own argument it is not necessary to
carry the process so far as this, or indeed any farther than it has
already gone. The purely negative stage of interference, at which we
have stuck for the present, is in itself quite favourable to all these
eugenical experiments. The capitalist whose half-conscious thought and
course of action I have simplified into a story in the preceding
chapters, finds this insufficient solution quite sufficient for his
purposes. What he has felt for a long time is that he must check or
improve the reckless and random breeding of the submerged race, which
is at once outstripping his requirements and failing to fulfil his
needs. Now the anomalous situation has already accustomed him to
stopping things. The first interferences with sex need only be
negative; and there are already negative interferences without number.
So that the study of this stage of Socialism brings us to the same
conclusion as that of the ideal of liberty as formally professed by
Liberalism. The ideal of liberty is lost, and the ideal of Socialism
is changed, till it is a mere excuse for the oppression of the poor.

The first movements for intervention in the deepest domestic concerns
of the poor all had this note of negative interference. Official
papers were sent round to the mothers in poor streets; papers in which
a total stranger asked these respectable women questions which a man
would be killed for asking, in the class of what were called gentlemen
or in the countries of what were called free men. They were questions
supposed to refer to the conditions of maternity; but the point is
here that the reformers did not begin by building up those economic or
material conditions. They did not attempt to pay money or establish
property to create those conditions. They never give anything--except
orders. Another form of the intervention, and one already mentioned,
is the kidnapping of children upon the most fantastic excuses of sham
psychology. Some people established an apparatus of tests and trick
questions; which might make an amusing game of riddles for the family
fireside, but seems an insufficient reason for mutilating and
dismembering the family. Others became interested in the hopeless
moral condition of children born in the economic condition which they
did not attempt to improve. They were great on the fact that crime was
a disease; and carried on their criminological studies so successfully
as to open the reformatory f