purposes of Society classified as a criminal, tells me little as to his value, still less as to the possible value of his offspring.  It is a fault inherent in criminal jurisprudence, based on non-biological data, that the law must needs take the nature of the offenses rather than that of the offenders as the basis of classification.  A change in the right direction has begun, but the problem is difficult and progress will be very slow....  We all know of persons convicted, perhaps even habitually, whom the world could ill spare.  Therefore I hesitate to proscribe the criminal.  Proscription... is a weapon with a very nasty recoil.  Might not some with equal cogency proscribe army contractors and their accomplices, the newspaper patriots?  The crimes of the prison population are petty offenses by comparison, and the significance we attach to them is a survival of other days.  Felonies may be great events, locally, but they do not induce catastrophies.  The proclivities of the war-makers are infinitely more dangerous than those of the aberrant beings whom from time to time the law may dub as criminal.  Consistent and portentous selfishness, combined with dulness of imagination is probably just as transmissible as want of self-control, though destitute of the amiable qualities not rarely associated with the genetic composition of persons of unstable mind.”

In this connection, we should note another type of “respectable” criminality noted by Havelock Ellis:  “If those persons who raise the cry of `race-suicide’ in face of the decline of the birth-rate really had the knowledge and the intelligence to realize the manifold evils which they are invoking, they would deserve to be treated as criminals.”

Our debt to the science of Eugenics is great in that it directs our attention to the biological nature of humanity.  Yet there is too great a tendency among the thinkers of this school, to restrict their ideas of sex to its expression as a purely procreative function.  Compulsory legislation which would make the inevitably futile attempt to prohibit one of the most beneficent and necessary of human expressions, or regulate it into the channels of preconceived philosophies, would reduce us to the unpleasant days predicted by William Blake, when

“Priests in black gowns will be walking their rounds And binding with briars our joys and desires.”

Eugenics is chiefly valuable in its negative aspects.  It is “negative Eugenics” that has studied the histories of such families as the Jukeses and the Kallikaks, that has pointed out the network of imbecility and feeble-mindedness that has been sedulously spread through all strata of society.  On its so-called positive or constructive side, it fails to awaken any permanent interest.  “Constructive” Eugenics aims to arouse the enthusiasm or the interest of the people in the welfare of the world fifteen or twenty generations in the future.  On its negative side it shows us that we are paying for and even submitting to the dictates of an ever increasing, unceasingly spawning class of human beings who never should have been born at all—­that the wealth of individuals and of states is being diverted from the development and the progress of human expression and civilization.