500 READINGS IN EVOLUTION, GENETICS, AND EUGENICS 



compassionate will fail to find objects for their compassion; but at 

 present the supply vastly exceeds the demand ; the land is over-stocked 

 and over-burdened with the listless and the incapable. In any scheme 

 of eugenics, energy is the most important quality to favor; it is, as we 

 have seen, the basis of living action, and it is eminently transmissible 

 by descent." 



Need it be pointed out that any political system which ceases to 

 favor or actively disfavors energy, making it as profitable to be lazy as 

 to be active, is antieugenic, and must inevitably lead to disaster ? 

 That, however, by the way. Our present point is that eugenics can 

 reasonably promise, when its principles are recognized, to multiply 

 the human and diminish the vegetable type in the community. In so 

 doing, it will greatly further the production of talent, and therefore 

 of that traditional or acquired progress which men of talent and 

 genius create. Such a result will also further, though indirectly, the 

 production of genius itself. For, as Mr. Galton points out, "men of an 

 order of ability which is now very rare, would become more frequent, 

 because the level out of which they rose would itself have risen." 



This is by no means the only fashion in which an effective and 

 practicable race-culture would serve genius, and I shall not be blamed 

 for considering this matter further by any reader who realizes, however 

 faintly, what the man of genius is worth to the world. If it were shown 

 possible to establish such social conditions that genius could never 

 flower in them, we should realize that their establishment would 

 mean the putting of an end to progress and the blasting of all the 

 highest hopes of the highest of all ages. 



The immediate need of this age, as of all ages, is perhaps not so 

 much the birth of babies capable of developing into men and women of 

 genius, as the full exploitation of the possibilities of genius with which, 

 as I fancy, every generation on the average is about as well endowed as 

 any other. There is, of course, the popular doctrine that there are no 

 mute inglorious Miltons, that "genius will out," and that therefore 

 if it does not appear, it is not there to appear. In expressing the com- 

 pelling power of genius in many cases this doctrine is not without 

 truth. Yet history abounds in instances where genius has been de- 

 stroyed by environment — and we can only guess how many more 

 instances there are of which history has no record. To take the single 

 case of musical genius, it is a lamentable thought that there may be 

 those now living whose natural endowments, in a favorable environ- 

 ment, would have enabled them to write symphonies fit to place 



