ly a custodian of the inheritance
of the whole past; it is far more disgraceful for you to squander or
ruin this heritage, or to regard it as intended solely for your
individual, selfish gratification, than it would be for you to dissipate
a fortune in money which you had received, or to betray any trust which
had been confided to you by one of your fellow men."

Such is the teaching of eugenics. It is not wholly new. The early Greeks
gave much thought to it, and with the insight which characterized them,
they rightly put the emphasis on the constructive side; they sought to
breed better men and women, not merely to accomplish a work of hygiene,
to lessen taxes, and reduce suffering, by reducing the number of
unfortunates among them. As early as the first half of the sixth century
B. C. the Greek poet Theognis of Megara wrote: "We look for rams and
asses and stallions of good stock, and one believes that good will come
from good; yet a good man minds not to wed an evil daughter of an evil
sire, if he but give her much wealth.... Wealth confounds our stock.
Marvel not that the stock of our folk is tarnished, for the good is
mingling with the base." A century later eugenics was discussed in some
detail by Plato, who suggested that the state intervene to mate the best
with the best, and the worst with the worst; the former should be
encouraged to have large families, and their children should be reared
by the government, while the children of the unfit were to be, as he
says, "put away in some mysterious, unknown places, as they should be."
Aristotle developed the idea on political lines, being more interested
in the economic than the biological aspects of marriage; but he held
firmly to the doctrine that the state should feel free to intervene in
the interests of reproductive selection.

For nearly two thousand years after this, conscious eugenic ideals were
largely ignored. Constant war reversed natural selection, as it is doing
to-day, by killing off the physically fit and leaving the relatively
unfit to reproduce the race; while monasticism and the enforced celibacy
of the priesthood performed a similar office for many of the mentally
superior, attracting them to a career in which they could leave no
posterity. At the beginning of the last century a germ of modern
eugenics is visible in Malthus' famous essay on population, in which he
directed attention to the importance of the birth-rate for human
welfare, since this