ADAM. Pity us not. This madness is ours. We surely envy not you for your soberness. What in the world ever was great and noble was such madness, which is not confined by circumspect anxiety. The angel’s speech that sweetly sounds down to us from higher spheres is a safer proof of our soul’s affinity and kinship to the higher regions. We despise the low common dust of this earth, boldly searching the road to the higher spheres. (_He holds Eve in close embrace._) JUDGE. Why listen any longer to this nonsense. Away to the hospital with both of them. This poetical fancy gives, nevertheless, a true picture of the conditions our descendants in future generations will have to contend with if the patriarchal doctrines of our radical sociologists should ever materialize. Their order of things must logically lead to the hardest and most bewildering tyranny mankind has ever known. The tyrannical Draconic laws will prescribe what to eat, what to drink, how long to sleep, how to mate, and what the children should be. This is not a fancy-dream. Even in our free country the drift of the law-giving power is towards such conditions. In one State, it is allowed to drink tea or coffee, but not alcohol, although ten grains caffeine is already a deadly poison, but it will take many more grains alcohol to kill. In another State it is allowed to smoke cigars but not cigarettes, although of the three modes of using tobacco, snuffing, chewing and smoking, the cigar is the worst of the last mode, because, as a rule, it combines the effects of chewing and smoking. Another state forbids marriage without a physician’s certificate, although, if the marriage candidate wishes to conceal the truth, there is no physician living, Neisser, the discoverer of the gonococcus, and Wassermann with his test, included, who could tell with absolute certainty whether a man has been infected or not. Even if the candidate himself, having been infected, wishes to know whether he has been cured, the different tests are of such an elaborate nature that very few physicians, even in the metropolis, are able to make them. Still ignorance passes laws. Besides this, no law, forbidding marriage, can prevent mating and the propagation of the unfit. Even if the king, the representative of the law, should imprison his young daughter in a brazen tower, her Jupiter will find his way to her by a shower of gold. [CK] No doubt castration is a severe penalty for any human being. But degeneracy itself is the penalty for the violation of biological laws, and the eradication of degeneracy is no more than the satisfaction of the law of talion and the restoration of the moral equilibrium. Society has a right to make use of these measures of defense to free itself of the degenerates, and nothing short than depriving them of the capability of procreation will do the work.