deal. The question of improving the breed, of raising the average human
heredity we have discussed and set aside. We are going to draw together
now as many things as possible that bear upon the artificial
constituent, the made and controllable constituent in the mature and
fully-developed man. We are going to consider how it is built up and
how it may be built up, we are going to attempt a rough analysis of the
whole complex process by which the civilized citizen is evolved from
that raw and wailing little creature.

Before his birth, at the very moment when his being becomes possible,
the inherent qualities and limitations of a man are settled for good
and all, whether he will be a negro or a white man, whether he will be
free or not of inherited disease, whether he will be passionate or
phlegmatic or imaginative or six-fingered or with a snub or aquiline
nose. And not only that, but even before his birth the qualities that
are not strictly and inevitably inherited are also beginning to be
made. The artificial, the avoidable handicap also, may have commenced
in the worrying, the overworking or the starving of his mother. In the
first few months of his life very slight differences in treatment may
have life-long consequences. No doubt there is an extraordinary
recuperative power in very young children; if they do not die under
neglect or ill-treatment they recover to an extent incomparably greater
than any adult could do, but there remains still a wide marginal
difference between what they become and what they might have been. With
every year of life the recuperative quality diminishes, the initial
handicap becomes more irrevocable, the effects of ill-feeding, of
unwholesome surroundings, of mental and moral infections, become more
inextricably a part of the growing individuality. And so we may well
begin our study by considering the circumstances under which the
opening phase, the first five years of life, are most safely and