zation could at first be
permissive._--_It should apply, to begin with, to criminals and
the insane._--_Marriage certificates of health should be
required._--_Women's readiness to submit to surgical treatment for minor
as well as major pelvic diseases._--_Surgically induced sterility of
healthy women a greater crime than abortion._--_This danger not remote._

The fertility of the unfit goes on unrestrained by any other check, save
vice and misery. The great moral checks have not, and cannot have any
place with them. But the State is, by its humanitarian zeal, limiting
the scope and diminishing the force of these natural checks amongst all
classes of the community, but especially amongst the unfit, so that its
policy now fosters the fertility of this class, while it fails to arrest
the declining nativity of our best citizens. The greater the fertility
of the unfit, the greater the burden the fit have to bear, and the less
their fertility.

The State's present policy therefore, fosters the fertility of the
unfit, and discourages the fertility of the fit. This disastrous policy
must be changed without delay. The State can arrest the gradual
degradation of its people, by sterilizing all defective women and the
wives of defective men falling into the hands of the law. Mr. Henry M.
Boies in "Prisoners and Paupers" suggests life-long isolation. He
says:--"It is time however that society should interpose in this
propagation of criminals. It is irrational and absurd to occupy our
attention and exhaust our liberality with the care of his constantly
growing class, without any attempt to restrict its reproduction. This is
possible too, without violating any humanitarian instinct, by
imprisonment for life; and this seems to be the most practicable
solution of the problem in America. As soon as an individual can be
identified as an hereditary or chronic criminal, society shall confine
him or her in a penitentiary at self-supporting labour for life.

Every State should have an institution, adapted to the safe and secure
separation of such from society, where they can be employed at
productive labour, without expense to the public, during their natural
life. When this is ended with them, the class will become extinct, and
not before. Then each generation would only have to take care of its own
moral cripples and defectives, without the burden of the constantly
increasing inheritance of the past. When upon a third conviction the
ju