"should not marry" for "should not procreate," and he gives the
following as a list of "bars to marriage": pulmonary consumption,
organic heart disease, epilepsy, insanity, diabetes, chronic Bright's
disease, and rheumatic fever. I wish I had sufficient medical knowledge
to analyze that proposal. He mentions inherited defective eyesight and
hearing also, and the "neurotic" quality, with which I have dealt in my
text. He adds two other suggestions that appeal to me very strongly. He
proposes to bar all "cases of non-accidental disease in which life is
saved by the surgeon's knife," and he instances particularly,
strangulated hernia and ovarian cyst. And he also calls attention to
apoplectic breakdown and premature senility. All these are suggestions
of great value for individual conduct, but none of them have that
quality of certainty that justifies collective action.] Until great
advances are made in anthropology--and at present there are neither men
nor endowments to justify the hope that any such advances will soon be
made--that is as much as can be done hopefully for many years in the
selective breeding of individuals by the community as a whole.
[Footnote: If at any time certainties should replace speculations in
the field of inheritance, then I fancy the common-sense of humanity
will be found to be in favour of the immediate application of that
knowledge to life.] At present almost every citizen in the civilized
State respects the rules of the laws of consanguinity, so far as they
affect brothers and sisters, with an absolute respect--an enormous
triumph of training over instinct, as Dr. Beattie Crozier has pointed
out--and if in the future it should be found possible to divide up
humanity into groups, some of which could pair with one another only to
the disadvantage of the offspring, and some of which had better have no
offspring, I believe there would be remarkably little difficulty in
enforcing a system of taboos in accordance with such knowledge. Only it
would have to be absolutely certain knowledge proved and proved again