Biographical note: William Baylebridge was born in Queensland 1883, was recognized as a major poet in his lifetime, but his work has always been relatively obscure and inaccessible; he himself was reclusive and uninterested in publicity. He took inspiration from Nietzsche and British eugenicists, and described a political theory considered proto-fascist. His books are out of print, and the editions that remain are prohibitively expensive or locked away in a few library storerooms. It is for this reason that I have begun transcribing his work. The following is the parts III, IV, V, VI, and VII of Baylebridge’s National Notes, first published in 1913.
Parts I & II - New Nationalism and Morals
Part III - Eugenics
Part IV - Fertilities, their Increase and Restriction
Part V - Reproduction and Population
Part VI - Marriage and the Family
Part VII - Women
EUGENICS
EUGENICS make possible the study of those agencies, under social control, which may improve or impair the racial qualities physical and mental, of future generations. As opposed to kakogenics (that is, to our present manner of reproduction), eugenics deal with those influences that improve the inborn qualities of a race – with those influences, too, that develop these qualities to the utmost advantage. Eugenics are concerned largely with the promotion of such calculation or choice in marriage as shall maximize the number of efficient individuals; the eugenist asserts, and declares it the first law for ambitious nations, that the picked classes in a community must always yield more than their proportion to the next generation.
In theory, therefore, the science of eugenics may be summed up in these questions:
What, in any given community, are the hereditary sources of progressive culture, physical and psychic?
By what criteria may the relative cultural worth of different human stocks be assessed?
Under what conditions do the higher cultural varieties of stock originate and develop?
How may existing selective agencies be relatively modified to encourage the higher types?
IN this science we have the means for a new, and very definitely a richer, national life. For does not the present authority, civil and religious, set up and support social standards which, far from furthering, almost entirely ignore, the welfare and the destiny of the race?
Heredity, inexorably, and irresistibly, is eternally at work; if it is not working for us, it is working against us. And it will toil in either part at our option. Only blindness or imbecility would reject so powerful a confederate.
Is it not highly probable that only a mode of life based on eugenics – and especially so in a world that becomes always more competitive – can save modern civilizations from the fate that has overtaken all former civilizations?
Is it necessary, we might be asked – and fitly enough in other connections – to consider each personality as something added, either supernaturally or with conscious effort, to the stock of Nature? Is it not rather a segregation of what already existed – under a new shape, and as a normal consequence of previous conditions?...The conclusion of the question suggests the answer here. And, if life is single in its essence, it is still interactive in its manifestations.
THE power in man to vary the human stocks of the future puts a great, and a new, responsibility into the hands of each generation. This truth has never yet been properly recognized, never yet been deliberately made use of.
Conscious race-culture would deal, and deal effectively, with the evils that have followed the too prodigal suspension of that purifying force, natural selection.
Blind legislation, and charity that undoes itself, must answer for much here; and the progress of medical science has added to the same chaos. The last, to which mankind owes so tremendous a debt, will find its chief justification in combatting those scourges that strike, without discrimination, at the fit as well as the unfit.
Our standards would make it impossible for morbid stocks either to multiply or to exist.
To permit the degenerate and worthless, since this handicaps the endowed and profitable, is to be twice unblest.
OUR aim hitherto has been to better, not life, but the conditions under which life is lived. In this way we have made the path increasingly smoother for the unfit, who are encouraged thus to propagate their unfitness, and increasingly harder for the fit, who have to support it. With each generation this injustice is multiplied – in a kind of arithmetical progression… Social reform, beginning at the wrong end, has merely increased the evil it set out to remove.
We must renounce life, and the joy and virtues of life, or refuse to be anywhere misled by the myopic zeal of the wrong-end reformer.
The enormous sums spent on ‘social services’ are the measure of their decrepitude…. ‘Social disservices’ would be the right reference here.
To improve the conditions of life, and not life itself, is to lower the level of life.
We are told that ‘the future of the race’ demands, amongst other things, the removal of our slums. But Europe has satisfied impartial inquirers that the only effective way to remove slums is to remove what makes them possible – slum mentality. Remove that, and slums would in very truth be anachronisms. They would disappear automatically. Foster that mentality, however, and we should still have the slum – thought it might have cost more.
