not discuss here which morality I favour; but I insist that
they are opposite. The Eugenist really sets up as saints the very men
whom hundreds of families have called sneaks. To be consistent, they
ought to put up statues to the men who deserted their loves because of
bodily misfortune; with inscriptions celebrating the good Eugenist
who, on his fiancee falling off a bicycle, nobly refused to marry her;
or to the young hero who, on hearing of an uncle with erysipelas,
magnanimously broke his word. What is perfectly plain is this: that
mankind have hitherto held the bond between man and woman so sacred,
and the effect of it on the children so incalculable, that they have
always admired the maintenance of honour more than the maintenance of
safety. Doubtless they thought that even the children might be none
the worse for not being the children of cowards and shirkers; but this
was not the first thought, the first commandment. Briefly, we may say
that while many moral systems have set restraints on sex almost as
severe as any Eugenist could set, they have almost always had the
character of securing the fidelity of the two sexes to each other, and
leaving the rest to God. To introduce an ethic which makes that
fidelity or infidelity vary with some calculation about heredity is
that rarest of all things, a revolution that has not happened before.

It is only right to say here, though the matter should only be touched
on, that many Eugenists would contradict this, in so far as to claim
that there was a consciously Eugenic reason for the horror of those
unions which begin with the celebrated denial to man of the privilege
of marrying his grandmother. Dr. S.R. Steinmetz, with that creepy
simplicity of mind with which the Eugenists chill the blood, remarks
that "we do not yet know quite certainly" what were "the motives for
the horror of" that horrible thing which is the agony of Oedipus. With
entirely amiable intention, I ask Dr. S.R. Steinmetz to speak for
himself. I know the motives for regarding a mother or sister as
separate from other women; nor have I reached them by any curious
researches. I found them where I found an analogous aversion to eating
a baby for breakfast. I found them in a rooted detestation in the
human soul to liking a thing in one way, when you already like it in
another quite incompatible way. Now it is perfectly true that this
aversion may have acted eugenically; and so had a certain ultimate
confirm