rst right of every human being is the
right of being well-born. This is the goal of all our struggles for
progress--it is the sole end worthy of them.

Let me try to make this clearer.

Reproduction carries life beyond the individual. Haeckel has said that
the process is nothing more than the growth of the organism beyond its
individual mass. But this process in the higher forms of life has
become exceedingly complex. All living beings are individual in one
respect and composite in another, for the inheritance of each
individual is a mosaic of ancestral contributions. Galton's _Law of
Inheritance_ makes this abundantly clear. Briefly stated, the law is
as follows: The two parents of each living being contribute _on the
average_ one-half of each inherited quality, each of them contributing
one-quarter of it. The four grand-parents furnish between them
one-quarter, or each of them one-sixteenth; and so on backwards
through past generations of ancestors. Now, though, of course, these
numbers are purely arbitrary, applying only to averages, and rarely
true exactly of individual cases, where the prepotency of any one
ancestor may, and often does, upset the balance of the contributions
made by the other ancestors, it may certainly be accepted as the most
probable theory that biology has given us to explain the difficult
problem of Nature--that is the inheritance we receive from our
ancestors.

We see that the heredity relation is an extremely complex affair. It
is not merely dual from the parents; but it is multiple, through them
reaching back to the grand-parents, great-grand-parents,
great-great-grand-parents, and so on backwards indefinitely. It is,
indeed, a mosaic of many, yes, of uncountable, contributions. The Life
Force gathering within itself these multiple sets of heredity
contributions is like capital ever growing at compound interest. The
importance of this is abundantly clear. For as we come to understand
the continuity of our inheritance from generation to generation we
realise more vividly how the past has a living hand on and in the
present, and how that present will be carried on to the future. We are
all links in the one mighty Chain of Life, and on us, and upon women
especially, rests a high responsibility. We must hand on our past
inheritance unimpaired, so that the new link forged by us may
strengthen and not weaken the chain. It is the duty of every woman as
a potential mother of men to choose a fitt