EUGENICS CONDEMNED.

King Country Chronicle, Volume VI, Issue 509, 16 October 1912, Page 6

EUGENICS CONDEMNED.

Dr Alfred Russell Wallace, the contemporary of Darwin and a life long student of the problems of heredity and human development, does not approve of "the modern eugenic heresies that are now being advocated." In an article published in the last number of M\lgate Monthly the veteran scientist, now in his ninetieth year, says that he feels a little sore to learn from a monthly magazine that he is supposed to be spending the evening of his days in fusthering the teaching of eugenics. "Wherever did I advocate any such preposterous theories?" Dr Wallace asks. "Not a reference to any of my writings, not a word is quoted in justification of this scientific libel. Where can they put their finger on any statement of mine tnat aa much as lends colour to such an assertion? *Why, never by word or deed have I given the slightest countenance to eugenics. Segregation of the unfit, indeed! It is a mere excuse for establishing a medical tyranny. And we have enough of this kind of tyranny alreadv. Even now, the lunacy laws give dangerous powers to the medical fraternity. At the present moment there are Bome perfectly sane people incarcerated in lunatic asylums simply for believing in spiritualism." Dr Wallace states that the world does not want the eugenist to set it straight. If the people are given good conditions of life they will tend towards the highest type. Eugenics is simply "the meddlesome interference of an arrogant scientific priest-craft." "There are no really bad people," he adds. "No one is absolutely beyond reclaim. That is where our prison system is all wrong. We treat our prisoners as though they were utterly bad, where there is none utterly bad. but only different degree of goodness." Dr Wallace' idea, it seems, is that th 9 world should reach the goal of the eugenists along the path of social reform.