nd not a word of the charters of the carpenters, smiths,
shipwrights and all the rest? The reason is that the English peasant
is not only not allowed to have an estate, he is not even allowed to
have lost one. The past has to be painted pitch black, that it may be
worse than the present.

There is one strong, startling, outstanding thing about Eugenics, and
that is its meanness. Wealth, and the social science supported by
wealth, had tried an inhuman experiment. The experiment had entirely
failed. They sought to make wealth accumulate--and they made men
decay. Then, instead of confessing the error, and trying to restore
the wealth, or attempting to repair the decay, they are trying to
cover their first cruel experiment with a more cruel experiment. They
put a poisonous plaster on a poisoned wound. Vilest of all, they
actually quote the bewilderment produced among the poor by their first
blunder as a reason for allowing them to blunder again. They are
apparently ready to arrest all the opponents of their system as mad,
merely because the system was maddening. Suppose a captain had
collected volunteers in a hot, waste country by the assurance that he
could lead them to water, and knew where to meet the rest of his
regiment. Suppose he led them wrong, to a place where the regiment
could not be for days, and there was no water. And suppose sunstroke
struck them down on the sand man after man, and they kicked and danced
and raved. And, when at last the regiment came, suppose the captain
successfully concealed his mistake, because all his men had suffered
too much from it to testify to its ever having occurred. What would
you think of the gallant captain? It is pretty much what I think of
this particular captain of industry.

Of course, nobody supposes that all Capitalists, or most Capitalists,
are conscious of any such intellectual trick. Most of them are as much
bewildered as the battered proletariat; but there are some who are
less well-meaning and more mean. And these are leading their more
generous colleagues towards the fulfilment of this ungenerous evasion,
if not towards the comprehension of it. Now a ruler of the Capitalist
civilisation, who has come to consider the idea of ultimately herding
and breeding the workers like cattle, has certain contemporary
problems to review. He has to consider what forces still exist in the
modern world for the frustration of his design. The first question is
how much remains of the