Yet the truth is, Age is a natural beautiful phase; in its way, as natural, as healthful and as beautiful as are any of the younger seasons. Calm and stately as the snows of Nature's winter, as Nature's winter shows us, old age does not presage death--because there is no Death. That we call Death is but a temporary Recession from the Outer and Terrestrial to the Inner and Celestial zone of Being. And with the vital quietude and longer-sightedness of eyes, come spiritual quickening and longer-sightedness of mental view. So that both eyes and mind perceive The Outer more and more obscurely, focusing more and more on The Remote. The stream of life runs stilly for the reason that it runs more deep; centring again to that Within and Spiritual, whence it issued in Birth, and will issue again in re-Birth. Compare such serene-faced, dignified age, cause to all of reverence and tenderness, for the mystery and pathos of its wise and tranquil resignation--Compare such with the restless, harried, malcontent old age of modern counsels! IX Before the advent of that admirable institution, the Eugenics Education Society, for the establishment of a new Science of Heredity, as, too, of a new propaganda of Race-Culture, vital and illuminating data, not only of supreme scientific interest but, moreover, of the greatest practical significance, passed, for the most part, unnoted. I venture to believe, however, that Eugenic propaganda has been too much in the direction of eliminating defect from the Race by prohibiting marriage to the so-called "Unfit." Whereas the true way of Racial health, of normality and excellence, is, surely, to eliminate from life the many conditions, material, economic, and personal, which make for Unfitness--which preclude, indeed, the survival of little save Unfitness. For since we are not in the secret of Nature's aims, and are wholly in the dark as to the human type for which she is aiming, to prohibit parenthood to any but the flagrantly abnormal, the insane and imbecile, the epileptic and the hopelessly-diseased, might be to quench the evolution of such higher Fitness as we are not qualified to foresee. That which shows like disability in one age may be the incipient ability of a later. In cruder, primitive days, when standards of Fitness were physical strength, rapacity and cunning, honesty and mercy, and more delicate organisation of body--the starting-points of new routes of evolutionary development--would have been condemned as worthy only of extermination. In sickly and declining stock there may exist, moreover, an ebbing vein of rare faculty, which, re-vitalised by a due potential of maternal re-creative power, might come to throb with genius.