the ground that by promoting equality of opportunity it spreads and intensifies the rivalry of life. But many, if not most, of the steps in this movement repress the struggle on the purely physical plane. Poor laws and sanitary legislation, for example, are directly engaged in securing the continued existence of those whom the physical struggle would eliminate through hunger or disease. With severer logic Mr. Herbert Spencer has protested against such legislation because its object is to keep alive those "unfit" persons whose sacrifice was demanded in the interest of society. Mr. Kidd even stamps with his approval education acts and the eight-hour movement, though the very raison d' être of such movements is to relieve the strain of the physical struggle.
But even assuming that this stern deduction of Weismannism were correct, the "rejection" of the unfit, which is essential to progress, can be secured by a less barbarous method than the homicidal practices consecrated by Mr. Kidd's religion. The simple wisdom of the saying that "Prevention is better than cure" can surely never be so fully justified as where killing is the cure that is advocated.
Mr. Kidd asserts that socialism would place restrictions upon population, and that such restrictions would cause progressive degeneration of the race. Here he begs a very important question, the question whether society cannot secure the rejection of the unfit much more effectually than it is now secured, by sternly repressing the anti-social conduct which produces the physically unfit. Might not a society which knew how to look after its own interests and the interests of future generations protect itself more effectively by enjoining on its members the command: "Thou shalt not kill, but needst not strive officiously to make alive."
No socialist community could fail to recognize that marriage and production of children were the most important social acts; that society had a clear right to determine what sort of children should be born, seeing that society had both to support them and to depend upon them for support. I do not mean that such society need unduly and vexatiously interfere with freedom of
