be prevented if before an
engagement was finally concluded each party placed himself or herself in
the hands of a physician and authorized him to report to the other party.
Such a report would extend far beyond venereal disease. If its necessity
became generally recognized it would put an end to much fraud which now
takes place when entering the marriage bond. It constantly happens at
present that one party or the other conceals the existence of some serious
disease or disability which is speedily discovered after marriage,
sometimes with a painful and alarming shock--as when a man discovers his
wife in an epileptic fit on the wedding night--and always with the bitter
and abiding sense of having been duped. There can be no reasonable doubt
that such concealment is an adequate cause of divorce. Sir Thomas More
doubtless sought to guard against such frauds when he ordained in his
_Utopia_ that each party should before marriage be shown naked to the
other. The quaint ceremony he describes was based on a reasonable idea,
for it is ludicrous, if it were not often tragic in its results, that any
person should be asked to undertake to embrace for life a person whom he
or she has not so much as seen.

It may be necessary to point out that every movement in this direction
must be the spontaneous action of individuals directing their own lives
according to the rules of an enlightened conscience, and cannot be
initiated by the dictation of the community as a whole enforcing its
commands by law. In these matters law can only come in at the end, not at
the beginning. In the essential matters of marriage and procreation laws
are primarily made in the brains and consciences of individuals for their
own guidance. Unless such laws are already embodied in the actual practice
of the great majority of the community it is useless for parliaments to
enact them by statute. They will be ineffective or else they will be worse
than ineffective by producing undesigned mischiefs. We can only go to the
root of the matter by insisting on education in moral responsibility and
instruction, in matters of fact.

The question arises as to the best person to impart this instruction. As
we have seen there can be little doubt that before puberty the parents,
and especially the mother, are the proper instructors of their children in
esoteric knowledge. But after puberty the case is altered. The boy and the
girl are becoming less amenable to parental influen