of acute and catastrophic miseries, it
cannot, if it would, strike at the radical causes of social misery. At
its worst, it is sentimental and paternalistic.

(2) Marxian Socialism: This may be considered typical of many widely
varying schemes of more or less revolutionary social reconstruction,
emphasizing the primary importance of environment, education, equal
opportunity, and health, in the elimination of the conditions (i. e.
capitalistic control of industry) which have resulted in biological
chaos and human waste. I shall attempt to show that the Marxian doctrine
is both too limited, too superficial and too fragmentary in its
basic analysis of human nature and in its program of revolutionary
reconstruction.

(3) Eugenics: Eugenics seems to me to be valuable in its critical and
diagnostic aspects, in emphasizing the danger of irresponsible and
uncontrolled fertility of the "unfit" and the feeble-minded establishing
a progressive unbalance in human society and lowering the birth-rate
among the "fit." But in its so-called "constructive" aspect, in seeking
to reestablish the dominance of healthy strain over the unhealthy, by
urging an increased birth-rate among the fit, the Eugenists really offer
nothing more farsighted than a "cradle competition" between the fit
and the unfit. They suggest in very truth, that all intelligent and
respectable parents should take as their example in this grave matter of
child-bearing the most irresponsible elements in the community.

(1) United States Public Health Service: Psychiatric
Studies of Delinquents. Reprint No. 598: pp. 64-65.

(2) The Problem of the Feeble-Minded: An Abstract of the
Report of the Royal Commission on the Cure and Control of
the Feeble-Minded, London: P. S. King & Son.

(3) Cf. Feeble-Minded in Ontario: Fourteenth Report for
the year ending October 31st, 1919.

(4) Eugenics Review, Vol. XIII, p. 339 et seq.

(5) Dwellers in the Vale of Siddem: A True Story of the
Social Aspect of Feeble-mindedness. By A. C. Rogers and
Maud A. Merrill; Boston (1919).

CHAPTER V: The Cruelty of Charity

"Fostering the good-for-nothing at the expense of the
good is an extreme cruelty. It is a deliberate storing
up of miseries for future generations. There is no greater
curse to posterity than that of bequeathing them an increasing
population of imbeciles."

Herber