sk whether such
a rule of life is one under which any one of us would like to live. In
every respect it is the antipodes of the Christian rule of life, and of
that rule of life which civilised countries, whether in fact Christian
or not, have derived from Christianity and still practise. The
non-Christian rule of the Indians is one under which might is right and
no real individual liberty exists, all personal rights being sacrificed
to the supposed needs and benefit of the community.

So much from the point of view of Natural Selection, but it would appear
that those who have given up that factor as of anything but a very minor
value, if even that, have also their rule of life founded on their
interpretation of Nature. Thus Professor Bateson, the great exponent of
Mendel's doctrines, who has told us in his Presidential Address to the
British Association that we must think much less highly of Natural
Selection than some would have us do, has, as has been set forth in the
previous section of this essay, his opinion as to the rule of life which
we should follow.

Professor Conklyn, an American enthusiast for extreme eugenistic views,
has also set down in print his ideas as to the lines on which our lives
are to be run under a scientific domination, and these are to be dealt
with in another article.[20] His scheme entails a forcible visit, not,
it may be supposed, to the Altar, but to the Registry Office, for all
persons held to be fit to perpetuate the race, and forcible restraint,
whether by imprisonment or by sterilisation, for all others.

The first thing which all these essays towards a scientific conduct of
life reveal is a total want of perspective, for they proceed on the
hypothesis--which no doubt their authors would defend--that this world
and its concerns are everything, and that the intellectual and physical
improvement of the human race by any measures, however harsh, is the
"one thing needful." But beyond this the persons who hold such views
seem to have entirely overlooked the fact that their proposed State
would be one conducted on principles of the bitterest and most galling
slavery imaginable by the mind of man, a form of slavery that never
could persist if for a moment it be conceded that it could ever come
into operation. The fact is that the whole thing is ludicrous when
looked at from the point of view of common sense, but how few take the
trouble to contemplate these schemes as they would be in oper