It is indeed just here that we find a certain clash between the modern view of life and the view of earlier civilisations.  The ancients were less careful than we claim to be of the individual, but they were more careful of the race.  They cultivated eugenics after their manner, though it was a manner which we reprobate.[21] We pride ourselves, rightly or wrongly, on our care for the individual; during all the past century we claim to have been strenuously working for an amelioration of the environment which will make life healthier and pleasanter for the individual.  But in the concentration of our attention on this altogether desirable end, which we are still far from having adequately attained, we have lost sight of that larger end, the well-being of the race and the amelioration of life itself, not merely of the conditions of life.  The most we hope is that somehow the improvement of the conditions of the individual will incidentally improve the stock.  These our practical ideals, which have flourished for a century past, arose out of the great French Revolution and were inspired by the maxim of that Revolution, as formulated by Rousseau, that “All men are born equal.”  That maxim, was overthrown half a century ago; the great biological movement of science, initiated by Darwin, showed that it was untenable.  All men are not born equal.  Everyone agrees about that now, but nevertheless the momentum of the earlier movement was so powerful that we still go on acting as though all men are, and always will be, born equal, and that we need not trouble ourselves about heredity but only about the environment.

[21] But this statement must not be left without important qualification.  Thus the ancient Greeks (as Moissides has shown in Janus, 1913), not only their philosophers and statesmen, but also their women, often took the most enlightened interest in eugenics, and, moreover, showed it in practice.  They were in many respects far in advance of us.  They clearly realised, for instance, the need of a proper interval between conceptions, not only to ensure the health of women, but also the vigour of the offspring.  It is natural that among every fine race eugenics should be almost an instinct or they would cease to be a fine race.  It is equally natural that among our modern degenerates eugenics is an unspeakable horror, however much, as the psycho-analysts would put it, they rationalise that horror.

The way out of this clash of ideals—­which has compelled us to hope impossibilities from the environment because we dreaded what seemed the only alternative—­is, as we know, furnished by birth-control.  An unqualified reliance on the environment, making it ever easier and easier for the feeblest and most defective to be born and survive, could only, in the long run, lead to the degeneration of the whole race.  The knowledge of the practice of birth-control gives us the mastery of all that the ancients gained by infanticide, while yet enabling