(3) Little positive advice can yet be given as to those who are best fitted to have children, except in the matter of health and freedom from inheritable defects.  According to Professor Boaz,[Footnote:  F. Boaz, The Mind of Primitive Man.] one racial stock is about as good as another; so whatever selection is to be made may be between individual strains.  But to breed the human stock for beauty, energy, mental ability, immunity to disease, sanity, or what not, is a task far beyond our present knowledge.  Personal value and reproductive value are not closely correlative; and the factors that determine a good inheritance are highly complex.  So that the choice of wife and husband may be left to those instinctive affinities and preferences which will in any case continue to be the deciding causes for the strong and educated and well-to-do to beget and rear children; the tendency to “race-suicide” among the upper classes is a matter for serious alarm.  That portion of the population that is least able to give proper nurture to children, and to train them up to American ideals, is producing them in overwhelmingly greatest numbers.  The older stocks in this country are dying out and being replaced by the large families of the east and south European immigrants.  In England also, we are told, one sixth of the population, and this the least desirable sixth, is producing half of the coming generation.  In 1790 the American family averaged 5.8 persons; in 1900 the average was 4.6.  Among native Americans the average is lower still.  College graduates are failing to reproduce their own numbers.  Everywhere the Western peoples are breeding more and more slowly, while the Orientals, Negroes, and, in general, the less civilized peoples, are multiplying rapidly.  Unless the upper classes in western Europe and America cease their selfish refusal to rear citizens, the earth will be inherited by the more backward peoples.  This means, plainly, a perpetual clog upon progress.  We may now ask what the State should demand in the interests of race- improvement.

(1) Health certificates may be required from both parties at marriage i.e., marriage may be prohibited without a guarantee from a licensed physician of freedom from communicable or inheritable disease, or inheritable defects.  This seems the minimum of protection due the contracting parties themselves, as well as due the next generation.

(2) Marriage restrictions are easily evaded, however; unscrupulous physicians can usually be found to sign certificates.  And where marriage is prohibited, illegitimacy is sure to flourish.  Hence the segregation (with proper care) of those obviously unfit to become parents seems necessary.  Great as would be the initial expense, the rapid reduction in the number of idiots, epileptics, etc, would in a generation or two counterbalance it and greatly diminish the problem.  It is estimated that there are some three hundred thousand feeble-minded persons in the United States, only twenty thousand of whom are segregated in institutions, the rest being free to propagate-which they do with notorious rapidity.  Most of them can be made self-supporting; and real as the hardship to some of them may be in confining them from sex relations, the sacrifice seems demanded by the welfare of coming generations.