the Oneida Community, as it was originally
planned, or the Parisian society of _L'Elite_--in both of which the
selection of mates was to be carefully controlled--or some of the
fantasies of Bernard Shaw, to indicate the character of these
failures. Only recently have we become able to suggest the possibility
of race improvement by scientific methods, and only very recently has
the possibility appeared in the light of a necessity, the alternative
being the universal reward of the unsuccessful.

The present eugenic movement may be said to date from 1865 when
Francis Galton showed that mental qualities are inherited just as are
physical qualities, and pointed out that this opened the way to an
improvement of the race in all respects. The data in support of this
pregnant conclusion were included in Galton's work on "Hereditary
Genius" published in 1869, when he again emphasized definitely the
possibility and desirability of improving the natural qualities of the
human race. His suggestions fell upon the stony ground of ignorance
even of the most elementary facts of heredity. The subject was raised
again in his "Inquiries into the Human Faculty" in 1883, and the word
"Eugenics" was then coined. The ground was still non-receptive.

Then followed a period of rapid increase in our knowledge of heredity
in animals and plants and in 1901 Galton returned again to the
subject, this time in a more direct and elaborate way, and his Huxley
Lecture of that year before the Anthropological Institute was upon
"The Possible Improvement of the Human Breed under the Existing
Conditions of Law and Sentiment." This time he received a real
hearing, partly on account of recent disclosures regarding the state
of human society and its trends in Great Britain, chiefly because
there was at last a real scientific basis for such a proposal. In this
lecture, after declaring that the possibility of human race culture is
no longer to be considered an academical or impractical problem,
Galton proceeded to show that we have a sufficient biological
knowledge of man to furnish a working basis. We know of man's
variability and heredity--that some men are worth more than others in
the community, and that individual traits are also family possessions.
This he followed up with definite suggestions as to possible means of
the "augmentation of favored stock."

The then recently organized Sociological Society of London took up the
subject enthusiastically, and