[1] The Eugenists fiercely contest this statement, and rightly,
for it is extreme. Society is threatened at its roots by the
present high birth rate of the low grade and the low birth rate
of the high grade. Environment, culture, can do much, but they
cannot make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. Neither can heredity
make a silk purse out of silk; without culture and the
environmental influences, without social heredity, the silk
remains crude and with no special value. The aims of a rational
society, which we are born a thousand years too soon to see would
be twofold: to control marriage and birth so that the number of
the unfit would be kept as low as possible, and then to bring
fostering influences to bear on the fit.


"Education," says Oliver Wendell Holmes, "is only second to
nature. Imagine all the infants born this year in Boston and
Timbuctoo to change places!" And education is merely social
inheritance organized by parents and teachers for the sake of
molding the scholar into usefulness and conformity to the group
into which he is born. There may be in each individual an innate
capacity for this ability or that, for expressing and controlling
this or that emotion, for developing this or that purpose. Which
ability will be developed, which emotion or purpose will be
expressed, is a matter of the age in which a man is born, the
country in which he lives, the family which claims him as its
own. In a warrior age the fighting spirit chooses war as its
vocation and develops a warlike character; in a peaceful time
that same fighting spirit may seek to bring about such reforms as
will do away with war.[1] When the world said that a man might