What seems usually to happen, in the presence of a formal legislative prohibition against the marriage of a particular class, is a combination of various evils.  In part the law becomes a dead letter, in part it is evaded by skill and fraud, in part it is obeyed to give rise to worse evils.  This happened, for instance, in the Terek district of the Caucasus where, on the demand of a medical committee, priests were prohibited from marrying persons among whose relatives or ancestry any cases of leprosy had occurred.  So much and such various mischief was caused by this order that it was speedily withdrawn.[452]

If we remember that the Catholic Church was occupied for more than a thousand years in the attempt to impose the prohibition of marriage on its priesthood,—­an educated and trained body of men, who had every spiritual and worldly motive to accept the prohibition, and were, moreover, brought up to regard asceticism as the best ideal in life,[453]—­we may realize how absurd it is to attempt to gain the same end by mere casual prohibitions issued to untrained people with no motives to obey such prohibitions, and no ideals of celibacy.

The hopelessness and even absurdity of effecting the eugenic improvement of the race by merely placing on the statute book prohibitions to certain classes of people to enter the legal bonds of matrimony as at present constituted, reveals the weakness of those who undervalue the eugenic importance of environment.  Those who affirm that heredity is everything and environment nothing seem strangely to forget that it is precisely the lower classes—­those who are most subjected to the influence of bad environment—­who procreate most copiously, most recklessly, and most disastrously.  The restraint of procreation, and a concomitant regard for heredity, increase pari passu with improvement of the environment and rise in social well-being.  If even already it can be said that probably fifty per cent. of sexual intercourse—­perhaps the most procreatively productive moiety—­takes place outside legal marriage, it becomes obvious that statutory prohibition to the unfit classes to refrain from legal marriage merely involves their joining the procreating classes outside legal matrimony.  It is also clear that if we are to neglect the factor of environment, and leave the lower social classes to the ignorance and recklessness which are the result of such environment, the only practical method of eugenics left open is that by castration and abortion.  But this method—­if applied on a wholesale scale as it would need to be[454] and without reference to the consent of the individual—­is entirely opposed to modern democratic feeling.  Thus those short-sighted eugenists who overlook the importance of environment are overlooking the only practical channel through which their aims can be realized.  Attention to procreation and attention to environment are not, as some have supposed, antagonistic, but they play harmoniously into each other’s hands.  The care for environment leads to a restraint on reckless procreation, and the restraint of procreation leads to improved environment.