que sa parole_" does not mean "_Noblesse oblige_," or "I am the
Duke of Billingsgate and must keep my word." It means: "One has a
sense of honour as one has a backbone: every man, rich or poor, should
feel honourable"; and this, whether possible or no, is the purest
ambition of the republic. But when the Eugenists say, "Conditions
must be altered" or "Ancestry should be investigated," or what not, it
seems clear that they do not mean that the democracy must do it,
whatever else they may mean. They do not mean that any man not
evidently mad may be trusted with these tests and re-arrangements, as
the French democratic system trusts such a man with a vote or a farm
or the control of a family. That would mean that Jones and Brown,
being both ordinary men, would set about arranging each other's
marriages. And this state of affairs would seem a little elaborate,
and it might occur even to the Eugenic mind that if Jones and Brown
are quite capable of arranging each other's marriages, it is just
possible that they might be capable of arranging their own.

This dilemma, which applies in so simple a case, applies equally to
any wide and sweeping system of Eugenist voting; for though it is true
that the community can judge more dispassionately than a man can judge
in his own case, this particular question of the choice of a wife is
so full of disputable shades in every conceivable case, that it is
surely obvious that almost any democracy would simply vote the thing
out of the sphere of voting, as they would any proposal of police
interference in the choice of walking weather or of children's names.
I should not like to be the politician who should propose a particular
instance of Eugenics to be voted on by the French people. Democracy
dismissed, it is here hardly needful to consider the other old models.
Modern scientists will not say that George III., in his lucid
intervals, should settle who is mad; or that the aristocracy that
introduced gout shall supervise diet.

I hold it clear, therefore, if anything is clear about the business,
that the Eugenists do not merely mean that the mass of common men
should settle each other's marriages between them; the question
remains, therefore, whom they do instinctively trust when they say
that this or that ought to be done. What is this flying and evanescent
authority that vanishes wherever we seek to fix it? Who is the man who
is the lost subject that governs the Eugenist's verb? In a la