Part 11 (1/2)
The Chief, with whom I was soon cloistered, was a man of about sixty years. His face revealed a greater degree of intelligence than I had yet observed among the Germans, nor was his demeanour that of haughty officiousness, for a kindly warmth glowed in his soft dark eyes.
”I have a report here,” said Dr. Zimmern, ”from my Investigator. He recommends that your rights of paternity be revoked on the grounds that he believes yours to be a case of atavistic radicalism. In short he thinks you are rebellious by instinct, and that you are therefore unsafe to father the coming generation. It is part of the function of this office to breed the rebellious instinct out of the German race. What have you to say in answer to these charges?”
”I do not want to seem rebellious,” I stammered, ”but I wish to be relieved of this duty.”
”Very well,” said Zimmern, ”you may be relieved. If you have no objection I will sign the recommendation as it stands.”
Surely, I thought, this man does not seem very bitter toward my traitorous instincts.
Zimmern smiled and eyed me curiously. ”You know,” he said, ”that to possess a thought and to speak of it indiscreetly are two different things.”
”Certainly,” I replied, emboldened by his words. ”A man cannot do original work in science if he possesses a mind that never thinks contrary to the established order of things.”
The clerks in the outer office must have thought my case a grievous one for I was closeted with their chief for nearly an hour. Though our conversation was vague and guarded, I knew that I had discovered in Dr.
Ludwig Zimmern, Chief of the Eugenic Staff, a man guilty himself of the very crime of possessing rebellious instincts for which he had decided me unfit to sire German children. And when I finally took my leave I carried with me his private card and an invitation to call at his apartment to continue our conversation.
~7~
In the weeks that followed, my acquaintance with the Chief of the Eugenic Staff ripened rapidly into a warm friends.h.i.+p. The frank manner in which he revealed his dissatisfaction with the state of affairs in Germany pleased me greatly. Zimmern was interested in my chemical researches and quickly comprehended their importance.
”I know so little of chemistry,” he deplored, ”yet on it our whole life hangs. That is why I am so glad of an opportunity to talk to you. I do not approve of so much ignorance of each other's work on the part of our scientists. Our old university system was better. Then a scientist in any field knew something of the science in all fields. But now we are specialized from childhood. Take, for example, yourself. You are at work on a great problem by which all of our labour stands to be undone if you chemists do not solve it, and yet you do not understand how we will all be undone. I think you should know more of what it means, then you will work better. Is it not so?”
”Perhaps,” I said, ”but I have little time. I am working too hard now.”
”Then,” said Zimmern, ”you should spend more time in pleasure on the Free Level. Two days ago I conferred with the Emperor's Advisory Staff, and I learned that grave changes are threatened. That is one reason I am so interested in this protium on which you chemists are working. If you do not solve this problem and replenish the food supply, the Emperor has decided that the whole Free Level with its five million women must be abolished. His Majesty will have no half-way measures. He is afraid to take part of these women away, lest the intellectual workers rebel like the labourers did in the last century when their women were taken away piecemeal.”
”But what will His Majesty do with these five million women?” I inquired, eagerly desirous to learn more.
”Do? What can he do with the women?” exclaimed Dr. Zimmern in a low pitched but vibrant voice. ”He thinks he will make workers of them. He does not seem to appreciate how specialized they are for pleasure. He will make machine tenders of them to relieve the workmen, who are to be made soldiers. He would make surface soldiers out of these blind moles of the earth, put amber gla.s.ses on them and train them to run on the open ground and carry the war again into the sunlight. It is folly, sheer folly, and madness. His Majesty, I fear, reads too much of old books. He always was historically inclined.”
On a later occasion Zimmern gave me the broad outlines of the history of German Eugenics.
”Our science of applied Eugenics,” he said, ”began during the Second World War. Our scientists had long known that the same laws of heredity by which plants and animals had been bred held true with man, but they had been afraid to apply those laws to man because the religion of that day taught that men had souls and that human life was something too sacred to be supervised by science. But William III was a very fearless man, and he called the scientists together and asked them to outline a plan for the perfection of the German race.
”At first all they advocated was that paternity be restricted to the superior men. This broke up the old-fas.h.i.+oned family where every man chose his own wife and sired as many children as he liked. There were great mutterings about that, and if we had not been at war, there would have been rebellion. The Emperor told the people it was a military necessity. The death toll of war then was great and there was urgent need to increase the birth rate, so the people submitted and women soon ceased to complain because they could no longer have individual husbands. The children were supported by the state, and if they had legitimate fathers of the approved cla.s.s they were left in the mothers'
care. As all women who were normal and healthy were encouraged to bear children, there was a great increase in the birth rate, which came near resulting in the destruction of the race by starvation.
”As soon as a sufficient number of the older generation that had believed in the religious significance of the family and marriage system had died out, the ambitious eugenists set about to make other reforms.
The birth rate was cut down by restricting the privilege of motherhood to a selected cla.s.s of women. The other women were instructed in the arts of pleasing man and avoiding maternity, and that is where we have the origin of our free women. In those days they were free to a.s.sociate with men of all cla.s.ses. Indeed any other plan would at first have been impossible.
”A second fault was that the superior men for whom paternity was permitted were selected from the official and intellectual cla.s.ses. The result was that the quality of the labourers deteriorated. So two strains were established, the one for the production of the intellectual workers, and the other for producing manual workers. From time to time this specialization has increased until now we have as many strains of inheritance as there are groups of useful characteristics known to be hereditary.
”We have produced some effects,” mused Zimmern, ”which were not antic.i.p.ated, and which have been calling forth considerable criticism.
His Majesty sends me memorandums nearly every year, after he reviews the maternity levels, insisting that the feminine beauty of the race is, as a whole, deteriorating. And yet this is logical enough. With the exception of our small actor-model strain, the characteristics for which we breed have only the most incidental relation to feminine beauty. The type of the labour female is, as you have seen, a buxom, fleshly beauty; youth and full nutrition are essential to its display, and it soon fades.
In the scientific strains it seems that the power of original thought correlates with a feminine type that is certainly not beautiful.
Doubtless not understanding this you may have felt that you were discriminated against in your a.s.signment. But the clerical mind with its pa.s.sion for monotonous repet.i.tion of petty mental processes seems to correlate with the most exquisite and refined feminine features. Those scintillating beauties on the Free Level who have ever at their beck our wisest men are from our clerical strain,--but of course they are only the rejects. It is unfortunate that you cannot see the more privileged specimens in the clerical maternity level.