Pelvic inflammation, sometimes very slight, following a birth, or the same process set up by uterine pessaries used for displacements, may induce adhesive inflammation in the tubes, and simple and permanent sterility is the incurable result. It is a well known fact that prostitutes are usually sterile, and this arises from the prevalence of venereal disease, which produces gonorrhoeal inflammation of the Fallopian tubes, resulting in complete and permanent occlusion. This process could be best imitated, if cauterisation of the tubes were a safe and reliable procedure. An electric cautery passed along the tubes would result in a simple and speedy occlusion. But in the present state of our gynecological knowledge this appears impracticable. We have therefore at our hand, a simple, safe, and certain method of stopping procreation by the sterilization of women by tubo-ligature. This operation would entail no hardship on women. It is so easy, safe and painless, that thousands would readily submit to it to-morrow, to be relieved from the anxiety which a possible increase in their already too numerous families excites. Hundreds of women and men to-day are living unnatural lives, because of their refusal to bring children into the world with the hereditary taint they know courses in their own veins. Many men are living loose and irregular lives, amongst the easy women of society, because the indiscretion of their youth has damned them for ever with a syphilitic taint, which they could not fail to transmit to their progeny. Many virtuous men and women are living a life of abstinence from even each other's society, because their physician has taught them something of the law of heredity. Would not all these women readily submit to sterilization? As it produces no mental nor moral, nor physical change, it violates no law, and outrages no sentiment. It is an outrage upon society, and a greater upon an innocent helpless victim to bring a defective into the world; it is a moral act to prevent it by this means. And of all the methods yet suggested or devised, or practised, tubo-ligature is the simplest, most effective, and least opposed to sentiment and prejudice. It will of course be asked:--What about criminals and defective men? Let their wives be sterilized. The wife of any criminal would deem it a boon to be protected from the offspring of such a man, so would society. If he is not married, then society must take the risk, and it is not very great. The women who will be his companions will be either sterilized by disease or by tubo-ligature, because they are defectives. This protection from the progeny of defective men, though not absolute, is complete enough for all practical purposes. If all defective women and the wives of all defective men are sterilized, a greater improvement will take place in the race in the next 50 years, than has been accomplished by all the sanitation of the Victorian era. CHAPTER XII.