they would not perform a marriage ceremony for
a man and woman, unless these could prove themselves to be physically
untainted. Later the States acted upon this suggestion and forbade
certain persons entering into the marriage relation.

Some day we shall pass from what I venture to call negative and physical
malgenics to positive and spiritual eugenics. The one is necessary to
insure the birth of healthy and normal human animals: the latter will be
adopted in the hope of making possible the birth and life of normal
souls. The normal, wholesome, untainted body must go before, but it can
only go before. For it is not an end to itself but means to an end, and
that end the furtherance of the well-being of the immortal soul.

But in reality the eugenic responsibility of parents is a negative one
and, being met, the second and major responsibility remains to be met.
The former involves a decision; the latter the conduct of a lifetime.
Once upon a time and not so long ago, it might have been said that
parents are not responsible for the heredity of which they are the
transmitters. Today, with certain limitations, we charge parents with
the responsibility of heredity which they bestow or inflict as well as
with the further and continuous responsibility of environment.
Whatever may be held with respect to the duty of parents as
"hereditarians," there can be no doubt that it is the obligation of
parents consciously to determine, as far as may be, the content of the
home environment. I would go so far, and quite unjestingly, as to
maintain that the least some parents can do for their children is
through environmental influence to neutralize the heredity which they
have inflicted upon them. Unhappily, it may be, we cannot choose our
grandparents, but we can in some measure choose our grandchildren.

But environmental influence is more than a mouth-filling phrase.
Parenthood and the begetting of children are not quite interchangeable
terms. The continuity of parental functioning is suggested by the Hebrew
origin of the term, child, which is etymologically connected with
builder, parents being not the architects of a moment but the builders
of a lifetime. This means that we are consciously to determine the
apparently indeterminable atmosphere of our children's life and home.
That this involves care of the bodily side of child-being goes without
saying, but, as we have in another chapter pointed out, this stress
seems to be needle