There is no general unwillingness to limit their families among the poor; what is lacking consists simply in power of control over the physical conditions of fertility. To see children half-starved and wives sickly and miserable is no more pleasant to parents of the Ginx order than to those of us who view it from a safe distance; and there is ample intelligence to perceive the connexion between, on the one hand, discomfort and poverty attendant on a family of ten or twelve, on the other, comparative comfort allied with a family of only three or four. A code of ethics covering the interests of the entire nation commands strenuous effort on the part of all thoughtful, intelligent people to make the artificial checks known to the thoughtless and unintelligent. It is not by proudly rejecting scientific invention in this matter that we shall attain to development of higher and higher types of man, but by skilfully using it as a powerful ally in our struggle to maintain and regenerate species at less and less cost to individual happiness. Apart altogether from man’s partial practice of neo-Malthusian art, under egoistic motives, civilization has created an interference with the original order of race preservation under generous or altruistic motive. Social feeling slowly developing revolts—in detail—from the cruel method of the law of natural selection. It spontaneously supersedes that law by one of sympathetic selection. But whereas the former law issued in survival of the fittest, the latter issues day by day in indiscriminate survival, and consequent race deterioration. A controlled rate of increase is not therefore the only position to which reason and science must guide us; we have further to escape from the disastrous consequences of the above law and pass to conditions of life evolved under the benign influence of a rational and moral law—a law of social selection, resulting in appropriate birth, or the birth of the socially fit. There are thousands of our present day population with whom family life is no whit superior to that of birds, whose pairing is immediately followed by rapid breeding and a complete scattering of the brood when the young are barely fledged. A wise philanthropy in line with the march of progressive evolution may lift these thousands to the level of the higher vertebrates, “which produce few young at longer intervals and give them aid for longer periods.” The recalcitrant minority refusing to practice parental prudence must be treated by society as abnormal individuals, incapable of rising to the standard of average civilized human nature, and these must be subjected to social restraint. _PART III_ ABNORMAL HUMANITY Men may rise on stepping-stones Of their dead selves to higher things. —From _In Memoriam_. THE ELIMINATION OF CRIME