regiments, universal brotherhood, red republics, or unexampled revolutions; we may strangle and murder each other, we may persecute and despise those whose sexual necessities force them to break through our unnatural moral codes; we may burn alive if we please the prostitutes and the adulterers; we may break our own and our neighbor’s hearts against the adamantine laws that surround us, but not one step, not one shall we advance, till we acknowledge these laws, and adopt the only possible mode in which they can be obeyed.”  These words were written in 1854.  Recent events have accentuated their stinging truth.

     (1) Marx:  “Capital.”  Vol.  I, p. 675.

     (2) Op. cit. pp, 695, 707, 709.

     (3) Fabian Essays in Socialism. p. 21.

     (4) Uncontrolled Breeding, By Adelyne More. p. 84.

(5) For a sympathetic treatment of modern psychological research as bearing on Communism, by two convinced Communists see “Creative Revolution,” by Eden and Cedar Paul.

     (6) Neo-Malthusianisme et Socialisme, p. 22.

CHAPTER VIII:  Dangers of Cradle Competition

Eugenics has been defined as “the study of agencies under social control that may improve or impair the racial qualities of future generations, either mentally or physically.”  While there is no inherent conflict between Socialism and Eugenics, the latter is, broadly, the antithesis of the former.  In its propaganda, Socialism emphasizes the evil effects of our industrial and economic system.  It insists upon the necessity of satisfying material needs, upon sanitation, hygiene, and education to effect the transformation of society.  The Socialist insists that healthy humanity is impossible without a radical improvement of the social—­and therefore of the economic and industrial—­environment.  The Eugenist points out that heredity is the great determining factor in the lives of men and women.  Eugenics is the attempt to solve the problem from the biological and evolutionary point of view.  You may ring all the changes possible on “Nurture” or environment, the Eugenist may say to the Socialist, but comparatively little can be effected until you control biological and hereditary elements of the problem.  Eugenics thus aims to seek out the root of our trouble, to study humanity as a kinetic, dynamic, evolutionary organism, shifting and changing with the successive generations, rising and falling, cleansing itself of inherent defects, or under adverse and dysgenic influences, sinking into degeneration and deterioration.