There is no lack of utility and direct application in the study of Genetics. I have alluded to some strictly practical results. If we want to raise mangels that will not run to seed, or to breed a cow that will give more milk in less time, or milk with more butter and less water, we can turn to Genetics with every hope that something can be done in these laudable directions. But here I would plead what I cannot but regard as a higher usefulness in our work. Genetic inquiry aims at providing knowledge that may bring, and I think will bring, certainty into a region of human affairs and concepts which might have been supposed reserved for ages to be the domain of the visionary. We have long known that it was believed by some that our powers and conduct were dependent on our physical composition, and that other schools have maintained that nurture not nature, to use Galton's antithesis, has a preponderating influence on our careers; but so soon as it becomes common knowledge--not a philosophical speculation, but a certainty--that liability to a disease, or the power of resisting its attack, addiction to a particular vice, or to superstition, is due to the presence or absence of a specific ingredient; and finally that these characteristics are transmitted to the offspring according to definite, predicable rules, then man's views of his own nature, his conceptions of justice, in short his whole outlook on the world, must be profoundly changed. Yet as regards the more tangible of these physical and mental characteristics there can be little doubt that before many years have passed the laws of their transmission will be expressible in simple formulae.
The blundering cruelty we call criminal justice will stand forth divested of natural sanction, a relic of the ferocious inventions of the savage. Well may such justice be portrayed as blind. Who shall say whether it is crime or punishment which has wrought the greater suffering in the world? We may live to know that to the keen satirical vision of Sam Butler on the pleasant mountains of Erewhon there was revealed a dispensation, not kinder only, but wiser than the terrific code which Moses delivered from the flames of Sinai.