The Task of Social Hygiene | Page 7

era of
development in chemistry and physics, which alone enabled a sound

system of sanitation to be developed. The fight against disease would
have been impossible but for bacteriology. The new care for human life,
and for the protection of its source, is associated with fresh
developments of biological science. Sociological observations and
speculation, including economics, are intimately connected with the
efforts of social reform to attain a broad, sound, and truly democratic
basis.[6]
When we survey this movement as a whole, we have to recognize that
it is exclusively concerned with the improvement of the conditions of
life. It makes no attempt to influence either the quantity or the quality
of life.[7] It may sometimes have been carried out with the assumption
that to improve the conditions of life is, in some way or other, to
improve the quality of life itself. But it accepted the stream of life as it
found it, and while working to cleanse the banks of the stream it made
no attempt to purify the stream itself.
It must, however, be remembered that the arguments which, especially
nowadays, are brought against the social reform of the condition of life,
will not bear serious examination. It is said, for instance, or at all events
implied, that we need bestow very little care on the conditions of life
because such care can have no permanently beneficial effect on the race,
since acquired characters, for the most part, are not transmitted to
descendants. But to assume that social reform is unnecessary because it
is not inherited is altogether absurd. The people who make this
assumption would certainly not argue that it is useless for them to
satisfy their own hunger and thirst, because their children will not
thereby be safeguarded from experiencing hunger and thirst. Yet the
needs which the movement of organized social reform seeks to satisfy
are precisely on a level with, and indeed to some extent identical with,
the needs of hunger and thirst. The impulse and the duty which move
every civilized community to elaborate and gratify its own social needs
to the utmost are altogether independent of the race, and would not
cease to exist even in a community vowed to celibacy or the most
absolute Neo-Malthusianism. Nor, again, must it be said that social
reform destroys the beneficial results of natural selection.

Here, indeed, we encounter a disputed point, and it may be admitted
that the precise data for absolute demonstration in one direction or the
other cannot yet be found. Whenever human beings breed in reckless
and unrestrained profusion--as is the case under some conditions before
a free and self-conscious civilization is attained--there is an immense
infantile mortality. It is claimed, on the one hand, that this is beneficial,
and need not be interfered with. The weak are killed off, it is said, and
the strong survive; there is a process of natural survival of the fittest.
That is true. But it is equally true, as has also been clearly seen on the
other hand, that though the relatively strongest survive, their relative
strength has been impaired by the very influences which have proved
altogether fatal to their weaker brethren. There is an immense infantile
mortality in Russia. Yet, notwithstanding any resulting "survival of the
fittest," Russia is far more ravaged by disease than Norway, where
infantile mortality is low. "A high infantile mortality," as George
Carpenter, a great authority on the diseases of childhood, remarks,
"denotes a far higher infantile deterioration rate"; or, as another doctor
puts it, "the dead baby is next of kin to the diseased baby," The
protection of the weak, so frequently condemned by some
Neo-Darwinians, is thus in reality, as Goldscheid terms it, "the
protection of the strong from degeneration."
There is, however, more to be said. Not only must an undue struggle
with unfavourable conditions enfeeble the strong as well as kill the
feeble; it also imposes an intolerable burden upon these enfeebled
survivors. The process of destruction is not sudden, it is gradual. It is a
long-drawn-out process. It involves the multiplication of the diseased,
the maimed, the feeble-minded, of paupers and lunatics and criminals.
Even natural selection thus includes the need for protecting the feeble,
and so renders urgent the task of social reform, while the more
thoroughly this task is carried out with the growth of civilization, the
more stupendous and overwhelming the task becomes.
It is thus that civilization, at a certain point in its course, renders
inevitable the appearance of that wider and deeper organization of life
which in the present volume we are concerned with under the name of
Social Hygiene. That movement is far from being an abrupt or

revolutionary manifestation in the ordinary progress of social growth.
As we have seen, social reform during the past eighty years