an ordinary contractor produces stores for sale to the Government, and
the Government rejects them as not up to the required standard, the
condemned goods are either sold for what they will fetch or else
scrapped: that is, treated as waste material; whereas if the goods
consisted of human beings, all that could be done would be to let them
loose or send them to the nearest workhouse. But there is nothing new
in private enterprise throwing its human refuse on the cheap labor
market and the workhouse; and the refuse of the new industry would
presumably be better bred than the staple product of ordinary poverty.
In our present happy-go-lucky industrial disorder, all the human
products, successful or not, would have to be thrown on the labor
market; but the unsuccessful ones would not entitle the company to a
bounty and so would be a dead loss to it. The practical commercial
difficulty would be the uncertainty and the cost in time and money of
the first experiments. Purely commercial capital would not touch such
heroic operations during the experimental stage; and in any case the
strength of mind needed for so momentous a new departure could not be
fairly expected from the Stock Exchange. It will have to be handled by
statesmen with character enough to tell our democracy and plutocracy
that statecraft does not consist in flattering their follies or applying
their suburban standards of propriety to the affairs of four continents.
The matter must be taken up either by the State or by some organization
strong enough to impose respect upon the State.

The novelty of any such experiment, however, is only in the scale of it.
In one conspicuous case, that of royalty, the State does already select
the parents on purely political grounds; and in the peerage, though the
heir to a dukedom is legally free to marry a dairymaid, yet the social
pressure on him to confine his choice to politically and socially
eligible mates is so overwhelming that he is really no more free to
marry the dairymaid than George IV was to marry Mrs Fitzherbert; and
such a marriage could only occur as a result of extraordinary strength
of character on the part of the dairymaid acting upon extraordinary
weakness on the part of the duke. Let those who think the whole
conception of intelligent breeding absurd and scandalous ask themselves
why George IV was not allowed to choose his own wife whilst any tinker
could marry whom he pleased? Simply because it did