ridiculous callipers of witless anthropology. A criminal is no doubt of
less personal value to the community than a law-abiding citizen of the
same general calibre, but _it does not follow for one moment that he
is of less value as a parent._ His personal disaster may be due to
the possession of a bold and enterprising character, of a degree of
pride and energy above the needs of the position his social
surroundings have forced upon him. Another citizen may have all this
man's desires and impulses, checked and sterilized by a lack of nervous
energy, by an abject fear of the policeman and of the consequences of
the disapproval of his more prosperous fellow-citizens. I will frankly
confess that for my own part I prefer the wicked to the mean, and that
I would rather trust the future to the former strain than to the
latter. Whatever preference the reader may entertain, there remains
this unmistakable objection to its application to breeding, that
"criminality" is not a specific simple quality, but a complex that may
interfuse with other complexes to give quite incalculable results in
the offspring it produces. So that here again, on the negative side, we
find a general expression unserviceable for our use. [Footnote: No
doubt the home of the criminal and social failure is generally
disastrous to the children born into it. That is a question that will
be fully dealt; with in a subsequent paper, and I note it here only to
point out that it is outside our present discussion, which is concerned
not with the fate of children born into the world, but with the prior
question whether we may hope to improve the quality of the average
birth by encouraging some sorts of people to have children and
discouraging or forbidding others. It is of vital importance to keep
these two questions distinct, if we are to get at last to a basis for
effective action.]

But it will be alleged that although criminality as a whole means