impracticable.

We have therefore at our hand, a simple, safe, and certain method of
stopping procreation by the sterilization of women by tubo-ligature.

This operation would entail no hardship on women. It is so easy, safe
and painless, that thousands would readily submit to it to-morrow, to be
relieved from the anxiety which a possible increase in their already too
numerous families excites. Hundreds of women and men to-day are living
unnatural lives, because of their refusal to bring children into the
world with the hereditary taint they know courses in their own veins.

Many men are living loose and irregular lives, amongst the easy women of
society, because the indiscretion of their youth has damned them for
ever with a syphilitic taint, which they could not fail to transmit to
their progeny.

Many virtuous men and women are living a life of abstinence from even
each other's society, because their physician has taught them something
of the law of heredity. Would not all these women readily submit to
sterilization?

As it produces no mental nor moral, nor physical change, it violates no
law, and outrages no sentiment. It is an outrage upon society, and a
greater upon an innocent helpless victim to bring a defective into the
world; it is a moral act to prevent it by this means.

And of all the methods yet suggested or devised, or practised,
tubo-ligature is the simplest, most effective, and least opposed to
sentiment and prejudice.

It will of course be asked:--What about criminals and defective men? Let
their wives be sterilized. The wife of any criminal would deem it a boon
to be protected from the offspring of such a man, so would society.

If he is not married, then society must take the risk, and it is not
very great. The women who will be his companions will be either
sterilized by disease or by tubo-ligature, because they are defectives.
This protection from the progeny of defective men, though not absolute,
is complete enough for all practical purposes.

If all defective women and the wives of all defective men are
sterilized, a greater improvement will take place in the race in the
next 50 years, than has been accomplished by all the sanitation of the
Victorian era.

CHAPTER XII.

SUGGESTIONS AS TO APPLICATION.

_The State's humanitarian zeal protects the lives and fosters the
fertility of the degenerate._--_A confirmed or hereditary criminal
defined._--_Law on the subject of sterili