These limitations are more strikingly shown in the types of so-called
"eugenic" legislation passed or proposed by certain enthusiasts.
Regulation, compulsion and prohibitions affected and enacted by
political bodies are the surest methods of driving the whole problem
under-ground. As Havelock Ellis has pointed out, the absurdity and even
hopelessness of effecting Eugenic improvement by placing on the statute
books prohibitions of legal matrimony to certain classes of people,
reveal the weakness of those Eugenists who minimize or undervalue the
importance of environment as a determining factor. They affirm that
heredity is everything and environment nothing, yet forget that it is
precisely those who are most universally subject to bad environment who
procreate most copiously, most recklessly and most disastrously. Such
marriage laws are based for the most part on the infantile assumption
that procreation is absolutely dependent upon the marriage ceremony,
an assumption usually coupled with the complementary one that the only
purpose in marriage is procreation. Yet it is a fact so obvious that it
is hardly worth stating that the most fertile classes who indulge in the
most dysgenic type of procreating--the feeble-minded--are almost totally
unaffected by marriage laws and marriage-ceremonies.

As for the sterilization of habitual criminals, not merely must we
know more of heredity and genetics in general, but also acquire
more certainty of the justice of our laws and the honesty of their
administration before we can make rulings of fitness or unfitness merely
upon the basis of a respect for law. On this point the eminent William
Bateson writes:(6) "Criminals are often feeble-minded, but as regards
those that are not, the fact that a man is for the purposes of Society
classified as a criminal, tells me little as to his value, still less
as to the possible value of his offspring. It is a fault inherent in
criminal jurisprudence, based on non-biological data, that the law must