ocially and in
every way creditable in its history. In contrast to the Jukes family,
the history of the Edwards family has been written. Its members
married well, were well-bred, and gave much attention to education.
Out of fourteen hundred individuals more than one hundred and twenty
were Yale graduates, and one hundred and sixty-five more completed
their education at other colleges; thirteen were college presidents,
and more than a hundred college professors; they were founders of
schools of all grades; more than one hundred were clergymen,
missionaries, and theological professors; seventy-five were officers
in the army and navy; more than eighty have been elected to public
office; more than one hundred were lawyers, thirty judges, sixty
physicians, and sixty prominent in literature. Not a few of them have
been active in philanthropy, and many have been successful in
business. It is impossible to escape from the conviction that whatever
may be the physical and social environment, heredity perpetuates
physical and mental worth or defectiveness and tends to produce social
good or evil, and that the right to a worthy parentage belongs with
the other rights to which individuals lay claim. It is as important as
the right to a living, to an education, to a good home, or to the
franchise. Without it society is incalculably poorer and the ultimate
effects of failure are startling to consider.

51. =Marriage and Education.=--Some enthusiasts have demanded that to
make sure of a good bodily inheritance, individuals be permitted to
produce children without the trammels of marriage if they are well
fitted for parenthood, but such persons seem ignorant or forgetful
that free love has never proved otherwise than disastrous in the
history of the race, and that physical perfection is not the sole good
with which the child needs to be endowed, but that it must be
supplemented with moral, mental, and spiritual endowment, and with the
permanent affection and care of both parents in the home. Galton
himself acknowledges marriage as a prerequisite in eugenics by saying:
"Marriage, as now sanctified by religion and safeguarded by law in the
more highly civilized nations, may not be ideally perfect, nor may it
be universally accepted in future times, but it is the best that has
hitherto been devised for the parties primarily concerned, for their
children, for home life, and for society."

The greatest hope of eugenics lies in social educa