irth-control is thus a far more effective lever for raising the state of
the social environment and improving the conditions of breeding, than is
direct action on the part of the community in its collective capacity to
attain the same end. For however energetic such collective action may be
in striving to improve general social conditions by municipalising or
State-supporting public utilities, it can never adequately counter-balance
the excessive burden and wasteful expenditure of force placed on a family
by undue child-production. It can only palliate them.

When, however, we have found reason to believe that, even if practised
without regard to eugenic considerations, birth-control may yet act
beneficially to promote good breeding, we begin to realise how great a
power it may possess when consciously and deliberately directed towards
that end. In eugenics, as already pointed out, there are two objects that
may be aimed at: one called positive eugenics, that seeks to promote the
increase of the best stocks amongst us; the other, called negative
eugenics, which seeks to promote the decrease of the worst stocks. Our
knowledge is still too imperfect to enable us to pursue either of these
objects with complete certainty. This is especially so as regards positive
eugenics, and since it seems highly undesirable to attempt to breed human
beings, as we do animals, for points, when we are in the presence of what
seem to us our finest human stocks, physically, morally, and
intellectually, it is our wisest course just to leave them alone as much
as we can. The best stocks will probably be also those best able to help
themselves and in so doing to help others. But that is obviously not so as
regards the worst stocks. It is, therefore, fortunate that the aim here
seems a little clearer. There are still many abnormal conditions of which
we cannot say positively that they are injurious to the race and that we
should therefore seek to breed them out. But there are other conditions so
obviously of evil import alike to the subjects themselves and to their
descendants that we cannot have any reasonable doubt about them. There is,
for instance, epilepsy, which is known to be transformed by heredity into
various abnormalities dangerous alike to their possessors and to society.
There are also the pronounced degrees of feeble-mindedness, which are
definitely heritable and not only condemn those who reveal them to a
permanent inaptitude for ful