So far at least we may go, towards improving the quality of the average
birth now, but it is manifestly only a very slow and fractional advance
that we shall get by these expedients. The obstacle to any ampler
enterprise is ignorance and ignorance alone--not the ignorance of a
majority in relation to a minority, but an absolute want of knowledge.
If we knew more we could do more.

Our main attack in this enterprise of improving the birth supply must
lie, therefore, through research. If we cannot act ourselves, we may
yet hold a light for our children to see. At present, if there is a man
specially gifted and specially disposed for such intricate and
laborious inquiry, such criticism and experiment as this question
demands, the world offers him neither food nor shelter, neither
attention nor help; he cannot hope for a tithe of such honours as are
thrust in profusion upon pork-butchers and brewers, he will be heartily
despised by ninety-nine per cent. of the people he encounters, and
unless he has some irrelevant income, he will die childless and his
line will perish with him, for all the service he may give to the
future of mankind. And as great mental endowments do not, unhappily,
necessarily involve a passion for obscurity, contempt and extinction,
it is probable that under existing conditions such a man will give his
mind to some pursuit less bitterly unremunerative and shameful. It is a
stupid superstition that "genius will out" in spite of all
discouragement. The fact that great men have risen against crushing
disadvantages in the past proves nothing of the sort; this roll-call of
survivors does no more than give the measure of the enormous waste of
human possibility human stupidity has achieved. Men of exceptional
gifts have the same broad needs as common men, food, clothing, honour,
attention, and the help of their fellows in self-respect; they may not