538 EVOLUTION, GENETICS, AND EUGENICS 



half a million children are involved in the total of the wastage of child- 

 life and the torture and neglect of child -life in a single year." Surely 

 Mr. G. R. Sims, to whom I would offer a hearty tribute for his recent 

 services to childhood, is justified in saying, "Against the guilt of race 

 suicide our men of science are everywhere preaching their sermons 

 to-day. It is against the guilt of race murder that the cry of the 

 children should ring through the land." As regards race suicide and 

 the men of science, I am not so sure as to the assertion. But the truth 

 of the second sentence quoted is as indisputable as it is horrible. 



Now no legislation conceivable will wholly cure this evil nor avert 

 its consequences. At bottom it depends upon human nature, and 

 you can cure it only by curing the defect of human nature. This, in 

 general, is of course beyond the immediate powers of man, but evi- 

 dently we should gain the same end if only we could confine the advent 

 of children to those parents who desired them— that is to say, those in 

 whom human nature displayed the first, if not indeed almost the only, 

 requisite for the happiness of childhood. To this most beneficent 

 and wholly moral end we shall come, notwithstanding the blind and 

 pitiable guidance of most of our accredited moral teachers today. By 

 no other means than the realization of the ideal defined, that every 

 new baby shall be loved and desired in anticipation— an ideal which is 

 perfectly practicable — can the black stain of child murder and child 

 torture and child neglect be removed from our civilization. 



Ruskin and race-culture. — The name of Ruskin, perhaps, would 

 not occur to the reader as likely to afford support to the fair hopes of 

 the eugenist. Consider then, these words from Time and Tide: 



"You leave your marriages to be settled by supply and demand, 

 instead of wholesome law. And thus, among your youths and maid- 

 ens, the improvident, incontinent, selfish, and foolish ones marry, 

 whether you will or not; and beget families of children necessarily 

 inheritors in a great degree of these parental dispositions; and for 

 whom, supposing they had the best dispositions in the world, you have 

 thus provided, by way of educators, the foolishest fathers and mothers 

 you could find; (the only rational sentence in their letters, usually, is 

 the invariable one, in which they declare themselves 'incapable of 

 providing for their children's education')- On the other hand, who- 

 soever is wise, patient, unselfish, and pure among your youth, you 

 keep maid or bachelor; wasting their best days of natural fife in pain- 

 ful sacrifice, forbidding them their best help and best reward, and care- 

 fully excluding their prudence and tenderness from any offices of 



