Editing G. K. Chesterton (section)

===Opposition to eugenics===
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In ''Eugenics and Other Evils'', Chesterton attacked [[eugenics]] as Parliament was moving towards passage of the [[Mental Deficiency Act 1913]]. Some backing the ideas of eugenics called for the government to sterilise people deemed "mentally defective"; this view did not gain popularity but the idea of segregating them from the rest of society and thereby preventing them from reproducing did gain traction. These ideas disgusted Chesterton who wrote, "It is not only openly said, it is eagerly urged that the aim of the measure is to prevent any person whom these propagandists do not happen to think intelligent from having any wife or children."<ref name=Eugenics/> He condemned the proposed wording for such measures as being so vague as to apply to anyone, including "Every tramp who is sulk, every labourer who is shy, every rustic who is eccentric, can quite easily be brought under such conditions as were designed for homicidal maniacs. That is the situation; and that is the point{{nbsp}}... we are already under the Eugenist State; and nothing remains to us but rebellion."<ref name="Eugenics">{{Cite book |last=Chesterton |first=Gilbert Keith |title=Eugenics and Other Evils |publisher=Cassell and Company |year=1922 |location=London, UK}}</ref> He derided such ideas as founded on nonsense, "as if one had a right to dragoon and enslave one's fellow citizens as a kind of chemical experiment".<ref name=Eugenics/> Chesterton mocked the idea that poverty was a result of bad breeding: "[it is a] strange new disposition to regard the poor as a race; as if they were a colony of Japs or Chinese coolies{{nbsp}}... The poor are not a race or even a type. It is senseless to talk about breeding them; for they are not a breed. They are, in cold fact, what Dickens describes: 'a dustbin of individual accidents,' of damaged dignity, and often of damaged gentility."<ref name=Eugenics/><ref>[http://www.secondspring.co.uk/articles/sparkes.htm "The Enemy of Eugenics"] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170323214803/http://www.secondspring.co.uk/articles/sparkes.htm |date=23 March 2017 }}, by Russell Sparkes.</ref>