126 THE MENDEL JOURNAL 



Still another idea finds adherents ; namely, that 

 the nnfit should be sterilised, so that in the course 

 of, at the most, a very few generations the inherited 

 strains of unfitness would tend automatically to 

 become extinct. Apart from the oppressive tyranny 

 with which this would arm officialdom, grave objec- 

 tion can be taken to such an idea. In practice it 

 might work fairly well in the case of the male 

 degenerate, but it would be another story altogether 

 Avith the female. Little imagination is required to 

 foresee that, as segregation and effective mutilation 

 are alternatives, and as any combination of alterna- 

 tives can only result in excess of the most wasteful 

 and extravagant form, such a course would at once 

 result in letting loose on the community hordes of 

 utterly reckless characters whose instincts would 

 lead them to spend lives of depraved abandon in 

 the realisation of having been emancipated from 

 those physiological consequences which, to a certain 

 extent, act at the present time as deterrents to the 

 depraved of both sexes. 



Such is some of the criticism that can be 

 directed against suggestions already put forward 

 for the remedy of a danger which, though always, 

 present and never inactive, has, in these latter days 

 of increased populations, of added facilities for 

 luigration wherebj^ stocks may become disseminated 

 in all directions, and of the increasing struggle for 

 existence, assiuned an importance that can hardly 

 be over-estimated, and the menace of which becomes' 

 ever greater as time goes on. It remains to be seen 



