58 Dr. C. W. Salep^ [Feb. 14, 



changes races — that mere education is a Sisyphean task, which has 

 to be done all over again from the beginning in each generation. 



Using the word environment in its widest sense, including, for 

 instance, public opinion— and its use in any sense less wide is always 

 erroneous and misleading^ — we must surely see that it is our business 

 to provide the environment which selects the best for parentage and 

 discourages the parentage of the worst : say, to Ijegin with, the deaf 

 and dumb, the feeble-minded, the insane, the epileptic, the inebriate, 

 those afflicted with hereditary disease of other kinds, and so forth. 

 Our principles should enable us, also, to define what we mean by good 

 environment. Comprehensive and indiscriminate charity means a 

 good environment for many in a sense, but it may also mean the 

 selection of the worst for parentage — e.g. the feeble-minded. This 

 good environment, then, means the degeneration of the race. We 

 must therefore appraise environment in terms of its selective action. 

 A good environment is that w^hich selects the good, and the best en- 

 vironment is that which selects the best ; discovers them, makes the 

 utmost of them, and confers upon them the supreme privilege and 

 duty of parentage. That, and that alone, is the best environment ; 

 and all other moral judgments upon environment are fallacious, and 

 will be disastrous. 



The new law of love need not go, the brutal struggle for existence 

 need not be restored, we need not be damned to be saved. The unfit 

 must survive, hut they must not multiply. We need only follow 

 the Lancashire society Avhich now cares for the feeble-minded 

 all their days, and thus serves the present and the future 

 simultaneously. 



Eugenics, or " good breeding," is Mr. Francis Galton's name for 

 the science of race-culture, which assumes that there is no wealth but 

 life, and that the first duty of all governments and patriots, and good 

 citizens is, to quote Ruskin again, " the production and recognition of 

 human worth, the detection and extinction of human unworthiness." 

 The idea is not new-fangled, but w^as clearly laid down by Plato, and 

 by Theognis two centuries before him. The modern expression of 

 it is now nearly a quarter of a century old, and it has already passed 

 the stage of ridicule, except by the ridiculous. 



Eugenics is a project of the most elevated and provident morality, 

 aiming at no object less sublime than the ennoblement of mankind ; 

 and if one may suggest its motto, it would be, The products of progress 

 are not jnechanisms but men. It aims at ." working out the beast." 

 It is based upon the principle of the selection or choice of the superior 

 for parentage, Avhich has been the essential factor of all progress in 

 the world of life, but which all civilisations have tended, in some 

 degree, to abrogate, or even to invert — as when the feeble-minded 

 child is cared for till maturity, and sent out into the world to produce 

 its like, whilst healthy children are daily destroyed by ignorance and 

 neglect. 



