614 THE CONTROL OF LIFE: 



the survival of types who are a source of weakness to human 

 society. Hygienic endeavours which interfere with indis- 

 criminate elimination — as in the case of much infantile 

 mortality — may be pushed on unhesitatingly. 



(2) As things are, there ought to be no question of drastic 

 social surgery or of accepting Plato's proposals for the purga- 

 tion of the state. For, on the one hand, we do not know 

 enough to go far with safety, and, on the other hand, we are 

 forbidden by the social sentiment of the most moralised 

 types. What can be done is to work back to the old and 

 wholesome pride of race, and to work away from whatever 

 tends to encourage the multiplication of the diseased and the 

 unwholesome. For a long time to come reformers will have 

 enough to do along negative lines, — in seeking to prevent the 

 spoiling of good stock with bad. Much may also be achieved 

 by educating public opinion, replacing baseless prejudices by 

 convictions founded on facts. It is not in the 20th cen- 

 tury too much to ask that the quaint lists of forbidden 

 degrees which used to be prefixed to copies of the Scriptures 

 should be replaced by sound eugenic information. 



(3) The commonplace must be borne in mind that man 

 is a social person, and that what is biologically commendable 

 may be socially disruptive. Many of those who are seriously 

 handicapped by inheritance, and who ought not to be en- 

 couraged to have offspring, are in other respects valuable 

 citizens. Many of the weaklings whom the social surgeon 

 threatens are strong in spirit. As poets and artists, reform- 

 ers and preachers, many of the weaklings have been among 

 the " makers and shakers " of the world. 



A useful office is the careful criticism of all the methods 

 of discriminate elimination — whether deliberate or not — 

 that are at work in mankind. Some economists have wisely 



