Whenever you can, count

Andrew Berry

• A Life of Sir Francis Galton: From African Exploration to the Birth of Eugenics by Nicholas Wright Gillham
  Oxford, 416 pp, £22.50, September 2002, ISBN 0 19 514365 5

In 1904, George Bernard Shaw announced that there was now ‘no reasonable excuse for refusing to face the fact that nothing but a eugenic religion can save our civilisation’; in 1912, Major Leonard Darwin, Charles Darwin’s son, jubilantly launched a campaign for eugenic legislation designed ‘to stamp out feeble-mindedness from future generations’; and in 1919, Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, was keen to articulate her mission in eugenic terms: ‘More children from the fit, less from the unfit – that is the chief issue of birth control.’ Eugenics, or ‘self-directed evolution’ as it was styled by its proponents, signalled the way towards a utopian future. In 1913, that promise acquired human form with the birth in London of a ‘eugenic baby’, the product of careful breeding. She was christened Eugenette.