If society is to successfully meet the present situation it must utilize its psychological insight to remedy conditions which are obviously dysgenic and detrimental to the welfare of the race.  If the egoistic and highly individualized modern man and woman are induced to sacrifice personal ambitions in the interests of reproduction, for instance, it will only be because society has learned to turn those same egoistic impulses to its own ends.  This will never be accomplished by the forces of tradition or by any such superimposed method of control as conscription for parenthood.  There is too much of a spirit of freedom and individual liberty in the social mind to-day for any such measure to meet with success.  The same spirit of freedom which formerly burst the bonds of superstition and entered into the world of science is now as impatient of restraint of its emotional life as it formerly was of restriction of its intellectual search for the truth.

Therefore society can no longer depend upon taboo standards crystallized into institutionalized forms as a means of control.  It must appeal to more rational motives if it expects to have any degree of influence over its most intelligent and energetic members.  Only when the production of eugenic offspring brings the same social approval and reward that is meted out for other activities will the ineradicable and irrespressible egoistic desires that now prevent individuals from assuming the responsibilities of family life be enlisted in the very cause to which they are now so hostile.  When the same disapproval is manifested for the shirking of reproductive activities by the eugenically fit that is now directed toward lack of patriotism in other lines, the number of voluntary celibates in society will be materialy decreased.

The greatest triumph of society in the manipulation of the sexual and reproductive life of its members will come when it is able to condition the emotional reaction of the individual by the substitution of the eugenic ideal for the parental fixation and to focus the sentiment of romantic love upon eugenic traits.  When this is accomplished, the selection of the mate will at least be favourable for racial regeneration even if individual disharmonies are not entirely eliminated.  That there are great difficulties in the way of this accomplishment may be admitted at the outset.  The conditioned responses to be broken down and replaced are for the most part formed in early childhood, and have had a long period in which to become firmly impressed upon the organism.  But psychological experiments have proven that even the best established conditioned reactions can be broken down and others substituted in their place, so that the situation is not so hopeless.  When we recollect that for ages the traditional ideals of masculinity and femininity have been conditioning the emotional life of men and women to respond to their requirements with a remarkable degree of success, there is ground for the belief that the same forces of suggestion and imitation may be turned to more rational ends and utilized as an effective means of social therapy.