e of that puerile moral obsession which marks the
professor.... But they so seldom tell it! Well, perhaps some of them
have--and their penalty is that they are damned and forgotten.

XIV

THE CURSE OF CIVILIZATION

A civilized man's worst curse is social obligation. The most unpleasant
act imaginable is to go to a dinner party. One could get far better
food, taking one day with another, at Childs', or even in a Pennsylvania
Railroad dining-car; one could find far more amusing society in a
bar-room or a bordello, or even at the Y. M. C. A. No hostess in
Christendom ever arranged a dinner party of any pretensions without
including at least one intensely disagreeable person--a vain and vapid
girl, a hideous woman, a follower of baseball, a stock-broker, a veteran
of some war or other, a gabbler of politics. And one is enough to do the
business.

XV

EUGENICS

The error of the eugenists lies in the assumption that a physically
healthy man is the best fitted to survive. This is true of rats and the
_pediculae_, but not of the higher animals, _e. g._, horses, dogs and
men. In these higher animals one looks for more subtle qualities,
chiefly of the spirit. Imagine estimating philosophers by their chest
expansions, their blood pressures, their Wassermann reactions!

The so-called social diseases, over which eugenists raise such a pother,
are surely not the worst curses that mankind has to bear. Some of the
greatest men in history have had them; whole nations have had them and
survived. The truth about them is that, save in relatively rare cases,
they do very little damage. The horror in which they are held is chiefly
a moral horror, and its roots lie in the assumption that they cannot be
contracted without sin. Nothing could be more false. Many great
moralists have suffered from them: the gods are always up to such
sardonic waggeries.

Moreover, only one of them is actually inheritable, and that one is
transmitted relatively seldom. But among psychic characters one finds
that practically all are inheritable. For example, stupidity, credulity,
avarice, pecksniffery, lack of imagination, hatred of beauty, meanness,
poltroonry, petty brutality, smallness of soul.... I here present, of
course, the Puritan complex; there flashes up the image of the "good
man," that libel on God and the devil. Consider him well. If you had to
choose a sire for a first-rate son, would you choose a consumptive Jew
with the fi