SCIENCE AND LOVE.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLIX, Issue 3871, 15 November 1928, Page 4

SCIENCE AND LOVE.

EUGENIST ON MARRIAGE. HOW 'TO ATTAIN SUCCESS. London, Nov. 1. “Shall the cold voice of science .strive to dictate to the age-old passion of love?” asked Dr. Bernard Hollander addressing the Ethnological Society, of which he is president and founder. Dr. Hollander answered his question in the affirmative, although he admitted that successful marriages could not be guai’anteed, even if experts selected the partners. • Nevertheless, he said, we knew enough to rob this most popular of all lotteries of the worst characteristics of a lottery. Marriage was not a matter of a lovers’ evening out, but of intimate association. Only compatible persons could face it without disaster, yet man still allowed his almost unalloyed primeval instinct to guide him in the matter, forgetting his common sense and judgment, and the usual of sanity that he displayed in other problems. Man praised domesticity and economy, yet he married a maiden whose idleness kept her fingers soft and white. Even the most perfect man and the best wom'an, he said, had defects, and they remained lifelong lovers only by cultivating a happy blindness. Urging the reform of the marriage laws lie said that although there was much opposition to easier divorce, none opposed the system of permitting anyone to marry who was capable merely of obtaining a license. Until marriage was propevly regulated it was altruistic to make a divorce easier.

Dr. Hollander advocated teaching defectives birth control ancl declared that “marriage between chronic lunatics, imbeciles, epileptics and habitual drunkards is so contaminating the race that some effort is necessary to limit the curse.” \