staff of daily life. If it is allowed to penetrate so deeply as to affect the germ-cells as well as the somatic cells, then it is almost certain that the offspring will be affected also. This is one of the few cases in which 'acquired characters' may be said to be transmissible. If a man injures his brain by an accident, the whole course of his life may be changed for the worse, but there is no reason to fear that, as a further consequence, the brains of his children will suffer. On the other hand, if he drinks himself stupid' he may drink his unborn children stupid also, or at least transmit to them a constitutional weakness which will sooner or later express itself in some other degenerate fashion. For alcohol may work like poison through every part of the system, although it is not a poison to start with. So a minute dose of arsenic is a sound tonic and often prescribed as such by doctors, whereas an over-dose may be, and often is, fatal.

But it is not only by the transmission of an 'alcoholic diathesis' that great mischief is wrought by parents on their innocent children. The babe in its intra-uterine condition may take in alcohol directly from its mother, if the mother is a drunkard. Thus its fate may be determined, its disposition turned towards evil, while it is yet unborn.

Considerations such as these led 'The Eugenics Education Society'. to protest a short time ago against the action of the London County Council in putting an end to their contracts for the maintenance of female inebriates committed to Inebriate Homes from the County of London because, after eighteen months' detention, they did not seem likely to be cured. The Council thereupon decided to send adrift some 500 women, many of whom will in all probability become mothers. That habitual drunkenness is no effective hindrance to fertility is shown by the fact that 365 inebriate women committed to these Reformatories in 1905-6 gave birth to 2200 children between theman average of five to six children apiece.

On these grounds, too, the Eugenics Society lately urged on the Home Secretary the amendment of The Inebriates Act 1898' which requires three previous public convictions of drunkenness, all within the last twelve months, to be proved before that Act is put in operation. The truth, however, is that secret drinking is quite as inimical to the race as overt drinking. The difficulty in the former case is, of course, how to procure the necessary proof-a point to be discussed, and, it is to be hoped, solved, by the Departmental Committee which Mr. Gladstone set going last month. One of the most eminent of our Metropolitan Police Magistrates, Mr. Cecil Chapman, is reported to have recently said: 'Inebriety is a disease and should be treated scientifically. Hence the question whether a man or woman is an habitual inebriate should be settled by a competent tribunal with proper medical examination.' In this all Eugenists would concur, and most of them would add that not until such persons can show a

clean bill of health in this and divers other respects should they be allowed to marry and propagate their kind.

Those Prohibitionists who would expel human nature with a parliamentary pitchfork shut their eyes to the causes that go to manufacture the 'drinker' and concentrate their efforts too exclusively on 'the drink.' They make the same mistake as did the framers of our early unreformed criminal law, who divided offences into felonies and misdemeanours, apportioned to each class what they conceived to be the proper punishment, but overlooked the character of the criminal. The framers of the Code Napoléon committed the same mistake. We in Great Britain have of late years begun to see the error of our ways, and to realise that a criminal is more often than not the creature either of his birth or his environment. The Eugenist takes this same view of drunkards and rather than eliminate the drink would eliminate them. For sobriety consists not in being unable to get at the drink, but in steadily resisting any temptation it may offer.

Eugenics and Disease.-The attitude which Eugenics assumes towards alcoholism it assumes towards disease in general. It seeks as far as possible to eliminate disease-a more desirable achievement than curing it. Here, again, comes in the hereditary principle, since some diseases are heritable whilst others are not.

When it is said that a given disease is heritable, it must be borne in mind that disease is not a material thing but a process-an abnormal, injurious process which runs its course in some part of the body. Now, we cannot speak correctly of the transference of a process as we can of the transference of heat or light. What is transmitted in disease is then, according to the biologists, not the disease itself but a susceptibility to it, and the transmission is effected through the medium of those same germ-cells which were referred to in the first part of this paper. Pulmonary consumption, for example, says Dr. Thomson, is not inherited as such; what is inherited is, 'a predisposition to caseous degeneration of tissues and allied pathological processes.' So with regard to gout; it is not heritable as such, but a predisposition to gout is. Since, however, when this predisposition is transmitted it may manifest itself in the second or third generation, even amongst those who live very careful and abstemious lives, it is obvious that the distinction between the inheritance of gout and the inheritance of a predisposition to gout 'looks better on paper than by the bedside.' And this holds good for diseases generally.

Non-hereditary diseases are induced by modifications of the somatic cells due to unnatural habits or surroundings. To this class belong the 'diseases of occupation,' on which Professor Thomas Oliver, of Durham University, has lately published an exhaustive treatise. 'Collier's lung' (a non-tuberculous disease due to the inbreathing of particles of very fine dust and lamp-smoke) is a disease of occupation.

It occurs among successive generations of colliers, but, being induced by their special environment, it cannot be properly classed as heritable. Microbes are also, as we all know, a very common cause of disease, but being parasitic and forming no part of the organism, the diseases they give rise to are not transmissible diseases, nor is there any transmission of the microbes themselves. It is true that pathologists have discovered the existence of the so-called tubercle bacillus, but this comes to each individual sufferer from the outside, and its attack on the epithelial tissues is only successful because it finds them vulnerable by reason of some weakness of constitution.

