“Blood Will Tell”. The Eugenics Movement in Canada Prior

Until the eugenics movement got under way, “race” was always in some sense a popular science. In the nineteenth century there were important attempts to identify nationality with race.2 Racialism thus provided a powerful framework for interpreting and explaining other cultures, and for articulating the racial supremacy of one race. Moreover, racial heredity implied that there must be a unity of descent. Once upon a time there must have existed a number of ancestors of definite bodily form, from whom the present population has descended. This is clearest in the case of a homogenous population.