is the oldest of the sciences.”  The question has merely been transformed.  Instead of being limited mechanically by caste, we begin to see that the choice of sexual mates must be limited intelligently by actual fitness.  Promiscuous marriages have never been the rule; the possibility of choice has always been narrow, and the most primitive peoples have exerted the most marked self-restraint.  It is not so merely among remote races but among our own European ancestors.  Throughout the whole period of Catholic supremacy the Canon law multiplied the impediments to matrimony, as by ordaining that consanguinity to the fourth degree (third cousins), as well as spiritual relationship, is an impediment, and by such arbitrary prohibitions limited the range of possible mates at least as much as it would be limited by the more reasonable dictates of eugenic considerations.

At the present day it may be said that the principle of the voluntary control of procreation, not for the selfish ends of the individual, but in order to extinguish disease, to limit human misery, and to raise the general level of humanity by substituting the ideal of quality for the vulgar ideal of mere quantity, is now generally accepted, alike by medical pathologists, embryologists and neurologists, and by sociologists and moralists.

It would be easy to multiply quotations from distinguished authorities on this point.  Thus, Metchnikoff points out (Essais Optimistes, p. 419) that orthobiosis seems to involve the limitation of offspring in the fight against disease.  Ballantyne concludes his great treatise on Antenanal Pathology with the statement that “Eugenics” or well-begetting, is one of the world’s most pressing problems.  Dr. Louise Robinovitch, the editor of the Journal of Mental Pathology, in a brilliant and thoughtful paper, read before the Rome Congress of Psychology in 1905, well spoke in the same sense:  “Nations have not yet elevated the energy of genesic function to the dignity of an energy.  Other energies known to us, even of the meanest grade, have long since been wisely utilized, and their activities based on the principle of the strictest possible economy.  This economic utilization has been brought about, not through any enforcement of legislative restrictions, but through steadily progressive human intelligence.  Economic handling of genesic function will, like the economic function of other energies, come about through a steady and progressive intellectual development of nations.”  “There are circumstances,” says C.H.  Hughes, ("Restricted Procreation,” Alienist and Neurologist, May, 1908), “under which the propagation of a human life may be as gravely criminal as the taking of a life already begun.”

From the general biological, as well as from the sociological side, the acceptance of the same standpoint is constantly becoming more general, for it is recognized as the inevitable