most beautiful social construction to fragments.
It is the more necessary to point this out since it is on the Socialist
and Democratic side, much more frequently than on the Individualist side,
that we find an indifferent or positively hostile attitude towards eugenic
considerations. Put social conditions on a sound basis, the people on
this side often say, let all receive an adequate economic return for their
work and be recognised as having a claim for an adequate share in the
products of society, and there is no need to worry about the race or about
the need for birth-control, all will go well of itself. There is not the
slightest ground for any such comfortable belief.

This has been well shown by Dr. Eden Paul, himself a Socialist and even in
sympathy with the extreme Left.[23] After setting forth the present
conditions, with our excessive elimination of higher types, and undue
multiplication of lower types, the racial degeneration caused by the
faulty and anti-selective working of the marriage system in modern
capitalist society, so that in our existing civilisation unconscious
natural selection has largely ceased to work towards the improvement of
the human breed, he proceeds to consider the possible remedies. The
frequent impatience of the Socialist, and Social Reformers generally, with
eugenic proposals has a certain degree of justification in the fact that
many evils thoughtlessly attributed to inferiority of stock are really due
to bad environment. But when the environment has been so far improved that
all defects due to its badness are removed, we shall be face to face,
without possibility of doubt, with bad inheritance as the sole remaining
factor in the production of inefficient and anti-social members of the
community. A socialist community must recognise the right to work and to
maintenance of all its members, Eden Paul points out, but, he adds, a
community which allowed this right to all defectives without imposing any
restrictions in their perpetuation of themselves would deserve all the
evils that would fall upon it. It is quite clear how intolerable the
burden of these evils would be. A State that provided an adequate
subsistence for all alike, the inefficient as well as the efficient, would
encourage a racial degeneration, from excessive multiplication of the
unfit, far more dangerous even than that of to-day.[24] Ability to earn
the minimum wage, Eden Paul argues in agreement with H.G. Wells, must b