Sunira

“Like many members of the Victorian elite, Galton and his friends were chilled by the fear of race degeneration (Galton’s own encounter with the “savage races,” symptomatic of Britain’s encounter with colonial natives throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, had also convinced him that the racial purity of whites had to be maintained and protected against the forces of miscegenation). The Second Reform Act of 1867 had given working-class men in Britain the right to vote. By 1906, even the best-guarded political bastions had been stormed—twenty-nine seats in Parliament had fallen to the Labour Party—sending spasms of anxiety through English high society. The political empowerment of the working class, Galton believed, would just provoke their genetic empowerment: they would produce bushels of children, dominate the gene pool, and drag the nation toward profound mediocrity. The homme moyen would degenerate.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Gene: An Intimate History