ely for the practical work of obtaining a livelihood
but to enable them to enjoy art and literature and song. His opposition
to Eugenics (to adopt the word introduced by Galton, which Wallace
called jargon) sprang from his idealism and his love of the people, as
well as from his scientific knowledge. On the social side he thought
that Eugenics offered less chance of a much-needed improvement of
environment than the social reforms which he advocated, whilst on the
scientific side he believed that the attempt, with our extremely limited
knowledge, to breed men and women by artificial selection was worse than
folly. He feared that, as he understood it, Eugenics would perpetuate
class distinctions, and postpone social reform, and afford
quasi-scientific excuses for keeping people "in the positions Nature
intended them to occupy," a scientific reading of the more offensive
saying of those who, having plenty themselves, believe that it is for
the good of the lower classes to be dependent upon others. "Clear up,"
he said to the present writer one day, when we drifted into a warm
discussion of the teachings of Eugenists; "change the environment so
that all may have an adequate opportunity of living a useful and happy
life, and give woman a free choke in marriage; and when that has been
going on for some generations you may be in a better position to apply
whatever has been discovered about heredity and human breeding, and you
may then know which are the better stocks."

"Segregation of the unfit," he remarked to an interviewer after the
Eugenic Conference, at which much was unhappily said that wholly
justified his caustic denunciation, "is a mere excuse for establishing
a medical tyranny. And we have enough of this kind of tyranny already
... the world does not want the eugenist to set it straight.... Eugenics
is simply the meddlesome interference of an arrogant scientific
priestcraft."

Thus his radicalism and his so-called fads were born of his high
aspirations. He was not the recluse calmly spinning theories from a
bewildering chaos of observations, and building up isolated facts into
the unity of a great and illuminating conception in the silence and
solitude of his library, unmindful of the great world of sin and sorrow
without. He could say with Darwin, "I was born a naturalist"; but we can
add that his heart was on fire with love for the toiling masses. He had
felt the intense joy of discovering a vast and splendid gene