It is very interesting to see how a humanist religious language is substituted for true religion, and eugenics (as Robert Hugh Benson well saw in Lord of the World) eulogized as nothing less than a ‘sacred’ duty: ‘Parenthood, with the divine gift of love in its power, with the glorious potentialities of handing on a radiant, wholesome, beautiful youth should be a sacred and preserved gift, a privilege only to be exercised by those who rationally comprehend the counter-balancing duties.’ (212). Likewise, ‘It is the duty of a seer to embody his message in such a form that its beauty is apparent and the vision can be seen by all the people.’ (219)
It is clear in reading you these few quotations that there is a certain kind of terminology or language employed that is less familiar now, or at least far less common. Thus instead of talking of humanity she talks of ‘race’, and instead of populations she talks of human ‘stocks’. There is no accident here, however, or careless use. Stopes was a decided racist, and anti-semite. She was also an ardent supporter and, as one might now say, fan of Adolf Hitler. As late as August 1939, just one month before we were at war with Germany, Stopes was writing to Hitler with these words: ‘Dear Herr Hitler, Love is the greatest thing in the world: so will you accept from me these (poems) that you may allow the young people of your nation to have them?’[1] Havelock Ellis among many others noted her anti-semitism, and she also drew critical fire for attending the Nazi-sponsored International Congress for Population Science in Berlin in 1935.
But Stopes also practised what she preached. She once again became notorious when she cut her own son, the Humanist ‘philosopher’ Harry Stopes-Roe, out of her will, because he insisted on marrying Mary Eyre Wallis, later Mary Stopes-Roe, who was myopic. Stopes reasoned that her grandchildren might inherit the condition. One of the comments left on the Telegraph website subsequent to Gerald Warner’s critique of the stamp bearing Stope’s portrait suggested that it was quite wrong to call Stopes ‘anti-life’; after all, ‘she wanted every child a wanted, loved and cared-for child’. A brilliantly acid rejoinder to this comment puts it thus: ‘which translated means “Stopes was very much anti-life. She wanted every unwanted child a dead child."’ Even her own grandchildren!
Possibly still the best and most far-reaching criticism that has been made to date of the whole basis of eugenics, and with it birth-control, is that of G. K. Chesterton, in his 1922 work Eugenics and Other Evils. I mention this work not only because I happen to find Chesterton’s critique so congenial, but still more because Stopes seems so concretely to encapsulate the objects of that critique. Chesterton was, of course, ridiculed at the time by Shaw and so many other fashionable intellectuals, but his analysis has, I think, stood the test of time, and one might even say that it appears to be quite prescient about our current post-eugenic environment. It is not the occasion to rehearse the whole of Chesterton’s argument here, but there are nevertheless a couple of points that could be made to show how the general trend of his argument relates to Stopes.
Chesterton’s book[2] is divided into two sections, the first of which deals with the utter impracticality of this ‘false theory’. Chesterton sought to demonstrate the absurdity of the eugenic position, firstly on the grounds that it is a pseudoscience that is not in a position to demonstrate the beneficial nature of its practices, and secondly (and perhaps more importantly), because there is no authority, other than sheer tyranny, that could make decisions on such intimately private and human activity. We have already seen how Stopes’s arguments for eugenics rely on false analogies with agricultural practice, to the degree even of likening a woman to a strip of land. Perhaps more pernicious still is her supreme confidence that she has just the scientific expertise and authority to decide who should marry, to whom, and how many, if any, children, they should be allowed. One can see in this simple plea for power the whole system of servitude that Belloc so ably characterised, rearing its ugly head once more. Like many another utopian, Stopes fantasises entirely on the condition that she is the boss, and no-one else. Of course, Chesterton notes, the problem with experts is that they all disagree with each other (one might add that they also have an unnerving habit of changing their minds on the merest whim).
The second half of the book is the more challenging, and all the darker for it. Chesterton portays with biting accuracy, the ‘real aim’ of eugenics; in fine, the enslavement of the working and poorer classes to the capitalists and their industrial economy. Having realised (whether consciously or not) that to give their workers the means to buy the tools necessary to make their own living (i.e. real productive property) would not be to their own economic advantage, the only real solution is to make them utterly dependent for a living on them alone. This necessarily involves paying a salary so low that a working man can only find the means to subsist for himself and his family. This, Chesteron explains, has necessarily meant a great increase in the impoverishment of the labouring classes with respect to the wealthy, the consequence of which has been an increase in a whole range of social ills, unrest and so the ‘revolt’ to which Stopes herself refers. Now it begins to dawn on us the abject hypocrisy of Stopes’s solution. She doesn’t suggest that a real living is offered to such working families, but rather that they be progressively sterilised so that ‘innumerable tens of thousands of stunted, warped, and inferior’ beings might be eliminated; an economic and aesthetic ‘problem’ removed from bourgeois life. That is the savagery of her ‘care’ for women; that those reduced to abject poverty might have their one last freedom left (that of family) taken away too. This is the liberal ‘utopia’ she imagines. No great leap of imagination is required to see that the same ‘calculations’ lie behind much of our contemporary debates about population reduction, climate change, the provision of condoms and other contraceptives to the world’s poorest people.[3] What is dressed up in terms of philanthropic concern is exactly the same self-serving nihilism that Chesterton ascribed in his own day to the cynical ploys of the English capitalist classes to their own population. It is absolutely incumbent upon us to demonstrate, just as Chesterton did in his own day, the absurdity, the falsity, and the utter hypocrisy, that lies behind our own Malthusian intelligentsia.
[1] Cited by Gerald Warner, ‘Marie Stopes is forgiven racism and eugenics because she was anti-life’, The Daily Telegraph, 28 August 2008. Warner doesn’t state what his source for this letter is.
[2] G. K. Chesterton, Eugenics and Other Evils (London: Cassell and Company, 1922).
[3] This might be a place to expand this talk into a discussion of ‘overpopulation’ in sub-Saharan Africa, for example, where it is exactly radical underpopulation, usually the result of civil war, endemic disease, and more distant causes such as the slave trade, that is so often the reason for poverty.
