Mental Science, Oct., 1907, p. 710), “with the way in which this subject is taking possession of intelligent people, by the number of times one is consulted by young men and young women, proposing to marry, or by their fathers or mothers.  I used to have the feeling in the back of my mind, when I was consulted, that it did not matter what I said, it would not make any difference.  But it is making a difference; and I, and others, could tell of scores of marriages which were put off in consequence of psychiatric medical advice.”

Ellen Key, also, refers to the growing tendency among both men and women, to be influenced by eugenic consideration in forming partnerships for life (Century of the Child, Ch.  I).  The recognition of the eugenic attitude towards marriage, the quickening of the social and individual conscience in matters of heredity, as also the systematic introduction of certification and registration, will be furthered by the growing tendency to the socialization of medicine, and, indeed, in its absence would be impossible. (See e.g., Havelock Ellis, The Nationalization of Health.) The growth of the State Medical Organization of Health is steady and continuous, and is constantly covering a larger field.  The day of the private practitioner of medicine—­who was treated, as Duclaux (L’Hygiene Sociale, p. 263) put it, “like a grocer, whose shop the customer may enter and leave as he pleases, and when he pleases”—­will, doubtless, soon be over.  It is now beginning to be felt that health is far too serious a matter, not only from the individual but also from the social point of view, to be left to private caprice.  There is, indeed, a tendency, in some quarters, to fear that some day society may rush to the opposite extreme, and bow before medicine with the same unreasoning deference that it once bowed before theology.  That danger is still very remote, nor is it likely, indeed, that medicine will ever claim any authority of this kind.  The spirit of medicine has, notoriously, been rather towards the assertion of scepticism than of dogma, and the fanatics in this field will always be in a hopelessly small minority.

The general introduction of authentic personal records covering all essential data—­hereditary, anthropometric and pathological—­cannot fail to be a force on the side of positive as well as of negative eugenics, for it would tend to promote the procreation of the fit as well as restrict that of the unfit, without any legislative compulsion.  With the growth of education a regard for such records as a preliminary to marriage would become as much a matter of course as once was the regard to the restrictions imposed by Canon law, and as still is a regard to money or to caste.  A woman can usually refrain from marrying a man with no money and no prospects; a man may be passionately in love with a woman of lower class than himself but he seldom marries her.  It needs but a clear general perception of all that is involved in heredity and health to make eugenic considerations equally influential.