228 BIOLOGY OF DEATH 



genetics was sufficiently ample and profound to make it 

 possible to make a racial germ-plasm exactly whatever 

 one pleased; what individual or group of individuals 

 could possibly be trusted to decide what it should be? 

 Doubtless many persons of uplifting tendencies would 

 promptly come forward prepared to undertake such a 

 responsibility. But what of history? If it teaches us 

 anything, it is that social, moral and political standards 

 are not fixed and absolute, but vary, and vary radically 

 in both space and time. And further, history teaches 

 that a great many of the most valuable people, in the 

 highest and best sense, whom the world has ever known, 

 were so constituted, physically, morally) or otherwise, 

 as to make it certain that under a strict eugenic regime 

 they never would have existed at all. One cannot but 

 feel that man's instinctive wariness about experimental 

 interferences with his germ-plasm is in considerable 

 degree, well-f a;unded. 



But because of the altogether more impersonal na- 

 ture of the case, most men individually and society in 

 general are perfectly willing to let anybody do anything 

 they like in the direction of modifying the environment in 

 what is believed, or hoped to be, the direction of improve- 

 ment, or trying to, quite regardless of whether science 

 is able to give any slightest inkling on the basis of ascer- 

 tained facts as to whether the outcome will be good, bad 

 or indifferent. Hence many kinds of weird activities and 

 propaganda flourish like the proverbial bay tree. 



Of all organized activities looking towards the direct 

 modification of the environment to the benefit of mankind, 

 that group comprised under the terms sanitation, hygiene 



