Of course, our modern eugenists will disclaim any wish to adopt such measures as are here hinted at, which are in every way dangerous and detestable. But I protest strenuously against any direct interference with the freedom of marriage, which, as I shall show, is not only totally unnecessary, but would be a much greater source of danger to morals and to the well-being of humanity than the mere temporary evils it seeks to cure. I trust that all my readers will oppose any legislation on this subject by a chance body of elected persons who are totally unfitted to deal with far less complex problems than this one, and as to which they are sure to bungle disastrously.
It is in the highest degree presumptuous and irrational to attempt to deal by compulsory enactments with the most vital
and most sacred of all human relations, regardless of the fact that our present phase of social development is not only extremely imperfect, but, as I have already shown, vicious and rotten at the core. How can it be possible to determine by legislation those relations of the sexes which shall be best alike for individuals and for the race, in a society in which a large proportion of our women are forced to work long hours daily for the barest subsistence, with an almost total absence of the rational pleasures of life, for the want of which thousands are driven into wholly uncongenial marriages in order to secure some amount of personal independence or physical well-being?
Let anyone consider, on the one hand, the lives of the wealthy as portrayed in the society newspapers of the day, with their endless round of pleasure and luxury, their almost inconceivable wastefulness and extravagance, indicated by the cost of female dress and the fact of a thousand pounds or more being expended on the flowers for a single entertainment. On the other hand, let him contemplate the awful lives of millions of workers, so miserably paid and with such uncertainty of
work that many thousands of the women and young girls are driven on the streets as the only means of breaking the monotony of their unceasing labour and obtaining some taste of the enjoyments of life at whatever cost; and then ask himself if the Legislature which cannot remedy this state of things should venture to meddle with the great problems of marriage and the sanctities of family life. Is it not a hideous mockery that the successive Governments which for forty years have seen the people they profess to govern so driven to despair by the vile conditions of their existence that in an ever larger and larger proportion they seek death by suicide as their only means of escape—that Governments which have done nothing to put an end to this continuous horror of starvation and suicide, should be thought capable of remedying some of its more terrible results, while leaving its causes absolutely untouched?
It is my firm conviction, for reasons I shall give farther on, that, when we have cleansed the Augean stable of our present social organisation, and have made such arrangements that all shall contribute their share either of physical or
mental labour, and that every one shall obtain the full and equal reward for their work, the future progress of the race will be rendered certain by the fuller development of its higher nature acted on by a special form of selection which will then come into play.
When men and women are, for the first time in the course of civilisation, alike free to follow their best impulses; when idleness and vicious or hurtful luxury on the one hand, oppressive labour and the dread of starvation on the other, are alike unknown; when all receive the best and broadest education that the state of civilisation and knowledge will admit; when the standard of public opinion is set by the wisest and the best among us, and that standard is systematically inculcated on the young; then we shall find that a system of truly natural selection will come spontaneously into action which will steadily tend to eliminate the lower, the less developed, or in any way defective types of men, and will thus continuously raise the physical, moral, and intellectual standard of the race. The exact mode in which this selection will operate will now be briefly explained.