in the days to come. At any rate, it will be a terminating
evil. At present the Abyss is a hotbed breeding undesirable and too
often fearfully miserable children. _That_ is something more than a
sentimental horror. Under the really very horrible morality of to-day,
the spectacle of a mean-spirited, under-sized, diseased little man,
quite incapable of earning a decent living even for himself, married to
some underfed, ignorant, ill-shaped, plain and diseased little woman,
and guilty of the lives of ten or twelve ugly ailing children, is
regarded as an extremely edifying spectacle, and the two parents
consider their reproductive excesses as giving them a distinct claim
upon less fecund and more prosperous people. Benevolent persons throw
themselves with peculiar ardour into a case of this sort, and quite
passionate efforts are made to strengthen the mother against further
eventualities and protect the children until they attain to nubile
years. Until the attention of the benevolent persons is presently
distracted by a new case.... Yet so powerful is the suggestion of
current opinions that few people seem to see nowadays just what a
horrible and criminal thing this sort of family, seen from the point of
view of social physiology, appears.

And directly such principles as these come into effective operation, and
I believe that the next hundred years will see this new phase of the
human history beginning, there will recommence a process of physical and
mental improvement in mankind, a raising and elaboration of the average
man, that has virtually been in suspense during the greater portion of
the historical period. It is possible that in the last hundred years, in
the more civilized states of the world, the average of humanity has
positively fallen. All our philanthropists, all our religious teachers,
seem to be in a sort of informal conspiracy to preserve an atmosphere of
mystical ignorance about these matters, which, in view of the
irresistible nature of the sexual impulse, results in a swelling tide of
miserable little lives. Consider what it will mean to have perhaps half
the population of the world, in every generation, restrained from or
tempted to evade reproduction! This thing, this euthanasia of the weak
and sensual, is possible. On the principles that will probably animate
the predominant classes of the new time, it will be permissible, and I
have little or no doubt that in the future it will be planned and
achiev