494 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



to the consumer. The Individualist, however, has a far stronger argument. He 

 reminds us that a Community will truly prosper directly as the percentage of 

 gifted and desirable units, and inversely as the percentage of wasters and 

 degenerates : he and we alike know that even some years ago the percentage of 

 the former was falling in this country because the desirables were having smaller 

 and smaller families, while the undesirables conversely were increasing both pro- 

 portionately and absolutely : and we all realise that the war has robbed us of our 

 very best, and has cut off — often childless — much of the moral and intellectual 

 flower of our race. If, now, the Community is systematically to foster and 

 paternally to provide for all the degenerate and semi-degenerate, and to see that 

 the children of the idle and thriftless be well provided for — even if their wilfully 

 worthless parents be left to stew in their own juice — what is before us but a 

 tremendous national decline through the swamping increase of low types that 

 should be encouraged to die out ? Surely in such case we shall soon have neither 

 an A i nor a C3 but a Z26 nation ! This is what the Individualist means when he 

 — as true a philanthropist as the Socialist — maintains that the most merciful — i.e., 

 the ultimately least unmerciful — course is to let the degenerate die out, and to let 

 Nature gradually extinguish Nature's failures. 



If we had no practical reply to these objections, we should have to admit that, 

 in spite of all the foregoing arguments, we are helpless, and that the Community 

 cannot take actual and efficient responsibility for the degeneracy bequeathed by 

 the past without bequeathing in turn a yet still more terrible and fatal legacy to 

 the future. The key to the answer was, however, given above when I spoke of 

 control. Just as many already realise that rights entail duties, and that 

 privileges imply obligations — even Homer's heroes and Milton's friends realised 

 this ; and that noblesse oblige is proverbial — so we must insist as a fundamental 

 sociological axiom that responsibility connotes power. 



This is absolutely vital ; and its neglect under any " Socialistic '' regime starkly 

 suicidal. Power without responsibility means Prussianism and Tsarism : re- 

 sponsibility without power is hell. If the Community is to shoulder half or three- 

 quarters of the burden of sustaining l those degenerates who, through no fault of 

 their own, are congenitally incompetent to maintain themselves in decent comfort, 

 and is to render the life-pilgrimage of these unfortunates tolerable instead of a 

 dreary nightmare ; if it is to assume paternal charge of all the tens or hundreds 

 of thousands of children whose parents cannot or will not provide adequately for 

 them, and is to guarantee to all such children as much education as they are 

 capable of receiving, and a really fair start in life : then in sheer self-preservation 

 the Community must insist on, and rigidly enforce, its absolute claim to secure 

 that no degeneracy or heritable congenital defects shall persist beyond the present 

 generation of degenerates, and that the Community of fifty or seventy years hence 

 shall have no incubus of mentally or morally, or even physically, degenerate 

 members — none but a few occasional sporadic morbid " sports " from the normal, 

 which it, in turn, may effectually prevent from handing on their like. Here we 

 have the really central problem of " Socialism " — a problem that, so far as my 

 limited knowledge goes, though I write subject to correction, Socialistic propa- 

 gandists have never squarely faced. 



Yet, unless it be squarely faced, and most efficaciously dealt with, a perma- 

 nently successful Collectivist Community is inherently impossible, and national 

 deterioration increasing with something like geometric progression is inevitable. 

 If we agree to be responsible for the degenerates during their individual lives, 



1 Not at mere subsistence-level, but at an agreed standard of comfort. 



