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nydus/The Task of Social HygienePublic
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Table of Contents

INDIVIDUALISM AND SOCIALISM

quantity, begins to be seen, not merely as a noble ideal in itself, but as the only method by which Socialism can be enabled to continue on its present path. If the entry into life is conceded more freely to the weak, the incompetent, and the defective than to the strong, the efficient, and the sane, then a Sisyphean task is imposed on society; for every burden lifted two more burdens appear. But as individual responsibility becomes developed, as we approach the time to which Galton looked forward, when the eugenic care for the race may become a religion, then social control over the facts of life becomes possible. Through the slow growth of knowledge concerning hereditary conditions, by voluntary self-restraint, by the final disappearance of the lingering prejudice against the control of procreation, by sterilization in special cases, by methods of pressure which need not amount to actual compulsion,12 it will be possible to attain an increasingly firm grip on the evil elements of heredity. Not until such measures as these, under the controlling influence of a sense of personal responsibility extending to every member of the community, have long been put into practice, can we hope to see man on the earth risen to his full stature, healthy in body, noble in spirit, beautiful in both alike, moving spaciously and harmoniously among his fellows in the great world of Nature, to which he is so subtly adapted because he has himself sprung out of it and is its most exquisite flower. At this final point social hygiene becomes one with the hygiene of the soul.13

Poets and prophets, from Jesus and Paul to Novalis and Whitman, have seen the divine possibilities of Man. There is no temple in the world, they seem to say, so great as the human body; he comes in contact with Heaven, they declare, who touches a human person. But these human things, made to be gods, have spawned like frogs over all the earth. Everywhere they have beslimed its purity and befouled its beauty,

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