of virtue and not of
grace they belong more naturally to the sphere of morals. But here they
certainly need to go far deeper than the mere intelligence of the mind can
take them. They cannot become guides to conduct until their injunctions
have been printed on the fleshy tablets of our hearts. The demands of the
race must speak from within us, in the voice of conscience which we
disobey at our peril. When that happens with regard to ascertained laws of
racial well-being we may know that we are truly following, even though not
in the letter, those great spirits, like Galton with his intellectual
vision and Ellen Key with her inspired enthusiasm, who have pointed out
new roads for the ennoblement of the race.

II

It may be well, before we go further, to look a little more closely into
the suspicion and dislike which eugenics still arouses in many worthy
old-fashioned people. To some extent that attitude is excused, not only by
the mistakes which in a new and complex science must inevitably be made
even by painstaking students, but also by the rash and extravagant
proposals of irresponsible and eccentric persons claiming without warrant
to speak in the name of eugenics. Two thousand years ago the wild excesses
of some early Christians furnished an excuse for the ancient world to view
Christianity with contempt, although the extreme absence of such excesses
has furnished still better ground for the modern world to maintain the
same view. To-day such a work as _Le Haras Humain_ ("The Human Stud-farm")
of Dr. Binet-Sangle, putting forward proposals which, whether beneficial
or not, will certainly find no one to carry them out, similarly furnishes
an excuse to those who would reject eugenics altogether. Utopian schemes
have their value; we should be able to find inspiration in the most modern
of them, just as we still do in Plato's immortal _Republic_. But in this,
as in other matters, we must exercise a little intelligence. We must not
confuse the brilliant excursion of some solitary thinker with the
well-grounded proposals of those who are concerned with the sober
possibilities of actual life in our own time. People who are incapable of
exercising a little shrewd commonsense in the affairs of life, and are in
the habit of emptying out the baby with the bath, had better avoid
touching the delicate problems connected with practical eugenics.

There is one prejudice already mentioned, due to lack of clear thinking,
which d