nswerable, but which, at any rate, is unanswered.
I do not mean that no remote Eugenist wrote upon the subject; for it
is impossible to read all writings, especially Eugenist writings. I do
mean that the leading Eugenists write as if this challenge had never
been offered. The gauntlet lies unlifted on the ground.

Having given honour for the idea where it is due, I may be permitted
to summarise it myself for the sake of brevity. Mr. Wells' point was
this. That we cannot be certain about the inheritance of health,
because health is not a quality. It is not a thing like darkness in
the hair or length in the limbs. It is a relation, a balance. You have
a tall, strong man; but his very strength depends on his not being too
tall for his strength. You catch a healthy, full-blooded fellow; but
his very health depends on his being not too full of blood. A heart
that is strong for a dwarf will be weak for a giant; a nervous system
that would kill a man with a trace of a certain illness will sustain
him to ninety if he has no trace of that illness. Nay, the same
nervous system might kill him if he had an excess of some other
comparatively healthy thing. Seeing, therefore, that there are
apparently healthy people of all types, it is obvious that if you mate
two of them, you may even then produce a discord out of two
inconsistent harmonies. It is obvious that you can no more be certain
of a good offspring than you can be certain of a good tune if you play
two fine airs at once on the same piano. You can be even less certain
of it in the more delicate case of beauty, of which the Eugenists talk
a great deal. Marry two handsome people whose noses tend to the
aquiline, and their baby (for all you know) may be a goblin with a
nose like an enormous parrot's. Indeed, I actually know a case of this
kind. The Eugenist has to settle, not the result of fixing one steady
thing to a second steady thing; but what will happen when one toppling
and dizzy equilibrium crashes into another.

This is the interesting conclusion. It is on this degree of knowledge
that we are asked to abandon the universal morality of mankind. When
we have stopped the lover from marrying the unfortunate woman he
loves, when we have found him another uproariously healthy female whom
he does not love in the least, even then we have no logical evidence
that the result may not be as horrid and dangerous as if he had
behaved like a man of honour.

CHAPTER VII

THE