t on this side, were so truly scientific
as to have resort to specialists. To cultivate a sense of fun, they
visited Harry Lauder, and then Wilkie Bard, and afterwards George
Robey; but all, it would appear, in vain. To the newspaper reader,
however, it looked as if the names of Metchnikoff and Steinmetz and
Karl Pearson would soon be quite as familiar as those of Robey and
Lauder and Bard. Arguments about these Eugenic authorities, reports of
the controversies at the Eugenic Congress, filled countless columns.
The fact that Mr. Bolce, the creator of perfect pre-natal conditions,
was afterwards sued in a law-court for keeping his own flat in
conditions of filth and neglect, cast but a slight and momentary
shadow upon the splendid dawn of the science. It would be vain to
record any of the thousand testimonies to its triumph. In the nature
of things, this should be the longest chapter in the book, or rather
the beginning of another book. It should record, in numberless
examples, the triumphant popularisation of Eugenics in England. But as
a matter of fact this is not the first chapter but the last. And this
must be a very short chapter, because the whole of this story was cut
short. A very curious thing happened. England went to war.

This would in itself have been a sufficiently irritating interruption
in the early life of Eugenette, and in the early establishment of
Eugenics. But a far more dreadful and disconcerting fact must be
noted. With whom, alas, did England go to war? England went to war
with the Superman in his native home. She went to war with that very
land of scientific culture from which the very ideal of a Superman had
come. She went to war with the whole of Dr. Steinmetz, and presumably
with at least half of Dr. Karl Pearson. She gave battle to the
birthplace of nine-tenths of the professors who were the prophets of
the new hope of humanity. In a few weeks the very name of a professor
was a matter for hissing and low plebeian mirth. The very name of
Nietzsche, who had held up this hope of something superhuman to
humanity, was laughed at for all the world as if he had been touched
with lunacy. A new mood came upon the whole people; a mood of
marching, of spontaneous soldierly vigilance and democratic
discipline, moving to the faint tune of bugles far away. Men began to
talk strangely of old and common things, of the counties of England,
of its quiet landscapes, of motherhood and the half-buried religion of