most hereditary."

Bucknill and Tuke, p. 647, say:--

"Of marriage it may be said that the celibacy of the insane is the
prophylaxis of Insanity in the race, and although a well chosen mate and
a happy marriage may sometimes postpone or even prevent the development
of insanity in the individual, still no medical man, having regard to
the health of the community, or even of that of the family, can possibly
feel himself justified in recommending the marriage of any person of
either sex in whom the insane diathesis is well marked."

Again (pp. 647 and 648) "It is thus that the seeds of mental diseases
and of moral evils are sown broadcast through the land; and other new
defects and diseases are multiplied and varied with imbecilities, and
idiocies, and suicidal and other propensities and dispositions, leading
to all manner of vice and crime. The marriage of hereditary lunatics is
a veritable Pandora's box of physical and moral evil."

The least fit, then, are the most fertile, and the most fertile are
subject to the common law of heredity, and the defects are transmitted
to their offspring, often accentuated by the intermarriage which their
circumstances favour or even necessitate.

But this is not all. The least fit have the worst environment, and in
the worst possible surroundings the progeny of the unfit multiply and
develop. They are born into conditions, well described by Dr. Alice
Vicery, in a paper on "The food supplies of the next generation."
"Conditions in which the food, warmth, and clothing which are necessary
for the mere maintenance of the functions of the body in their normal
state, cannot be obtained; in which men, women, and children are forced
to crowd into dens wherein decency is abolished, and the most ordinary
conditions of healthful existence are impossible of attainment; in which
the pleasures within reach are reduced to bestiality and drunkenness; in
which the pains accumulate at compound interest in the shape of
starvation, disease, stunted development, and moral degradation in which
the prospect of even steady and honest industry is a life of
unsuccessful battling with hunger, rounded by a pauper's grave."

What possible hope can there be for the progeny of defectives born with
vicious, criminal, drunken or pauper tendencies, into an environment
whose whole influence from infancy to maturity tends to accentuate and
develop these inherited defects?

In this pitiable stratum of human society,