hildren, and honestly wonders what he can do with them. But
prosperity does not favour self-examination; and he does not even ask
himself whether he means "How can I help them?" or "How can I use
them?"--what he can still do for them, or what they could still do for
him. Probably he sincerely means both, but the latter much more than
the former; he laments the breaking of the tools of Mammon much more
than the breaking of the images of God. It would be almost impossible
to grope in the limbo of what he does think; but we can assert that
there is one thing he doesn't think. He doesn't think, "This man might
be as jolly as I am, if he need not come to me for work or wages."

That this is so, that at root the Eugenist is the Employer, there are
multitudinous proofs on every side, but they are of necessity
miscellaneous, and in many cases negative. The most enormous is in a
sense the most negative: that no one seems able to imagine capitalist
industrialism being sacrificed to any other object. By a curious
recurrent slip in the mind, as irritating as a catch in a clock,
people miss the main thing and concentrate on the mean thing. "Modern
conditions" are treated as fixed, though the very word "modern"
implies that they are fugitive. "Old ideas" are treated as impossible,
though their very antiquity often proves their permanence. Some years
ago some ladies petitioned that the platforms of our big railway
stations should be raised, as it was more convenient for the hobble
skirt. It never occurred to them to change to a sensible skirt. Still
less did it occur to them that, compared with all the female fashions
that have fluttered about on it, by this time St. Pancras is as
historic as St. Peter's.

I could fill this book with examples of the universal, unconscious
assumption that life and sex must live by the laws of "business" or
industrialism, and not _vice versa_; examples from all the magazines,
novels, and newspapers. In order to make it brief and typical, I take
one case of a more or less Eugenist sort from a paper that lies open
in front of me--a paper that still bears on its forehead the boast of
being peculiarly an organ of democracy in revolt. To this a man writes
to say that the spread of destitution will never be stopped until we
have educated the lower classes in the methods by which the upper
classes prevent procreation. The man had the horrible playfulness to
sign his letter "Hopeful." Well, there are certainly