ially successful movement
which will doubtless spread to this country to provide that a woman be
granted a little time before and after the birth of her child during
which she shall not be allowed to suffer because her power to earn a
wage is temporarily gone. These things cannot fail in the long run to
strengthen the people. They strengthen chiefly the present generation.
The blight of the fact that acquired characters cannot be transmitted,
meets us here. This improved environment can only slowly, if at all,
improve the race, and every effort made in this direction must be
repeated with each generation.

Under such circumstances is it to be wondered at that the eugenist is
hoping to raise the strain? Any improvement he can bring about is not
only valuable for the generation in which it comes but is carried on
into the generations which follow. This is the hope that strengthens
and sustains him in his effort. The science of eugenics is so new, so
little is surely known concerning the transmission of human
characters, that no one is able as yet wisely to say what course is
to be pursued in improving the race. But the problem is so interesting
and its outcome so overwhelmingly important that men will never cease
striving to know, and may, before many years, begin wisely to guide us
in our efforts to provide a finer stock.

Heretofore our efforts at improving the strain have been confined to
cattle, chickens and plants. An almost unalterable repugnance rises as
soon as we speak of improving the human strain. Visions, if not
stories, start up at once, of experimental matings of human beings,
and of all other unspeakable abominations which no decent man expects
to happen or even wishes to attempt. If there is one thing in human
society the value of which has been demonstrated through the unending
ages, it is the monogamic marriage. All ideal workers must point to
the life-long union of a strong, vigorous, clean-minded and
clean-lived man with a similarly fine, strong, clean-minded and
clean-lived woman. Such an ideal may be slow in its attainment, but he
aims too low who aims to secure anything less than this. The long
struggle out of bestiality into pure monogamy has been so slow, so
gradual, so noble in its attainments, and is still so far from
perfection, that it would be an inconceivably stupid blunder to let go
a single point that has been gained. Whether divorce shall be allowed
to remedy a mistake may be a matter o