in this field; with high civilization fertility
inevitably diminishes.

II

Under these circumstances it was to be expected that a new ideal should
begin to flash before men's eyes. If the ideal of _quantity_ is lost to
us, why not seek the ideal of _quality_? We know that the old rule:
"Increase and multiply" meant a vast amount of infant mortality, of
starvation, of chronic disease, of widespread misery. In abandoning that
rule, as we have been forced to do, are we not left free to seek that
our children, though few, should be at all events fit, the finest, alike
in physical and psychical constitution, that the world has seen?

Thus has come about the recent expansion of that conception of
_Eugenics_, or the science and art of Good Breeding in the human race,
which a group of workers, pioneered by Francis Galton[148]--at first in
England and later in America, Germany and elsewhere--have been
developing for some years past. Eugenics is beginning to be felt to
possess a living actuality which it failed to possess before. Instead of
being a benevolent scientific fad it begins to present itself as the
goal to which we are inevitably moving.

The cause of Eugenics has sometimes been prejudiced in the public mind
by a comparison with the artificial breeding of domestic animals. In
reality the two things are altogether different. In breeding animals a
higher race of beings manipulates a lower race with the object of
securing definite points that are of no use whatever to the animals
themselves, but of considerable value to the breeders. In our own race,
on the other hand, the problem of breeding is presented in an entirely
different shape. There is as yet no race of super-men who are prepared
to breed man for their own special ends. As things are, even if we had
the ability and the power, we should surely hesitate before we bred men
and women as we breed dogs or fowls. We may, therefore, quite put aside
all discussion of eugenics as a sort of higher cattle-breeding. It would
be undesirable, even if it were not impracticable.

But there is another aspect of Eugenics. Human eugenics need not be, and
is not likely to be, a cold-blooded selection of partners by some
outside scientific authority. But it may be, and is very likely to be, a
slowly growing conviction--first among the more intelligent members of
the community and then by imitation and fashion among the less
intelligent members--that our children, the future ra