eserves more special consideration because it is widespread among
the socialistic democracy of several countries as well as among social
reformers, and is directed alike against eugenics and birth-control. This
prejudice is based on the ground that bad economic conditions and an
unwholesome environment are the source of all social evils, and that a
better distribution of wealth, or a vast scheme of social welfare, is the
one thing necessary, when that is achieved all other things being added
unto us, without any further trouble on our part. It is certainly
impossible to over-rate the importance of the economic factor in society,
or of a good environment. And it is true that eugenics alone, like
birth-control alone, can effect little if the economic basis of society is
unsound. But it is equally certain that the economic factor can never in
itself suffice for fine living or even as a cure-all of social and racial
diseases. Its value is not that it can effect these things but that it
furnishes the favourable conditions for effecting them. He would be
foolish indeed who went to the rich to find the example of good breeding
and, as is well known, it is not with the rich that the future of the race
lies. The fact is that under any economic system the responsible personal
direction of the individual and the family remain equally necessary, and
no progress is possible so long as the individual casts all responsibility
away from himself on to the social group he forms part of. The social
group, after all, is merely himself and the likes of himself. He is merely
shifting the burden from his individual self to his collective self, and
in so doing he loses more than he gains.

Thus there is always a sound core in that Individualism which has been
preached so long and practised so energetically, especially in
English-speaking lands, however great the abuse involved in its excesses.
It is still in the name of Individualism that the most brilliant
antagonists of eugenics and of birth-control are wont to direct their
attacks. The counsel of self-control and foresight in procreation, the
restriction necessary to purify and raise the standard of the race, seem
to the narrow and short-sighted advocates of a great principle an
unwarrantable violation of the sacred rights of their individual liberty.
They have not yet grasped the elementary fact that the rights of the
individual are the rights of all individuals, and that Individualism
itse