Page:Little Essays of Love and Virtue (1922).djvu/158

 we shall be face to face, without possibility of doubt, with bad inheritance as the sole remaining factor in the production of inefficient and antisocial 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. 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.”