abandoning that rule, as we have been forced to do, are we not left free to seek that our children, though few, should be at all events fit, the finest, alike in physical and psychical constitution, that the world has seen?
Thus has come about the recent expansion of that conception of Eugenics, or the science and art of Good Breeding in the human race, which a group of workers, pioneered by Francis Galton 2—at first in England and later in America, Germany and elsewhere—have been developing for some years past. Eugenics is beginning to be felt to possess a living actuality which it failed to
possess before. Instead of being a benevolent scientific fad it begins to present itself as the goal to which we are inevitably moving.
The cause of Eugenics has sometimes been prejudiced in the public mind by a comparison with the artificial breeding of domestic animals.
In reality the two things are altogether different.
In breeding animals a higher race of beings manipulates a lower race with the object of securing definite points that are of no use whatever to the animals themselves, but of considerable value to the breeders.
In our own race, on the other hand, the problem of breeding is presented in an entirely different shape. There is as yet no race of super-men who are prepared to breed man for their own special ends. As things are, even if we had the ability and the power, we should surely hesitate before we bred men and women as we breed dogs or fowls.
We may, therefore, quite put aside all discussion of eugenics as a sort of higher cattle-breeding. It would be undesirable, even if it were not impracticable.
But there is another aspect of Eugenics. Human eugenics need not be, and is not likely to be, a cold-blooded selection of partners by some