THK CAVKNDISH LKCTUKK 27 



mental doctrint the principle that everyone, being born, has the 

 right to live, but the right to live does not in itself convey the 

 right to everyone to reproduce their kind. 



Our social instincts, our common humanity enforce upon us 

 the conception that each person born has the right to live, yet 

 this right essentially connotes a suspension of the full intensity of 

 natural selection. Darwinism and medical progress are opposed 

 forces, and we shall gain nothing by screening that fact, or, in 

 opposition to ample evidence, asserting that Darwinism has no 

 application to civilised man. 



It is here, at this opposition of Darwinism and medical pro- 

 gress, that eugenics seem to provide a key to the situation. As 

 eugenists we assert that the right to live does not connote the right 

 of each man to reproduce his kind. Step by step, as we lessen the 



G-CNCRAL DcGCNERACr 



© Menially defective I ' I 1 



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Q Osleo-arlhritcs 



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1(1. + l^ied in infancy 



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V 9 9 O 0+ The Treasury of Human Inheritance 



Fig. 16. — Mr. Bishop Harman's case of the intermarriage of degenerate 

 stocks and the propagation of multiple degeneracies. 



stringency of natural selection, and more and more of the weak- 

 lings and the unfit survive, we must increase the standard, mental 

 and physical, of parentage. We must say to the diseased and 

 the deformed, to the syphilitic, the epileptic, the feeble-minded 

 and the insane, " Medical progress must do all in its power to make 

 your life easier, but you have no right to be the parents of the 

 coming generation whenever and wherever heredity or contact 

 insures that even a sensible percentage of your offspring will be 

 themselved deformed or diseased." I shall be told that men of 

 genius have occasionally had an insane parentage. My answer to 

 that is that the average number of insane offspring of an insane 

 parentage is about 25 per cent., and that when we follow these 

 families of the in.sane up to fifty years of age it is more nearly 40 per • 

 cent. Are we for the sake of a genius once in a century to inflict 