Preventive medicine is infinitely better than curative; and eugenics administer the former in divine doses.
The greatest service we can render to humanity is the service we render to it before it was born…. The eugenist, that discerning humanist, would achieve nobly what the humanitarian bungles.
To improve the conditions of life is one thing; to regenerate it is a vastly different thing.
The energy we waste now on social amelioration will, as we complete our lesson, be as much an instrument for good as at present it too often is for evil: we will expend that energy on racial amelioration.
The ram and the grasshopper can generate life; let man regenerate it.
WHY this sole, this always intensified, obsession with externals? The essential thing is the being they surround – the stuff and substance of his body, his heart, his brain. Make something of him, and the rest leave – as you may – to its own making.
WE understand that the genesis of living from lifeless forms is beyond us.
Is not the problem of national evolution a problem – approached with knowledge and imagination – in the vital statistics of large numbers?
From their new calculus eugenists expect much, and justifiably so. The association of phenomena, the inter-relationship of quantity and environment, the dependence of characters on nurture and on nature, can now, they claim, be measure with a quite sufficient accuracy.
The work of determining the functional groups in a given community, of classifying them on a cultural basis, would have to be taken definitively in hand.
National degeneracy and national fitness, thought not insoluble, are questions of immense biological complexity. An intensive study, amongst other things, of heredity in man, of differential marriage rates, of differential fertilities, of selective death rates, of migration, and the correlation of all these with the positive and negative qualities of the several reproductive groups in a community – this seems necessary for their solution.
Science, however, is continually finding new tools for the eugenist. Our knowledge of the different blood groupings, for instance, promises much here. This knowledge, which has already been used widely in connection with blood transfusion, and occasionally in connection with such matters as disputed paternity, might also be serviceable to the eugenist. The association of particular blood groupings with certain defects or qualities, if properly determined, should provide him with a memorable weapon – a notable short cut…. Gland treatment, again, if the actions and interactions of the glands become sufficiently known, he might accept as a positive attempt at human betterment.
Incidentally, the experiments which are at present directly impossible for the eugenist man himself makes.... We can remember, too, that the basic laws operate in humans as in plants and animals.
WE are said to take our individual characters from a groundwork of genes, half of which are contributed by each parent. Has fate hitherto played with these genes, so significant to us, as we might play with a pack of cards – or, rather, with two packs, from each of which we have selected, or merely taken at random, half the cards, joining these two halves to make a third pack? What endless combinations of cards (characteristics) might be in that composite pack (our individual selves) – some suits being doubled in it, some effaced, and so on in an infinite progression of possible variation! The chance hitherto of drawing a combination of any value in that lottery might well have been vastly more remote than the chance of drawing one in the lotteries conducted by our Governments. The combination of such cards or characteristics as produce a genius is, we already know, only one in myriads of such possible combinations.... This subject already promises the eugenist a large field for investigation.
LET our minds become firmly possessed of these truths, and means will be found, now or ultimately, to give effect to them.... We would appeal to the better social feeling, to an enlightened national pride.
Would not a chief obstacle to reform be the sentimentalism of 'philanthropists' who are themselves degenerates?
As a national instrumentality from which we can, and with confidence, expect much, eugenics are long overdue. But this science, to achieve its intention, would have to be removed from the strife of parties and the conflict of creeds; it would have to be secured against false conceptions of charity, and the unbalanced impulses of sentiment.
Eugenists affirm that no environmental grindstone avails, and none educational, unless the tool to be ground is of pure steel – of tough race and tempered stock. Ambitious nations have no option. Eugenics, as a practical idea, would have to be introduced into the national consciousness forthwith, and with the authority of a new religion.
FERTILITIES, THEIR INCREASE AND RESTRICTION
WHATEVER beliefs we might hold about the transmission of characters from parent to offspring, it is plain that, apart from migration, the innate constitution of a nation can be consciously affected for good or ill only by using those influences that affect the rates of reproduction of its different classes and elements.
No nation can attain efficiency, or preserve it, unless dominant fertility be associated with its finer stocks, mentally and physically so; and this principle must be accepted as axiomatic by those stocks themselves.
