There is one prejudice already mentioned, due to lack of clear thinking, which deserves more special consideration because it is widespread among the socialistic democracy of several countries as well as among social reformers, and is directed alike against eugenics and birth-control.  This prejudice is based on the ground that bad economic conditions and an unwholesome environment are the source of all social evils, and that a better distribution of wealth, or a vast scheme of social welfare, is the one thing necessary, when that is achieved all other things being added unto us, without any further trouble on our part.  It is certainly impossible to over-rate the importance of the economic factor in society, or of a good environment.  And it is true that eugenics alone, like birth-control alone, can effect little if the economic basis of society is unsound.  But it is equally certain that the economic factor can never in itself suffice for fine living or even as a cure-all of social and racial diseases.  Its value is not that it can effect these things but that it furnishes the favourable conditions for effecting them.  He would be foolish indeed who went to the rich to find the example of good breeding and, as is well known, it is not with the rich that the future of the race lies.  The fact is that under any economic system the responsible personal direction of the individual and the family remain equally necessary, and no progress is possible so long as the individual casts all responsibility away from himself on to the social group he forms part of.  The social group, after all, is merely himself and the likes of himself.  He is merely shifting the burden from his individual self to his collective self, and in so doing he loses more than he gains.

Thus there is always a sound core in that Individualism which has been preached so long and practised so energetically, especially in English-speaking lands, however great the abuse involved in its excesses.  It is still in the name of Individualism that the most brilliant antagonists of eugenics and of birth-control are wont to direct their attacks.  The counsel of self-control and foresight in procreation, the restriction necessary to purify and raise the standard of the race, seem to the narrow and short-sighted advocates of a great principle an unwarrantable violation of the sacred rights of their individual liberty.  They have not yet grasped the elementary fact that the rights of the individual are the rights of all individuals, and that Individualism itself calls for a limitation of the freedom of the individual.