of
achieving their eugenical resurrection themselves. It has never been
shown, and it cannot be shown, that the method would have failed. But
it can be shown, and it must be closely and clearly noted, that the
method had very strict limitations from the employers' own point of
view. If they made the worker too comfortable, he would not work to
increase another's comforts; if they made him too independent, he
would not work like a dependent. If, for instance, his wages were so
good that he could save out of them, he might cease to be a
wage-earner. If his house or garden were his own, he might stand an
economic siege in it. The whole capitalist experiment had been built
on his dependence; but now it was getting out of hand, not in the
direction of freedom, but of frank helplessness. One might say that
his dependence had got independent of control.

But there was another way. And towards this the employer's ideas
began, first darkly and unconsciously, but now more and more clearly,
to drift. Giving property, giving leisure, giving status costs money.
But there is one human force that costs nothing. As it does not cost
the beggar a penny to indulge, so it would not cost the employer a
penny to employ. He could not alter or improve the tables or the
chairs on the cheap. But there were two pieces of furniture (labelled
respectively "the husband" and "the wife") whose relations were much
cheaper. He could alter the _marriage_ in the house in such a way as
to promise himself the largest possible number of the kind of children
he did want, with the smallest possible number of the kind he did
not. He could divert the force of sex from producing vagabonds. And he
could harness to his high engines unbought the red unbroken river of
the blood of a man in his youth, as he has already harnessed to them
all the wild waste rivers of the world.

CHAPTER V

THE MEANNESS OF THE MOTIVE

Now, if any ask whether it be imaginable that an ordinary man of the
wealthier type should analyse the problem or conceive the plan, the
inhumanly far-seeing plan, as I have set it forth, the answer is:
"Certainly not." Many rich employers are too generous to do such a
thing; many are too stupid to know what they are doing. The eugenical
opportunity I have described is but an ultimate analysis of a whole
drift of thoughts in the type of man who does not analyse his
thoughts. He sees a slouching tramp, with a sick wife and a string of
rickety c