If the fertility of the better stocks be restricted by any social opinion, class prejudice, or habit of life, a few generations will suffice to modify – and seriously so – the national character.
A vital question therefore would be: How can dominant fertility in the better stocks be secured and maintained?... Haphazard selection, or an absence of selection, would give place to reproductive selection. This would increasingly lessen the fertility of the unfit, increasingly raise the fertility of the fit.
This proper and essential increase would be exalted, and thus ensured, by the national religion.
CONTRACEPTION and professional abortion are not agencies to be used lightly, or without discrimination, as they are used now: their employment could not be left to caprice.
The systematic destruction of prenatal life is practised – or was till recently – mostly among a certain class, and that not the lowest, where reproduction seems to be controlled by a different ethic, and where this limitation appears to be made possible, in some measure at least, by the possession of special knowledge. Either the class must be sacrificed or its ethic here must be revised.... To allege that progeny is restricted so that the care and nourishment it gets may be increased will hardly convince our eugenist. To reduce, at any point, the severity of 'the struggle for existence' is no substitute, he will reply, for positive attempts at man's betterment.
Among the sound, interference with the natural reproductive processes would, by the use of every possible deterrent, be discouraged.
THE fit, encouraged to marry early and have large families, would outmultiply the less fit, not thus encouraged. With us, conditions the direct reverse of these are now largely in force.
For many, and not less so for the fit, the present economic conditions make parenthood a burden.... The placing of sound parents on a worse footing economically than the unmarried would be obviated.
The distinction between the fit, married and celibate, would have to be emphasized – to the advantage of the former.
Reversing the present paradox, we would endow fit parentage at the expense of the unfit parent and the childless, with exceptions, perhaps, in special cases.
Old-age pensions.... As we endowed fit parentage more, we should need to endow such pensioners less, with these yearly millions.
WE fight a great deal which, by joining issue chiefly with the unfit, is in truth fighting the battle of life for us.
If good and ill are to be alike multiplied, the common welfare could mean what but the common tribulation? To make the former a significant idea – and one held and supported by a majority – we must first use selection.
A false sympathy has rendered powerless almost every form of racial purification... by everywhere suspending selection, by checking the operation of such factors as would automatically purge the State of degenerates, mental and physical.
Our present methods can achieve nothing here.... Too often do they not merely screen degeneracy behind a multitude of arrested degenerates?
Under the process of nature the unprovided and unfit, and their redundant issue, would be cut off; but the 'philanthropist' now steps in, supports the degenerate, protects what they bring forth, and to do this heaps burdens upon the fit.
After one defective ancestor of four removes, two score or fifty defectives may be traced often in his stock, which is still multiplying, and which Nature, left to herself, would almost certainly have cut off at its inception.... A well-known case, properly authenticated, is this. One woman, a tramp, a drunkard, and a thief, had 709 traceable descendants. Of these, 106 were illegitimates, 64 lived on charity, 142 were tramps and beggars, 181 were prostitutes, 76 were convicts, and 7 were convicted for murder. At the time of the above reckoning, this degenerate stock, in trials, poor-houses, and prisons, had already cost-to speak of money alone – a quarter of a million, this of course being a charge on the State.
We feed even the procreating beast, calling it human – and make war, at a cost ever greater than before, on the pollution it begets.
We foster, without helping, the worst types of the insane; others – perhaps because the present necessity for room presses – we discharge as 'cured'. After a brief liberty they not seldom return to State supervision, leaving behind them the germs of a new generation of deteriorants.
The problem of mental defectiveness is admittedly an involved one. Not only does this defect differ in type, but it can be, it seems, either a dominant or a recessive character, or both. Nevertheless, we possess sufficient knowledge to make a safe beginning here – a task as proper as it is long overdue.
We not only prevent Nature from weeding out wastage; we make the conditions increasingly more favourable for its reproduction.
Number alone goes for next to nothing; indeed, it might be a positive disadvantage: the correlation, for instance, between certain diseases and fertility is generally admitted.
To extol brotherhood and the love of one's fellows, and demand for life conditions fated to multiply misery, is the paradox of this age....The true lover of man-kind would attack misery, not after it has been helped to its hideous perfection, but before its appearance in the world.
