Provision must be made for the birth of children whose brains shall, so far as possible, be innately of good quality; this means the denial of the privilege of parenthood to those likely to transmit bad nervous systems to their offsprings.

What the carrying out of such a programme would mean to mankind at large, how profoundly it would modify those ideas about life, those standards of human dignity and human rights, which are so fundamental and so pervasive that they are taken for granted without express thought in every act and every feeling of all normal men and women—­this does not seem ever to trouble the mind of the devotee of universal regulation.  He sees the possibility of effecting a certain definite and measurable improvement; that the means by which this is accomplished must fatally impair those elemental conceptions of human life whose value transcends all measurement, he has not the insight or the imagination to recognize.  The distinctions of social class, of wealth, of public honor, leave untouched the equality of men in the fundamentals of human dignity.  They do not go to the vitals of self-respect; they do not interfere with a man’s sense of what is due to him, and what is due from him, in the primary relations of life.  If nature has been unkind to him in his physical or mental endowments, he does not therefore feel in the least disqualified, as regards his family, his friends, his neighbors, the stranger with whom he chances to come into contact, from receiving the same kind of consideration, in the essentials of human intercourse, that is accorded to those who are more fortunate; nor does he feel in any respect absolved from the duty of playing the full part of a man.  Under the regime of medical classification—­and the “mental hygiene” programme can mean nothing less than that—­all this would disappear.  Some men would be men, others would be something less.  It is true that, so far as regards the imbecile, the insane, and the criminal, such a state of things obtains as it is; but this stands wholly apart from the general life of the race, and has no influence whatever on the habitual feelings and experiences of human beings.  The normal life of mankind is shot through and through with the idea that a man’s a man; all that is highest in feeling and conduct is closely bound up with it.  Lessen its sway over our feelings and thoughts and instincts, and how much benefit in the shape of “preventing Czolgoszes and Schranks” would be required to compensate for the loss in nobleness, in depth, which human life would suffer?

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