specific quality is another. It may be impossible to set aside selected
persons from the population and say to them, "You are cowardly, weak,
silly, mischievous people, and if we tolerate you in this world it is
on condition that you do not found families." But it may be quite
possible to bear in mind that the law and social arrangements may
foster and protect the cowardly and the mean, may guard stupidity
against the competition of enterprise, and may secure honour, power and
authority in the hands of the silly and the base; and, by the guiding
principle we have set before ourselves, to seek every conceivable
alteration of such laws and such social arrangements is no more than
the New Republican's duty. It may be impossible to select and
intermarry the selected best of our race, but at any rate we can do a
thousand things to equalize the chances and make good and desirable
qualities lead swiftly and clearly to ease and honourable increase.

At present it is a shameful and embittering fact that a gifted man from
the poorer strata of society must too often buy his personal
development at the cost of his posterity; he must either die childless
and successful for the children of the stupid to reap what he has sown,
or sacrifice his gift--a wretched choice and an evil thing for the
world at large. [Footnote: This aspect of New Republican possibilities
comes in again at another stage, and at that stage its treatment will
be resumed. The method and possibility of binding up discredit and
failure with mean and undesirable qualities, and of setting a premium
upon the nobler attributes, is a matter that touches not only upon the
quality of births, but upon the general educational quality of the
State in which a young citizen develops. It is convenient to hold over
any detailed expansions of this, therefore, until we come to the
general question, how the laws, institutions and customs of to-day go
to make or unmake the men of to-morrow.]