CELIBACY would be discouraged among the fit, promoted among the unfit.
For the national good, we should have to provoke shame in the parents of a predestined weakling.... Parents would have to grasp the idea, too often forgotten or simply not conceived now, that they had produced a new citizen, and consider beforehand the duties, and the definite responsibilities, involved in this.
We would believe that one heir of merit is God's bounty, but not so a hundred fools – and that in many such heirs this bounty is magnified.
Repression, where it was manifestly proper, could be employed.... For the degenerate... segregation might be used, or sterilization. (The monstrous, and the charity of the lethal chamber, are subjects for another category.)... The eugenist, like Nature, cares for the kind only. He gives no facilities to any section likely to become – either in itself, or in its descendants – a burden to the State.
We could clear the ground for our work proper in a single generation, and by the least complex of means. The feeble-minded, their near kindred the unemployable (as distinguished from the unemployed), and perhaps other degenerates, could be denied assistance from the State until – at their own request, preferably – they had been made incapable, by the simple and harmless methods now at hand, of propagating their unfitness. The resolution to begin, and a small addition to our present social machinery, are all that would be required here.
Do not a dispassionate study of these matters, and a grasping of the necessity they illustrate, give death a different aspect, a more profound and less invidious meaning?
To suppress the manifestly unfit as racial factors should not be difficult; to increase the fertility of the better stocks might, without special incitement, be less easy. Of these ends our ethic would secure both.... If we submit, as we do now, to a constraint that does not, and cannot conceivably, benefit the race, why should we not submit to a constraint that very definitely would?
THE present selective birth-rate – or, if the reader prefers it so, discriminative birth-rate – is unfavourable to many characters that contribute most to national welfare. On the other hand, the selective death-rate, by the effects of legislation, medical progress (so excellent in some connections), and an ambiguous charity, has been largely stripped of its primary significance.
The unfit selective birth-rate incident to kakogenics, and at present widely accepted without question, would have to be questioned truly.
A fit selective birth-rate-and one increasingly this – would be essential. Can bodily nurture, can education, create new germinal types? Is a progressive evolution of the race possible by means of these agencies only? The rise and fall of nations, their advancement and their decline, are summed up in the selection of the germ.
In the nature of things, a fit selective birth-rate would itself largely counteract the effects – in any case less obstructive then – of an unfit selective death-rate.
Fit rates would assure, both the highest average of faculty, and room for this to develop in. And before we could finally make good our original assumption, that the human organism was capable of greater things than, on the average, it had yet achieved, and show its possibilities for systematic improvement, this room would be necessary.
IN a new environment, the centre of fertility will shift – hence the racial differences, already perceptible, between our British forebears and us.... This opposition between the two centres, in so far as it sets natural selection to work, might be a factor in our racial progress.
Human fertility changes, in civilized societies, from the natural to the artificial phase – a fact pregnant for good or evil as we understand it or omit to. This change, failing with them to become a conscious one, and thus necessarily ungoverned by racial foresight, smashed the great civilizations of the ancient world. Are not their hitherto inexplicable decline and fall, resulting from no definite external cause, explained at once by the relative fertility of their fit and unfit elements, considered with all that we now know of the laws of inheritance?... the old story of the parasite that devoured its host, and concluded the tale thus for both of them.... This process is being repeated today.
Statistics show that twelve per cent of one generation in man – without necessarily bettering anything – produce now fifty per cent. of the next generation. This illustrates the possibilities of reproductive selection.
With us, race preservation and race betterment, so closely linked in practice with the relative fertilities of our stocks, and impossible without a proper adjustment of these fertilities, would become efficient ideas.
REPRODUCTION AND POPULATION
WE are scattered thinly across a continent; at our doors are alien races with new effective birth-rates and new ambitions: as a nation, we must populate or perish.
Compared with that of our Pacific neighbours – some of whom are seeking new domiciles (doubtless for strategic reasons, economic, or military, or both) – the growth of our population is negligible; more than one of those nations has now a natural increase which itself, in a few years, outnumbers the entire population of Australia.
