The story of what went wrong with the Human Betterment League, founded in 1947, can be viewed as a classic example of why democracy works better than any other political system yet devised. Where the public weal is concerned, decision-making should be participatory and inclusive. It wasn't in this instance, and the result was an awful mistake.

The league, founded by James G. Hanes of Hanes Hosiery in Winston-Salem and others, promoted eugenics - improving the human race by controlling hereditary factors. The method of choice was sterilization of the "feeble-minded" and "promiscuous."

Eugenics, as the Journal series this week details, was in those days more theory than science.

This was not Winston-Salem's finest hour. The league pursued its objectives with skill and determination, and sterilizations rose dramatically in North Carolina, even as they were declining everywhere else. In 1945, there were 117 sterilizations. In 1954, they peaked at 700, while the science used to justify the programs was being refuted.

Heredity was a lot more complicated than the advocates of such programs understood. More seriously, the programs, designed to be voluntary but too often mandated in practice, violated human rights and basic humanity.

Yet the league and its objectives drew strong support from this and several other major newspapers around the state. The net effect of having decisions made in this community by a handful of leaders, one of whom, at the time, owned the newspaper, was to limit public discussion of the issues. Maybe, just maybe, a more public, democratic approach would have resulted in voices of caution being heard.

One suspects a pretty wide gap of experience between the people subjected to the sterilization program and its promoters. While many of those promoters appear to have been people of good faith and even people determined to give a hand to those in need, the help provided was rarely hands-on.

The promotion of the program by high-profile citizens may also have given the bureaucracy that ran the program a false sense of righteous power. Clearly, there was a "we know what's best for you" attitude in some places. Only in recent years has the delivery of social services become infused with the effort to involve the client in decisions about what services are needed.

It would be hard to argue that Winston-Salem and its residents were not net beneficiaries of the patriarchy that ran things for so long. Because the leaders did much good, others probably questioned their wisdom less as time went on. And one senses a provincialism, an isolation from the rest of the world, in the way that the Human Betterment League developed in the face of growing doubt about the science, never mind the moral authority, behind the concept.

We are, being human, subject to erring. The best and brightest among us make mistakes. If ever the oft-maligned skepticism that journalists embrace to keep them asking questions was ever justified, this was an instance, and journalism came up short. In a sense, then, the series is an effort, belated as it may be, to make amends.

It is unfortunate that power, even power wielded to do good, tends to breed arrogance more often than humility. Few of us know as much as we think we do, and it is therefore better that we include more points of view, especially when we make life-changing decisions.