defray the cost of direct
State experiments, and provide inducements to private persons to achieve
successful results. It may mean a private society or a chartered
company for the improvement of human live stock. But for the present it
is far more likely to mean a blatant repudiation of such proposals as
indecent and immoral, with, nevertheless, a general secret pushing of
the human will in the repudiated direction; so that all sorts of
institutions and public authorities will under some pretext or other
feel their way furtively towards the Superman. Mr Graham Wallas has
already ventured to suggest, as Chairman of the School Management
Committee of the London School Board, that the accepted policy of the
Sterilization of the Schoolmistress, however administratively
convenient, is open to criticism from the national stock-breeding point
of view; and this is as good an example as any of the way in which the
drift towards the Superman may operate in spite of all our hypocrisies.
One thing at least is clear to begin with. If a woman can, by careful
selection of a father, and nourishment of herself, produce a citizen
with efficient senses, sound organs, and a good digestion, she should
clearly be secured a sufficient reward for that natural service to make
her willing to undertake and repeat it. Whether she be financed in the
undertaking by herself, or by the father, or by a speculative
capitalist, or by a new department of, say, the Royal Dublin Society, or
(as at present) by the War Office maintaining her "on the strength" and
authorizing a particular soldier to marry her, or by a local authority
under a by-law directing that women may under certain circumstances have
a year's leave of absence on full salary, or by the central government,
does not matter provided the result be satisfactory.

It is a melancholy fact that as the vast majority of women and their
husbands have, under existing circumstances, not enough nourishment, no
capital, no credit, and no knowledge of science or business, they would,
if the State would pay for birth as it now pays for death, be exploited
by joint stock companies for dividends, just as they are in ordinary
industries. Even a joint stock human stud farm (piously disguised as a
reformed Foundling Hospital or something of that sort) might well, under
proper inspection and regulation, produce better results than our
present reliance on promiscuous marriage. It may be objected that when