An ideal too distant, too remote, may interest the dreamer and the reformer possibly, but it cannot inspire a whole nation. An ideal within the range of possibility, that each one of us who lives a full lifetime may actually perceive, such an ideal can spur and fire the imagination, not only of our own nation, but of the world. It is my prayer that I may present such a racial ideal, not only to my own people but to humanity. It is my prayer that I may live to see in the generation of my grandchildren a humanity from which almost all the most blackening and distressing elements have been eliminated, and in which the vernal bodily beauty and unsullied spiritual power of those then growing up will surpass anything that we know to-day except among the rare and gifted few. This is not a wild dream; it is a real potentiality almost within reach. The materialization of this vital racial vision is in the hands of the mothers for the next twenty or thirty years. If every woman will but consciously and deliberately exercise the powers of her motherhood after learning of those powers; if she bear only those children which she and her mate ardently desire; if she refuse to bear any but these, and if she so space these children that she herself rests and recovers vitality between their births, and during their coming she lives in such a way as I have indicated in the preceding chapters, and if at the same time the deadly and horrible scourges of the venereal diseases and the multitude of ramifications of racial baseness are eliminated _as they can be_, then with a comparatively small percentage of accidents and unforeseeable errors, the quality of those born will enormously improve, and by a second generation all should be already far on the highway to new and wonderful powers, which are to-day almost unsuspected. What are the greatest dangers which jeopardize the materialization of this glorious dream of a human stock represented only by well-formed, desired, well-endowed beautiful men and women? Two main dangers are in the way of its consummation; the first is ignorance. It is difficult to reach the untutored mind, to teach a public hardened and deadened to callousness and the lack of dreams of their own; even though if one could but reach them it would be possible to make them understand. A second and almost greater danger is not a simple ignorance, but the inborn incapacity which lies in the vast and ever increasing stock of degenerate, feeble-minded and unbalanced who are now in our midst and who devastate social customs. These populate most rapidly, these tend proportionately to increase, and these are like the parasite upon the healthy tree sapping its vitality. These produce less than they consume and are able only to flourish and reproduce so long as the healthier produce food for them; but by ever weakening the human stock, in the end they will succumb with the fine structure which they have destroyed.