Page:Little Essays of Love and Virtue (1922).djvu/148

 more effective lever for raising the state of the social environment and improving the conditions of breeding, than is direct action on the part of the community in its collective capacity to attain the same end. For however energetic such collective action may be in striving to improve general social conditions by municipalising or State-supporting public utilities, it can never adequately counter-balance the excessive burden and wasteful expenditure of force placed on a family by undue child-production. It can only palliate them.

When, however, we have found reason to believe that, even if practised without regard to eugenic considerations, birth-control may yet act beneficially to promote good breeding, we begin to realise how great a power it may possess when consciously and deliberately directed towards that end. In eugenics, as already pointed out, there are two objects that may be aimed at: one called positive eugenics, that seeks to promote the increase of the best stocks amongst us; the other, called negative eugenics, which seeks to promote the decrease of the worst stocks. Our knowledge is still too imperfect to enable us to pursue either of these objects with complete certainty. This is especially so as regards positive eugenics, and since it seems highly undesirable to attempt to breed human beings, as we do animals, for points, when we are in the presence of what