536 EVOLUTION, GENETICS, AND EUGENICS 



beside Beethoven's, but whom some environmental factors — conven- 

 tional, economic, educational, or what not— have silenced; or worse, 

 have persuaded to write such sterile nullities as need not here be 

 instanced. There is surely no waste in all this wasteful world so 

 lamentable as this waste of genius. 



If, then, anyone could devise for us a means by which the genius, 

 potentially existing at any time, were realized, he would have per- 

 formed in effect a service equivalent to that of which eugenics repudi- 

 ates the present possibility — the actual creation of genius. But if we 

 consider what the conditions are which cause the waste of genius, we 

 realize at once that they mainly inhere in the level of the human 

 environment of the priceless potentiality in question. As we noted 

 elsewhere, in an age like that of Pericles genius springs up on all hands. 

 It is encouraged and welcomed because the average level of the human 

 environment in which it finds itself is so high. But if eugenics can 

 raise the average level of intelligence, in so doing not merely does it 

 render more likely, as Mr. Galton points out, the production of men of 

 the highest ability, but it provides those conditions in which men of 

 genius, now swamped, can swim. We could not undertake to produce 

 a Shakespeare, but we might reasonably hope to produce a generation 

 which would not destroy its Shakespeares. And even if men of genius 

 still found it necessary, as men of genius have found it necessary, to 

 "play to the gallery," they would play, as Mr. Galton says of the 

 demagogue in a eugenic age, " to a more sensible gallery than at 

 present." 



Darwin somewhere points out that it is not the scientific, but the 

 unscientific man who denies future possibilities. Thus though an 

 advocate of eugenics may be applauded for his judgment if he declares 

 that the creation of genius will forever be impossible, yet I should not 

 care to assert that the ultimate limitations of eugenics can thus be 

 defined. We have yet to hear the last of Mendelism. 



Eugenics and unemployment. — Let us look now at another aspect 

 of the promise of race-culture. When the time comes that quality 

 rather than quantity is the ideal of those who concern themselves with 

 the population question, it is quite evident that not a few of the social 

 problems which we now find utterly insoluble will disappear. In 

 this brief outline, we can only allude to one or two points. Take, for 

 instance, the question of unemployment. We know that some by no 

 means small proportion of the unemployed were really destined to be 

 unemployable from the first, as for instance by reason of hereditary 



