nightmare, if it is to assume paternal charge of all the tens or hundreds of thousands of children whose parents cannot or will not provide adequately for them and is to guarantee to all such children as much education as they are capable of receiving, and a really fair start in life: then in sheer self-preservation the community must insist on, and rigidly enforce, its absolute claim to secure that no degeneracy or inheritable congenital defects shall persist beyond the present generation of degenerates, and that the community of fifty or seventy years hence shall have no incubus of mentally, or morally, or even physically, degenerate members—none but a few occasional sporadic morbid ‘sports’ from the normal, which it, in turn, may effectively prevent from handing on their like.” Unless the problem is squarely faced, Perrycoste concludes, national deterioration must increase and a permanently successful collectivist society is inherently impossible.
We are not now concerned with the details of any policy of eugenics and of birth-control, which I couple together because although a random birth-control by no means involves much, if any, eugenic progress, it is,not easy under modern conditions to conceive any practical or effective policy of eugenics except through the instrumentation of birth-control. We here take it for granted that in this field the slow progress of
