Put social conditions on a sound basis, the people on this side often say, let all receive an adequate economic return for their work and be recognised as having a claim for an adequate share in the products of society, and there is no need to worry about the race or about the need for birth-control, all will go well of itself.

There is not the slightest ground for any such comfortable belief.
This has been well shown by Dr.Eden Paul, himself a Socialist and even in sympathy with the extreme Left.[23] After setting forth the present conditions, with our excessive elimination of higher types, and undue multiplication of lower types, the racial degeneration caused by the faulty and anti-selective working of the marriage system in modern capitalist society, so that in our existing civilisation unconscious natural selection has largely ceased to work towards the improvement of the human breed, he proceeds to consider the possible remedies.

The frequent impatience of the Socialist, and Social Reformers generally, with eugenic proposals has a certain degree of justification in the fact that many evils thoughtlessly attributed to inferiority of stock are really due to bad environment.

But when the environment has been so far improved that all defects due to its badness are removed, we shall be face to face, without possibility of doubt, with bad inheritance as the sole remaining factor in the production of inefficient and anti-social members of the community.

A socialist community must recognise the right to work and to maintenance of all its members, Eden Paul points out, but, he adds, a community which allowed this right to all defectives without imposing any restrictions in their perpetuation of themselves would deserve all the evils that would fall upon it.