The committee would next provide, with the aid of the central society,
for a few sane and sensible lectures to be given on eugenics, including
the A B C of heredity, at some convenient spot, and they would exert
themselves to arouse a wide interest in the subjects by making it known
in the district. They would seek the co-operation of the local medical
men, clergy, and lawyers, of the sanitary authorities, and of all
officials whose administrative duties bring them into contact with
various classes of society, and they would endeavour to collect round
this nucleus that portion of the local community which was likely to be
brought into sympathy with the eugenic cause. Every political
organisation, every philanthropic agency, proceeds on some such lines as
I have just sketched out.
The committee might next issue, on the part of the president and council
of the new society, a series of invitations to guests at their social
gatherings, where differences of rank should be studiously ignored. The
judicious management of these gatherings would, of course, require
considerable tact, but there are abundant precedents for them, among
which I need only mention the meetings of the Primrose League at one end
of the scale, and those held in Toynbee Hall at the other end. Given a
not inclement day, an hour suitable to the occasion, a park or large
garden to meet in, these informal yet select reunions might be made
exceedingly pleasant, and very helpful to the eugenic cause.
The inquiries made by the committee when they were considering the names
of strangers to whom invitations ought to be sent, would put them in
possession of a large fund of information concerning the qualities of
many notable individuals in their district, and their family histories.
These family histories should be utilised for eugenic studies, and it
should be the duty of the local council to cause them to be tabulated in
an orderly way, and to communicate the more significant of them to the
central society.
The chief of the notable qualities, to which I refer in the preceding
paragraph, is the possession of what I will briefly call by the general
term of “Worth.” By this I mean the civic worthiness, or the value to
the State, of a person, as it would probably be assessed by experts, or,
say, by such of his fellow-workers as have earned the respect of the
community in the midst of which they live. Thus the worth of soldiers
would be such as it would be rated by respected soldiers, students by
students, business men by business men, artists by artists, and so on.
The State is a vastly complex organism, and the hope of obtaining a
proportional representation of its best parts should be an avowed object
of issuing invitations to these gatherings.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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