use the later born
children are less liable to survive the conditions produced by a large
family.

In passing, we should here recognize the difficulties presented by the
idea of "fit" and "unfit." Who is to decide this question? The grosser,
the more obvious, the undeniably feeble-minded should, indeed, not only
be discouraged but prevented from propagating their kind. But among the
writings of the representative Eugenists one cannot ignore the distinct
middle-class bias that prevails. As that penetrating critic, F. W.
Stella Browne, has said in another connection, "The Eugenics Education
Society has among its numbers many most open-minded and truly
progressive individuals but the official policy it has pursued for years
has been inspired by class-bias and sex bias. The society laments with
increasing vehemence the multiplication of the less fortunate classes at
a more rapid rate than the possessors of leisure and opportunity. (I do
not think it relevant here to discuss whether the innate superiority of
endowment in the governing class really is so overwhelming as to justify
the Eugenics Education Society's peculiar use of the terms `fit' and
`unfit'!) Yet it has persistently refused to give any help toward
extending the knowledge of contraceptives to the exploited classes.
Similarly, though the Eugenics Review, the organ of the society,
frequently laments the `selfishness' of the refusal of maternity by
healthy and educated women of the professional classes, I have yet
to learn that it has made any official pronouncement on the English
illegitimacy laws or any organized effort toward defending the unmarried
mother."

This peculiarly Victorian reticence may be inherited from the founder of
Eugenics. Galton declared that the "Bohemian" element in the Anglo-Saxon
race is destined to perish, and "the sooner it goes, the happier for
mankind." The trouble with any effort of trying to divide humanity
into the "fit" and the "unfit," is that we do not want, as H. G. Wells
recently pointed out,(5) to breed for uniformity but for variety. "We
want statesmen and poets and musicians and philosophers and strong
men and delicate men and brave men. The qualities of one would be the
weaknesses of the other." We want, most of all, genius.

Proscription on Galtonian lines would tend to eliminate many of the
great geniuses of the world who were not only "Bohemian," but actually
and pathologically abnormal--men like Rousseau, Dostoevsky