So it is that the question of breed, the production of fine individuals, the elevation of the ideal of quality in human production over that of mere quantity, begins to be seen, not merely as a noble ideal in itself, but as the only method by which Socialism can be enabled to continue on its present path. If the entry into life is conceded more freely to the weak, the incompetent, and the defective than to the strong, the efficient, and the sane, then a Sisyphean task is imposed on society; for every burden lifted two more burdens appear. But as individual responsibility becomes developed, as we approach the time to which Galton looked forward, when the eugenic care for the race may become a religion, then social control over the facts of life becomes possible. Through the slow growth of knowledge concerning hereditary conditions, by voluntary self-restraint, by the final disappearance of the lingering prejudice against the control of procreation, by sterilization in special cases, by methods of pressure which need not amount to actual compulsion, 259 it will be possible to attain an increasingly firm grip on the evil elements of heredity. Not until such measures as these, under the controlling influence of a sense of personal responsibility extending to every member of the community, have long been put into practice, can we hope to see man on the earth risen to his full stature, healthy in body, noble in spirit, beautiful in both alike, moving spaciously and harmoniously among his fellows in the great world of Nature, to which he is so subtly adapted because he has himself sprung out of it and is its most exquisite flower. At this final point social hygiene becomes one with the hygiene of the soul. 260
Poets and prophets, from Jesus and Paul to Novalis and Whitman, have seen the divine possibilities of Man. There is no temple in the world, they seem to say, so great as the human body; he comes in contact with Heaven, they declare, who touches a human person. But these human things, made to be gods, have spawned like frogs over all the earth. Everywhere they have beslimed its purity and befouled its beauty, darkening the very sunshine. Heaped upon one another in evil masses, preying upon one another as no other creature has ever preyed upon its kind, they have become a festering heap which all the oceans in vain lave with their antiseptic waters, and all the winds of heaven cannot purify. It is only in the unextinguished spark of reason within him that salvation for man may ever be found, in the realization that he is his own star, and carries in his hands his own fate. The impulses of Individualism and of Socialism alike prompt us to gain self-control and to learn the vast extent of our responsibility. The whole of humanity is working for each of us; each of us must live worthy of that great responsibility to humanity. By how fine a flash of insight Jesus declared that few could enter the Kingdom of Heaven! Not until the earth is purified of untold millions of its population will it ever become the Heaven of old dreamers, in which the elect walk spaciously and nobly, loving one another. Only in such spacious and pure air is it possible for the individual to perfect himself, as a rose becomes perfect, according to Dante's beautiful simile, 261 in order that he may spread abroad for others the fragrance that has been generated within him. If one thinks of it, that seems a truism, yet, even in this twentieth century, how few, how very few, there are who know it!
This is why we cannot have too much Individualism, we cannot have too much Socialism. They play into each other's hands. To strengthen one is to give force to the other. The greater the vigour of both, the more vitally a society is progressing. "I can no more call myself an Individualist or a Socialist," said Henry George, "than one who considers the forces by which the planets are held to their orbits could call himself a centrifugalist or a centripetalist." To attain a society in which Individualism and Socialism are each carried to its extreme point would be to attain to the society that lived in the Abbey of Thelema, in the City of the Sun, in Utopia, in the land of Zarathustra, in the Garden of Eden, in the Kingdom of Heaven. It is a kingdom, no doubt, that is, as Diderot expressed it, "diablement idéal." But to-day we hold in our hands more certainly than ever before the clues that were imperfectly foreshadowed by Plato, and what our fathers sought ignorantly we may attempt by methods according to knowledge. No Utopia was ever realized; and the ideal is a mirage that must ever elude us or it would cease to be ideal. Yet all our progress, if progress there be, can only lie in setting our faces towards that goal to which Utopias and ideals point.