ritating. I have
called them, for immediate purposes, the Casuists. Suppose I say "I
dislike this spread of Cannibalism in the West End restaurants."
Somebody is sure to say "Well, after all, Queen Eleanor when she
sucked blood from her husband's arm was a cannibal." What is one to
say to such people? One can only say "Confine yourself to sucking
poisoned blood from people's arms, and I permit you to call yourself
by the glorious title of Cannibal." In this sense people say of
Eugenics, "After all, whenever we discourage a schoolboy from marrying
a mad negress with a hump back, we are really Eugenists." Again one
can only answer, "Confine yourselves strictly to such schoolboys as
are naturally attracted to hump-backed negresses; and you may exult in
the title of Eugenist, all the more proudly because that distinction
will be rare." But surely anyone's common-sense must tell him that if
Eugenics dealt only with such extravagant cases, it would be called
common-sense--and not Eugenics. The human race has excluded such
absurdities for unknown ages; and has never yet called it Eugenics.
You may call it flogging when you hit a choking gentleman on the back;
you may call it torture when a man unfreezes his fingers at the fire;
but if you talk like that a little longer you will cease to live among
living men. If nothing but this mad minimum of accident were involved,
there would be no such thing as a Eugenic Congress, and certainly no
such thing as this book.

I had thought of calling the next sort of superficial people the
Idealists; but I think this implies a humility towards impersonal good
they hardly show; so I call them the Autocrats. They are those who
give us generally to understand that every modern reform will "work"
all right, because they will be there to see. Where they will be, and
for how long, they do not explain very clearly. I do not mind their
looking forward to numberless lives in succession; for that is the
shadow of a human or divine hope. But even a theosophist does not
expect to be a vast number of people at once. And these people most
certainly propose to be responsible for a whole movement after it has
left their hands. Each man promises to be about a thousand policemen.
If you ask them how this or that will work, they will answer, "Oh, I
would certainly insist on this"; or "I would never go so far as that";
as if they could return to this earth and do what no ghost has ever
done quite successfully--