In July 1912 800 delegates met at the Hotel Cecil on the Strand in London for the First International Eugenics Congress. Some of the foremost figures of the day – including the former and future British prime ministers Arthur Balfour and Winston Churchill – were there. The delegates represented a wide spectrum of opinion. Not only right-wing racists but also liberals and socialists believed eugenic policies should be used to raise what they regarded as the low quality of sections of the population.
The Liberal founder of the welfare state, William Beveridge, wrote in 1906 that men “who through general defects” are unemployable should suffer “complete and permanent loss of all citizen rights – including not only the franchise but civil freedom and fatherhood”. In Marriage and Morals (1929), Bertrand Russell, while criticising American states that had implemented involuntary sterilisation too broadly, defended enforcing it on people who were “mentally defective”. In 1931 an editorial in this magazine endorsed “the legitimate claims of eugenics”, stating they were opposed only by those “who cling to individualistic views of parenthood and family economics”.
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