them, not with approval, but merely to show how grave and serious the
social outlook is, in the minds of some of the best thinkers and truest
philanthropists that have taught mankind. If the fertility of the fit
could be kept uniformly at its normal rate in a state of nature, the
race would have little to fear, for the tendency to further degeneration
and consequent extinction amongst the defective would be sufficient to
counteract their disposition to a high fertility. But in all civilized
nations, the fertility of the fit is rapidly departing from that normal
rate, and Mr. Herbert Spencer declares, with the gloomiest pessimism,
that the infertility of the best citizens is the physiological result of
their intellectual development. I have already expressed the opinion
that prudence and social selfishness, operating through sexual
self-restraint on the part of the best citizens of the State, are the
cause of their infertility. It is impossible for the State to correct
this evil, except by lessening the burden the fit man has to bear; and
the elimination of the unfit, by artificial selection, is the surest and
most effective way of bringing this about.

We have learned from the immortal Pasteur the true and scientific method
of artificial selection of the fit, by the elimination of the unfit. We
have already seen that he examined the moth, to find if it were healthy,
and rejected its eggs if it were diseased. Medical knowledge of heredity
and disease makes it possible to conduct analogous examinations of
prospective mothers; and surgery secreted in the ample and luxurious
folds of anæsthesia, and protected by its guardian angels antiseptics,
makes it possible to prevent the fertilization of human ova with a
vicious taint. It is possible to sterilize defective women, and the
wives of defective men by an operation of simple ligature, which
produces absolutely no change whatever in the subjects of it, beyond
rendering this fertilization impossible, for the rest of life. This