account of public opinion not being ripe to receive it in the proposed form, or through a discovered flaw in some non-essential part of it. Experience shows that the safest course in a new undertaking is to proceed warily and tentatively towards the desired end, rather than freely and rashly along a predetermined route, however carefully it may have been elaborated on paper.
Again, whatever scheme of action is proposed for adoption must be neither Utopian nor extravagant, but accordant throughout with British sentiment and practice.
The successful establishment of any general system of constructive eugenics will, in my view (which I put forward with diffidence), depend largely upon the efforts of local associations acting in close harmony with a central society, like our own. A prominent part of its business will then consist in affording opportunities for the interchange of ideas and for the registration and comparison of results. Such a central society would tend to bring about a general uniformity of administration the value of which is so obvious that I do not stop to insist on it.
Assuming, as I do, that the powers at the command of the local associations will be almost purely social, let us consider how those associations might be formed and conducted so as to become exceedingly influential.
It is necessary to be somewhat precise at the outset, so I will begin with the by no means improbable supposition that in a given district a few individuals, some of them of local importance, are keenly desirous of starting a local association or society, and are prepared to take trouble to that end. How should they set to work?
Their initial step would seem to be to form themselves into a provisional executive committee, and to nominate a president, council, and other officers of the new society. This done, the society in question, though it would have no legal corporate existence, may be taken as formed.