the Eugenics Education Society's peculiar use of the terms `fit' and
`unfit'!) Yet it has persistently refused to give any help toward
extending the knowledge of contraceptives to the exploited classes.
Similarly, though the Eugenics Review, the organ of the society,
frequently laments the `selfishness' of the refusal of maternity by
healthy and educated women of the professional classes, I have yet
to learn that it has made any official pronouncement on the English
illegitimacy laws or any organized effort toward defending the unmarried
mother."

This peculiarly Victorian reticence may be inherited from the founder of
Eugenics. Galton declared that the "Bohemian" element in the Anglo-Saxon
race is destined to perish, and "the sooner it goes, the happier for
mankind." The trouble with any effort of trying to divide humanity
into the "fit" and the "unfit," is that we do not want, as H. G. Wells
recently pointed out,(5) to breed for uniformity but for variety. "We
want statesmen and poets and musicians and philosophers and strong
men and delicate men and brave men. The qualities of one would be the
weaknesses of the other." We want, most of all, genius.

Proscription on Galtonian lines would tend to eliminate many of the
great geniuses of the world who were not only "Bohemian," but actually
and pathologically abnormal--men like Rousseau, Dostoevsky, Chopin, Poe,
Schumann, Nietzsche, Comte, Guy de Maupassant,--and how many others?
But such considerations should not lead us into error of concluding that
such men were geniuses merely because they were pathological specimens,
and that the only way to produce a genius is to breed disease and
defect. It only emphasizes the dangers of external standards of "fit"
and "unfit."