“You leave your marriages to be settled by supply and demand, instead of wholesome law. And thus, among your youths and maidens, the improvident, incontinent, selfish, and foolish ones marry, whether you will or not; and beget families of children necessarily inheritors in a great degree of these parental dispositions; and for whom, supposing they had the best dispositions in the world, you have thus provided, by way of educators, the foolishest fathers and mothers you could find; (the only rational sentence in their letters, usually, is the invariable one, in which they declare themselves ‘incapable of providing for their children's education’). On the other hand, whosoever is wise, patient, unselfish, and pure among your youth, you keep maid or bachelor; wasting their best days of natural life in painful sacrifice, forbidding them their best help and best reward, and carefully excluding their prudence and tenderness from any offices of parental duty. Is not this a beatific and beautifully sagacious system for a Celestial Empire, such as that of these British Isles?” Apart from the point as to wholesome law rather than the education of opinion as the eugenic means, the foregoing passage must win the assent and respect of every eugenist. It indicates the promise of race-culture as it appeared to John Ruskin. The passage has been quoted in full not for the benefit of the ordinary thoughtful reader but for that of the professional literary man who, in this remarkable age, so far as I can judge, reads nothing but what he writes, and thus qualifies himself for dismissing Spencer or Darwin or Galton in any casual phrase--meanwhile condemning Ruskin, whom he probably professes to adore. =Race-culture and human variety.=--Now let us turn to another question. Let it be asserted most emphatically that, if there is anything in the world which eugenics or race-culture does _not_ promise or desire, it is the production of a uniform type of man. This delusion, for which there has never been any warrant at all, possesses many of the critics of eugenics, and they have made pretty play with it, just as they do with their other delusions. Let us note one or two facts which bear upon this most undesirable ideal. In the first place, it is unattainable because of the existence of what we call variation. No apparatus conceivable would suffice to eliminate from every generation those who varied from the accepted type.