402 Life and Letters of Francis Galton 



combined with a natural capacity and zeal for work. It would thus appear 

 that strenuousness is compounded of three or more simpler factors, and it is 

 needful to suppose that these are individually either linked or highly correlated. 

 My own investigations of school-children demonstrated that Health, Ability 

 and Athletic Power were certainly inherited. Hence a compound of these 

 would be so without doubt. Further, I found that these three factors were 

 themselves intercorrelated, if not so highly as each separately was correlated 

 in brothers*; thus it appears probable that strenuousness is an inheritable 

 quality. Galton contrasts the strenuous and slack communities in apt sentences 

 worth preserving : 



"A prosperous community is distinguished by the alertness of its members, by their busy 

 occupations, by their taking pleasure in their work, by their doing it thoroughly, and by an 

 honest pride in their community as a whole. The members of a decaying community are, for the 

 most part, languid and indolent ; their very gestures are dawdling and slouching, the opposite 

 of smart. They shirk work when they can do so, and scamp what they undertake. A prosperous 

 community is remarkable for the variety of the solid interests in which some or other of its 

 members are eagerly engaged, but the questions that agitate a decadent community are for the 

 most part of a frivolous order. Prosperous communities are also notable for enjoyment of life, 

 for though their members must work hard in order to procure the necessary luxuries of an 

 advanced civilisation, they are endowed with so large a store of energy that, when their daily 

 toil is over, enough of it remains unexpended to allow them to pursue their special hobbies during 

 the remainder of the day. In a decadent community, the men tire easily and soon sink into 

 drudgery; there is consequently much languor among them and little enjoyment of life." (pp.74-5.) 



Some of the critics of Eugenics have said that men of genius, who areso 

 valuable to a nation, are often epileptic, crippled or semi-insane; this is the old 

 fallacy of pointing to isolated exceptions, which prove the rule, when once we 

 have demonstrated how few such exceptions are. There is no link of Nature 

 which binds intellects of exceptional ability to sickness of body or mind ; and if 

 such a bond existed our first object as Eugenists would be to rupture the chain 

 and breed men noble in body as well as in mind. Shall we permit epileptics to 

 breed that another Napoleon may be given to mankind ? He may come soon 

 enough without that ! Shall we refuse to segregate morons f , because Byron 

 was a poet ? Dante and Goethe were not morons and were greater than he ! 

 Shall we cease to discourage the mating of the tuberculous, because Keats 

 was consumptive ? The outrooting of phthisis is of more importance to a 

 strenuous nation than even the possession of the man who wrote Hyperion I 

 Surely Galton has reached a truth when he tells us that to work for the 

 strengthening of our nation is higher philanthropy than we are wont to meet 

 with in the current and very restricted meaning of that word. The practice 

 of Eugenics is something greater than the practice of charity. Let us, he says 

 in conclusion, interest ourselves 



" in such families of civic worth as we come across, especially in those that are large, making 

 friends both with the parents and the children and showing ourselves disposed to help to 

 a reasonable degree, as opportunity may offer, whenever help is really needful." (p. 76.) 



* See " On the Relationship of Health to the Psychical and Physical Characters in School 

 Children," Drapers' Company Research Memoirs, Studies in National Deterioration, No. IV, 

 Cambridge UniversityTress. 



'^The accepted technical term for a mentally high grade abnormal person. 



