to be regenerated by Act of Parliament for the benefit of Ginx's
Baby and the people of England. Sir Charles listened
impatiently, and at last burst forth again.

He said: "When you consider it, what we are all trying to do
nowadays is--vulgarly-- to improve the breed; but we go to work
in a round-about way. At the outset we are met by the
depreciated state of part of the existing generation; and one
problem is to prevent these depreciated people from increasing,
or to get them to increase healthily. No one seems to have gone
directly to such a problem as that. The difficulties to be faced
are tremendous. Your dirtiest British youngster is hedged round
with principles of an inviolable liberty and rights of Habeas
Corpus. You let his father and mother, or any one who will save
you the trouble of looking after him, mould him in his years of
tenderness as they please. If they happen to leave him a walking
invalid, you take him into the poorhouse; if they bring him up a
thief, you whip him and keep him at high cost at Millbank or
Dartmoor; if his passions, never controlled, break out into
murder and rape, you may hang him, unless his crime has been so
atrocious as to attract the benevolent interest of the Home
Secretary; if he commit suicide, you hold a coroner's inquest,
which also costs money; and however he dies you give him a deal
coffin and bury him. Yet I may prove to you that this being,
whom you treat like a dog at a fair, never had a day's--no, nor
an hour's--contact with goodness, purity, truth, or even human
kindness; never had an opportunity of learning anything better.
What right have you then to hunt him like a wild beast, and kick
him and whip him, and fetter him and hang him by expensive
complicated machinery, when you have done nothing to teach him