THE PROMISE OF RACE CULTURE 503 
half a million children are involved in the total of the wastage of child- 
life and the torture and neglect of child-life in a single year.” Surely 
Mr. G. R. Sims, to whom I would offer a hearty tribute for his recent 
services to childhood, is justified in saying, ‘Against the guilt of race 
suicide our men of science are everywhere preaching their sermons 
to-day. It is against the guilt of race murder that the cry of the 
children should ring through the land.” As regards race suicide and 
the men of science, I am not so sure as to theassertion. But the truth 
of the second sentence quoted is as indisputable as it is horrible. 
Now no legislation conceivable will wholly cure this evil nor avert 
its consequences. At bottom it depends upon human nature, and 
you can cure it only by curing the defect of human nature. This, in 
general, is of course beyond the immediate powers of man, but evi- 
dently we should gain the same end if only we could confine the advent 
of children to those parents who desired them—that is to say, those in 
whom human nature displayed the first, if not indeed almost the only, 
requisite for the happiness of childhood. To this most beneficent 
and wholly moral end we shall come, notwithstanding the blind and 
pitiable guidance of most of our accredited moral teachers today. By 
no other means than the realization of the ideal defined, that every 
new baby shall be loved and desired in anticipation—an ideal which is 
perfectly practicable—can the black stain of child murder and child 
torture and child neglect be removed from our civilization. 
Ruskin and race-culture.—The name of Ruskin, perhaps, would 
not occur to the reader as likely to afford support to the fair hopes of 
the eugenist. Consider then, these words from Time and Tide: 
“You leave your marriages to be settled by supply and demand, 
instead of wholesome law. And thus, among your youths and maid- 
ens, the improvident, incontinent, selfish, and foolish ones marry, 
whether you will or not; and beget families of children necessarily 
inheritors in a great degree of these parental dispositions; and for 
whom, supposing they had the best dispositions in the world, you have 
thus provided, by way of educators, the foolishest fathers and mothers 
you could find; (the only rational sentence in their letters, usually, is 
the invariable one, in which they declare themselves ‘incapable of 
providing for their children’s education’). On the other hand, who- 
soever is wise, patient, unselfish, and pure among your youth, you 
keep maid or bachelor; wasting their best days of natural life in pain- 
ful sacrifice, forbidding them their best help and best reward, and care- 
fully excluding their prudence and tenderness from any offices of 
