ctuation.

My own belief is that these great ideas like Equality and Justice are
things which, like poetry, are born and cannot be made. That a number of
earnest people should be thinking about them shows that they are in
the air; but the interest felt in them is the sign and not the cause
of their increase. I believe that one must go forwards, trying to avoid
anything that is consciously harsh or pompous or selfish or base, and
the great ideas will take care of themselves.

The two great obvious difficulties which seem to me to lie at the root
of all schemes for producing a system of social equality are first the
radical inequality of character, temperament, and equipment in human
beings. No system can ever hope to be a practical system unless we can
eliminate the possibility of children being born, some of them perfectly
qualified for life and citizenship, and others hopelessly disqualified.
If such differences were the result of environment it would be a
remediable thing. But one can have a strong, vigorous, naturally
temperate child born and brought up under the meanest and most
sordid conditions, and, on the other hand, a thoroughly worthless and
detestable person may be the child of high-minded, well-educated people,
with every social advantage. My work as a practical educationalist
enforced this upon me. One would find a boy, born under circumstances
as favourable for the production of virtue and energy as any socialistic
system could provide, who was really only fitted for the lowest kind
of mechanical work, and whose instincts were utterly gross. Even if the
State could practise a kind of refined Mendelism, it would be impossible
to guard against the influences of heredity. If one traces back the
hereditary influences of a child for ten generations, it will be found
that he has upwards of two thousand progenitors, any one of whom may
give him a bias.

And secondly, I cannot see that any system of socialism is consistent
with the system of the family. The parents in a socialistic state
can only be looked upon as brood stock, and the nurture of the rising
generation must be committed to some State organisation, if one is to
secure an equality of environing influences. Of course, this is done to
a certain extent by the boarding-schools of the upper classes; and here
again my experience has shown me that the system, though a good one for
the majority, is not the best system invariably for types with marked
origi