6

I have dwelt on these well-established facts because they show that all who are likely to become parents should take far more care than they do at present when choosing their partners for life—say, a tenth part of the care they take when selecting their horses or their dogs. Let a picture in the Royal Academy Exhibition of this year point the moral. A physician is seated at his consulting table with an open book before him in which are recorded his notes of the cases' of his patients as they have from time to time come under his observation. Near him sits a young man who but for the bloodlessness of his countenance and the despair in his terror-stricken eyes appears to be in perfect health. Inscribed on the lower part of the frame are the words 'Sentence of Death.' Truly a powerful conception, whatever may be our opinion on the much debated point whether the subject is or is not one for the painter's art. Stop and listen for a moment to the profound remarks of some of the bystanders. 'How pathetic! What do you think is wrong with the poor young man?' says one gaper. Is it consumption, or heart, or appendicitis?' says another, etc., etc., etc. What on earth, we ask, does it matter? The painter has painted for us a situation, not a specific experience. But he has also, for some of us, painted a great deal more. Suppose that the father or mother of this young man had a transmissible disease—a disease known to be, and capable of being diagnosed as, such before their marriage took place. Suppose, further, that this disease has reappeared in the son at the very time when it first showed itself in his parent; suppose that this fact had been recorded on the frame by adding to 'Sentence of Death' the words 'Victim of hereditary disease.' Would not the picture then have conveyed a tremendous lesson in Eugenics, calculated to make a lasting impression on the groups that stand daily in front of it?

Eugenics and Socialism.-In the early part of this year some interesting scenes were enacted in the West-End of London at the houses of certain ladies who arranged for addresses to be given in their drawing-rooms by distinguished members of the Fabian Society.

At these gatherings a good deal of 'Socialism and Water' was poured out, the water being added in such proportion as seemed most conducive to the easy digestion of the audiences. We heard much about the unequal distribution of this world's goods, and of the desirability of taxing the rich to make the poor comfortable, but we heard nothing about the unequal distribution of life. Nor were we told who were the rich' or who were the poor' except by the citation of some sensational figures in which gross and net receipts seemed to be treated as the same thing, whilst the fact was ignored that the socalled 'rich' are, in the majority of cases, saddled with such heavy obligations for the benefit of others that what is left over for themselves is but a very modest sum. To the landless and the childless statistics of this sort are acceptable enough: they are out of place when paraded before more responsible folk. To some of those present came the thought that these audiences might have been more profitably employed in listening to lecturers such as Mrs. Gosset and Miss Ravenhill, who would have shown them the need of instructing 'poor' mothers how to guard their unborn children and how to feed them after birth. Teaching such as this would help to curtail the terrible infantile mortality of the 'poor'—a matter of deep public concern which has been fully discussed at the National Conferences of 1906 and 1907. The Reports of these Conferences are full of interest and cannot be too widely read.

A good deal of this infantile mortality is due to the little regard paid to the condition of the mother when she is 'carrying the child.' In France there are a number of municipal Asiles in which expectant mothers, whether married or unmarried, may obtain the rest which is, as every sage-femme knows, absolutely necessary for them. In England we allow women advanced in pregnancy to work hard in ill-ventilated factories, and consider we have done all that is required of us when we have established Lying-in Hospitals. But birth is not the beginning of life; we are all alive biologically, and (as lawyers know) for some purposes legally, for many months before we are born."

What I have said with regard to these Fabian addresses is equally true of Socialistic literature as a whole. There is a lack of appreciation of the truth of the saying 'Man cannot live by bread alone,' and of the corollary to it that the whole duty of man cannot be learned at the London School of Economics. We are told again and again that man has a 'right to work,' but his primary right to the chance of a healthy life is thrust into the background. Now, whether the life of an individual human being is healthy or the

The Factory and Workshop Act 1901' provides (s. 61)' that an occupier of s factory or workshop shall not knowingly allow women or girls to be employed therein within four weeks after having given birth to a child.' Their ante-natal condition appears to have been regarded as too delicate a matter for the legislature to handle.

contrary depends (bodily accidents apart) upon two things : (1) whether his parents were healthy; (2) whether the environment he himself encounters is favourable to his development. Socialists have a great deal to say about the mischief wrought by bad environment; they have very little to say about the mischief wrought by bad parentage. Mr. H. G. Wells is a striking exception. In his recent book, New Worlds for Old, he says: 'A State that undertakes to sustain all the children born into it will do its best to secure good births.' He adds, 'this implies a distinct bar to the marriage and reproduction of the halt, the blind, the bearer of transmissible disease, and the like.' It is a pity he did not employ his brilliant pen in explaining what form his 'bar' would take. Perhaps, though, he will do so later on.

Without fear of contradiction I maintain that under Socialism the study and practice of Eugenics would be to the full as necessary as they are under Capitalism. For biologists find no warrant for concluding that there is anything in the Socialistic régime which is peculiarly favourable to the improvement of the race. At most, under Socialism, what they call a modification' of the individual would take place, and this modification would have to persist for a very long time before it became 'a germinal variation,' capable of impressing itself on future generations. Moreover, against the probabilities of any such variation' must be set the fact that with the advent of the Socialistic millennium, when, we are told, the struggle for wealth, place, and power will cease, there would also cease the tightening up of the springs of energy and action, which must then fall into decay by disuse. To avert such a result, the entire spiritual and intellectual level of humanity would have to be raised, and this can only be done by perpetuating the noblest and the best in accordance with eugenic principles. Hence, all Socialists should be Eugenists, even if no Eugenist were a Socialist.

One word more. We have within the last month reached a stage in democratic development when Old Age Pensions have been admitted within the pale of practical politics. No one supposes that these pensions will remain restricted to septuagenarians, or that they will stop at the five shillings a week named in Mr. Asquith's recent Budget speech. It has since been semi-officially stated that the Government wisely began with a plan that admits of expansion as revenue permits,' and that the conditions will be liable to be altered according to the teachings of experience.' Thus are we launched on a sea of uncertainty which occasions great uneasiness to many persons and especially to those who have families to support. What with free education at one end and the prospect of greatly increased burdens at the other, John Bull is being sorely tried. Whilst he justly seeks, by a fervent appeal to patriotism, to encourage the reasonable