EVOLUTION OF MAN AND ITS CONTROL 67 



or another, and that it permits a remarriage of some superior persons 

 to better partners. In order to increase this action it might be advis- 

 able 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 infe- 

 riority rather than an " occasional crime." 



Venereal disease, in so far as it causes infecundity among the vic- 

 ious, 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 ex- 

 empt, 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 stand- 

 ard 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 im- 

 possible to lavish upon a larger number all the care and luxury de- 

 manded 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 re- 

 former, 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 



