“My dear young man,” says the Eugenist at this point, “you must study biology. Your plan for the improvement of mankind is all shot through with childish ignorance of nature’s way of doing things. Come into my laboratory for a few years; and you will learn how little you can do by merely changing the environment. It’s nature that counts, not nurture. Improvement depends on the elimination of the inferior, not on their reformation by Socialist leaflets or settlement work. What you have to do is to find some substitute for that natural selection--the automatic and ruthless killing off of the unfit--which we are more and more frustrating with our short-sighted charity. Humanitarianism must get informed. Our squeamishness about interfering with the holy ‘liberty of the individual’ will have to be moderated by some sense of the right of society to protect itself from interference by the individual. Here are the feeble-minded, for example; they breed more rapidly than healthy people do, and they almost always transmit their defect. If you don’t interfere with these people, if you don’t teach them or force them to be childless, you will have an increase in insanity along with the development of humanity. Think of making a woman suffer to deliver into the world a cripple or an idiot. And further, consider that the lowest eighth of the people produce one-half of the next generation. The better people, the more vigorous and healthy people, are refusing to have children; every year the situation is becoming more critical. City-life and factory-life make things still worse; young men coming from the country plunge into the maelstrom of the city, then into its femalestrom; they emerge with broken health, marry deformities dressed up in the latest fashion, and produce children inferior in vigor and ability to themselves. Given a hundred years more of this, and western Europe and America will be in a condition to be overcome easily by the fertile and vigorous races of the East. That is what you have to think of. The problem is larger than that of making poor people less poor; it is the problem of preserving our civilization. Your socialism will help, but it will be the merest beginning; it will be but an introduction to the socialization of selection,--which is eugenics. We will prevent procreation by people who have a transmissible defect or disease; we will require certificates of health and clean ancestry before permitting marriage; we will encourage the mating, with or without love, of men and women possessed of energy and good physique. We will teach people, in Mr. Marett’s phrase, to marry less with their eyes and more with their heads. It will take us a long while to put all this into effect; but we will put it. Time is on our side; every year will make our case stronger. Within half a century the educated world will come and beg us to guide them in a eugenic revolution.” 4 _Anarchism_ A gentle anarchist: