the end, areconceived with reference to recent events, the actual bulk ofpreliminary notes about the science of Eugenics were written beforethe war. It was a time when this theme was the topic of the hour; wheneugenic babies (not visibly very distinguishable from other babies)sprawled all over the illustrated papers; when the evolutionary fancyof Nietzsche was the new cry among the intellectuals; and when Mr.Bernard Shaw and others were considering the idea that to breed a manlike a cart-horse was the true way to attain that higher civilisation,of intellectual magnanimity and sympathetic insight, which may befound in cart-horses. It may therefore appear that I took the opiniontoo controversially, and it seems to me that I sometimes took it tooseriously. But the criticism of Eugenics soon expanded of itself intoa more general criticism of a modern craze for scientific officialismand strict social organisation.
And then the hour came when I felt, not without relief, that I mightwell fling all my notes into the fire. The fire was a very big one,and was burning up bigger things than such pedantic quackeries. And,anyhow, the issue itself was being settled in a very different style.Scientific officialism and organisation in the State which hadspecialised in them, had gone to war with the older culture ofChristendom. Either Prussianism would win and the protest would behopeless, or Prussianism would lose and the protest would be needless.As the war advanced from poison gas to piracy against neutrals, itgrew more and more plain that the scientifically organised State wasnot increasing in popularity. Whatever happened, no Englishmen wouldever again go nosing round the stinks of that low laboratory. So Ithought all I had written irrelevant, and put it out of my mind.
I am greatly grieved to say that it is not irrelevant. It hasgradually grown apparent, to my astounded gaze, that the rulingclasses in England are still proceeding on the assumption that Prussiais a pattern for the whole world. If parts of my book are nearly nineyears old, most of their principles and proceedings are a great dealolder. They can offer us nothing but the same stuffy science, the samebullying bureaucracy and the same terrorism by tenth-rate professorsthat have led the German Empire to its recent conspicuous triumph. Forthat reason, three years after the war with Prussia, I collect andpublish these papers.
G.K.C.
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