d calling her a bad lot; or between charging a man
with leading infants to Protection and leading them to sin and shame.
But the vital point to which to return is this. That it is not
necessarily, nor even specially, an anarchy in the populace. It is an
anarchy in the organ of government. It is the magistrates--voices of
the governing class--who cannot distinguish between cruelty and
carelessness. It is the judges (and their very submissive special
juries) who cannot see the difference between opinion and slander. And
it is the highly placed and highly paid experts who have brought in
the first Eugenic Law, the Feeble-Minded Bill--thus showing that they
can see no difference between a mad and a sane man.

That, to begin with, is the historic atmosphere in which this thing
was born. It is a peculiar atmosphere, and luckily not likely to last.
Real progress bears the same relation to it that a happy girl laughing
bears to an hysterical girl who cannot stop laughing. But I have
described this atmosphere first because it is the only atmosphere in
which such a thing as the Eugenist legislation could be proposed among
men. All other ages would have called it to some kind of logical
account, however academic or narrow. The lowest sophist in the Greek
schools would remember enough of Socrates to force the Eugenist to
tell him (at least) whether Midias was segregated because he was
curable or because he was incurable. The meanest Thomist of the
mediaeval monasteries would have the sense to see that you cannot
discuss a madman when you have not discussed a man. The most owlish
Calvinist commentator in the seventeenth century would ask the
Eugenist to reconcile such Bible texts as derided fools with the other
Bible texts that praised them. The dullest shopkeeper in Paris in 1790
would have asked what were the Rights of Man, if they did not include
the rights of the lover, the husband, and the father. It is only in
our own London Particular (as Mr. Guppy said of the fog) that small
figures can loom so large in the vapour, and even mingle with quite
different figures, and have the appearance of a mob. But, above all, I
have dwelt on the telescopic quality in these twilight avenues,
because unless the reader realises how elastic and unlimited they are,
he simply will not believe in the abominations we have to combat.

One of those wise old fairy tales, that come from nowhere and flourish
everywhere, tells how a man came to own a sma