members. But
the right to marry, thus understood, in no way involves the right to
procreate. For while marriage _per se_ only affects the two individuals
concerned, and in no way affects the State, procreation, on the other
hand, primarily affects the community which is ultimately made up of
procreated persons, and only secondarily affects the two individuals who
are the instruments of procreation. So that just as the individual couple
has the first right in the question of marriage, the State has the first
right in the question of procreation. The State is just as incompetent to
lay down the law about marriage as the individual is to lay down the law
about procreation.

That, however, is only one-half of the folly committed by those who would
select the candidates for matrimony by statute. Let us suppose--as is not
indeed easy to suppose--that a community will meekly accept the abstract
prohibitions of the statute book and quietly go home again when the
registrar of marriages informs them that they are shut out from legal
matrimony by the new table of prohibited degrees. An explicit prohibition
to procreate within marriage is an implicit permission to procreate
outside marriage. Thus the undesirable procreation, instead of being
carried out under the least dangerous conditions, is carried out under the
most dangerous conditions, and the net result to the community is not a
gain but a loss.

What seems usually to happen, in the presence of a formal legislative
prohibition against the marriage of a particular class, is a combination
of various evils. In part the law becomes a dead letter, in part it is
evaded by skill and fraud, in part it is obeyed to give rise to worse
evils. This happened, for instance, in the Terek district of the Caucasus
where, on the demand of a medical committee, priests were prohibited from
marrying persons among whose relatives or ancestry any cases of leprosy
had occurred. So much and such various mischief was caused by this order
that it was speedily withdrawn.[452]

If we remember that the Catholic Church was occupied for more than a
thousand years in the attempt to impose the prohibition of marriage on its
priesthood,--an educated and trained body of men, who had every spiritual
and worldly motive to accept the prohibition, and were, moreover, brought
up to regard asceticism as the best ideal in life,[453]--we may realize
how absurd it is to attempt to gain the same end by mere casual
pr