ESSAYS 495 



and for all the children of the nation who may need help, we must ensure that 

 only mentally and morally and physically healthy stocks shall breed and increase, 

 and that all tainted stocks shall be extinguished. To have said this a generation 

 ago would have been equivalent to demanding either that the degenerate should 

 not marry, or that, if they married, they should either systematically practise an 

 unnatural abstinence or unfailingly take certain precautions : whereas the 

 mentally and morally degenerate are precisely the very people who can be 

 confidently relied upon to do nothing of the sort. Now, however, we know that 

 permanent sterilisation is perfectly practicable, and that the sterilised are not 

 deprived of the capacity for the gratification of mankind's strongest natura 

 passion. Individuals who have no degenerate taint, but who, for one reason or 

 another, had decided that they ought to beget no more children, have voluntarily 

 submitted themselves to a simpie operation in order to obviate the necessity of 

 repeatedly recurring individual precautions ad hoc : and what such individuals 

 have done voluntarily for their own sakes, the Community must absolutely insist 

 that the degenerate shall do compulsorily. We can afford to take no risks what- 

 ever in this sphere. Anyhow, and even under the existing regime, the horde of 

 degenerates already involves a great danger and great expense to the Community ; 

 but the danger and the expense will become fatal if the Community assume full 

 responsibility for all its units, but exert no power of preventing the multiplication 

 of unfit units. There is no question of caste or class here, but merely of the 

 national extirpation of a national menace. Any individual of any class or rank or 

 occupation whatsoever, who is afflicted with any form of mental or moral or 

 serious physical degeneracy probably heritable by children — no matter whether 

 such individual belong to a class of tramps or paupers, to that of unskilled labour 

 or of skilled labour, to commerce or the professions, to the peerage or to the 

 Royal Family itself, must be sterilised in time, and effectually prevented from 

 handing on the taint to a succeeding generation. The appalling history of the 

 "Jukes" family in America is a standard example and warning of the huge 

 expense of crime, vice, misery, and actual money, caused to the Community by 

 the offspring to a few generations of one pair of degenerate units : but we have to 

 contemplate the multiplication of such expense by thousands or tens of thousands 

 if a Collectivist regime safeguard degenerate stocks from extinction by the hard 

 and painful agency of natural processes, but refuse to ensure their painless 

 extinction by sterilisation. Crowded with wrong and injustice and destitution and 

 exploitation as is our present social regime, I am open to maintain that it would 

 be ultimately better to carry on in large measure as we are, and to abandon 

 entirely for the present — and until an eugenic conscience be developed by the 

 majority — any attempt to assume Collective responsibility for the comfort and 

 happiness of all the units of the Community, unless we are prepared to assume 

 and efficaciously to discharge the correlated responsibility for ensuring the 

 Community against the propagation and increase of the unfit. This is a condition 

 that should be put in the very forefront of the Labour Party's program, if this 

 Party is to be really the Party of hand-workers and head-workers : and what class 

 stands to gain more than that of the hand-workers by the elimination of the 

 unfit? 



* * * * * 



I have concluded an inquiry that has run to far greater length than I had 

 anticipated, It appears to me that, subject to the proviso for unflinching eugenic 

 control, I have turned — a frontal attack seeming impossible — the Spencerian 

 biological argument against " Socialism," and have shown that the Collectivist 



