Eugenics in race and state.

  • International Congress of Eugenics
Date:
1923
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Eugenics in race and state. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    435/534 (page 419)
    THE NATURE-NURTURE ISSUE IN ITS BEARING ON GOVERNMENT ALLEYNE IRELAND Caiskill, New York I. THE PRESENT STATE OF GOVERNMENT To the student of government the present political situation throughout the world offers a striking spectacle. We are faced not only by those forms of protest which derive their impulse from a desire to overthrow existing institutions of government—by Communism, by Syndicalism, by Bolshev¬ ism, and by the various brands of Socialism—but also by a growing sense of exasperation and helplessness amongst those who wish to obtain relief from the prevailing distress by reforming the political systems which we now employ as agents for carrying out our social purposes. A very brief examination of the course of political evolution in modern times raises in every intelligent and candid mind the question of what it is that has so intrigued the advance of popular government that politics is left to be the only phase of human activity of which it can be said that during the past hundred years it has not made notable progress toward the attainment of its objects. The specific abuses which in the eighteenth century led to the American War of Independence and to the French Revolution, which in the nineteenth century led to the movement for parliamentary reform in England and to the revolt of the Spanish-American Colonies, and which in the twentieth century have already, in less than two decades, produced the Russian Revolution and the Chinese Revolution, suggested to the leaders of these enterprises that future immimity from mis-government would be assured if the people were allowed to participate in government, to make their in¬ fluence determine the aims which Goverimient should pursue, and to exer¬ cise a vigilant supervision over the methods employed in their pursuit. Of this popular participation in government we have had nearly a century in England and nearly a century and a half in the United States. Through¬ out even the shorter of these periods there is to be observed a continuous and noteworthy improvement in the general conditions of human life. In food, in housing, in clothing, in transportation, in medicine, in surgery, in 419