“Already,” wrote Haycraft (Darwinism and Race Progress, p. 160), referring to the law for the prevention of cruelty to children, “public opinion has expressed itself in the public rule that a man and woman, in begetting a child, must take upon themselves the obligation and responsibility of seeing that that child is not subjected to cruelty and hardship.  It is but one step more to say that a man and a woman shall be under obligation not to produce children, when it is certain that, from their want of physique, they will have to undergo suffering, and will keep up but an unequal struggle with their fellows.”  Professor J. Arthur Thomson, in his volume on Heredity (1908), vigorously and temperately pleads (p. 528) for rational methods of eugenics, as specially demanded in an age like our own, when the unfit have been given a better chance of reproduction than they have ever been given in any other age.  Bateson, again, referring to the growing knowledge of heredity, remarks (Mendel’s Principles of Heredity, 1909, p. 305):  “Genetic knowledge must certainly lead to new conceptions of justice, and it is by no means impossible that, in the light of such knowledge, public opinion will welcome measures likely to do more for the extinction of the criminal and the degenerate than has been accomplished by ages of penal enactment.”  Adolescent youths and girls, said Anton von Menger, in his last book, the pregnant Neue Sittenlehre (1905), must be taught that the production of children, under certain circumstances, is a crime; they must also be taught the voluntary restraint of conception, even in health; such teaching, Menger rightly added, is a necessary preliminary to any legislation in this direction.

Of recent years, many books and articles have been devoted to the advocacy of eugenic methods.  Mention may be made, for instance, of Population and Progress (1907), by Montague Crackanthorpe, President of the Eugenics Education Society.  See also, Havelock Ellis, “Eugenics and St. Valentine,” Nineteenth Century and After, May, 1906.  It may be mentioned that nearly thirty years ago, Miss J.H.  Clapperton, in her Scientific Meliorism (1885, Ch.  XVII), pointed out that the voluntary restraint of procreation by Neo-Malthusian methods, apart from merely prudential motives, there clearly recognized, is “a new key to the social position,” and a necessary condition for “national regeneration.”  Professor Karl Pearson’s Groundwork of Eugenics, (1909) is, perhaps, the best brief introduction to the subject.  Mention may also be made of Dr. Saleeby’s Parenthood and Race Culture (1909), written in a popular and enthusiastic manner.

How widely the general principles of eugenics are now accepted as the sound method of raising the level of the human race, was well shown at a meeting of the Sociological Society, in 1905,