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There are, to be sure, the claims and assertions and negative achievements of the youngest of the sciences, eugenics. They are invincible optimists, the eugenists: it is perhaps a case of a virtue born of necessity.
It seemed to be suspiciously easy for him to accept an excuse to slide down the dizzy height he had climbed from the African level. The eugenists would put their trust in the encouraged breeding of the best and the compulsory sterility of the rest. But what is the best, and who are the best, and where will you find them when they are not inextricably emulsified with the worst?
Thus no real good can come of the Eugenic movement per se. Its contribution to Progress consists in its value as an "announcer" of a higher ideal, rather than a higher order. The higher order can come only by getting back to primal laws. The fact should not be overlooked that the ancient Greeks were competent Eugenists.
Like most of our social idealists, statesmen, politicians and economists, some of the Eugenists suffer intellectually from a restricted and inhibited understanding of the function of sex.
"As soon as a sufficient number of the older generation that had believed in the religious significance of the family and marriage system had died out, the ambitious eugenists set about to make other reforms. The birth rate was cut down by restricting the privilege of motherhood to a selected class of women.
Imagine estimating philosophers by their chest expansions, their blood pressures, their Wassermann reactions! The so-called social diseases, over which eugenists raise such a pother, are surely not the worst curses that mankind has to bear. Some of the greatest men in history have had them; whole nations have had them and survived.
To which I can only answer, with heart-broken patience, that I am not an Individualist, but a poor fallen but baptised journalist who is trying to write a book about Eugenists, several of whom he has met; whereas he never met an Individualist, and is by no means certain he would recognise him if he did.
But since free-will is believed by Eugenists no more than by Calvinists, since front-doors are respected by Eugenists no more than by house-breakers, and since the Habeas Corpus is about as sacred to Eugenists as it would be to King John, why do not they bring light and peace into so many human homes by removing a demoniac from each of them?
And the attempt of the Eugenists and other fatalists to treat all men as irresponsible is the largest and flattest folly in philosophy. The Eugenist has to treat everybody, including himself, as an exception to a rule that isn't there.
It is my business to acquaint myself with the literature of both eugenics and feminism, and I know that hitherto the eugenists have inclined to oppose the claims of feminism, Sir Francis Galton, for instance, having lent his name to the anti-suffrage side; whilst the feminists, one and all, so far as Anglo-Saxondom is concerned for Ellen Key must be excepted are either unaware of the meaning of eugenics at all, or are up in arms at once when the eugenist or at any rate this eugenist, who is a male person mildly inquires: But what about motherhood? and to what sort of women are you relegating it by default?
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