We have a vast coastline to defend, and a grotesquely insufficient population to defend it, most of which is collected in the State capitals. Providence has given us some precious and perhaps unrepeatable years in which to alter these ominous conditions; and we have done nothing. In this as in other things, those in authority have lacked vision. We have acted generally as if the problem of defence did not arise here – as if Australia were some remote and insignificant Pacific island, and not a continent.
The potential value of tropical Australia – without looking beyond this – is now known to everyone but ourselves, who pretend to despise it. The rest of that story, unless we shake off our apathy, and at once, will need no elucidation.
With our falling birth-rate, and our hostility to immigration of any kind, we threaten to become what some have already declared us to be – a dying race. We are certainly a highly improvident one.
We would have a different conception of those duties, a different feeling about those processes, of our sexual life upon which a nation's health, and, indeed, its existence ultimately, so largely depend…. In this connection, as in so many others, number alone would mean nothing. A physical, mental, and spiritual development would have to accompany it.
At present there is no considered system of sexual morality…. We should have to end this disorder, leading, as it does, to sterility and decay, and institute a system that would make use of every factor in the re-production of our best stocks, and fully so.
In addition, immigration of the stocks we need would have to be definitely encouraged. The task of peopling a continent, in the time likely with good fortune to be allowed us for this, is an immense one; and the present means to achieve it, though we made these what they should be, would still be insufficient.
IN old communities, where resources have been fully exploited, a higher birth-rate might not in itself mean a larger population; with us it would.
What naturally affects population most is the availability of food-stuffs. Our production of food-stuffs should be almost illimitable; for these, we need not look beyond our own borders. Internal pressure, therefore, should not hinder much – nor, if we used discernment, hinder at all – our natural increase.
With us, marriage should seldom or never have to be delayed on grounds merely prudential. The moral, in the face of our present large celibacy, and our deferred and thus wasteful marriage – conditions by no means confined to our poorer stocks – is obvious.
We have every inducement to increase our stocks that Nature can provide; the innumerable checks that we in turn provide would, as things both inexpedient and profane, be forthwith abandoned.
EARLY marriage among the fit would be encouraged. We would not delay, but multiply, our generations.... To decrease our mean age for marriage would add, in the course of nature, both to the number of marriages, and to the yield of each.
Incidentally, if the birth-rate declines, much of Nature's selective material is cut off; for the mental and physical conditions of the earlier members of a family are often unfavourably differentiated from those of its later members.
Women would be inspired to a true conception of their duty thus; men enjoying health would consider their honour involved in the possession of offspring.
For a fit growth of population is it not essential that this should be largely settled, and with a minimum of disadvantages, upon the land?
For the sake of the parentage, and seemingly for this only, Nature evolved the related instinct; civilized man separates them.... This vital connection would be emphasized.
The inducements to a vicious celibacy – a step likely to safeguard at least something –would be removed.
Prostitution, a source of weakness and waste under the present system, and under a proper system unnecessary, would be excluded from the Commonwealth.
The division of surplus property, a not inconsiderable factor in population, could be further used – but always to fit ends.
Considerations of private interest act often as restraints on natural increase; these considerations, where advisable and possible, would be made ineffective.
WE would employ every means to increase our best stocks because we should have, more than ever, a definite, an imperative, need for them. Even now, no nation on earth has a greater need thus.
Extent of territory alone can give us no national status: that status must be sought, consciously and unceasingly, in an efficient population. To secure this would be vital.
MARRIAGE AND THE FAMILY
MARRIAGE is now contracted mostly under the influence of secondary social predispositions that care nothing for the future of the race. One of the most vital and, in its effects, one of the most far-reaching functions allotted to mankind, it is left to individual caprice.
Marriage is a sexual union in which the offspring is the essential feature.
To breed the race unhampered by the irrelevant conditions implied, with the relevant, in the present marriage – this would be necessary.
THE conventions of the present marriage were based, not on natural instinct, but on social expedience.... A new social expedience, a new economic or political necessity, would give rise to new conventions in marriage.
The present forms of marriage are not sacred and inviolable forms upon which the very existence of the human race depends: they are political devices. Where a new political vision found them deficient, they would have to be re-devised – to satisfy its new needs.
