households.  The tie that bound it together was as permanent, and at least as sacred, as that of marriage.  Every man’s care, and the whole of the common property, was pledged for the maintenance and protection of the women, and the support and education of the children.”  It is not probable that the Oneida Community presented in detail the model to which human society generally will conform.  But even at the lowest estimate, its success showed, as Lord Morely has pointed out (Diderot, vol. ii, p. 19), “how modifiable are some of these facts of existing human character which are vulgarly deemed to be ultimate and ineradicable,” and that “the discipline of the appetites and affections of sex,” on which the future of civilization largely rests, is very far from an impossibility.

In many respects, the Oneida Community was ahead of its time,—­and even of ours,—­but it is interesting to note that, in the matter of the control of conception, our marriage system has come into line with the theory and practice of Oneida; it cannot, indeed, be said that we always control conception in accordance with eugenic principles, but the fact that such control has now become a generally accepted habit of civilization, to some extent deprives Noyes’ criticism of our marriage system of the force it possessed half a century ago.  Another change in our customs—­the advocacy, and even the practice, of abortion and castration—­would not have met with his approval; he was strongly opposed to both, and with the high moral level that ruled his community, neither was necessary to the maintenance of the stirpiculture that prevailed.

The Oneida Community endured for the space of one generation, and came to an end in 1879, by no means through a recognition of failure, but by a wise deference to external pressure.  Its members, many of them highly educated, continued to cherish the memory of the practices and ideals of the Community.  Noyes Miller (the author of The Strike of a Sex, and Zugassant’s Discovery) to the last, looked with quiet confidence to the time when, as he anticipated, the great discovery of Noyes would be accepted and adopted by the world at large.  Another member of the Community (Henry J. Seymour) wrote of the Community long afterwards that “It was an anticipation and imperfect miniature of the Kingdom of Heaven on earth.”

Perhaps the commonest type of proposal or attempt to improve the biological level of the race is by the exclusion of certain classes of degenerates from marriage, or by the encouragement of better classes of the community to marry.  This seems to be, at present, the most popular form of eugenics, and in so far as it is not effected by compulsion but is the outcome of a voluntary resolve to treat the question of the creation of the race with the jealous care and guardianship which so tremendously serious, so godlike, a task involves, it has much to be said in its favor and nothing against it.