ohibitions issued to untrained people with no motives to obey such
prohibitions, and no ideals of celibacy.

The hopelessness and even absurdity of effecting the eugenic improvement
of the race by merely placing on the statute book prohibitions to certain
classes of people to enter the legal bonds of matrimony as at present
constituted, reveals the weakness of those who undervalue the eugenic
importance of environment. Those who affirm that heredity is everything
and environment nothing seem strangely to forget that it is precisely the
lower classes--those who are most subjected to the influence of bad
environment--who procreate most copiously, most recklessly, and most
disastrously. The restraint of procreation, and a concomitant regard for
heredity, increase _pari passu_ with improvement of the environment and
rise in social well-being. If even already it can be said that probably
fifty per cent. of sexual intercourse--perhaps the most procreatively
productive moiety--takes place outside legal marriage, it becomes obvious
that statutory prohibition to the unfit classes to refrain from legal
marriage merely involves their joining the procreating classes outside
legal matrimony. It is also clear that if we are to neglect the factor of
environment, and leave the lower social classes to the ignorance and
recklessness which are the result of such environment, the only practical
method of eugenics left open is that by castration and abortion. But this
method--if applied on a wholesale scale as it would need to be[454] and
without reference to the consent of the individual--is entirely opposed
to modern democratic feeling. Thus those short-sighted eugenists who
overlook the importance of environment are overlooking the only practical
channel through which their aims can be realized. Attention to procreation
and attention to environment are not, as some have supposed, antagonistic,
but they play harmoniously into each other's hands. The care for
environment leads to a restraint on reckless procreation, and the
restraint of procreation leads to improved environment.

Legislation on marriage, to be effectual, must be enacted in the home, in
the school, in the doctor's consulting room. Force is helpless here; it is
education that is needed, not merely instruction, but the education of the
conscience and will, and the training of the emotions.

Legal action may come in to further this process of education, though it
cannot repla