“Unless you can measure men you cannot select them,” says Mr. Wiggam.[125] “It is often said that eugenics is hopeless because it does not know what it wants in human nature--it has no ideal. To this Dr. Morton Prince of Boston aptly replied: ‘Yes it has; it wants such men as William Graham Sumner and William James.’ This certainly sets a lofty ideal.... Yet, in all soberness it is doubtful if we want a whole race of such men. Men like these would doubtless clean our streets and remove our garbage a hundred times better than it is now done, but they could not at the same time be teachers, writers, lecturers and philosophers, unless perchance a society of such men would be so perfect that the street cleaner and philosopher would willingly interchange their tasks from hour to hour or from day to day. Pending such a possibility, however, eugenics is content with a much less but more inclusive ideal, namely, the increase of health, sanity and energy.” This is a little obscure to me. It is difficult to picture William James (or Henry, for that matter) as a superlative street-cleaner. But the goal of the eugenist seems clear--health, sanity and energy. These are excellent things. But as Mr. Wiggam estimates--by what method I do not know--that we owe to heredity fully nine-tenths of what we are, it would not seem advisable that the name of an invalid should be made to perish from the land of the living until we are able to know much more than we can as yet possibly know of the quality of the “germ-plasm” we are dealing with. Energy presents another difficulty. The rattlesnake possesses considerable energy, and is usually in good health. Chicago’s gunmen are energetic enough in all conscience. Obviously the direction of energy will have to be taken into consideration. And here again we are confronted by the question, Who is to decide what directions are right and what directions are wrong? “Let us,” says Mr. Wiggam,[126] “see to it that those to whom our sympathies have extended the privilege of a happy life instead of sounding for them the death knell of the jungle, shall not have the high biological privilege, which should always run parallel with social privilege and always be under social control, namely, the privilege of reproduction.” Never before in the history of the world has the idea of special privilege reached such heights as this. Through our “sympathies” we have, it appears, extended to certain persons we do not approve of the “privilege” of a happy life instead of killing them outright as we perhaps should have done. But we are not to allow our sentimentality to carry us so far that these persons shall have the further “privilege” of reproduction.