Eugenics and Other Evils

"Eugenics itself, in large quantities or small, coming quickly or coming slowly, urged from good motives or bad, applied to a thousand people or applied to three, Eugenics itself is a thing no more to be bargained about than poisoning."
-G. K. Chesterton, Eugenics and Other Evils
Eugenics and Other Evils: An Argument Against the Scientifically Organized State (1922) was written by G. K. Chesterton as an attack on a bill being debated by the British parliament that would have legalized eugenics. This bill was the culmination of a campaign instigated by Sir Francis Galton and H. G. Wells, among others. They represented a number of contemporary intellectuals who believed the government should sterilize people deemed "mentally defective." In his book, Chesterton, who was strongly motivated by Christian theology, argued that spiritual principles were more important than scientific ones in the governance of human affairs. Ultimately, the bill failed to pass by a vote of 167 to 89.

Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) was born into a middle-class family in London. He dropped out of art school to work as a journalist. For the rest of his life most of his work appeared first in periodicals, including his own publication, G. K.'s Weekly, The Illustrated London News, The Daily News, and many others. His collected works are expected to run to fifty volumes, with most of the collections containing as many as three separate books, and each averaging about six hundred pages. Since his death in 1936, an inquiry into his case for canonization by the Roman Catholic is now underway.
Arthur Livingston is an adjunct professor of English literature at Regent University and co-founder of the oldest continuously meeting chapter of the G. K. Chesterton Society in the United States. He has also written poetry for fifty-five years.