500 READINGS IN EVOLUTION, GENETICS, AND EUGENICS 
compassionate will fail to find objects for their compassion; but at 
present the supply vastly exceeds the demand; the land is over-stocked 
and over-burdened with the listless and the incapable. In any scheme 
of eugenics, energy is the most important quality to favor; it is,as we 
have seen, the basis of living action, and it is eminently transmissible 
by descent.” 
Need it be pointed out that any political system which ceases to 
favor or actively disfavors energy, making it as profitable to be lazy as 
to be active, is antieugenic, and must inevitably lead to disaster ? 
That, however, by the way. Our present point is that eugenics can 
reasonably promise, when its principles are recognized, to multiply 
the human and diminish the vegetable type in the community. In so 
doing, it will greatly further the production of talent, and therefore 
of that traditional or acquired progress which men of talent and 
genius create. Such a result will also further, though indirectly, the 
production of geniusitself. For, as Mr. Galton points out, “‘men of an 
order of ability which is now very rare, would become more frequent, 
because the level out of which they rose would itself have risen.” 
This is by no means the only fashion in which an effective and 
practicable race-culture would serve genius, and I shall not be blamed 
for considering this matter further by any reader who realizes, however 
faintly, what the man of genius is worth to the world. Ifit were shown 
possible to establish such social conditions that genius could never 
flower in them, we should realize that their establishment would 
mean the putting of an end to progress and the blasting of all the 
highest hopes of the highest of all ages. 
The immediate need of this age, as of all ages, is perhaps not so 
much the birth of babies capable of developing into men and women of 
genius, as the full exploitation of the possibilities of genius with which, 
as I fancy, every generation on the average is about as well endowed as 
any other. There is, of course, the popular doctrine that there are no 
mute inglorious Miltons, that “genius will out,” and that therefore 
if it does not appear, it is not there to appear. In expressing the com- 
pelling power of genius in many cases this doctrine is not without 
truth. Yet history abounds in instances where genius has been de- 
stroyed by environment—and we can only guess how many more 
instances there are of which history has no record. To take the single 
case of musical genius, it is a lamentable thought that there may be 
those now living whose natural endowments, in a favorable environ- 
ment, would have enabled them to write symphonies fit to place 
