Do you, sir, enjoy living in the neighborhood of vandals and thieves? Well, hardly. One could not be expected to take so frivolous a view of life, therefore you will in self defense take every possible precaution to suppress vandalism and thievery? Never, my dear sir, never! You must take every possible precaution to reduce the spirit of vandalism and of thievery. The acts are in themselves unconsequential--they are but the product of a diseased mind or an indifferent training. The spirit, here as elsewhere, is all important. Are you a scientist? Do you admire Pasteur and Herbert Spencer? You are a "practical" man--see what Edison has done for you. As a statesman, you revere Lincoln and Daniel Webster. You cannot, as an artist, overlook the portraits of Rembrandt or the water scenes of Ruysdael. You must agree with me that these and a thousand others that I might mention--men called geniuses by their contemporaries or their descendants--have contributed untold worth to the society of which they were a part. They chose rightly. They are looked upon, and justly, as the salt of the earth. You admit the value of geniuses, in civilization, and you would, of course, do anything to increase their number? Then, let me say to you that the first thing for you to decide is that your own children shall be neither vandals nor thieves. The second thing for you to decide is that they shall, in so far as you are able to determine the matter, possess all of your good qualities, coupled with the good qualities which you lack, supplied by an able mate. In short, you must choose your life partner with a view to the elimination of anti-social tendencies, on the one hand, and on the other to the development of the qualities which distinguish the Super Man. How obvious is this statement, yet how haphazard has been the production of greatness. Only once in a generation does a man, in his choice of a wife, follow the example of John Newcomb. In a truly scientific spirit he enumerated on paper the qualities which he possessed; placed opposite them the qualities in which he was lacking; and then set out to find the woman who should supply his deficiencies. When he had located his future helpmeet, playing hymn tunes on an organ in a little red school house, and upon further acquaintance, had assured himself that she really possessed the needed qualities, he married her, with the determination that their first child should be a great mathematician. Their first child was Simon Newcomb, one of the leading astronomers of the nineteenth century. John Newcomb was a village school master, and his wife a village maiden, but in their choice they combined two sets of qualities which would inevitably produce a Super Man. John Newcomb was a pioneer eugenist. He chose a mate with the thought of the future foremost in his mind.