=Eugenics and cruelty to children.=--This ideal, also, offers us in its realisation the only complete remedy for the present ghastly cruelty under which so many children suffer even in Great Britain, even in the twentieth century. Is the reader aware that the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children enquired into the ill-treatment or cruel neglect of 115,000 children in the year beginning April 1st, 1906? It has been reasonably and carefully estimated that “over half a million children are involved in the total of the wastage of child-life and the torture and neglect of child-life in a single year.” Surely Mr. G. R. Sims, to whom I would offer a hearty tribute for his recent services to childhood, is justified in saying, “Against the guilt of race-suicide our men of science are everywhere preaching their sermons to-day. It is against the guilt of race-murder that the cry of the children should ring through the land.” As regards race suicide and the men of science, I am not so sure as to the assertion. But the truth of the second sentence quoted is as indisputable as it is horrible. Now no legislation conceivable will wholly cure this evil nor avert its consequences. At bottom it depends upon human nature, and you can cure it only by curing the defect of human nature. This, in general, is of course beyond the immediate powers of man, but evidently we should gain the same end if only we could confine the advent of children to those parents who desired them--that is to say, those in whom human nature displayed the first, if not indeed almost the only, requisite for the happiness of childhood. To this most beneficent and wholly moral end we shall come, notwithstanding the blind and pitiable guidance of most of our accredited moral teachers to-day. By no other means than the realisation of the ideal defined, that every new baby shall be loved and desired in anticipation--an ideal which is perfectly practicable--can the black stain of child murder and child torture and child neglect be removed from our civilisation. =Ruskin and race-culture.=--The name of Ruskin, perhaps, would not occur to the reader as likely to afford support to the fair hopes of the eugenist. Consider then, these words from _Time and Tide_:--