vi Preface 



The farther aspect of the matter lies in the opinion I have formed of what 

 Galton's influence will be upon the future. Even since his death I see what 

 strides in public acceptance the doctrine he preached has made. The dominant 

 race of the future, the leading nation of civilisation, will not be the one with 

 the greatest material resources, nay, not even the one with the greatest 

 wealth of tradition; it will be the one which can claim to have the finest 

 breed of men and women, physically and mentally. Civilisation has gained 

 nothing from rivalry in destructive warfare; it can gain enormously from 

 the rivalry of nations in rearing their future generations from the most 

 efficient of their citizens. Galton was the first to realise this great truth, to 

 preach it as a moral code, and to lay the foundations of the new science which 

 it demands of man. In the centuries to come, when the principles of Eugenics 

 shall be commonplaces of social conduct and of politics, men, whatever their 

 race, will desire to know all that is knowable about one of the greatest, 

 perhaps the greatest scientist of the nineteenth century. I have endeavoured 

 to put together many things of which the knowledge in another fifty years will 

 have perished, or not improbably the documents on which that knowledge 

 could be based will be distributed in many directions. I have to the extent of 

 my judgment and powers given an account of Galton's scientific work and 

 of his social ideas, so that all that is essential to an appreciation of his labour 

 and thought will be found in these volumes without the need for continual 

 reference to widely scattered papers, and in the future to still more widely 

 scattered letters. 



With regard to Francis Galton's letters a word must be said here. I owe 

 a deep debt of thanks to his relatives and friends for the immense mass of 

 correspondence which has been placed at my disposal. Galton's own letters 

 cover a period of at least eighty-five years, and the family letters stretch 

 over a century. During that time profound changes have taken place in the 

 manner of thought and in the habits of the dwellers in this country, and 

 nothing can illustrate these changes better than the letters interchanged 

 between the members, old and young, of a large family. We learn from such 

 a century of letters much of the social history of our own country. We pass 

 from an age when people travelled on horseback or in coaches to an epoch of 

 aeroplanes and motor-boats; we note that it was once an open question 

 whether it was wiser to invest in canal or railway shares, and we trace the 

 changes from private to joint-stock banks. We see brought forcibly before 

 us the passage from sail to steam ; and — as the chief interest — we grasp how 

 this evolution influenced the minds of those who were spectators of it. This 

 century of Galton family letters would in the future be of high value to the 

 social historian of our country, and it is with grief that I think of its disper- 

 sion. In a biography like the present there is small excuse for publishing 

 letters which do not directly bear on the characterisation of its subject, but 

 in picking out for publication letters from the many placed at my disposal 

 my delight in social history may have occasionally led me to err in choosing 

 letters which depict Galton's family environment even more significantly 

 than they illustrate his keen affection for four generations of his kinsfolk. 



