Alfred Russel Wallace 



on earth by the masses of the people. He had a large and 

 noble vision of their future. And he had his plan for their 

 immediate redemption — national ownership of the soil, better 

 housing, higher wages, certainty of employment, abolition of 

 preventable diseases, more leisure and wider education, not 

 merely for the practical work of obtaining a livelihood but to 

 enable them to enjoy art and literature and song. His oppo- 

 sition to Eugenics (to adopt the word introduced by Galton, 

 which Wallace called jargon) sprang from his idealism and 

 his love of the people, as well as from his scientific know- 

 ledge. On the social side he thought that Eugenics offered 

 less chance of a much-needed improvement of environment 

 than the social reforms which he advocated, whilst on the 

 scientific side he believed that the attempt, with our ex- 

 tremely limited knowledge, to breed men and women by 

 artificial selection was worse than folly. He feared that, as 

 he understood it. Eugenics would perpetuate class distinc- 

 tions, and postpone social reform, and afford quasi- scientific 

 excuses for keeping people '' in the positions Nature intended 

 them to occupy," a scientific reading of the more offensive 

 saying of those who, having plenty themselves, believe that 

 it is for the good of the lower classes to be dependent upon 

 others. " Clear up," he said to the present writer one day, 

 when we drifted into a warm discussion of the teachings of 

 Eugenists ; " change the environment so that all may have 

 an adequate opportunity of living a useful and happy life, 

 and give woman a free choice in marriage; and when that 

 has been going on for some generations you may be in a 

 better position to apply whatever has been discovered about 

 heredity and human breeding, and you may then know which 

 are the better stocks." 



" Segregation of the unfit," he remarked to an inter- 

 viewer after the Eugenic Conference, at which much was 

 unhappily said that wholly justified his caustic denuncia- 



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