, when we consider how cruel and
clumsy the law can be even about things as old and plain as the Ten
Commandments--I simply cannot conceive any responsible person
proposing to legislate on our broken knowledge and bottomless
ignorance of heredity.

But though I have to consider this dull matter in its due logical
order, it appears to me that this part of the matter has been settled,
and settled in a most masterly way, by somebody who has infinitely
more right to speak on it than I have. Our press seems to have a
perfect genius for fitting people with caps that don't fit; and
affixing the wrong terms of eulogy and even the wrong terms of abuse.
And just as people will talk of Bernard Shaw as a naughty winking
Pierrot, when he is the last great Puritan and really believes in
respectability; just as (_si parva licet_ etc.) they will talk of my
own paradoxes, when I pass my life in preaching that the truisms are
true; so an enormous number of newspaper readers seem to have it fixed
firmly in their heads that Mr. H.G. Wells is a harsh and horrible
Eugenist in great goblin spectacles, who wants to put us all into
metallic microscopes and dissect us with metallic tools. As a matter
of fact, of course, Mr. Wells, so far from being too definite, is
generally not definite enough. He is an absolute wizard in the
appreciation of atmospheres and the opening of vistas; but his answers
are more agnostic than his questions. His books will do everything
except shut. And so far from being the sort of man who would stop a
man from propagating, he cannot even stop a full stop. He is not
Eugenic enough to prevent the black dot at the end of a sentence from
breeding a line of little dots.

But this is not the clear-cut blunder of which I spoke. The real
blunder is this. Mr. Wells deserves a tiara of crowns and a garland of
medals for all kinds of reasons. But if I were restricted, on grounds
of public economy, to giving Mr. Wells only one medal _ob cives
servatos_, I would give him a medal as the Eugenist who destroyed
Eugenics. For everyone spoke of him, rightly or wrongly, as a
Eugenist; and he certainly had, as I have not, the training and type
of culture required to consider the matter merely in a biological and
not in a generally moral sense. The result was that in that fine book,
"Mankind in the Making," where he inevitably came to grips with the
problem, he threw down to the Eugenists an intellectual challenge
which seems to me una