We have said that society can not well put many restrictions on marriage
at the present time. We urge by every means at our command that marriage
be looked upon more seriously, that it be undertaken with more
deliberation and consideration. We consider it a crime for people to
marry, without knowing each other's family histories. But in spite of
all this, ill-assorted, dysgenic marriages will still be made. When such
a marriage is later demonstrated to have been a mistake, not only from
an individual, but also from a eugenic point of view, society should be
ready to dissolve the union. Divorce is far preferable to mere
separation, since the unoffending party should not be denied the
privilege of remarriage, as the race in most cases needs his or her
contribution to the next generation. In extreme cases, it would be
proper for society to take adequate steps to insure that the dysgenic
party could neither remarry nor have offspring outside marriage. The
time-honored justifiable grounds for divorce,--adultery, sterility,
impotence, venereal infection, desertion, non-support, habitual
cruelty,--appear to us to be no more worthy of legal recognition
than the more purely dysgenic grounds of chronic inebriety,
feeble-mindedness, epilepsy, insanity or any other serious inheritable
physical, mental or moral defect.
This view of the eugenic value of divorce should not be construed as a
plea for the admission of mutual consent as a ground for divorce. It is
desirable, however, to realize that mismating is the real evil. Divorce
in such cases is merely a cure for an improper condition. Social
condemnation should stigmatize the wrong of mismating, not the undoing
of such a wrong.
Restrictions on age at marriage are almost universal. The object is to
prevent too early marriages. The objections which are commonly urged
against early marriage (in so far as they bear upon eugenics) are the
following:
1. That it results in inferior offspring. This objection is not well
supported except possibly in the most extreme cases. Physically, there
is evidence that the younger parents on the whole bear the sounder
children.
2. That a postponement of marriage provides the opportunity for better
sexual selection. This is a valid ground for discouraging the marriage
of minors.
3. The better educated classes are obliged to marry late, because a man
usually can not marry until he has finished his education and
established himself in business. A fair amount of restriction as to age
at marriage will therefore not affect these classes, but may affect the
uneducated classes. In so far as lack of education is correlated with
eugenic inferiority, some restriction of this sort is desirable, because
it will keep inferiors from reproducing too rapidly, as compared with
the superior elements of the population.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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