it sets up no one standard to which it would make the human race conform. Taking man as it finds him, it proposes to multiply all the types that have been found by past experience or present reason to be of most value to society. Not only would it multiply them in numbers, but also in efficiency, in capacity to serve the race.
By so doing, it undoubtedly fulfills the requirements of that popular philosophy which holds the aim of society to be the greatest happiness for the greatest number, or more definitely the increase of the totality of human happiness. To cause not to exist those who would be doomed from birth to give only unhappiness to themselves and those about them; to increase the number of those in whom useful physical and mental traits are well developed; to bring about an increase in the number of energetic altruists and a decrease in the number of the anti-social or defective; surely such an undertaking will come nearer to increasing the happiness of the greatest number, than will any temporary social palliative, any ointment for incurable social wounds. To those who accept that philosophy, made prominent by Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, and a host of other great thinkers, eugenics rightly understood must seem a prime necessity of society.