essive intellectual development of nations."
"There are circumstances," says C.H. Hughes, ("Restricted
Procreation," _Alienist and Neurologist_, May, 1908), "under
which the propagation of a human life may be as gravely criminal
as the taking of a life already begun."

From the general biological, as well as from the sociological
side, the acceptance of the same standpoint is constantly
becoming more general, for it is recognized as the inevitable
outcome of movements which have long been in progress.

"Already," wrote Haycraft (_Darwinism and Race Progress_, p.
160), referring to the law for the prevention of cruelty to
children, "public opinion has expressed itself in the public
rule that a man and woman, in begetting a child, must take upon
themselves the obligation and responsibility of seeing that that
child is not subjected to cruelty and hardship. It is but one
step more to say that a man and a woman shall be under obligation
not to produce children, when it is certain that, from their want
of physique, they will have to undergo suffering, and will keep
up but an unequal struggle with their fellows." Professor J.
Arthur Thomson, in his volume on _Heredity_ (1908), vigorously
and temperately pleads (p. 528) for rational methods of eugenics,
as specially demanded in an age like our own, when the unfit have
been given a better chance of reproduction than they have ever
been given in any other age. Bateson, again, referring to the
growing knowledge of heredity, remarks (_Mendel's Principles of
Heredity_, 1909, p. 305): "Genetic knowledge must certainly lead
to new conceptions of justice, and it is by no means impossible
that, in the light of such knowledge, public opinion will welcome
measures likely to do more for the extinction of the criminal and
the degenerate than has been accomplished by ages of penal
enactment." Adolescent youths and girls, said Anton von Menger,
in his last book, the pregnant _Neue Sittenlehre_ (1905), must be
taught that the production of children, under certain
circumstances, is a crime; they must also be taught the voluntary
restraint of conception, even in health; such teaching, Menger
rightly added, is a necessary preliminary to any legislation in
this direction.

Of recent years, many books and articles have been devoted to the
advoc