THE PROMISE OF RACE CULTURE 501 
beside Beethoven’s, but whom some environmental factors—conven- 
tional, economic, educational, or what not—have silenced; or worse, 
have persuaded to write such sterile nullities as need not here be 
instanced. There is surely no waste in all this wasteful world so 
lamentable as this waste of genius. 
If, then, anyone could devise for us a means by which the genius, 
potentially existing at any time, were realized, he would have per- 
formed in effect a service equivalent to that of which eugenics repudi- 
ates the present possibility—the actual creation of genius. But if we 
consider what the conditions are which cause the waste of genius, we 
realize at once that they mainly inhere in the level of the human 
environment of the priceless potentiality in question. As we noted 
elsewhere, in an age like that of Pericles genius springs up on all hands. 
It is encouraged and welcomed because the average level of the human 
environment in which it finds itself is so high. But if eugenics can 
raise the average level of intelligence, in so doing not merely does it 
render more likely, as Mr. Galton points out, the production of men of 
the highest ability, but it provides those conditions in which men of 
genius, now swamped, can swim. Wecould not undertake to produce 
a Shakespeare, but we might reasonably hope to produce a generation 
which would not destroy its Shakespeares. And even if men of genius 
still found it necessary, as men of genius have found it necessary, to 
“‘play to the gallery,” they would play, as Mr. Galton says of the 
demagogue in a eugenic age, “‘to a more sensible gallery than at 
present.” 
Darwin somewhere points out that it is not the scientific, but the 
unscientific man who denies future possibilities. Thus though an 
advocate of eugenics may be applauded for his judgment if he declares 
that the creation of genius will forever be impossible, yet I should not 
care to assert that the ultimate limitations of eugenics can thus be 
defined. We have yet to hear the last of Mendelism. 
Eugenics and unemployment.—Let us look now at another aspect 
of the promise of race-culture. When the time comes that quality 
rather than quantity is the ideal of those who concern themselves with 
the population question, it is quite evident that not a few of the social 
problems which we now find utterly insoluble will disappear. In 
this brief outline, we can only allude to one or two points. Take, for 
instance, the question of unemployment. We know that some by no 
means small proportion of the unemployed were really destined to be 
unemployable from the first, as for instance by reason of hereditary 
