a dreary nightmare, if it is to
assume paternal charge of all the tens or hundreds of thousands of
children whose parents cannot or will not provide adequately for them and
is to guarantee to all such children as much education as they are capable
of receiving, and a really fair start in life: then in sheer
self-preservation the community must insist on, and rigidly enforce, its
absolute claim to secure that no degeneracy or inheritable congenital
defects shall persist beyond the present generation of degenerates, and
that the community of fifty or seventy years hence shall have no incubus
of mentally, or morally, or even physically, degenerate members--none but
a few occasional sporadic morbid 'sports' from the normal, which it, in
turn, may effectively prevent from handing on their like." Unless the
problem is squarely faced, Perrycoste concludes, national deterioration
must increase and a permanently successful collectivist society is
inherently impossible.

We are not now concerned with the details of any policy of eugenics and of
birth-control, which I couple together because although a random
birth-control by no means involves much, if any, eugenic progress, it is
not easy under modern conditions to conceive any practical or effective
policy of eugenics except through the instrumentation of birth-control. We
here take it for granted that in this field the slow progress of
scientific knowledge must be our guide. Premature legislation, rash and
uninstructed action, will not lead to progress but are more likely to
delay it. Yet even with imperfect knowledge, it is already of the first
importance to evoke interest in the great issue here at stake and to do
all that we can to arouse the individual conscience of every man and woman
to his or her personal responsibility in this matter. That is here all
taken for granted.

It seems necessary to consider the political aspect of eugenics because
that aspect is frequently invoked, and a man's attitude towards this
question is frequently determined beforehand by what he considers that
Individualism or Socialism demands. We see that when the question is
driven home our political attitude makes no difference. It is only a
shallow Individualism, it is only a still more shallow Socialism, which
imagines that under modern social conditions the fundamental racial
questions can be left to answer themselves.

III

Many years before the Great War, in all the most civilised coun