288 HUMANISM 



XVI 



true, this book is not worth the paper it is printed on &quot; 

 (p. 203). 



Well, let us see. Let us appraise the value of human 

 beings according to the new ideals, with the coldly com 

 mercial and unsentimental eye of natural science, regarding 

 no man as an end in himself and every one merely as an 

 instrument to social well-being, and let us see where the 

 &quot; Bottom Dog &quot; will come out. 



The answer is not hard to get. For Sir Francis Galton 

 has studied the social value of the different types of human 

 being. He has calculated that the average value to the 

 community of an Essex labourer s baby at birth is about 

 $, i.e. that moderate sum would be the present value 

 of the surplus of his production over his consumption 

 of wealth during an average life. A baby genius (or 

 even talent) would, of course, be worth buying up at many 

 thousands of pounds by an intelligent society, and the new 

 science of Eugenics has for its ultimate aim an increase in 

 the natural supply of such valuable infants. A baby 

 criminal, on the other hand, or idiot, or lunatic, or weakling, 

 or wastrel, clearly possesses only negative value for social 

 purposes. Such creatures are a dead loss to the com 

 munity, which has to keep up prisons, asylums and hospitals 

 for their sakes, and to employ judges, doctors, clergymen 

 and policemen to cope with them. Not only do they fail 

 to enrich the community by useful work, but they are a 

 heavy burden upon it, and probably have to be supported 

 for the greater part of their lives at the public expense. 

 Clearly, therefore, society would be better without them, 

 and if Science could prevent their birth, it would 

 unquestionably do so ; if it could detect them after 

 birth, it would extinguish them as speedily as possible. 

 No sentiment of pity or prejudice about justice and right 

 would impede its mercilessly reasonable calculations. 

 The darker the colours in which the wretchedness of the 

 &quot; Bottom Dog &quot; is painted the more urgent would become 

 the case for his scientific and systematic suppression. 



But would this conclusion commend itself either to 

 Mr. Blatchford or to his client ? Yet he comes very 



