Page:Little Essays of Love and Virtue (1922).djvu/145

 that involves a knowledge of the laws of heredity which we are only learning slowly to acquire. We may all in our humble ways help to increase that knowledge by giving it greater extension and more precision through the observations we are able to make on our own families. To such observations Galton attached great importance and strove in various ways to further them. Detailed records, physical and mental, beginning from birth, are still far from being as common as is desirable, although it is obvious that they possess a permanent personal and family private interest in addition to their more public scientific value. We do not need, and it would indeed be undesirable, to emulate in human breeding the achievements of a Luther Burbank. We have no right to attempt to impose on any human creature an exaggerated and one-sided development. But it is not only our right, it is our duty, or rather one may say, the natural impulse of every rational and humane person, to seek that only such children may be born as will be able to go through life with a reasonable prospect that they will not be heavily handicapped by inborn defect or special liability to some incapacitating disease. What is called “positive” eugenics—the attempt, that is, to breed special qualities—may well be viewed with hesitation. But so-called “negative” eugenics—the effort to clear all inborn obstacles out of the path of the