onscious self which will be the
true characteristic of the Superman.

At this point we perceive the importance of giving fancy the widest
possible field. To cut humanity up into small cliques, and effectively
limit the selection of the individual to his own clique, is to postpone
the Superman for eons, if not for ever. Not only should every person be
nourished and trained as a possible parent, but there should be no
possibility of such an obstacle to natural selection as the objection of
a countess to a navvy or of a duke to a charwoman. Equality is
essential to good breeding; and equality, as all economists know, is
incompatible with property.

Besides, equality is an essential condition of bad breeding also; and
bad breeding is indispensable to the weeding out of the human race.
When the conception of heredity took hold of the scientific imagination
in the middle of last century, its devotees announced that it was a
crime to marry the lunatic to the lunatic or the consumptive to the
consumptive. But pray are we to try to correct our diseased stocks by
infecting our healthy stocks with them? Clearly the attraction which
disease has for diseased people is beneficial to the race. If two
really unhealthy people get married, they will, as likely as not, have a
great number of children who will all die before they reach maturity.
This is a far more satisfactory arrangement than the tragedy of a union
between a healthy and an unhealthy person. Though more costly than
sterilization of the unhealthy, it has the enormous advantage that in
the event of our notions of health and unhealth being erroneous (which
to some extent they most certainly are), the error will be corrected by
experience instead of confirmed by evasion.

One fact must be faced resolutely, in spite of the shrieks of the
romantic. There is no evidence that the best citizens are the offspring
of congenial marriages, or that a conflict of temperament is not a
highly important part of what breeders call crossing. On the contrary,
it is quite sufficiently probable that good results may be obtained from
parents who would be extremely unsuitable companions and partners, to
make it certain that the experiment of mating them will sooner or later
be tried purposely almost as often as it is now tried accidentally. But
mating such couples must clearly not involve marrying them. In
conjugation two complementary persons may supply one another's
deficiencies: i