This peculiarly Victorian reticence may be inherited from the founder of Eugenics.  Galton declared that the “Bohemian” element in the Anglo-Saxon race is destined to perish, and “the sooner it goes, the happier for mankind.”  The trouble with any effort of trying to divide humanity into the “fit” and the “unfit,” is that we do not want, as H. G. Wells recently pointed out,(5) to breed for uniformity but for variety.  “We want statesmen and poets and musicians and philosophers and strong men and delicate men and brave men.  The qualities of one would be the weaknesses of the other.”  We want, most of all, genius.

Proscription on Galtonian lines would tend to eliminate many of the great geniuses of the world who were not only “Bohemian,” but actually and pathologically abnormal—­men like Rousseau, Dostoevsky, Chopin, Poe, Schumann, Nietzsche, Comte, Guy de Maupassant,—­and how many others?  But such considerations should not lead us into error of concluding that such men were geniuses merely because they were pathological specimens, and that the only way to produce a genius is to breed disease and defect.  It only emphasizes the dangers of external standards of “fit” and “unfit.”

These limitations are more strikingly shown in the types of so-called “eugenic” legislation passed or proposed by certain enthusiasts.  Regulation, compulsion and prohibitions affected and enacted by political bodies are the surest methods of driving the whole problem under-ground.  As Havelock Ellis has pointed out, the absurdity and even hopelessness of effecting Eugenic improvement by placing on the statute books prohibitions of legal matrimony to certain classes of people, reveal the weakness of those Eugenists who minimize or undervalue the importance of environment as a determining factor.  They affirm that heredity is everything and environment nothing, yet forget that it is precisely those who are most universally subject to bad environment who procreate most copiously, most recklessly and most disastrously.  Such marriage laws are based for the most part on the infantile assumption that procreation is absolutely dependent upon the marriage ceremony, an assumption usually coupled with the complementary one that the only purpose in marriage is procreation.  Yet it is a fact so obvious that it is hardly worth stating that the most fertile classes who indulge in the most dysgenic type of procreating—­the feeble-minded—­are almost totally unaffected by marriage laws and marriage-ceremonies.

As for the sterilization of habitual criminals, not merely must we know more of heredity and genetics in general, but also acquire more certainty of the justice of our laws and the honesty of their administration before we can make rulings of fitness or unfitness merely upon the basis of a respect for law.  On this point the eminent William Bateson writes:(6) “Criminals are often feeble-minded, but as regards those that are not, the fact that a man is for the