Again, the whole of our accepted notions of charity, humaneness and compassion, might be subjected to a searching inquiry. Since it is a certain unknown but suspected infirmity of man that may be the cause of his complete dissatisfaction with his institutions and systems, nothing, however sacred, should be left unscrutinised, untested. It might be asked whether we have not been wrong all the time to allow our second-rate, third-rate, fourth-rate, and x-rate fellow-creatures to multiply and to live in our midst unbranded. In view of the alarming reports on the nation’s health recently published by the Government; in view of the fact that a [p204] British Prime Minister, and no society crank or faddist, has found it necessary to warn us that an “A1 nation cannot be built up out of C3 men”; in view, moreover, of the immense burden that the nation shoulders annually for the maintenance of lunatics, incurables, cripples, and other congenital degenerates, it might be asked, almost with trepidation, whether the healthy sections of the nation are even now plentiful enough and vigorous enough to be saved and secured from further infection. Since we have been brought to this pass by the most sacred ideals and principles of the past, these ideals and principles would require to be reverently taken up and examined. Again with regard to the idea of non-selective human multiplication,--apart from any suspicion it may have incurred of increasing disease or degeneration,--it might reasonably be questioned whether any species of animal could for long allow itself the liberties that we have allowed ourselves, in fostering undesirable examples of our kind and in scientifically persuading even the half-reluctant to live, without ultimately having to pay for it very severely indeed. What breed of sheep, what breed of horses, what breed of common barn-fowl, could have been abandoned to the promiscuous mating alone (not to mention other errors) to which modern man has long been abandoned, without suffering ultimate degeneration? A very fruitful method of inquiry would consist in investigating to what extent modern society may have failed as an organism through pursuing too ardently survival values alone, uncontrolled by æsthetic survival [p205] values. In plain English, has modern man pursued survival at all costs, even at the cost of caring _how_ he survived, or what manner of man he was when he did survive? The check of the æsthetic survival values might have prevented many a step, which though it insured the survival of abundant numbers, yet removed some grace, some desirable quality, from the form or mind of man.[42]