“When the State left the children to the mothers, they got no schooling; they were sent out to work under inhuman conditions, under-ground and over-ground for atrociously long hours, as soon as they were able to walk; they died of typhus fever in heaps; they grew up to be as wicked to their own children as their parents had been to them. State socialism rescued them from the worst of that, and means to rescue them from all of it. I now publicly challenge Dr. Saleeby to propose, if he dares, to withdraw the hand of the State and abandon the children to their mothers as they fall.... All I need say is that before Dr. Saleeby can persuade me to sacrifice the future of human society to his maternalism, he will have to tackle me with harder weapons than the indignant enthusiasm of a young man's mother worship.” Mr. Shaw's teaching constitutes a brutal and deliberate libel upon the highest aspects of womanhood. For his own purposes he attributes to the mothers all the abominations which, as every one knows, have lain and in some measure still lie, at the door of the State. The man who has this opinion of motherhood is complacently ignorant of the elements of the subject. His charge is denied by every one who has worked as doctor or nurse or visitor or missionary amongst the poorer classes, and knows that the mothers there met are of the very salt of the earth. It is well to state plainly here that these utterly irresponsible _dicta_ have absolutely no relation or resemblance whatever to the opinions or proposals of Mr. Francis Galton himself, who desires to effect race-culture through marriage, and whose whole propaganda is based upon this assumption. This we shall afterwards see. Meanwhile we may note Mr. Galton's own words: “The aim of eugenics is to bring as many influences as can be reasonably employed, to cause the useful classes in the community to contribute more than their proportion to the next generation.” Mr. Galton would be the first to assert that influences designed to supersede motherhood and to abolish everything but the physical aspect of fatherhood, would not be reasonable, but insane in the highest degree. The ideal of race-culture without fatherhood or motherhood, except in the mere physiological sense, constitutes a denial of the greatest facts in evolution, as we have seen. It ignores everything that is known and daily witnessed regarding the development of the individual, and the formation of character, without which intelligence is a curse. There is not the slightest fear that any such reversion to the order of the beast is possible, absolutely forbidden as it is by the laws of human nature. There is, however, reasonable ground for apprehension, especially when the recent developments in Germany are remembered, that the public may obtain its notions of eugenics in a highly-garbled form.[43]