Eugenics and Society 27 is the chief cause. For the latter, our inadequate educational system is chiefly responbile. The R. A. Fisher has brilliantly and devastatingly shown* the relentless way in which a system as ours promotes both infertility and certain types of talent, and in doing so ties together the genetic factors responsible. In the course of the generations genes making for small families become increasingly bound up with those making for social and economic success; and conversely those making for social and economic failure become bound up with those making for high reproduction rates. Eugenically speaking our system is characterized by the social promotion of infertility and the excess fertility of social failure. If this be true, then so long as we cling to a system of this type, the most we can hope to do is to palliate its effects as best we may, by extending birth-control facilities downwards, instituting graded systems of family allowances, providing for sterilization her and financial relief for children there. But even if we thus reduce the distortion we cannot hope to change its sign. Then, in so far as out system remains nationalist, the demand for man-power and quantity will continue to interfere with the higher aim of quality. Furthermore, modern war itself is dysgenic. This has often been pointed out as regard its direct effects. It appears, however, also to hold for its indirect effects; many among the more imaginative and sensitive types are to-day restricting their families, sometimes to zero, because they feel they cannot bear to bring children into a world exposed to such a risk of war and chaos. As eugenists we must therefore aim at transforming the social system. There may of course be those among our ranks who prefer not the disagreeable role of a Jeremiah darkly prophesying gloom to settling down at the more prosaic job of constructive work. But as a body, we shall wish, I take it, to see at least the possibility of our dreams coming true. [italics]The Eugenic Approach to Control of the Social Environment[end italics] What sort of practical changes, then, should we as eugenicists try to encourage in the social and economic system? In the first place - what we have already noted as desirable on theoretical grounds - the equalizing of environment in an upward direction. For this, by permitting of more definite knowledge as to the genetic constitution of different classes and types, will at once give us more certainty in any eugenic selection, negative or positive, upon which we may embark; and secondly, we must aim at the abandonment of the idea of national sovereign states, and the subordination of national disputes to international organization and supernational power. But we need something more radical than this - we must try to find a pattern of economic and communal life which will not be inherently dysgenic; and we must also try to find a pattern of family and reproductive life which will permit of more rapid and constructive eugenics. On the first point, it seems clear that the individualist scramble for social and financial promotion should be dethroned from its present position as main incentive in life, and that we must try to raise the power of group incentives. Group incentives are powerful in tribal existence, and have been powerful in many historical civilizations, such as the old Japanese. What interests us chiefly, however, is to find that they have been to a large extent effective in replacing individualist money incentives, or at least diminishing their relative social importance, in several modern States, notably Germany and the U.S.S.R. It is not for a biologist to discuss the purely social merits of different political philosophies: but he may be allowed to point out that not all group-incentives are equally valuable from the eugenic standpoint. Those of Nazi Germany, for instance, presuppose an intensification of nationalist feeling and activity instead of their diminution: and this, we have concluded, is actually anti-eugenic. It may of course be urged that it is in its immediate effect [left column-width hairline rule over footnote] [footnote]*Fisher, 1930, Chapter XI. [end]