Eugenics and Other Evils

Chesterton spent the years before the First World War arguing against the eugenics movement then fashionable among British intellectuals, George Bernard Shaw among them, and he collected those arguments into this 1922 book. It comes in two halves. The first, “The False Theory,” attacks eugenics as pseudo-science resting on terms nobody can define, chief among them the “feeble-minded” of the 1913 Mental Deficiency Act. The second, “The Real Aim,” argues that the true motive was never science at all but a wealthy class looking for legal cover to discipline the poor. He follows the logic where he thinks it leads: the state given power over marriage, childbirth, and the home, and liberty quietly withdrawn from people too ordinary to defend it. He wrote with Prussia in view, the model he said England’s rulers were copying.