Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 76.djvu/71

Rh or another, and that it permits a remarriage of some superior persons to better partners. In order to increase this action it might be advisable to extend the recognized grounds for divorce. Such defects as epilepsy, feeble-mindedness, extreme cruelty, moral perversity, repeated conviction for crime, or habitual drunkenness should be made of equal weight with unfaithfulness and desertion, as indicating innate inferiority rather than an "occasional crime."

Venereal disease, in so far as it causes infecundity among the vicious, may be regarded as a eugenic agent. In view of its great cost to society, however, the eugenicist should encourage every effort to stamp it out by education, medical control and the enforcement of social morality. While the vicious would, at best, only gradually become exempt, the innocent should at once be protected and society freed from the evil which now causes the sterility of 45 per cent, of its childless women.

The measures just mentioned, though important, do not effect the deplorable decline of the desire for children among the best men and women that is menacing the future. The work of Sir Francis Galton and Karl Pearson in England illustrates the efforts that should be brought to bear upon the enlightened classes to recognize the rearing of children as a duty to the race. Men and women should be made to realize the feeling of nothingness that is the portion of the childless in old age and the gratification that lies in living youth over again in one's children. The surest immortality, as well as the noblest fulfilment of life, is to be found in marriage and parenthood.

The strongest single influence in the voluntary limitation of the family is the complexity of modern life, with its abnormally high standard of expenditure. Not only does the selfishness of parents forbid any curtailing of personal extravagance for the sake of children, but parental love itself causes a restriction of the family to one or two, lest it be impossible to lavish upon a larger number all the care and luxury demanded by present-day standards. Dress, education and launching into life are all to be considered, and as a result we have the family too small to replace the parents and a stock that quickly dies out before the prolific immigrant peasant.

Both from the eugenic point of view and from that of the social reformer, there is need of an ethics of expenditure. As Professor Poss points out, a high valuation placed upon the things money can buy has as its reverse side, a low valuation of the things money can not buy—the integrity of the politician, the virtue of the woman and the ideal of the artist—and there is something alarming in the standard of "conspicuous expenditure" which sacrifices to itself both the souls of the present and the lives of the next generation.

A further result of the too extravagant standard is the postponement