Utopia of Usurers | Page 9

would think, would be to give the people a good cradle, or give them

money enough to buy one. But that means higher wages and greater
equalisation of wealth; and the plutocratic scientist, with a slightly
troubled expression, turns his eyes and pince-nez in another direction.
Reduced to brutal terms of truth, his difficulty is this and simply this:
More food, leisure, and money for the workman would mean a better
workman, better even from the point of view of anyone for whom he
worked. But more food, leisure, and money would also mean a more
independent workman. A house with a decent fire and a full pantry
would be a better house to make a chair or mend a clock in, even from
the customer's point of view, than a hovel with a leaky roof and a cold
hearth. But a house with a decent fire and a full pantry would also be a
better house in which to refuse to make a chair or mend a clock--a
much better house to do nothing in--and doing nothing is sometimes
one of the highest of the duties of man. All but the hard-hearted must
be torn with pity for this pathetic dilemma of the rich man, who has to
keep the poor man just stout enough to do the work and just thin
enough to have to do it. As he stood gazing at the leaky roof and the
rickety cradle in a pensive manner, there one day came into his mind a
new and curious idea--one of the most strange, simple, and horrible
ideas that have ever risen from the deep pit of original sin.
The roof could not be mended, or, at least, it could not be mended
much, without upsetting the capitalist balance, or, rather, disproportion
in society; for a man with a roof is a man with a house, and to that
extent his house is his castle. The cradle could not be made to rock
easier, or, at least, not much easier, without strengthening the hands of
the poor household, for the hand that rocks the cradle rules the
world--to that extent. But it occurred to the capitalist that there was one
sort of furniture in the house that could be altered. The husband and
wife could be altered. Birth costs nothing, except in pain and valour
and such old-fashioned things; and the merchant need pay no more for
mating a strong miner to a healthy fishwife than he pays when the
miner mates himself with a less robust female whom he has the
sentimentality to prefer. Thus it might be possible, by keeping on
certain broad lines of heredity, to have some physical improvement
without any moral, political, or social improvement. It might be
possible to keep a supply of strong and healthy slaves without coddling

them with decent conditions. As the mill-owners use the wind and the
water to drive their mills, they would use this natural force as
something even cheaper; and turn their wheels by diverting from its
channel the blood of a man in his youth. That is what Eugenics means;
and that is all that it means.
Of the moral state of those who think of such things it does not become
us to speak. The practical question is rather the intellectual one: of
whether their calculations are well founded, and whether the men of
science can or will guarantee them any such physical certainties.
Fortunately, it becomes clearer every day that they are, scientifically
speaking, building on the shifting sand. The theory of breeding slaves
breaks down through what a democrat calls the equality of men, but
which even an oligarchist will find himself forced to call the similarity
of men. That is, that though it is not true that all men are normal, it is
overwhelmingly certain that most men are normal. All the common
Eugenic arguments are drawn from extreme cases, which, even if
human honour and laughter allowed of their being eliminated, would
not by their elimination greatly affect the mass. For the rest, there
remains the enormous weakness in Eugenics, that if ordinary men's
judgment or liberty is to be discounted in relation to heredity, the
judgment of the judges must be discounted in relation to their heredity.
The Eugenic professor may or may not succeed in choosing a baby's
parents; it is quite certain that he cannot succeed in choosing his own
parents. All his thoughts, including his Eugenic thoughts, are, by the
very principle of those thoughts, flowing from a doubtful or tainted
source. In short, we should need a perfectly Wise Man to do the thing
at all. And if he were a Wise Man he would not do it.

VII. THE EVOLUTION OF THE PRISON
I have never understood why it