Page:Personal Beauty and Racial Betterment.djvu/74

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been validated.
68
Personal Beauty

very strongly organized guild, having the essential characteristics of the labor unions. It includes a large number of the most intelligent, scientific and morally estimable men in the nation; but its rank and file are properly ranked as skillful technicians and not above the middle-class average in intelligence and morality. The commission to such an organization of such sweeping control as is contemplated by the proponents of sterilization would be a political revolution of a most portentous nature. The assigning of complex problems involving medical and other factors, to the control of the medical profession as such, does, and under conditions such as the present, will, not only endanger the solution of these very problems, but also introduce dangerous political situations. A similar statement could equally well be made of any other organized trade or profession. If the time ever comes when the control of sterilization could be committed to a nonprofessional body, employing the services of men of whatever professional skill may be needed, the possibility of systematic legal sterilization may become a live one. At present, it must be emphatically rejected.

Progress is possible towards the elimination of the unfit through the means which have most contributed to all progress, namely, education and publicity. The elimination under consideration is