OUR problem, the minister said, was that "the unnatural and increasingly rapid growth of the feeble-minded and insane classes, coupled as it is with a steady restriction among all the thrifty, energetic and superior stocks, constitutes a national and race danger which it is impossible to exaggerate". And the answer? "The source from which the stream of madness is fed should be cut off and sealed." After "a simple surgical operation", the mentally inferior species "could be permitted to live freely in the world without causing much inconvenience to others".

Last week we learned that Sweden practised for decades the eugenic sterilisation of feeble-minded or "racially inferior" women. But before we sneer with superior disgust, we might remind ourselves how widespread the enthusiasm for eugenics once was.

The minister who advocated "a simple surgical operation" was Winston Churchill, at the time a Cabinet minister in the pre-1914 Liberal Government. By 1940 he was leading his country against a hateful tyranny that was sustained, as he memorably put it, "by the lights of perverted science". Yet National Socialism had begun its perverted course of "racial science" by sterilising - and sometimes "euthanatising", or killing - those individually considered unfit, before moving on to the wholesale extermination of "unfit" races.

No Final Solution was sought in Sweden. Nevertheless, between 1935 and 1976, the heyday of Social Democracy, as many as 60,000 Swedes were sterilised, either compulsorily or under pressure that amounted to compulsion. In the words of one report (which adds with unconscious humour that they are "not accustomed to being on the defensive on ethical issues"), the Swedes are appalled to learn that "a benign welfare state treasured for more than 50 years should contain National Socialist eugenics".

Reasons for selection ranged from backwardness to bad eyesight, general "inferiority" or "undesirable racial characteristics". An official document gave other "grounds for sterilisation" as "unmistakable gypsy features or psychopathy". One girl was sterilised when her pastor complained that she had not learned her Confirmation lessons satisfactorily.

Not that Sweden was alone. Norway, Denmark and Finland practised eugenic sterilisation for decades, and Austria has apparently done so until this day. So did many American states. So did some Swiss cantons; in fact, it was a Canton of Vaud law of 1928 for the sterilisation of the mentally handicapped that the Third Reich borrowed as a model for its own laws for "the protection of hereditary health".

Eugenics, from "well-born", is defined as "the science dealing with the influences which improve the innate qualities of a race". Its great apostle in this country was Sir Francis Galton, a follower of Darwin who was obsessed with "racial" deterioration or improvement and with the necessity of making "the useful classes in the community contribute more than their proportion to the next generation".

At the time of the Boer War, eugenics was boosted by the panic over "national deterioration": a high number of recruits were physically feeble and stunted. One of those alarmed by this was a hero of that war, Colonel Robert Baden-Powell, whose Boy Scout movement was largely inspired by his zeal for "national improvement".

Baden-Powell was an imperialist, as was Churchill, and some have portrayed eugenics as a conservative movement. Professor Stephen Jones, the eminent geneticist and Daily Telegraph columnist, who by his own account has always voted Labour except when he voted for the Socialist Workers Party, hates the tradition of which he is in a sense the heir - he works at the Galton Laboratory, named after his predecessor at London University - and which found its consummation in the Third Reich.

But in calling this tradition "Right-wing" or reactionary, he quite misses the point. Although Churchill was an imperialist and even a racist, he was, in his phase of eugenics enthusiasm, a progressive member of a famous Liberal ministry, the Government that laid the foundations for the welfare state. When he first became a junior minister, Churchill had said he dreaded being "shut up in a soup kitchen with Mrs Sidney Webb", the social reformer; but he had more in common with the Webbs than he may have known. Sidney Webb deplored the falling birth-rate among the superior classes, when "children are being freely born to the Irish Roman Catholics and to the Polish, Russian and German Jews, on the one hand, and to the thriftless and irresponsible . . . on the other. . . . This can hardly result in anything but national deterioration; or, as an alterative, in this country gradually falling to the Irish and the Jews".

Those words were written in 1907, in Fabian Tract No 131, by one of the founding fathers of British socialism, who later helped to draft the Labour Party's first properly socialist constitution, Clause Four and all. Eugenics was a passion Webb shared with Shaw, Wells and the other Fabians; is it so surprising that the Swedish . Categorising politics simply as Left or Right is misleading and trite. Broader trends are more illuminating. For most of this century, the broadest and strongest trend of all was state managerialism, social engineering and "planning". There were to be economic planning, town planning, family planning. Racial planning followed naturally enough. Marie Stopes, the mother (if that's the word) of family planning, was an ardent eugenicist, whose enthusiasm for contraception was inspired as much by her wish to improve the racial stock as by wanting happier sexual relations (she thought her own daughter-in-law "dysgenic" and fit for sterilisation, because she wore spectacles).

Stopes, Galton, Churchill and the Webbs are long gone, the Swedes are ashamed of themselves, and eugenics is a dirty word. But is it a thing of the past? There are unmistakable echoes in the present zeal for what may be called eugenic abortion: older pregnant women are urged to have amniocentesis tests, and then pressed - or at the very least faced with an intolerable decision - to abort the foetus if it is what Galton would have considered genetically unsound. If anything, the Swedish sterilisers might even be considered the more humane, since the simple surgical operation of Churchill's phrase removes that dilemma.

They could also be considered perfectly rational, given their own premises. The scientific breeding of human beings is no more intellectually absurd than Thoroughbred breeding, which is based on the experimentally verifiable belief that the offspring of a Derby winner and a One Thousand Guineas winner will usually be a better racehorse than the foal of two platers.

Eugenic sterilisation is also rational in terms of an omnipotent and omniscient welfare state. It's perfectly true that the child of an "inferior", "psychopathic", "backward" or "promiscuous" mother is likely to be a burden to the state, as an unaborted handicapped baby may also be. And Hitler's Third Reich was, among other things, a vigorous welfare state.

Instead of sharing the Swedes' astonishment, we might do better to see sterilisation as part of the spirit of the age, with its worship of the state, of planning, and of "progress". And we might think a little harder about what progress means.