I'm reading up on the history of statistics and need some context on Karl Pearson. He's a major figure in the history of statistical methods and his work is still taught to this day. If you've taken a statistics class and calculated a correlation coefficient, a standard deviation, or a chi-square, then you've used Pearson's methods.

Pearson was also born in 1857 and had some truly abhorrent beliefs. I found a speech he delivered in 1900 in which he explicitly states that he thinks the elimination of indigenous populations in North America and Australia was, on the whole, a good thing. Later he laments the fact that this didn't happen in South Africa.

Pearson was one of the foremost eugenicists of his era when he made those comments, which makes it difficult for me to parse his beliefs in context. Were opinions like this common among educated English men of the time? Or was Pearson more of an outlier/extremist owing to his position in the eugenics movement? Essentially, what was the "normal" degree of racism (insofar as you can make that generalization) among educated, middle-aged, English men in 1900?