“It is consistent with all the robust virtues, and makes a large practice of them possible. It is the measure of fulness of life; the more energy the more abundance of it; no energy at all is death; idiots are feeble and listless. In the enquiries I made on the antecedents of men of science no points came out more strongly than that the leaders of scientific thought were generally gifted with remarkable energy, and that they had inherited the gift of it from their parents and grandparents. I have since found the same to be the case in other careers.... It may be objected that if the race were too healthy and energetic there would be insufficient call for the exercise of the pitying and self-denying virtues, and the character of men would grow harder in consequence. But it does not seem reasonable to preserve sickly breeds for the sole purpose of tending them, as the breed of foxes is preserved solely for sport and its attendant advantages. There is little fear that misery will ever cease from the land, or that the compassionate will fail to find objects for their compassion; but at present the supply vastly exceeds the demand: the land is over-stocked and over-burdened with the listless and the incapable. In any scheme of eugenics, energy is the most important quality to favour; it is, as we have seen, the basis of living action, and it is eminently transmissible by descent.” Need it be pointed out that any political system which ceases to favour or actively disfavours energy, making it as profitable to be lazy as to be active, is anti-eugenic, and must inevitably lead to disaster? That, however, by the way. Our present point is that eugenics can reasonably promise, when its principles are recognised, to multiply the human[84] and diminish the vegetable type in the community. In so doing, it will greatly further the production of talent, and therefore of that traditional or acquired progress which men of talent and genius create. Such a result will also further, though indirectly, the production of genius itself. For, as Mr. Galton points out, “men of an order of ability which is now very rare, would become more frequent, because the level out of which they rose would itself have risen.” This is by no means the only fashion in which an effective and practicable race-culture would serve genius, and I shall not be blamed for considering this matter further by any reader who realises, however faintly, what the man of genius is worth to the world. If it were shown possible to establish such social conditions that genius could never flower in them, we should realise that their establishment would mean the putting of an end to progress and the blasting of all the highest hopes of the highest of all ages.