Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 83.djvu/138

134 improvement in the human stock. The task is only the usual one of any rational idealism—to teach people to want a certain thing that they ought to want, and to change social usages so as to satisfy this new want. The same sort of tuition whereby men are learning to want those

who are alive with them to be healthier, nobler and more capable, will serve to teach us to want those who are to live with our children's children to be healthier, nobler and more capable. Provided certain, care is taken to favor the sane, balanced type of intellect rather than the neurotic, any selective breeding which increases the fecundity of superior compared to inferior men, and which does not produce deterioration in the physical and social conditions in which men live, will serve.

The danger of deterioration in physical and social conditions from breeding for intellect and morals is trivial. The effect is almost certain to be the opposite—an improvement in physical and social conditions. The more rational the race becomes, the better roads, ships, tools, machines, foods, medicines and the like it will produce to aid itself, though it will need them less. The more sagacious and just and humane the original nature that is bred into man, the better schools, laws, churches, traditions and customs it will fortify itself by. There is no so certain and economical a way to improve man's environment as to improve his nature.

Each generation has of course to use what men it has to make the world better for them; but a better world for any future generation is best guaranteed by making better men. Certain worthy customs of present civilization may be endangered by rational control of who is ta be born, though this seems to me unlikely. In any case, we may be sure that if the better men are born they will establish better customs in place of those whose violation made their birth possible.