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; in law largely as two lines of property descent; in 
society, as fixing a certain status; but in eugenics, which considers its 
biological aspect, marriage is an experiment in 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 in 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 in 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.” 
c) 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, in 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 in question, is largely an ideal of the 
