From a story on lithub.com by Chris Wiggins and Matthew L. Jones headlined “From Eugenics to Targeted Advertising: The Dark Role of Data in Sorting Humanity”:

When the gentleman-​scholar Francis Galton inspected his fellow men of Victorian Britain, he found them wanting: “We want abler commanders, statesmen, thinkers, inventors, and artists,” he wrote in an article called “Hereditary Talent and Character.” “The natural qualifications of our race are no greater than they used to be in semi-​barbarous times,” even though “the conditions amid which we are born are vastly more complex than of old.” Modern civilization was all too much. “The foremost minds of the present day seem to stagger and halt under an intellectual load too heavy for their powers.”