According to Dr. Havelock Ellis Swiss alienists are unanimously in favour of the sterilisation of the mentally degenerate classes and hold that this matter should be regulated by law. Switzerland is the first European State which has adopted sterilisation as an alternative to the "indeterminate sentence" in the case of confirmed abnormalities and prisoners convicted of serious sexual offences against children. At Wil in Berne, two women and two men were incarcerated in the cantonal asylum. All were defectives but not strictly speaking insane. Children had already been born in each case. To prevent further procreative degeneracy sterilisation was suggested and agreed to by the four persons who welcomed the operation as an alternative to detention. The result has justified the experiment. According to the _Eugenics Review_ there has actually been a marked change in the characters of the individuals and there is certainly no danger of their weaknesses being reproduced at the expense of the coming generation. THE END * * * * * Transcriber Notes There is a quotation which begins on page 133 but there is no endquote in the text. It is assumed that the quotation ends on page 136 after the date August 21, 1909. End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Race Improvement : or, Eugenics : a Little Book on a Great Subject, by La Reine Helen Baker