incest, should have the ban against it removed. However unwise the removal, in England, of the prohibition against marrying a deceased wife’s sister, may have been—because she is so frequently a husband’s housemate—there is little reason, in America, in discouraging the marriage of first cousins. In the cases of aunt and nephew, and of uncle and niece, the incest-relation is possibly a distinct consideration.
In passing to the consideration of improvement by positive selection of the best stocks we are harking back nearly twenty-three hundred years, from preventive medicine to eugenics. Plato, in the Republic, outlines the first recorded plan for breeding a nation through careful selection of the most beautiful youths for parents, and punishment of unauthorized parents. Plato’s scheme probably would not work, on account of its extreme paternalism, and its depersonalization as regards the indispensable feature of sexual union, namely, the offspring. It tends to reduce the individual’s interest in cohabitation to the purely sexual level. The universal failure of institutional care of babies is a sound warning against allowing the sexual instinct to gain the ascendancy over the parental.
Plato was not fundamentally wrong in his the-
