Legislation on marriage, to be effectual, must be enacted in the home, in the school, in the doctor’s consulting room.  Force is helpless here; it is education that is needed, not merely instruction, but the education of the conscience and will, and the training of the emotions.

Legal action may come in to further this process of education, though it cannot replace it.  Thus it is very desirable that when there has been a concealment of serious disease by a party to a marriage such concealment should be a ground for divorce.  Epilepsy may be taken as typical of the diseases which should be a bar to procreation, and their concealment equivalent to an annulment of marriage.[455] In the United States the Supreme Court of Errors of Connecticut laid it down in 1906 that the Superior Court has the power to pass a decree of divorce when one of the parties has concealed the existence of epilepsy.  This weighty deliverence, it has been well said,[456] marks a forward step in human progress.  There are many other seriously pathological conditions in which divorce should be pronounced, or indeed, occur automatically, except when procreation has been renounced, for in that case the State is no longer concerned in the relationship, except to punish any fraud committed by concealment.

The demand that a medical certificate of health should be compulsory on marriage, has been especially made in France.  In 1858, Diday, of Lyons, proposed, indeed, that all persons, without exception, should be compelled to possess a certificate of health and disease, a kind of sanitary passport.  In 1872, Bertillon (Art.  “Demographic,” Dictionnaire Encyclopedique des Sciences Medicales) advocated the registration, at marriage, of the chief anthropological and pathological traits of the contracting parties (height, weight, color of hair and eyes, muscular force, size of head, condition of vision, hearing, etc., deformities and defects, etc.), not so much, however, for the end of preventing undesirable marriages, as to facilitate the study and comparison of human groups at particular periods.  Subsequent demands, of a more limited and partial character, for legal medical certificates as a condition of marriage, have been made by Fournier (Syphilis et Mariage, 1890), Cazalis (Le Science et le Mariage, 1890), and Jullien (Blenorrhagie et Mariage, 1898).  In Austria, Haskovec, of Prague ("Contrat Matrimonial et L’Hygiene Publique,” Comptes-rendus Congres International de Medecine, Lisbon, 1906, Section VII, p. 600), argues that, on marriage, a medical certificate should be presented, showing that the subject is exempt from tuberculosis, alcoholism, syphilis, gonorrhoea, severe mental, or nervous, or other degenerative state, likely to be injurious to the other partner, or to the offspring.  In America, Rosenberg and Aronstam argue that every candidate for marriage, male or female, should undergo a strict examination by a competent board