Meanwhile let us pull the beam out of our own eye before we try to cure other nations’ blindnesses. We have been mad enough in our disregard of honest warnings--we are pretty mad still. We have vied with the old-time “cities of the plain” in reckless orgies of vice and intemperance; but the great War has pulled us back on the road to ruin, and it seems we may be given another chance. Let us begin then by a good try for Sanity. In the first place let us make such laws for those who marry as shall compel them to submit to a searching health examination, so that union may be forbidden to the unfit. A diseased man or woman should no more be allowed to mate than any other diseased animal. The animals arrange this themselves, in a much more common-sense way than humans. They only rear healthy progeny. It is for us to do the same, and to see to it that the _mentality_ of children is safeguarded and set on a sound basis. This cannot be done by forcing education at too early an age, or perplexing young brains with difficulties of learning almost too much for their elders to grasp. The brain in childhood records impressions as a disc prepared for the phonograph records sound, and the circles marked on it in early days are seldom or never effaced. Therefore care must and should be taken that such impressions are of the best. Corporal punishment should never be resorted to as a means of training. A blow to a sensitive child frequently means a lasting contempt for the parent or teacher who inflicts it, and excites a rebellious spirit towards life in general. A vicious impulse or an act of crass stupidity does not necessarily mean inherent wickedness or obstinacy--it only shows that there is some “clog on the wheel” in the brain, which a day’s fasting and cooling medicine may remove. At any rate, such a method of cure is better worth trying than the rod and angry threats which have no real effect on “insane impulse.” Sometimes--indeed often--a physical defect in the brain is the cause of evil thoughts and evil deeds, as in the recent case of a man whose warped mind always tended towards murder and mutilation, and who was found to have a thickening of a portion of the cranium which pressed heavily upon certain of the cells within. The operation of “trepanning” was performed by a surgeon who was scientifically interested in the case, with the result that the previously insane criminal is now a person of perfectly normal type and harmless disposition. Who that knows the history of the German Kaiser’s ancestry can doubt that his brain has been more or less diseased from his birth, and that with his approach towards the “grand climacteric” the incipient lunacy bred within him has become more active and less capable of control! No _sane_ man would have acted as he has done, for, prior to the war, the trade of Europe was practically in Germany’s hands, and in the interests of his country a sane man would have