HERMANN J. MULLER 
being a conscious participant in the great human enterprise 
and find genuine fulfilment in playing a constructive part in 
it, he will fall into the position of an ever less important cog in 
a vast machine. In this situation, his own powers of determining 
his fate and his very will to do so will dwindle, and the minority 
who rule over him will eventually find ways of doing without 
him. Democratic control, therefore, implies an upgrading of 
the people in general in both their intellectual and social 
faculties, together with a maintenance or, preferably, an im- 
provement in their bodily condition. 
PROPOSED WAYS OUT OF THE PREDICAMENT 
Most eugenists of the old school believed they could educate 
the population so as to lead the better endowed to have larger 
than average families and the more poorly endowed to have 
smaller ones. However, people are notoriously unrealistic in 
assessing themselves and their spouses. Moreover, the deter- 
mination of the size of a family is, as we have seen, subject to 
strong influences that tend to run counter to the desiderata of 
eugenics. In view of this social naiveté on the part of the euge- 
nists in general, as well as the offensively reactionary attitude 
flaunted by that vociferous group of eugenists who were actuated 
by race and class prejudices, it is not surprising that some three- 
quarters of a century of old-style eugenics propaganda has 
resulted in so little actual practice of eugenic principles by 
people in general. 
It is true that heredity clinics have recently made some head- 
way and are in themselves highly commendable. However, the 
matter of choice of marriage partners, with which they concern 
themselves so much, has little relation to the eugenically crucial 
matter of gene frequencies. And so far as their advice concerning 
size of family is concerned, it is for the most part confined 
to considerations arising from the presence of a gene for some 
rare abnormality. For any individual case such a matter is of 
grave importance. Yet for the eugenic pattern as a whole the 
sum of all such cases is insignificant in relation to the major 
task of achieving a high correlation between the over-all genetic 
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