Stories From The Hiber-nation

"Eugenics and Other Evils," by G.K. Chesterton, published in 1922. Narrator's Introduction: For the next few paragraphs I will speak for myself, to set the stage for G.K. Chesterton's book, and to suggest why I believe it is still an important book. I think G.K. Chesterton explains his book rather well in his introduction, but it might help to start with a sense of the time in question. Chesterton started work on Eugenics and Other Evils in about 1910, but it was not completed and published until 1922. In his own introduction he talks about the period before and after "The War." The war he refers to is now called World War One. We now have a distaste for the word Eugenics, largely driven by events in World War Two. But at the time this book was published, Eugenics was lauded to the skies as a wonderful idea, and Chesterton was nearly the only person saying in writing that Eugenics was in fact evil. A case could be made, and has been made, that today, though the word Eugenics is avoided, some practices that ar