28 PRESIDENT’S ADDRESS. 
they stand as the very type of a polymorphic species. Even most of 
our local races consist of many distinct strains and individual types. 
From the population of any ordinary English town as many distinct 
human breeds could in a few generations be isolated as there are now 
breeds of dogs, and indeed such a population in its present state is 
much what the dogs of Kurope would be in ten years’ time but for the 
interference of the fanciers. ven as at present constituted, owing 
to the isolating effects of instinct, fashion, occupation, and social class, 
many incipient strains already exist. 
In one respect civilised man differs from all other species of animal 
or plant in that, having prodigious and ever-increasing power over 
nature, he invokes these powers for the preservation and maintenance 
of many of the inferior and all the defective members of his species. 
The inferior freely multiply, and the defective, if their defects be not 
so grave as to lead to their detention in prisons or asylums, multiply 
also without restraint. Heredity being strict in its action, the conse- 
quences are in civilised countries much what they would be in the 
kennels of the dog-breeder who continued to preserve all his puppies, 
good and bad: the proportion of defectives increases. The increase is 
so considerable that outside every great city there is a smaller town 
inhabited by defectives and those who wait on them. Round London 
we have a ring of such towns with some 30,000 inhabitants, of whom 
about 28,000 are defective, largely, though of course by no means 
entirely, bred from previous generations of defectives. Now, it is not 
for us to consider practical measures. As men of science we observe 
natural events and deduce conclusions from them. I may perhaps be 
allowed to say that the remedies proposed in America, in so far as they 
aim at the eugenic regulation of marriage on a comprehensive scale, 
strike me as devised without regard to the needs either of individuals 
or of a modern State. Undoubtedly if they decide to breed their 
population of one uniform puritan grey, they can do it in a few 
generations; but I doubt if timid respectability will make a nation 
happy, and I am sure that qualities of a different sort are needed if it 
is to compete with more vigorous and more varied communities. 
Everyone must have a preliminary sympathy with the aims of eugenists 
both abroad and at home. Their efforts at the least are doing some- 
thing to discover and spread truth as to the physiological structure of 
society. The spirit of such organisations, however, almost of 
necessity suffers from a bias towards the accepted and the ordinary, 
and if they had power it would go hard with many ingredients of 
Society that could be ill-spared. I notice an ominous passage in which 
even Galton, the founder of eugenics, feeling perhaps some twinge of 
his Quaker ancestry, remarks that ‘ as the Bohemianism in the nature 
of our race is destined to perish, the sooner it goes, the happier for 
