worth and the endowment of inferiority and incompetence. Eugenists can feel no sympathy for a doctrine which is so completely at variance with the facts of human nature.
But if it is admitted that men differ widely, and always must differ, in ability and worth, then eugenics can be in accord with the socialistic desire for distribution of wealth according to merit, for this will make it possible to favor and help perpetuate the valuable strains in the community and to discourage the inferior strains. T. N. Carver sums up the argument60 concisely:
"Distribution according to worth, usefulness or service is the system which would most facilitate the progress of human adaptation. It would, in the first place, stimulate each individual by an appeal to his own self-interest, to make himself as useful as possible to the community. In the second place, it would leave him perfectly free to labor in the service of the community for altruistic reasons, if there was any altruism in his nature. In the third place it would exercise a beneficial selective influence upon the stock or race, because the useful members would survive and perpetuate their kind and the useless and criminal members would be exterminated."
In so far as socialists rid themselves of their sentimental and Utopian equalitarianism, the eugenist will join them willingly in a demand that the distribution of wealth be made to depend as far as feasible on the value of the individual to society.61 As to the means by which this distribution can be made, there will of course be differences of opinion, to discuss which would be outside the province of this volume. Fundamentally, eugenics is anti-individualistic and in so far a socialistic movement, since it seeks a social end involving some degree of individual subordination, and this fact would