ATTITUDES TOWARD HUMAN NATURE 19 



tion by the careerists, prove themselves the weak links in the 

 chain of co-operation with an equal opportunity for all, that is the 



: democratic ideal? In what does the equality or inequality of men 

 consist? Just what are the qualities necessary for successful 

 competition, or if you will, co-living, of man with his fellow-men, 

 and how and why do they operate? No freedom, independent 

 of the servile repetitions of history and heredity, is conceivable 



I until these inquiries have been elaborately carried out toward a 

 certain working finality. 



The Promises of Eugenics 



There are, to be sure, the claims and assertions and negative 

 i achievements of the youngest of the sciences, eugenics. They 

 are invincible optimists, the eugenists: it is perhaps a case of a 

 ! virtue born of necessity. Thus Francis Galton, in the preface 

 \ to the "Bible of Eugenics," his essays on Hereditary Genius, de- 

 ; clares: "There is nothing either in the history of domestic animals 

 [ or in that of evolution to make us doubt that a race of sane men 

 may be formed who shall be as much superior, mentally and 

 morally, to the Modern European, as the Modern European is to 

 j the lowest of the Negro races." High hopes beat in this declara- 

 tion. But Galton could not have foreseen that the signing of a 

 scrap of paper by one of the Modern Europeans would let loose 

 all the other Modern Europeans in a pandemonium of horrors 

 | the lowest of the Negro races could not but envy as a master- 

 | piece of its kind. It seemed to be suspiciously easy for him to 

 j| accept an excuse to slide down the dizzy height he had climbed 

 f from the African level. 



The eugenists would put their trust in the encouraged breeding 

 of the best and the compulsory sterility of the rest. But what is 

 the best, and who are the best, and where will you find them when 

 they are not inextricably emulsified with the worst? It's a long, 

 long way to the day of a segregating out and in of Mendelian 

 unit-characters. Besides, this is a strange world of choices. No- 

 body is to be considered worthy of parenthood until he has fallen 

 in love properly. Nobody who would permit an outsider's deci- 

 sion as to when he was properly in love would be worth thirty 

 cents as a parent. There is the ultimate dilemma of the eugenist 

 — the dilemma which destroys forever the dream of a control of 

 parenthood from the point of view of merely psychic values. 



