Your knowledge of the laws of heredity has enabled you to improve upon the forms and qualities of all those creatures which have been taken from their native wilds to serve your uses; and yet, with a fatal inconsistency, you consign your own bodies to a carelessness of procreation which totally ignores all well known methods of improvement. The spectacle is common among you, of the skilled breeder straining his knowledge to remedy defects of form in the lower animals in his possession, while he and his progeny exhibit, in their own bodies, without concern or attention, the very same physical infirmities which he had so successfully banished in his brutes by parental selection. The neglect of your opportunities in this direction is more surprising, when it is considered how greatly you are suffering from it; for although the achievement of a more general perfection of form and strength is invaluable to you, as laying the foundation of a larger average of mental power and activity, yet this is not more important to your society than the easy and certain eradication by judicious matings of the most persistent and fatal of your diseases. It is appalling to estimate the sum of human misery perpetually transmitted congenitally in diseased tissues and functional defects. This evil, which has prevailed among you until your bodily ills are almost innumerable, you have been taught to consider as an arrangement of the divine will, and you rest yourselves helplessly in the belief that its endurance without remedy is the penalty of life; when, in fact, it is perpetuated chiefly by that over-powering individual selfishness which makes no account of the general good while gratifying sentiments of pleasure, or greed. I have already drawn your observation to that infallible test which marks the progress of social development--the average willingness of attention and sacrifice of individual interests to the common welfare. From our achievements in that direction already described, you may easily imagine that we have not neglected the opportunity to improve and benefit society by the observance of some of nature’s simplest and most easily applied laws. We are not embarrassed as you would be by protests of an infringement of personal liberty, because we have arrived beyond that stage where law and its enforcement are required. Official recommendation supported by a united public opinion, without any penalty for non-compliance except the general condemnation, is our only resort in directing the conduct of our people. Under such a system, any violation of individual rights is impossible. It is enough in our society to determine that a measure is for the common good, to secure its adoption without dissent.