The Task of Social Hygiene | Page 4

Advocates of
Environment and Heredity--A New Embodiment of the supposed
Conflict between Socialism and Individualism--The place of
Eugenics--Social Hygiene ultimately one with the Hygiene of the
Soul--The Function of Utopias 381
INDEX 407

THE TASK OF SOCIAL HYGIENE

I
INTRODUCTION
The Aim of Social Hygiene--Social Reform--The Rise of Social
Reform out of English Industrialism--The Four Stages of Social
Reform--(1) The Stage of Sanitation--(2) Factory Legislation--(3) The
Extension of the Scope of Education--(4) Puericulture--The Scientific

Evolution corresponding to these Stages--Social Reform only Touched
the Conditions of Life--Yet Social Reform Remains highly
Necessary--The Question of Infantile Mortality and the Quality of the
Race--The Better Organization of Life Involved by Social Hygiene--Its
Insistence on the Quality rather than on the Conditions of Life--The
Control of Reproduction--The Fall of the Birth-rate in Relation to the
Quality of the Population--The Rejuvenation of a Society--The
Influence of Culture and Refinement on a Race--Eugenics--The
Regeneration of the Race--The Problem of Feeble-Mindedness--The
Methods of Eugenics--Some of the Problems which Face us.
Social Hygiene, as it will be here understood, may be said to be a
development, and even a transformation, of what was formerly known
as Social Reform. In that transformation it has undergone two
fundamental changes. In the first place, it is no longer merely an
attempt to deal with the conditions under which life is lived, seeking to
treat bad conditions as they occur, without going to their source, but it
aims at prevention. It ceases to be simply a reforming of forms, and
approaches in a comprehensive manner not only the conditions of life,
but life itself. In the second place, its method is no longer haphazard,
but organized and systematic, being based on a growing knowledge of
those biological sciences which were scarcely in their infancy when the
era of social reform began. Thus social hygiene is at once more radical
and more scientific than the old conception of social reform. It is the
inevitable method by which at a certain stage civilization is compelled
to continue its own course, and to preserve, perhaps to elevate, the race.
The era of social reform followed on the rise of modern industrialism,
and, no doubt largely on this account, although an international
movement, it first became definite and self-conscious in England.
There were perhaps other reasons why it should have been in the first
place specially prominent in England. When at the end of the
seventeenth century, Muralt, a highly intelligent Swiss gentleman,
visited England, and wrote his by no means unsympathetic Lettres sur
les Anglais, he was struck by a curious contradiction in the English
character. They are a good-natured people, he observed, very rich, so
well-nourished that sometimes they die of obesity, and they detest

cruelty so much that by royal proclamation it is ordained that the fish
and the ducks of the ponds should be duly and properly fed. Yet he
found that this good-natured, rich, cruelty-hating nation systematically
allowed the prisoners in their gaols to die of starvation. "The great
cruelty of the English," Muralt remarks, "lies in permitting evil rather
than in doing it."[1] The root of the apparent contradiction lay clearly
in a somewhat excessive independence and devotion to liberty. We give
a man full liberty, they seem to have said, to work, to become rich, to
grow fat. But if he will not work, let him starve. In that point of view
there were involved certain fallacies, which became clearer during the
course of social evolution.
It was obvious, indeed, that such an attitude, while highly favourable to
individual vigour and independence, and not incompatible with fairly
healthy social life under the conditions which prevailed at the time,
became disastrous in the era of industrialism. The conditions of
industrial life tore up the individual from the roots by which he
normally received strength, and crowded the workers together in
masses, thus generating a confusion which no individual activity could
grapple with. So it was that the very spirit which, under the earlier
conditions, made for good now made for evil. To stand by and applaud
the efforts of the individual who was perhaps slowly sinking deeper
and deeper into a miry slough of degradation began to seem an even
diabolical attitude. The maxim of laissez-faire, which had once stood
for the whole unfettered action of natural activities in life, began to be
viewed with horror and contempt. It was realized that there must be an
intelligent superintendence of social conditions, humane regulation,
systematic organization. The very intensity of the evils which the
English spirit produced led to a reaction by which that spirit, while
doubtless remaining the same at heart, took on a different form, and
manifested its energy in a new direction.
The modern industrial era, replacing domestic industry by collective
work carried out by "hands" in factories,