are found by which that end is carried into effect.  Some of the objections offered at first will be discovered to be sentimental, and of no real importance—­the sentiment will change and they will disappear; others that are genuine are not met, but are in some way turned or eluded; and lastly, through the ingenuity of many minds directed for a long time towards the achievement of a common purpose, many happy ideas are sure to be hit upon that would not have occurred to a single individual.

* * * * *

This being premised, it will suffice to faintly sketch out some sort of basis for eugenics, it being now an understanding that we are provisionally agreed, for the sake of argument, that the improvement of race is an object of first-class importance, and that the popular feeling has been educated to regard it in that light.

The final object would be to devise means for favouring individuals who bore the signs of membership of a superior race, the proximate aim would be to ascertain what those signs were, and these we will consider first.

The indications of superior breed are partly personal, partly ancestral.  We need not trouble ourselves about the personal part, because full weight is already given to it in the competitive careers; energy, brain, morale, and health being recognised factors of success, while there can hardly be a better evidence of a person being adapted to his circumstances than that afforded by success.  It is the ancestral part that is neglected, and which we have yet to recognise at its just value.  A question that now continually arises is this:  a youth is a candidate for permanent employment, his present personal qualifications are known, but how will he turn out in later years?  The objections to competitive examinations are notorious, in that they give undue prominence to youths whose receptive faculties are quick, and whose intellects are precocious.  They give no indication of the directions in which the health, character, and intellect of the youth will change through the development, in their due course, of ancestral tendencies that are latent in youth, but will manifest themselves in after life.  Examinations deal with the present, not with the future, although it is in the future of the youth that we are especially interested.  Much of the needed guidance may be derived from his family history.  I cannot doubt, if two youths were of equal personal merit, of whom one belonged to a thriving and long-lived family, and the other to a decaying and short-lived family, that there could be any hesitation in saying that the chances were greater of the first-mentioned youth becoming the more valuable public servant of the two.

A thriving family may be sufficiently defined or inferred by the successive occupations of its several male members in the previous generation, and of the two grandfathers.  These are patent facts attainable by almost every youth, which admit of being verified in his neighbourhood and attested in a satisfactory manner.