In the recognition of its duties as Step-mother, the State will in self-defence protect its maternal arms from the influx of undesirables. The universal endowment of Motherhood may be a socialist dream rather than a Eugenic practical proposal, but even the Eugenists' demand for the State to act as step-mother involves an expenditure which will probably amount to the cost of a national war. It is part of our case that the money spent is an investment certain to pay big dividends in the shape of increased national efficiency. It is in any case inevitable. Public sentiment cannot tolerate this idiotic waste of the noblest of all raw material. It will be not the least of its advantages that the State will at length be directly interested, financially and therefore most deeply, in stopping the supply of the unfit--a bad investment at the best, requiring a maximum of trouble, and a continuous source of damage. The sterilisation of the unfit has become a regular experience in a number of States. It has outlived its detractors wherever it has been practised. It remains necessary now only to convert its objectors in other States, and to gradually extend its beneficent operation and the sphere of its activities. Naturally it begins with the habitual criminal. Of absolute success in the States where it has been tried it will be far more effective when it is applied in the more populous centres and when it becomes impossible for the permanently criminal to escape its attention. Sterilisation as now recommended and performed by our highest scientific authorities is in no sense cruel, it is not even painful. It must not be confounded with the mutilations of earlier centuries, it leaves the person operated on possessed of every faculty for use and capacity for happiness, it only takes away the power of reproduction. The first extension of the plan has been to the certified hopeless idiot. These two classes and the inmates of homes for incurable drunkards represent a very easy definition of those who should be treated to this operation. In the case of the criminal it will enable very great mercy to be extended. Sterilisation will not be a mere added infliction of a degrading punishment, it will substitute an awful warning for a long imprisonment. Only those criminals will be sterilised whose chronic criminality is proved after repeated convictions and form a study of what facts are ascertainable as to their hereditary history. They will leave the jail knowing that society regards them as unworthy to be parents, or if they themselves are also too dangerous to be let at large their close confinement will be rarely necessary.