tners be obtained before
marriage. What is required to ensure our individual life ought to be
demanded before we create new life. Here, as I believe, is one
direction in which the State should take action. Parentage on the part
of degenerate human beings is a crime, and as such it ought to be
prevented. It may be, and is, argued that any action of the State in
this direction entails an interference with the rights of the
individual. Just the same may be said of all laws. The man who wishes
to steal or to kill either another or himself may, with equal reason,
hold that it is an interference of the law that he is not permitted to
follow his inclinations in these matters. The sins that he may wish to
commit are assuredly less evil in their results than the sin of
irresponsible parentage. You see what I mean. For if this unceasing
crime against the unborn could somehow be stopped there would be so
great a reduction of all other sins that we might well be freed from
many laws. As an example I would refer the reader back to the wise
Spartans, to consider how great was the gain to them as individuals by
their strict and unceasing care for the welfare of the race.

There are many who attribute to mammon-marriages all the terrible
evils of our disordered love-life of to-day. It is, therefore, well to
remember that such conditions are not really a new thing, and cannot
be regarded as the result of our commercialised civilisation. The
intrusion of economics into marriage is of very ancient origin, and
may be found among peoples who are almost primitive. But there is this
important difference. In earlier and more vigorous societies such
property-based marriages occur side by side with other forms of sexual
associations, on a more natural basis, which are openly accepted and
honoured. Our marriage system by its rigorous exclusions closes this
way of escape. Morality may be outraged to any extent provided that
law and religion have been invoked in legal marriage.

Let me give my readers two cases from my own experience; facts speak
more forcibly than any mere statements of opinion. In a village that I
know well a woman, legally married, bore five idiot children one after
the other; her husband was a confirmed drinker and a mental
degenerate. One of the children fortunately died. The text that was
chosen as fitting for his funeral card was, "Of such is the kingdom of
heaven." About the same time in the same village a girl gave birth