f the race is by the exclusion of certain classes of
degenerates from marriage, or by the encouragement of better classes of
the community to marry. This seems to be, at present, the most popular
form of eugenics, and in so far as it is not effected by compulsion but is
the outcome of a voluntary resolve to treat the question of the creation
of the race with the jealous care and guardianship which so tremendously
serious, so godlike, a task involves, it has much to be said in its favor
and nothing against it.

But it is quite another matter when the attempt is made to regulate such
an institution as marriage by law. In the first place we do not yet know
enough about the principles of heredity and the transmissibility of
pathological states to enable us to formulate sound legislative proposals
on this basis. Even so comparatively simple a matter as the relationship
of tuberculosis to heredity can scarcely be said to be a matter of common
agreement, even if it can yet be claimed that we possess adequate material
on which to attain a common agreement. Supposing, moreover, that our
knowledge on all these questions were far more advanced than it is, we
still should not have attained a position in which we could lay down
general propositions regarding the desirability or the undesirability of
certain classes of persons procreating. The question is necessarily an
individual question, and it can only be decided when all the circumstances
of the individual case have been fairly passed in review.

The objection to any legislative and compulsory regulation of the right to
marry is, however, much more fundamental than the consideration that our
knowledge is at present inadequate. It lies in the extraordinary
confusion, in the minds of those who advocate such legislation, between
legal marriage and procreation. The persons who fall into such confusion
have not yet learnt the alphabet of the subject they presume to dictate
about, and are no more competent to legislate than a child who cannot tell
A from B is competent to read.

Marriage, in so far as it is the partnership for mutual help and
consolation of two people who in such partnership are free, if they
please, to exercise sexual union, is an elementary right of every person
who is able to reason, who is guilty of no fraud or concealment, and who
is not likely to injure the partner selected, for in that case society is
entitled to interfere by virtue of its duty to protect its