As we have seen, before the First World War, and in some circles until well into the interwar period, eugenics – literally, ‘well born’ or ‘good stocks’ – was the height of sophisticated, ‘progressive’ thought. Across Europe, the novels and plays of the period, such as H. G. Wells's The New Machiavelli(1911) and George Bernard Shaw's Man and Superman (1905), are suffused with the language of race-regeneration and fears of physical deterioration. In Arthur Schnitzler's novel, The Road to the Open (1908), Berthold Stauber, a young and enthusiastic Viennese Jewish physician, tells his father, the humane Dr Stauber, that ‘You need only consider, father, that the most honest and consistent social hygiene would have the direct result of annihilating diseased people, or at any rate excluding them from all enjoyment of life, and I don't deny that I have all kinds of ideas tending in that way which may seem cruel at the first glance.’ He went on to say that ‘You needn't be afraid, father, that I shall begin straight away to preach the murder of the unhealthy and superfluous. But theoretically that's certainly what my programme leads to.’ Although primarily a conservative ideology, both left and right were attracted to eugenic proposals. These ranged from ‘positive’ measures such as the encouragement of ‘hygienic marriage’, that is, marriage between two people of good stock, to ‘negative’ measures such as sterilisation or segregation in order to ensure that the unfit, feeble-minded and morally degenerate did not have children. In this chapter I will consider eugenics in general, before concentrating on one aspect of its rhetoric which to a post-Second World War audience is perhaps even more shocking than it was to an Edwardian one.

Eugenics was felt to be a modern, scientific enterprise, marking Edwardian Britain off from the more relaxed, self-confident style of its Victorian forebear. The Victorians were presented with the self-evident nature of British superiority, in the achievements of industry and empire. But the Edwardian period saw the emergence of fears of British decline, especially after the military shock of the Boer War and rapid German economic growth.