ation of
Health_.) The growth of the State Medical Organization of Health
is steady and continuous, and is constantly covering a larger
field. The day of the private practitioner of medicine--who was
treated, as Duclaux (_L'Hygiene Sociale_, p. 263) put it, "like a
grocer, whose shop the customer may enter and leave as he
pleases, and when he pleases"--will, doubtless, soon be over. It
is now beginning to be felt that health is far too serious a
matter, not only from the individual but also from the social
point of view, to be left to private caprice. There is, indeed, a
tendency, in some quarters, to fear that some day society may
rush to the opposite extreme, and bow before medicine with the
same unreasoning deference that it once bowed before theology.
That danger is still very remote, nor is it likely, indeed, that
medicine will ever claim any authority of this kind. The spirit
of medicine has, notoriously, been rather towards the assertion
of scepticism than of dogma, and the fanatics in this field will
always be in a hopelessly small minority.

The general introduction of authentic personal records covering all
essential data--hereditary, anthropometric and pathological--cannot fail
to be a force on the side of positive as well as of negative eugenics, for
it would tend to promote the procreation of the fit as well as restrict
that of the unfit, without any legislative compulsion. With the growth of
education a regard for such records as a preliminary to marriage would
become as much a matter of course as once was the regard to the
restrictions imposed by Canon law, and as still is a regard to money or to
caste. A woman can usually refrain from marrying a man with no money and
no prospects; a man may be passionately in love with a woman of lower
class than himself but he seldom marries her. It needs but a clear general
perception of all that is involved in heredity and health to make eugenic
considerations equally influential.

A discriminating regard to the quality of offspring will act beneficially
on the side of positive eugenics by substituting the pernicious tendency
to put a premium on excess of childbirth by the more rational method of
putting a premium on the quality of the child. It has been one of the most
unfortunate results of the mania for protesting against that decline of
the birthrate which is always and everywhere the result of c