moral
obligation" of normal school graduates to teach should be
discountenanced.

Against the proposal to employ married school teachers, two objections
are urged. It is said (1) that for most women school teaching is merely
a temporary occupation, which they take up to pass the few years until
they shall have married. To this it may be replied that the hope of
marriage too often proves illusory to the young woman who enters on the
pedagogical career, because of the lack of opportunities to meet men,
and because the nature of her work is not such as to increase her
attractiveness to men, nor her fitness for home-making. Pedagogy is too
often a sterilizing institution, which takes young women who desire to
marry and impairs their chance of marriage.

Again it will be said (2) that married teachers would lose too much
time from their work; that their primary interests would be in their own
homes instead of in the school; that they could not teach school without
neglecting their own children. These objections fall in the realm of
education, not eugenics, and it can only be said here that the reasons
must be extraordinarily cogent, which will justify the enforcement of
celibacy on so large a body of superior young women as is now engaged in
school teaching.

The magnitude of the problem is not always realized. In 1914 the
Commissioner of education reported that there were, in the United
States, 169,929 men and 537,123 women engaged in teaching. Not less than
half a million women, therefore, are potentially affected by the
institution of pedagogical celibacy.

CHAPTER XIX

RELIGION AND EUGENICS

Man is the only animal with a religion. The conduct of the lower animals
is guided by instinct,[186] and instinct normally works for the benefit
of the species. Any action which is dictated by instinct is likely to
result in the preservation of the species, even at the expense of the
individual which acts, provided there has not been a recent change in
the environment.

But in the human species reason appears, and conduct is no longer
governed by instinct alone. A young man is impelled by instinct, for
instance, to marry. It is to the interests of the species that he marry,
and instinct therefore causes him to desire to marry and to act as he
desires. A lower animal would obey the impulse of instinct without a
moment's hesitation. Not so the man. Reason intervenes and asks, "Is
this really the best thing for you to