The Ancestry of Francis Gallon 



61 



been born 1 Herein lies, we fear, all too certainly the key to that dearth 

 of exceptional ability which marks our own age. Herein lies also the 

 key to Francis Galton's demand that Eugenics should pass as rapidly as 

 possible from the laboratory to the market-place. 



In discussing his ancestry, we feel sure he would have allowed us 

 to draw a moral ; for he recognised fully that the modern principle of 

 small families applied to able stocks spelt disaster for the nation. One 

 able leader, inspirer and controller of men, is worth thousands of every- 

 day workers to the race. 



"I have no patience," wrote Francis Galton in 1869, "with the hypothesis occasion- 

 ally expressed, and often implied, especially in tales written to teach children to be good, 

 that babies are born pretty much alike, and that the sole agencies in creating differences 

 between boy and boy, and man and man, are steady application and moral effort. It 

 is in the most unqualified manner that I object to pretensions of natural equality." 



It is a hard doctrine for democracy, but the safety of the state lies 

 in its acceptance. 



Note to p. 46. The following characterisation of the Lunar Society from a letter 

 of Erasmus Darwin to Boulton is so excellent that it may be reproduced here : 



April bth, 1778. 

 Dear Boulton, 



I am sorry the infernal divinities wlio visit mankind with diseases, and are 

 therefore at perpetual war with doctors, should have prevented my seeing all your great 

 men at Soho to-day. Lord ! what inventions, what wit, what rhetoric, metaphysical, 

 mechanical, and pyrotechnical, will be on the wing, bandied like a shuttlecock from one 

 to another of your troup of philosophers, while poor I, I by my.self, I, imprison'd 

 in a post-chaise, am joggl'd, and bump'd, and bruised along the king's highroad to make 



war upon a stomach-ache or a fever 



Erasmus Darwin. 



Thus wrote the patriarch of the Society according to Dr Bolton, loc. cit. p. 49, ftn. 



