orbidity would become so powerful as to
work out its own salvation by bringing about the sterility and
extinction of its victims. The danger lies in the fact that these
degenerates mate with the _healthy_ members of the community and
thereby constantly drag fresh blood into the vortex of disease and
lower the general vigour of the nation."

Such a practice as vasectomy then represents nicely the eugenic aim of
allowing the individual, who is himself never to be blamed for his
hereditary constitution, the greatest possible personal freedom and
liberty, of allowing full play of sympathy for the individual, and at
the same time of exercising the greatest sympathy to society in
prohibiting the hereditary criminal from procreating a long line of
descendants endowed as badly as he himself was through no fault of his
own, but through the gross neglect of society.

Another quotation from Pearson: "To-day we feed our criminals up, and
we feed up our insane, we let both out of the prison or asylum
'reformed' or 'cured,' as the case may be, only after a few months to
return to State supervision, leaving behind them the germs of a new
generation of deteriorants. The average number of crimes due to the
convicts in his Majesty's prisons to-day is ten apiece. We cannot
reform the criminal, nor cure the insane from the standpoint of
heredity; the taint varies not with their mental or moral conduct.
These are the products of the somatic cells; the disease lies deeper
in their germinal constitution. Education for the criminal, fresh air
for the tuberculous, rest and food for the neurotic--these are
excellent, they may bring control, sound lungs, and sanity to the
individual; but they will not save the offspring from the need of like
treatment, nor from the danger of collapse when the time of strain
comes. They cannot make a nation sound in mind and body, they merely
screen degeneracy behind a throng of arrested degenerates. Our highly
developed human sympathy will no longer allow us to watch the State
purify itself by the aid of crude natural selection. We see pain and
suffering only to relieve it, without inquiry as to the moral
character of the sufferer or as to his national or racial value. And
this is right--no man is responsible for his own being; and nature and
nurture, over which he had no control, have made him the being he is,
good or evil. But here science steps in, crying: Let the reprieve be
accepted, but next remind the so