HUMAN CONSERVATION 477 



b) MORE DISCRIMINATING MARRIAGE LAWS 



Every people, including even the more primitive races, make 

 customs or laws that tend to regulate marriage. Of these, the laws 

 which relate to the eugenic aspect of marriage are the only ones that 

 concern us in this connection. "Marriage," says Davenport, "can 

 be looked at from many points of view. In novels as the climax of 

 human courtship; hi law largely as two lines of property descent; in 

 society, as fixing a certain status; but hi eugenics, which considers its 

 biological aspect, marriage is an experiment hi breeding." 



Certain of the United States have laws forbidding the marriage 

 of epileptics, the insane, habitual drunkards, paupers, idiots, feeble- 

 minded, and those afflicted with venereal diseases. It would be well 

 if such laws were not only more uniform and widespread, but also more 

 rigidly enforced. 



It is quite true that marriage laws hi themselves do not necessarily 

 control human reproduction, for illegitimacy is a factor that must 

 always be reckoned with; nevertheless such laws do have an important 

 influence in regulating marriage and consequent reproduction. 



Marriage laws may, however, sometimes bring about a deplor- 

 able result eugenically, as hi the case of forced marriage of sexual 

 offenders in order to legalize the offense and "save the woman's 

 honor." To compel, under the guise of legality, two defective streams 

 of germplasm to combine repeatedly and thereby result in defective 

 offspring just because the unfortunate event happened once illegiti- 

 mately, is fundamentally a mistake. Darwin says: "Except in the 

 case of man himself hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst 

 animals to breed." 



tf) AN EDUCATED SENTIMENT 



A far more effective means of restricting bad germplasm than 

 placing elaborate marriage laws upon our statute-books is to educate 

 public sentiment and to foster a popular eugenic conscience, hi the 

 absence of which the safeguards of the law must forever be largely 

 without avail. 



Such a sentiment already generally exists to a large extent with 

 respect to incest, and the marriage of persons as noticeably defective 

 as idiots or those afflicted with insanity, and also in America with 

 respect to miscegenation, but a cautious and intelligent examination 

 of the more obscure defective traits, exhibited in the somatoplasms of 

 the various members of families hi question, is largely an ideal of the 



