Such a practice as vasectomy then represents nicely the eugenic aim of allowing the individual, who is himself never to be blamed for his hereditary constitution, the greatest possible personal freedom and liberty, of allowing full play of sympathy for the individual, and at the same time of exercising the greatest sympathy to society in prohibiting the hereditary criminal from procreating a long line of descendants endowed as badly as he himself was through no fault of his own, but through the gross neglect of society. Another quotation from Pearson: "To-day we feed our criminals up, and we feed up our insane, we let both out of the prison or asylum 'reformed' or 'cured,' as the case may be, only after a few months to return to State supervision, leaving behind them the germs of a new generation of deteriorants. The average number of crimes due to the convicts in his Majesty's prisons to-day is ten apiece. We cannot reform the criminal, nor cure the insane from the standpoint of heredity; the taint varies not with their mental or moral conduct. These are the products of the somatic cells; the disease lies deeper in their germinal constitution. Education for the criminal, fresh air for the tuberculous, rest and food for the neurotic--these are excellent, they may bring control, sound lungs, and sanity to the individual; but they will not save the offspring from the need of like treatment, nor from the danger of collapse when the time of strain comes. They cannot make a nation sound in mind and body, they merely screen degeneracy behind a throng of arrested degenerates. Our highly developed human sympathy will no longer allow us to watch the State purify itself by the aid of crude natural selection. We see pain and suffering only to relieve it, without inquiry as to the moral character of the sufferer or as to his national or racial value. And this is right--no man is responsible for his own being; and nature and nurture, over which he had no control, have made him the being he is, good or evil. But here science steps in, crying: Let the reprieve be accepted, but next remind the social conscience of its duty to the race ... let there be no heritage if you would build up and preserve a virile and efficient people. Here, I hold, we reach the kernel of the truth which the science of eugenics has at present revealed."