There is no doubt however that, apart from ideals, preventatives are a means of averting more serious evils. This is not the place to enter into a detailed consideration of eugenics. We can only face the blatant fact that thousands of degenerate parents continue each year to breed degenerate children. The moral aspect with which alone I am dealing, is that this is a crime against the community; however irresponsible or ignorant the perpetrators, they are helping to burden the State with an altogether undesirable progeny. Now, whether they are allowed to marry or not, there is not the least likelihood that they will desist from sexual intercourse. Therefore, it seems to me an obviously lesser evil to remove all excuse for procreation by placing within reach the artificial means of prevention. In this, just as in the divorce problem, we have to determine whether it is better to insist on an ideal, which we know the majority will not keep, or to legislate down to the majority. There is no doubt in my own mind that to legislate on an ideal is not only impracticable but dangerous. I may believe, for instance, that it would be a higher ideal to live on vegetables and fruit rather than to slaughter animals and drink their blood. But even so, I should vehemently oppose a law which attempted to impose vegetarianism. I believe, too, that every moral influence should be brought to bear against marriages where the physical or mental degeneracy[12] of the parents renders the use of preventatives desirable. I wish to emphasize that the ideal towards which we should set our faces is that of fewer but healthier marriages. Both Church and State should, I feel, take pains to assure themselves that these undesirable elements are absent in all unions which they are respectively called upon to solemnize. And I emphasize this because I believe that we are suffering far too much from the popular fallacy and the smug Puritanic doctrine that the cure for all sexual proclivities is for men and women to marry, and that once they marry all things are sexually permissible. It is not only irritating, but it is a fallacy, for men who are comfortably married to declare that there is "really no sex-problem." There is probably as much immorality within the married state as outside it; and far from it being the duty of every man to marry, there are many men whose duty it is not to do so.