the number of marital failures. The provisions barring tuberculosis
and feeble-mindedness serve hygienic or eugenic purposes, but no one
has shown that marriages of such persons are less successful as mar-
riages than are others.

In a sample of 134 forced marriages, 57 per cent were unstable,
but these are marriages which even the strictest laws facilitate by
giving power to judges to make exceptions in their favor, in order
to avoid illegitimaey. ⁴¹

In general, there is hope for little improvement of American mar-
riage through the kinds of legislative measures with which states have
been experimenting. What we need are measures making sound mar-
riages easier to arrive at, not measures forbidding unions which are
known or guessed to be dangerous. To say that legislation is impotent
to affect the realities of marriage is perhaps too sweeping a statement.
It is true of legislation which merely restricts the rights of indi-
viduals who want to marry. But legislation creating new agencies
and imposing new responsibilities upon agencies and officials might
be positively helpful. Thus, if expert investigation and guidance for
marriage candidates, and pre-marriage courses of instruction for
adolescents, were made universal and compulsory, something might
be gained through legal compulsion.

-354-