Counter-Currents
It is touching to hear Mr. Percy MacKaye lament that "Mendelism has as yet hardly begun to influence art or popular feeling"; but he must not lose hope,—not, at least, so far as popular feeling is concerned. "Practical eugenics" is a phrase as familiar in our ears as "intensive farming." "How can we make the desirable marry one another?" asks Dr. Alexander Graham Bell, and answers his own question by affirming that every community should take a hand in the matter, giving the "support of public opinion," and the more emphatic support of "important and well-paid positions" to a choice stock of men, provided always that, "in the interests of the race," they marry and have offspring.
This is practical eugenics with a vengeance, but it is not practical business. Apart from the fact that most men and women regard marriage as a personal matter, with which their neighbours have no concern, it does not follow that the
162