Marriage that no longer recruits a race, destroys it.... Let us not confuse the marriage of yesterday with that demanded by the pressing need of today.... To-day, if we wish to become a nation, we must set about breeding man as a political animal – and with his higher faculties intact.
IS it not mostly among deteriorants, those degenerates in whom the instinct of fertility has faded into a mere itching for pleasure, that reluctance to disturb our conjugal licences would wear the cloak of offended morality?
Is the gratification of the amorous sentiment, in Nature's marriage and in ours, an adventitious function? Is it Nature's device to constrain us to her real business here?... To secure national efficiency, the elimination of the mere voluptuary from the evolutionary process would be essential.
THE opprobrium of mésalliance would fall upon the mating of physical and intellectual qualities with the defect of these…. Our prejudices here would be revised – to follow the teachings of eugenics.
Marriage might become binding on the birth of offspring. This would emphasize the meaning of marriage. Is not the present marriage without offspring, though not always, yet far too often, legalized prostitution?
Since disease is what it is, are not man and wife, in a real and most material sense, one flesh?
The present marriage is not seldom based, in some measure at least-though perhaps for the most part sub-consciously-on the principle of eugenics. Why should it not admit of a conscious, and a stricter, adherence to that principle?
In our choice of mates, we are mostly influenced by what? By sex-instinct? By aestheticism? To racial evolution the choice we now employ here might mean almost nothing.
Monogamy, polygamy, endogamy, exogamy, celibacy – each has, among various groups, at some time or place, become accepted by custom, hallowed by religion, and enforced by law.... To achieve definite ends, definite means must be provided.
To find a proper substitute for the training of children by parents – their own parents – during infancy and adolescence might prove difficult. Who, it might be asked, could understand like its parents, with their practical and spontaneous insight, the idiosyncrasies of a child? Who but those parents could interpret its distinctive character? Would not those who had transmitted their own nature to it be best able to administer its nurture, of mind and body?... It might prove, too, that this difficulty was illusive.
When we confess that each child is a natural product, to a sufficient degree predictable, and not purely a gift from the Unknown, we shall doubtless be willing to do as much for human beings as for wheat and sheep.
The ties of family, a source of weakness as well as strength, might have to be made accessory to the national aims. If the family retained its present form, it might have to be on this condition only.
WOMEN
WOMAN's place in the world, though not less honourable, seems less fortunate than man's. Is not this, on the whole, indicated by Nature herself?... Wars – and we must expect them –would tend to vary the proportion of the sexes; and this, and the decreased regard for material wealth, and for the present distinctions of class, are things that might affect women – either for good or the reverse.... Where her necessity was less acceptable, we might well be generous.
The present marketing of 'love', one result of woman's economic dependence on man, often makes her lot burdensome. Man's dominance because his task at present, and not hers, has a monetary value, his assumption of private property rights in his mate, not seldom asserted now, and easier to enforce because of her physical disadvantage, make her lot burdensome. Since to subject women is to prejudice the well-being of the nation, the proper remedies for these evils would be necessary.
It would be grossly unfair, as well as useless, to expect women to make concessions, and shoulder new responsibilities, while labouring under the disadvantages which the present convention implies for them. They would properly refuse to commit themselves thus until their economic independence at least was assured, and generously so. With that weapon in their hands, they could approach the task before them with more confidence; and without confidence here there could be no true service.
WOMEN, the sacred vessels of maternity.
Women should embrace this cause, and with resolution. The present unlimited reproduction of poor stock not only injures the community at large; it is, since it lessens the value of maternity, a very real injury to women.
For women, the chief business of life would mean maternity; and maternity, the entire matter of child-bearing and rearing, would be regarded first as citizen-making, and not merely as the result, more or less fortuitous, of the private relation of individuals.... Too many women are spending their instinct for devotion in ways barren and unworthy; it would be encouraged to serve in maternity. They would become repossessed of the sense of race-motherhood, a sense all but lost now, and in their consecration to the national good find their own good and their true happiness. Relieved of their present round of trivial duties, women would find their highest duty and pleasure in producing and bringing up the largest number of efficient citizens that their health and means would permit-a career and a profession at once difficult and interesting, and, for the reasons indicated, in the first degree worthy of honour.