marriages which were to be binding on their thought, feeling and action for life without requiring some time, however brief, between the application for a license and the final binding of vows?  Who will be able to understand how church and state could have sanctioned marriage between a broken-down old noble and a young and inexperienced girl of seventeen?  How will the future student explain the fact that in New Jersey state and church combined to sanction and bless the marriage of an imbecile woman and of her offspring until they had produced 148 feeble-minded children to curse the state.[50]

[50] See The Kalikak Family, by HERBERT H. GODDARD, New York:  Macmillan Company, 1912.

Who will then understand why a man and woman who had not only ceased to love each other but had come to feel a deep repugnance for each other should have been compelled to share bed and board, even when there were no children, until even murder seemed preferable to such slavery of soul and body?  How can this student understand woman’s economic dependence, her uncertain income, her insecure rights in property for which she toiled side by side with her husband?  Who will then believe that in the year 1911 an English citizen could go before a court and secure an order for legalized rape, under the name of restitution of marital rights?

Meantime every issue of the daily press counts as its choicest items stories of the shameful and soul-destroying ways in which men and women are trying to live their lives in spite of this mediaeval institution.  So far-reaching is the unrest, that at each new revelation of marital heresy, society feels constrained to rush forward and frantically denounce the heretic in order to prove its own orthodoxy.

Our own attitude toward marriage as a sacrament to be directed by a church, or as a pleasure to be exploited by individuals, must be changed if the life of the family is to be re-established as the great vocation of earnest men and women.  Intelligence must be turned upon this problem as upon all others that vitally affect our lives.  What President Eliot has called “the conspiracy of silence touching matters of sex” must be broken, and when it is, I believe honest men will agree with Ellen Key that “In love humanity has found the form of selection most conducive to the ennoblement of the species."[51]

[51] ELLEN KEY, Love and Marriage. New York:  G.P.  Putnam’s Sons, 1911

In this field, at least, a eugenic conscience must take the place of the older theological conscience.[52] We must recognize the infamy of knowingly bringing defective children into existence.  We must agree that under no conditions should people tainted with syphilis be allowed to marry; and that those subject to imbecility or insanity should not be allowed to live together unless they are unsexed.[53] Justice to future generations, and protection of the state, demands at least this much.