e
need no longer beg; but perhaps the most radically sympathetic of all is
the man who arranges that the beggar shall not be born.

So it is that the question of breed, the production of fine individuals,
the elevation of the ideal of quality in human production over that of
mere quantity, begins to be seen, not merely as a noble ideal in itself,
but as the only method by which Socialism can be enabled to continue on
its present path. If the entry into life is conceded more freely to the
weak, the incompetent, and the defective than to the strong, the
efficient, and the sane, then a Sisyphean task is imposed on society;
for every burden lifted two more burdens appear. But as individual
responsibility becomes developed, as we approach the time to which
Galton looked forward, when the eugenic care for the race may become a
religion, then social control over the facts of life becomes possible.
Through the slow growth of knowledge concerning hereditary conditions,
by voluntary self-restraint, by the final disappearance of the lingering
prejudice against the control of procreation, by sterilization in
special cases, by methods of pressure which need not amount to actual
compulsion,[259] it will be possible to attain an increasingly firm grip
on the evil elements of heredity. Not until such measures as these,
under the controlling influence of a sense of personal responsibility
extending to every member of the community, have long been put into
practice, can we hope to see man on the earth risen to his full stature,
healthy in body, noble in spirit, beautiful in both alike, moving
spaciously and harmoniously among his fellows in the great world of
Nature, to which he is so subtly adapted because he has himself sprung
out of it and is its most exquisite flower. At this final point social
hygiene becomes one with the hygiene of the soul.[260]

Poets and prophets, from Jesus and Paul to Novalis and Whitman, have
seen the divine possibilities of Man. There is no temple in the world,
they seem to say, so great as the human body; he comes in contact with
Heaven, they declare, who touches a human person. But these human
things, made to be gods, have spawned like frogs over all the earth.
Everywhere they have beslimed its purity and befouled its beauty,
darkening the very sunshine. Heaped upon one another in evil masses,
preying upon one another as no other creature has ever preyed upon its
kind, they have become a festering heap wh