ironment and Heredity--A New Embodiment of the supposed Conflict
between Socialism and Individualism--The place of Eugenics--Social
Hygiene ultimately one with the Hygiene of the Soul--The Function of
Utopias 381

INDEX 407

THE TASK OF SOCIAL HYGIENE

I

INTRODUCTION

The Aim of Social Hygiene--Social Reform--The Rise of Social Reform
out of English Industrialism--The Four Stages of Social Reform--(1)
The Stage of Sanitation--(2) Factory Legislation--(3) The Extension
of the Scope of Education--(4) Puericulture--The Scientific
Evolution corresponding to these Stages--Social Reform only Touched
the Conditions of Life--Yet Social Reform Remains highly
Necessary--The Question of Infantile Mortality and the Quality of
the Race--The Better Organization of Life Involved by Social
Hygiene--Its Insistence on the Quality rather than on the
Conditions of Life--The Control of Reproduction--The Fall of the
Birth-rate in Relation to the Quality of the Population--The
Rejuvenation of a Society--The Influence of Culture and Refinement
on a Race--Eugenics--The Regeneration of the Race--The Problem of
Feeble-Mindedness--The Methods of Eugenics--Some of the Problems
which Face us.

Social Hygiene, as it will be here understood, may be said to be a
development, and even a transformation, of what was formerly known as
Social Reform. In that transformation it has undergone two fundamental
changes. In the first place, it is no longer merely an attempt to deal
with the conditions under which life is lived, seeking to treat bad
conditions as they occur, without going to their source, but it aims at
prevention. It ceases to be simply a reforming of forms, and approaches
in a comprehensive manner not only the conditions of life, but life
itself. In the second place, its method is no longer haphazard, but
organized and systematic, being based on a growing knowledge of those
biological sciences which were scarcely in their infancy when the era of
social reform began. Thus social hygiene is at once more radical and
more scientific than the old conception of social reform. It is the
inevitable method by which at a certain stage civilization is compelled
to continue its own course, and to preserve, perhaps to elevate, the
race.