G.K.'s Weekly - A Rebellion Has Been Arranged
by Harold Robbins
One of the most urgent tasks confronting Distributism is to destroy eugenics, and that conviction of the necessity for treading on innumberable slugs which eugenics has created in England.
In the past, rebellions of the rich have had the effect of depriving men of their property. The one now in process of fomentation seeks to deprive them of their manhood. Progress is like that.
The eugenic leaders are not indeed rich, nor do they value money. They value something even more dangerous and unpleasant – the power to smash a sorry human scheme to bits, and mould it to their hearts’ desire. And in that reconstructed world there is no room for human equality, and therefore no room for the basis of western civilisation.
The intensive eugenic campaign in favour of sterilisation and control of marriage, which began in 1928, has had two tactical successes of the first importance. It has collared the women, and it has collared the Press, including the B.B.C.
Doubtless the recent $100,000 legacy to the Eugenics Society has not been without its uses. At all events, the eugenist propaganda has been welcomed with loud splashes by the daily Press. And psycho-analysis could no doubt explain why proposals to interfere with intimate human functions have had such a roaring success, and why the opposing sanity has been denied a hearing.
The B.B.C. discovered that the advocacy of sterilisation by astronomers and others was within the scope of its Charter, one speaker going to the length of explaining that thirty per cent of inheritance of mental defect justified prevention of procreation. As who should say that if three out of ten defectives have inherited their defect, we may sterilise the lot without knowing which three they are. Savoy Hill was not sacked.
In September, a house party in Dorset which chose to talk about it, was accorded a full column a day in the Press, and the Daily Mail for November 27th devoted a column with splashed headline to a drawing-room meeting in Belgrave Square. By a singular coincidence, the next page had a long article on sterilisation by Professor Julian Huxley, with a Leader thrown in. All the Professor’s assumptions were either improvable or untrue, but we cannot go into that now. The drawing-room meeting is more important, for it is the real rebellion of the rich.
The Chair was taken by Lady Cory. A resolution urging sterilisation was proposed by Lady Shaftesbury, seconded by Lady Perrott, supported by Lady Askwith and carried with enthusiasm. We have progressed since the days when great ladies sat smiling in their chairs.
Is it fanciful to see in this portent a macrocosm of the Great Servant Question? After all, the trouble about servants was always that they were men and women. If they could be made to cease from their manhood and womanhood…
Or is it a rebellion having the quality of a Jehad? There is no god but the Eugenics Society, and the Daily Mail is its prophet. Let us make sterility and call it peace.
The point is that these four or more ladies in a drawing-room can have more publicity than the desperate plight of our trade, and can have heavy artillery support into the bargain. Not one citizen in a hundred has been allowed to know that the postulates of sterilisation, apart altogether from morals, are utterly unproven. If it depended on the daily Press and the B.B.C. no one would know it at all.
It seems clear that important elements in our ruling classes have discovered a short cut to the Servile State: a short cut where no trade unions stand in the way, and where the wells are already poisoned.
All the elements of slavery will be introduced by the first sterilising or marriage controlling statute. Unless the whole of our policy is to be taken in flank, we must look to it. And there is not much time.
