MAN A WILD ANIMAL

Gisborne Times, Volume XXXIIII, Issue 3625, 11 September 1912, Page 7

MAN A WILD ANIMAL

MR BALFOUR UNDERTAKES TO EXPLAIN THE .DOCTRINES

OF EUGENICS

Mr Balfour was the chief speaker at a dinner given to inaugurate the first International Eugenics Congress at

the Hotel Cecil. Major Leonam Darwin presided. Mr Balfour dealt with the immense importance of the science of eugenics and its bearing on the future of the race, and took advantage of the opportunity to correct some popular misapprehensions.

"Me are very apt.” lie said, "to use the word ‘fit’ in two quite different senses. We say that the lit survive. All that means is that those who survive are fit, and are lit because they survive and survive because they are lit. It really adds nothing to your knowledge of the facts. "It is not what engonists mean. It does not mean that the mere survival indicates fitness. It means something much more than that—it moans that the ougenist has ideals of what man ought to be and what the State ought to be, and what society ought to be. and that those ideals are not being carried out because we have not yet grasped the true way of dealing with the problems involved.

"The professional classes, who, we ore told, 'now have 'families so small that it is impossible that they should keep up their numbers, are biologically unlit.

"In the same way, when I am told that the number of feeble-minded are greatly increasing, that can only mean from a naturalistic point of view, that the feeble-minded are getting more adapted to their surroundings.

“Engonists do not say that survival is everything; wo deliberately say it is not -everything. The truth is, that ve ought to have the courage of our opinions, as being, from the point of view of genetics, a wild animal.

“There may bo, and there are, certain qualifications to that. I suppose both among barbarous and many civilised tribes there are marriage customs and marriage laws which have their root, .1 do not know whether in. formulated laws of eugenics, but, at all events, are in harmony with what ira realise are the Jaws of eugenus. But, broadly speaking, man is a wild animal, and we. have to admit that if we carry out to its logical conclusion the sort of scientific work which is being done by congresses of this sort, man must become a domesticated animal.