fit and the unfit is a calamity or a catastrophe in cases of knowledge, it is a crime where the victim is deceived into ignorance. The union of two unfit persons entered into in complete knowledge will be an infinitely smaller evil.

To make marriage attractive we must very greatly increase the facilities for unmaking it, and we must lay down some general principles for its healthy continuance. The absolute right of a woman to her own person, and her prerogative to refuse to bear children, seem elementary conditions of civilised wedlock. Woman must be protected from outrage, be she wife or not. A married woman must have the same right over her own person and her own children that an unmarried woman has over hers. It is an unmistakable slight on marriage to compel a woman to relinquish any of the legal or social rights she would enjoy if unmarried. We cannot afford to throw these obstacles in the way of marriage, we want the best women to marry and not to abstain on account of the altogether unnecessary and unnatural disabilities which laws and men have made.

Eugenists are willing to concede that divorce should be cheap, easy and free from shameful scandal. This can only be done however without grave injustice to women and the race if, apart from religious and moral considerations, the family is made the first consideration. The problem is largely an economic one. It is not likely that the State willingly intends to take upon itself the burden of maintaining thousands of wives unable to maintain themselves discarded by husbands wealthy enough to incur new responsibilities and expense. Whether marriage should be regarded as giving a claim to equal shares in the property and income of either partner is worthy of discussion. It is likely enough that the thinking woman of the present day and her successors will insist on wages for wives, wages for motherhood, and wages for housekeeping, and that these stipulations will receive the sanction of State law wherever they are reasonably scheduled and definitely approved. The children of divorced parents occupy an onerous position. Mr. Henry James, in "What Maisie Knew," has touched convincingly on this point. It cannot be dismissed as unimportant for there is hardly a single good environment in children's lives so potent as that of a happy home in which the two parents' love for each other is only rivalled by their united love for the young lives their love has so miraculously created. But there is no worse condition for children than the home of hate. Divorce may be horrid, but the atmosphere of love turned to indifference and hate is hell for all who breathe there.

While marriage does not exhaust all the possibilities of increasing the race it may be said to be not only the best but the only socially desirable way. Preventing divorce, or railing marriage round with difficulties not only encourages illicit relations outside marriage, it inevitably tends to prevent marriages being as fecund as the interests of the race demands. There is no need to sigh for a uniform marriage-law. If the ideal rule could be discovered it would be a pity not to make it universal. States which have experimented under present conditions become valuable examples or warnings, and the only need is that the least enlightened (or the least speculative) State should come into line with the most advanced without undue delay. Fortunately already there has been a number of very interesting enterprises by individual States, and the time is ripe for the more general adoption of those marriage laws which have given general satisfaction where tried.

The "age of consent" and the age of marriage must be brought to a common minimum. If a girl is mature enough for one she is mature enough for the other. The condition of parental consent seems at first glance an anachronism, but may have some Eugenic value if modified to mean that the age of consent can be pre-dated in exceptional cases.

No husband or wife should be tied for life to a person who develops symptoms of such diseases as tuberculosis, syphilis, chronic alcoholism and the like. Felony and even incurable laziness or incapacity should be good grounds for divorce. There is no necessary connection between Socialism and Eugenics but neither is there any essential antagonism. Eugenics recognises the responsibilities of parenthood and to that extent is individualistic; it claims also that the children born to all men, rich or poor, are bound to be born as healthy as advancing science can make them. That is why Eugenics is sometimes regarded as socialistic, but we have long ago decided that health is a national concern and therefore the State builds hospitals, passes sanitary laws and insists on the notification of certain diseases. In a Republic it ought not to be necessary to say that classes should not exist. At the risk of accentuating the socialistic accusation it has to be made plain that matrimonial selection must ignore distinctions of wealth and class and creed. The fit must wed the fittest, that is the keynote of Eugenics. Eugenics speaks with no uncertain voice on the "Colour question"—every race must work out its own salvation, and in the interests of each race there must be no intermarrying. It is a healthy and natural objection which causes a white woman to shudder at the idea of a mixed marriage. The mating of a black woman with a white man is seldom a wedding, it generally means degradation to both and excessive suffering to the victims—the woman and the child.

After we have done all we can to make marriage a more perfect institution we are only beginning the ideal of Eugenic life. We have to know more than we know at present of what characteristics are best combined with what others, and to know which unions are fraught with dangers both to the partners and still more to the offspring. The old Stirpiculturists have very much to say on the subject of "likes and contrasts" from the days of Byrd Powell up till the time when scientific Eugenics under Sir Francis Galton gave new light to the study: Phrenology, freed from its showman and charlatan element, may yet help us in our quest. For there is no divorce law which can ever cure the ills of ill-assorted marriage. Our ignorance may not be criminal, it is nevertheless deplorable. Science gathers increasing information about all other things and we spend our millions on investigating the prevention of utilisation of waste, shall we not hope that this great institution of marriage may too in its turn be the subject of our scientists', philosophers' and statisticians' concern. Marriage has its origin in the profoundest needs of social man. The raison d'etre of marriage is human happiness now and in the generations to follow. Throwing legislative obstacles in the way of marriage has never had any effect except the increase of illegitimacy. The scientific remedy here as elsewhere is enlightenment. We have to safeguard the race and educate the present generation. We cannot tell those who would marry more than we know ourselves, but every ascertained fact and every reasonable probability about marriage should be at the disposal of every candidate for the "holy order." The mere necessity of systematising our knowledge ready for distribution will be a gain, the sum of actual fact about the mating of various temperaments and characteristics may be larger than we think. Anyhow it offers a promising field of research. Eugenics will encourage the endowment of such knowledge, it will seek subsidies from the State towards its acquisition, it will strive to popularise it in every way until