l life, but constitute a subtle poison working
through the social atmosphere in all directions and lowering the level of
civilisation in the community. Nowhere has this been so thoroughly studied
and so clearly proved as in the United States. It is only necessary to
mention Dr. C.B. Davenport of the Department of Experimental Evolution at
Cold Spring Harbor (New York) who has carried on so much research in
regard to the heredity of epilepsy and other inheritable abnormal
conditions, and Dr. Goddard of Vineland (New Jersey) whose work has
illustrated so fully the hereditary relationships of feeble-mindedness.
The United States, moreover, has seen the development of the system of
social field-work which has rendered possible a more complete knowledge of
family heredity than has ever before been possible on a large scale.

It is along such lines as these that our knowledge of the eugenic
conditions of life will grow adequate and precise enough to form an
effective guide to social conduct. Nature, and a due attention to laws of
heredity in life, will then rank in equal honour to our eyes with nurture
or that attention to the environmental conditions of life which we already
regard as so important. A regard to nurture has led us to spend the
greatest care on the preservation not only of the fit but the unfit, while
meantime it has wisely suggested to us the desirability of segregating or
even of sterilising the unfit. But the study of Nature leads us further
and, as Galton said, "Eugenics rests on bringing no more individuals into
the world than can be properly cared for, and these only of the best
stocks." That is to say that the only instrument by which eugenics can be
made practically effective in the modern world is birth-control.

It is not scientific research alone, nor even the wide popular diffusion
of knowledge, that will suffice to bring eugenics and birth-control,
singly or in their due combination, into the course of our daily lives.
They need to be embodied in our instinctive impulses. Galton considered
that eugenics must become a factor of religion and be regarded as a sacred
and virile creed, while Ellen Key holds that the religions of the past
must be superseded by a new religion which will be the awakening of the
whole of humanity to a consciousness of the "holiness of generation." For
my own part, I scarcely consider that either eugenics or birth-control can
be regarded as properly a part of religion. Being