‘It would be very much better if they never had children’: Eugenic Ideas and Policy-making in Edwardian Britain

‘What I want to insist upon is, that a state of things in which not two out of five of the population below a certain standard of life are fit to bear arms is a national danger, which cannot be met by any mere schemes of enlistment, and that true patriotism requires that that danger should be recognised’ (Miles, 1902: 81).1 Thus warned General J F Maurice writing under an alias in 1902 and sounding the alarm that the surprisingly poor performance of the British military in the Second Boer War (1899-1902), and its rejection of a worrying number of volunteers as physically unfit, might signal the end of British hegemony. General Maurice’s pronouncements launched a debate that would transform British politics in the twentieth century: the debate over physical deterioration and national efficiency. His views were not entirely new. Investigators, philanthropists, doctors and others, had been warning for decades that the physical condition of the British people, and especially its poorer sections, was disconcerting. General Maurice’s contribution was in explicitly linking these concerns to the burning issue of the day: the military setbacks of the Second Boer War and the realisation that Britain’s predominance had become fragile (Gilbert, 1965). Amid this doubt over ‘whether English ways of doing things were any longer invariably the best’ (Ibid: 143), the Balfour government reluctantly initiated a series of thorough investigations on the various failings of British society and politics, among them the Inter-departmental Committee on Physical Deterioration (1903-1904), the Royal Commission on the Care and Control of the Feeble-Minded (1904- 1908), and the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws and Relief of Distress (1905-1909). [Introduction continued in thesis]