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24 SCOPE AND IMPORTANCE TO THE STATE "-tion is painful, like similar cures in medicine, involving righteous punishment or inflicting death or exile in the last resort. For in this way we commonly dispose of great sinners who are incurable, and are the greatest injury to the whole state. But the milder form of purification is as follows: when men who have nothing, and are in want of food, show a disposition to follow their leaders in an attack on the property of the prosperous—these, who are the natural plague of the state, are sent away by the legislator in a friendly spirit as far as he is able, and this dismissal of them is euphemistically termed a colony. And every legislator should contrive to do this at once.’"

Now may we not claim Plato as a precursor of the modern Eugenics movement? He grasped the intensity of inheritance, for he appeals to the herd and the flock; he realized the danger to the state of a growing band of degenerates, and he called upon the legislator to purify the state. Plato’s purgation, if you will accept the view I have endeavoured to lay before you to-day, has in fact hitherto been carried out by natural selection, by the struggle of man against man, of man against nature, and of state against state. This very cosmical process has so developed our ethical feelings, that we find it difficult to regard the process as benign. A hundred years ago we still hung the greater proportion of our criminals or sent them for life across the seas, not even euphemistically terming it a ‘colony’. We shut up our insane, making no attempt at cure; the modern system of hospitals and institutions and charities was scarcely developed ; the physically and mentally weak had small chance of surviving and bearing offspring. There was a constant stern selection purifying in Plato’s sense the state. The growth of human sympathy—and is not this one of the chief factors of national fitness ?—has been so