coming generation—demands our heartiest sympathy and our best co-operation, for as Galton, the founder of modern Eugenics, wrote towards the end of his life of this new science: “Its first object is to check the birth-rate of the unfit, instead of allowing them to come into being, though doomed in large numbers to perish prematurely.” We can seldom be absolutely sure what stocks should not propagate, and what two stocks should on no account be blended, but we can attain reasonable probability, and it is on such probabilities in every department of life that we are always called upon to act.
It is often said—I have said it myself—that birth-control when practised merely as a limitation of the family, scarcely suffices to further the eugenic progress of the race. If it is not deliberately directed towards the elimination of the worst stocks or the worst possibilities in the blending of stocks, it may even tend to diminish the better stocks since it is the better stocks that are least likely to propagate at random. This is true if other conditions remain equal. It is evident, however, that the other conditions will not remain equal, for no evidence has yet been brought forward to show that birth-control, even when practised without regard to eugenic considerations—doubtless the usual rule up to the present—has produced any degeneration of the race. On the contrary, the evidence seems to
