“By this I mean the civic worthiness, or the Value to the State of a person, as it would probably be assessed by experts or, say, by such of his fellow-workers as have earned the respect of the community in the midst of which they live. Thus the worth of soldiers would be such as it would be rated by respected soldiers, students by students, business men by business men, artists by artists, and so on. The State is a vastly complex organism, and the hope of obtaining a Proportional Representation of its best parts should be an avowed object of issuing invitations to these gatherings. “Speaking only for myself, if I had to classify persons according to Worth, I should consider each of them under the three heads of Physique, Ability, and Character, subject to the provision that inferiority in any one of the three should outweigh superiority in the other two. I rank Physique first, because it is not only very valuable in itself and allied to many other good qualities, but has the additional merit of being easily rated. Ability I should place second on similar grounds, and Character third, though in real importance it stands first of all.”[16] We shall certainly misunderstand this quotation unless we clearly realise that Mr. Galton is speaking of eugenic worth--that is to say, of worth in relation to parenthood and heredity. No one, of course, would assert for a moment that inferiority in the matter of physique outweighed superiority in ability and character, so far as our estimate of an individual as an individual is concerned, nor yet so far as our estimate of him as a citizen is concerned. But from the eugenic standpoint, as a parent of citizens to come, such a person, though he may have himself saved the State, is on the average rightly to be regarded as unworthy on the eugenic scale--it being assumed, of course, that the inferiority of physique in the person in question is either native and therefore transmissible, or else due to forms of disease, or poisoning, such as, according to our knowledge of ante-natal pathology, will probably involve degeneracy on the part of his children. I would add that love is as precious as ability, if not more so, and that we should aim at its increase by making parenthood the most responsible act in life, so that children are born only to those who love children and who will transmit their high measure of the parental instinct and the tender emotion which is its correlate.[17] CHAPTER V THE MULTIPLICATION OF MAN “Increase and multiply” The ceaseless multiplication of man is one of the facts which distinguish him from all other living species, animal or vegetable.[18]