reader to what I
have said on the duties of parents toward their children, and on the
duties of society toward the procreators of healthy children. (Chapter
XIII.)

It would certainly take a century to obtain any appreciable
improvement in the quality of a race by this procedure, even if it
were carried out in a methodical and general way. At the end of a few
centuries our descendants might recognize the happiness that they owe
to our efforts. They would also no doubt be astonished at being
descended from such a race of barbarians, and at having so many
drunkards, criminals and imbeciles among their ancestors. The mingling
of mysticism in sexual life, which now exists under the name of
religion, would appear to them almost the same as idolatry and the
practice of "magicians" among savage races appears to us.

As to the effects of alcoholic drinks and prostitution, these would
give them almost the same impression as the instruments of torture of
the Middle Ages which we see exhibited in museums, or the horrors of
the Inquisition, or burning at the stake for witchcraft.

Many of my readers will no doubt regard my comparisons as exaggerated
or fanatical, because, imbued as we are with contemporary thought, we
cannot, without a great effort of imagination and having at our
disposal much experience and many objects of comparison, identify
ourselves with the thought of the past or that of the future. I
recommend persons who cannot appreciate this fact to read the "Key to
Uncle Tom's Cabin," by Harriet Beecher-Stowe (not the novel itself).
This book contains numerous documents relating to the time of negro
slavery before the American war of secession. When they read what
happened at that time, for example, advertisements in the public
journals of dogs trained to track escaped slaves, they will perhaps
agree with me. Pious pastors then gave their support to slavery, as
they often do now to alcohol. What now appears to us as monstrous
seemed then quite natural.

=Reform in Education.=--After human selection, I consider pedagogic
reform in the sexual and other domains as the most important of
positive reforms. (Vide Chapters XVII and XIII.) Although good quality
in the germ is one of the fundamental conditions for man's happiness,
it is not sufficient. Just as we can obtain by education comparatively
useful individuals from comparatively defective germs, so can we more
easily damage phylogenetically good germs, by evil influ