We believe that every child has the right to a good constitution. We regard as a misfortune every obstacle which renders healthy parents unwilling or unable to add their contribution to the welfare of the State by increasing the number of happy children growing into efficient men and women. Why wonder at the anti-social elements to be found in every city? What claim has the State on its children when the State has neglected the duty of a parent. To be a citizen is too great an honor to bestow on the hopeless children of degenerate parents. These children's heritage is sorrow, the nation's remorse is unavailing, Nemesis overtakes the neglectful State. CHAPTER IV MARRIAGE Forty years ago it would have been possible to say that all encouragements to marriage necessarily meant increasing the birth rate. Economic and other causes contribute to the decline of both marriage and birth-rates. In this chapter I am not concerned with the discouragements to race increase. I remark elsewhere on the absence of national inspiration to race improvement. I am at present concerned only with marriage as the medium for procreation, no other aspect of marriage is the concern of Eugenists. To encourage those marriages which will tend to produce a noble race might well befit the consideration of a great people. The views uttered here, while I think they would be largely shared by Eugenists as a whole, are more or less personal to the writer who alone is responsible for their statement. The legitimatisation in some way of the illegitimate seems to me a necessary, urgent duty of the State. The stigma, implying moral blame and sometimes meeting with actual ill-treatment on that account, is as unjust and undeserved as anything that can be imagined. To overcome the difficulty by making the marriage of the parents the sole method of removing the reproach seems to me as unjust as it is illogical. There is no sense in making a child suffer unnecessarily. The absence of a home with a pair of loving parents is often the natural sufferings inflicted on a "natural" child. We ought not to encourage any discrimination between the adopted and the unadopted illegitimate child. Public opinion must learn to regard all children from the moment of their birth as having an inherent right to the best possible welcome and the treatment best fitted to make them desirable citizens. Eugenics studies the parents and on occasion challenges their right to produce seed, and one of its basic reasons for doing so must inevitably be that there can be no post-natal challenge to the child's right to exist.