This has been well shown by Dr. Eden Paul, himself a Socialist and even in sympathy with the extreme Left.[23] After setting forth the present conditions, with our excessive elimination of higher types, and undue multiplication of lower types, the racial degeneration caused by the faulty and anti-selective working of the marriage system in modern capitalist society, so that in our existing civilisation unconscious natural selection has largely ceased to work towards the improvement of the human breed, he proceeds to consider the possible remedies.  The frequent impatience of the Socialist, and Social Reformers generally, with eugenic proposals has a certain degree of justification in the fact that many evils thoughtlessly attributed to inferiority of stock are really due to bad environment.  But when the environment has been so far improved that all defects due to its badness are removed, we shall be face to face, without possibility of doubt, with bad inheritance as the sole remaining factor in the production of inefficient and anti-social members of the community.  A socialist community must recognise the right to work and to maintenance of all its members, Eden Paul points out, but, he adds, a community which allowed this right to all defectives without imposing any restrictions in their perpetuation of themselves would deserve all the evils that would fall upon it.  It is quite clear how intolerable the burden of these evils would be.  A State that provided an adequate subsistence for all alike, the inefficient as well as the efficient, would encourage a racial degeneration, from excessive multiplication of the unfit, far more dangerous even than that of to-day.[24] Ability to earn the minimum wage, Eden Paul argues in agreement with H.G.  Wells, must be the condition of the right to become a parent.  “Unless the socialist is a eugenist as well, the socialist state will speedily perish from racial degradation.”

[23] In an essay on “Eugenics, Birth Control, and Socialism” in Population and Birth-Control:  A Symposium, edited by Eden and Cedar Paul.

[24] This is here and there beginning to be recognised.  Thus, not long ago, the Hereford War Pensions Committee resolved not to issue a maternal grant for children born during a prolonged period of treatment allowance.  Such a measure of course fails to meet the situation, for it is obvious that, when born, the children must be cared for.  But it shows a glimmering recognition of the facts, and the people capable of such a recognition will, in time, come to see that the right way of meeting the situation is, not to neglect the children, but to prevent their conception.  Mothers’ Clinics for instruction in such prevention are now being established in England, through the advocacy of Mrs. Margaret Sanger and the actual initiative of Dr. Marie Stopes.