ation and basis in the laws of procreation. But there really
cannot be any Eugenist quite so dull as not to see that this is not a
defence of Eugenics but a direct denial of Eugenics. If something
which has been discovered at last by the lamp of learning is something
which has been acted on from the first by the light of nature, this
(so far as it goes) is plainly not an argument for pestering people,
but an argument for letting them alone. If men did not marry their
grandmothers when it was, for all they knew, a most hygienic habit; if
we know now that they instinctly avoided scientific peril; that, so
far as it goes, is a point in favour of letting people marry anyone
they like. It is simply the statement that sexual selection, or what
Christians call falling in love, is a part of man which in the rough
and in the long run can be trusted. And that is the destruction of the
whole of this science at a blow.

The second part of the definition, the persuasive or coercive methods
to be employed, I shall deal with more fully in the second part of
this book. But some such summary as the following may here be useful.
Far into the unfathomable past of our race we find the assumption
that the founding of a family is the personal adventure of a free man.
Before slavery sank slowly out of sight under the new climate of
Christianity, it may or may not be true that slaves were in some sense
bred like cattle, valued as a promising stock for labour. If it was so
it was so in a much looser and vaguer sense than the breeding of the
Eugenists; and such modern philosophers read into the old paganism a
fantastic pride and cruelty which are wholly modern. It may be,
however, that pagan slaves had some shadow of the blessings of the
Eugenist's care. It is quite certain that the pagan freemen would have
killed the first man that suggested it. I mean suggested it seriously;
for Plato was only a Bernard Shaw who unfortunately made his jokes in
Greek. Among free men, the law, more often the creed, most commonly of
all the custom, have laid all sorts of restrictions on sex for this
reason or that. But law and creed and custom have never concentrated
heavily except upon fixing and keeping the family when once it had
been made. The act of founding the family, I repeat, was an individual
adventure outside the frontiers of the State. Our first forgotten
ancestors left this tradition behind them; and our own latest fathers
and mothers a few years ago