it ever easier and easier
for the feeblest and most defective to be born and survive, could only, in
the long run, lead to the degeneration of the whole race. The knowledge of
the practice of birth-control gives us the mastery of all that the
ancients gained by infanticide, while yet enabling us to cherish that
ideal of the sacredness of human life which we profess to honour so
highly. The main difficulty is that it demands a degree of scientific
precision which the ancients could not possess and might dispense with, so
long as they were able to decide the eugenic claims of the infant by
actual inspection. We have to be content to determine not what the infant
is but when it be likely to be, and that involves a knowledge of the laws
of heredity which we are only learning slowly to acquire. We may all in
our humble ways help to increase that knowledge by giving it greater
extension and more precision through the observations we are able to make
on our own families. To such observations Galton attached great importance
and strove in various ways to further them. Detailed records, physical and
mental, beginning from birth, are still far from being as common as is
desirable, although it is obvious that they possess a permanent personal
and family private interest in addition to their more public scientific
value. We do not need, and it would indeed be undesirable, to emulate in
human breeding the achievements of a Luther Burbank. We have no right to
attempt to impose on any human creature an exaggerated and one-sided
development. But it is not only our right, it is our duty, or rather one
may say, the natural impulse of every rational and humane person, to seek
that only such children may be born as will be able to go through life
with a reasonable prospect that they will not be heavily handicapped by
inborn defect or special liability to some incapacitating disease. What is
called "positive" eugenics--the attempt, that is, to breed special
qualities--may well be viewed with hesitation. But so-called "negative"
eugenics--the effort to clear all inborn obstacles out of the path of the
coming generation--demands our heartiest sympathy and our best
co-operation, for as Galton, the founder of modern Eugenics, wrote towards
the end of his life of this new science: "Its first object is to check the
birth-rate of the unfit, instead of allowing them to come into being,
though doomed in large numbers to perish prematurely." We can seld