1928. Cain, or the Future of Crime (1928) was the first contribution by author George Stanley Godwin (1889-1974), to the To-day and To-morrow series. His second, Columbia, or the Future of Canada (1928) is reviewed separately on this website (also see the entry on the To-day and To-morrow series on this website). After his Canadian experience and brief military service in Britain and France in World War I, Godwin returned to England and trained to become a lawyer, but instead he became a rather prolific author and raconteur, beginning with his two contributions for To-day and To-morrow. He went on publish over a dozen other works of non-fiction (including biographies of Lord Vancouver and Marconi) and three novels.

Whereas Columbia contained no overt references to eugenics, nor any mention of eugenic sterilization, segregation, or the downfall of society due to rampant degeneration or reproduction of the unfit, Cain contains numerous explicit references to all these and more. If one had read these two works without any identification of author or date of publication, one would be hard-pressed to reconcile the two works as being by the same person, and published in the same year. I can only speculate that much of Columbia was written while Godwin was still in British Columbia, perhaps while recovering from tuberculosis (he spent nearly two years recovering at a sanitarium at the Arrow Lakes, a widening of the Columbia River in the Lower Mainland). See mini-reviews for Cain, used as promotional advertising for the series, in the accompanying picture.

Cain begins with a quote about progress from Samuel Butler’s Erehwon (Nowhere ‘backwards’), a satire on Victorian society set in this mythical land that is superficially a sort of Utopia, and in which crime is considered to be a disease, to be treated rather than punished, and the criminal cured rather than executed or locked-up for life as society’s revenge for their crimes. Part of that cure involves psychological rehabilitation for the redeemable, but for the seriously defective, there is no choice but efficient elimination and disposal. In Godwin’s own words:

fantastic as that view of the problem [crime] may seem, it is, in a word, the ultimate solution of it. What follows is a plea for the recognition of this fact, after which the problem then falls naturally into three parts: the physical cure, the mental cure, and the disposal of the irreclaimable human material. (p 5)

-Michael Kohlman

• E.M. (1928). Review of Cain, or the future of crime. The Eugenics Review, 20(1), 44-45.

• Godwin, G.S. (1928). Cain, or the future of crime. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co.

• Godwin, G.S. (1929). Columbia, or the future of Canada. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co.

• Lyon, F.E. (1930). Review of Cain, or the future of crime. Journal of the American Institute of Criminal Law & Criminology, 21(1), 157-158.