=What is a good environment?=--Using the word environment in its widest sense, including, for instance, public opinion--and its use in any sense less wide is always erroneous and misleading--we may say that it is our business to provide the environment which selects the best for parenthood and discourages the parenthood of the worst--say the deaf and dumb, the feeble-minded, the insane, the epileptic, the inebriate, those afflicted with hereditary disease of other kinds, and so forth. Our principles should enable us, also, I think, to define what we mean by a good environment. Comprehensive and indiscriminate charity means a good environment for many in a sense, but it may also mean the selection of the worst for parenthood--_e.g._, the feeble-minded. This “good” environment _then_ means the degeneration of the race. We must therefore _appraise environment in terms of its selective action_. A good environment is that which selects the good, and the best environment is that which selects the best; discovers them, makes the utmost of them, and confers upon them the supreme privilege and duty of parenthood. That and that alone is the best environment, and all other moral judgments upon environment are fallacious and will be disastrous. =The necessary conclusion.=--National Eugenics teaches that the first duty of all governments and patriots and good citizens is, to quote Ruskin again, “the production and recognition of human worth, the detection and extinction of human unworthiness.” The idea is not new-fangled, but was clearly laid down by Plato, and by Theognis two centuries before him. Eugenics is a project of the most elevated and provident morality, aiming at no object less sublime than the ennoblement of mankind; and if one may suggest its motto it would be, _The products of progress are not mechanisms but men_. It is based upon the principle of the selection or choice of the superior for parenthood, which has been the essential factor of all progress in the world of life, but which all civilisations have tended in some degree to abrogate--or even to reverse, as when the feeble-minded child is cared for till maturity and sent out into the world to produce its like, whilst healthy children are daily destroyed by ignorance and neglect. “Through Nature only can we ascend”--and the merit of the eugenic proposal is that it is built upon “the solid ground of nature.” To the economist, it declares that _the culture of the racial life is the vital industry of any people_. It is to work through marriage, an institution more ancient than mankind, and supremely valuable in its services to childhood--with which lies all human destiny. Eugenics appeals to the individual, asking for a little imagination, which will make us realise that the future will one day be the present and that to serve it is to serve no fiction or phantom, but a reality as real as the present generation.