In the first chapter of our second Part, which deals with the practice of eugenics, there were introduced, defined, and briefly illustrated, the terms _positive eugenics_ and _negative eugenics_. Of these the latter, as the more urgent and the more completely and immediately practicable, claims our special attention; though the present writer, notwithstanding that he has devoted to it the greater part of his eugenic work, is bound to protest that the positive increase of ability and worth is never to be regarded as of secondary importance. The two methods are, of course, complementary in practice, as they are one in principle--to select is to reject, to choose is to refuse. The preceding chapter, on selection (and rejection) through marriage, has dealt with the conditions under which both aims are to be pursued. In the following pages we must discuss a specially urgent and practicable and indisputable portion of negative eugenic practice: none the less urgent because of the contemporary emergence and future world-importance of sober nations, such as Japan and Turkey. The term _racial poisons_, introduced by the present writer in the year 1907, is self-explanatory. After dealing with the most important of these poisons, we shall proceed, in the next chapter, to discuss some others. The racial poisons constitute a special department of eugenics which has not hitherto been considered by the pioneers of this subject, but for which I press the claim of the utmost gravity and moment, and which I conceive to be certainly a part, and a most important part, of our manifold yet single subject. * * * * * The argument of this chapter is that parenthood must be forbidden to the dipsomaniac, the chronic inebriate or the drunkard, whether male or female; and this whether Lamarck or Galton and Weismann be right, or whether, as we may believe with Galton and Weismann themselves, the controversy between the two parties is wholly irrelevant to the question in hand. This conclusion, that on no grounds whatever, theoretical or practical, can we continue to permit parenthood on the part of the drunkard, is one temperance reform, perhaps the only one, on which disagreement is absolutely impossible. It is, further, the most radical that can be named within the sphere of practical politics, and it is conspicuously practicable. It has hitherto been lamentably neglected by workers and reformers of all schools. Indeed, at the time of writing, the London County Council, governing the greatest city in the world, is pursuing a course of action in this regard, which will be detailed later, and which, as will appear, is misguided and deplorable in the last degree.