104 LOCAL ASSOCIATIONS
fund of information concerning the qualities of many notable individuals in their district, and their family histories. These family histories should be utilised for eugenic studies, and it should be the duty of the local council to cause them to be tabulated in an orderly way, and to communicate the more significant of them to the central society.
The chief of the notable qualities, to which I refer in the preceding paragraph, is the possession of what I will briefly call by the general term of "Worth." By this I mean the civic worthiness, or the value to the State, of a person, as it would probably be assessed by experts, or, say, by such of his fellow-workers as have earned the respect of the community in the midst of which they live. Thus the worth of soldiers would be such as it would be rated by respected soldiers, students by students, business men by business men, artists by artists, and so on. The State is a vastly complex organism, and the hope of obtaining a proportional representation of its best parts should be an avowed object of issuing invitations to these gatherings.
.Speaking only for myself, if I had to classify persons according to worth, I should consider each of them under the three heads of physique, ability, and character, subject to the provision that inferiority in any one of the three should outweigh superiority in the other two. I rank physique first, because it is not only very valuable in itself and allied to many
