ABSTRACT | PDF
This issue is dedicated to Gilbert Keith Chesterton on the centenary of his writing against eugenics in 1910, work not published until 1922. A particular concern for Chesterton was the extension of the traditionally limited concepts of lunatic and idiot to include a much wider section of the population who are "feeble-minded".
Winston Churchill was a strong supporter of sterilisation. His proposals for the forcible sterilisation of 100,000 moral degenerates were considered too extreme and so sensitive that they were kept secret until 1992. "The unnatural and increasingly rapid growth of the feeble-minded classes, coupled with a steady restriction among all the thrifty, energetic and superior stocks constitute a race danger which it is impossible to exaggerate. I feel that the sources from which the stream of madness is fed should be cut off and sealed up before another year has passed" (Winston Churchill, Home Secretary to Prime Minister Asquith, 1910, quoted by Clive Ponting, in The Guardian Outlook 20.6.1992)
Chesterton (29 May 1874 – 14 June 1936) was an English writer. Chesterton was a large man, standing 6 feet 4 inches (1.93 m) and weighing around 21 stone (130 kg; 290 lb). His girth gave rise to a famous anecdote. During World War I a lady in London asked why he was not 'out at the Front'; he replied, 'If you go round to the side, you will see that I am.' On another occasion he remarked to his friend George Bernard Shaw: "To look at you, anyone would think a famine had struck England". Shaw retorted, "To look at you, anyone would think you have caused it". P. G. Wodehouse once described a very loud crash as "a sound like Chesterton falling onto a sheet of tin."
When The Times invited several eminent authors to write essays on the theme "What's Wrong with the World?" Chesterton's contribution took the form of a letter:
Dear Sirs, I am. Sincerely yours, G. K. Chesterton.
Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all.
—Orthodoxy, Chapter III: The Suicide of Thought, 1909.
Chesterton's column in the Illustrated London News on September 18, 1909 had a profound effect on Mahatma Gandhi. P. N. Furbank asserts that Gandhi was "thunderstruck" when he read it, while Martin Green notes that "Gandhi was so delighted with this that he told Indian Opinion to reprint it."
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