The elimination of the bungled and the botched, and a rigorous selection of the newly-born on qualitative lines both of mind and body, will so much relieve the situation in all over-populated districts that early marriages will become a possibility again. Where it is difficult, assistance will easily be found. For where people acquire honour in helping and promoting the best, instead of promoting and helping the worst, the rich will seek distinction in endowing desirable people instead of endowing wrecks, cripples, and incurables.

When once these reforms have been instituted, it will be possible to order life on a much happier scale, particularly for women. Since males and females are normally about equal in number, the increased prosperity will enable most men to marry and most girls to find husbands, and the misery of modern sexual abstinence will cease for millions of women. But, as happiness can be permanently secured only if a nation cuts its coat according to its cloth, careful measures will have to be taken to keep the population within certain limits. Seeing, however, that birth-control and contraceptive methods sacrifice the adults in order to achieve this end, the tendency will be, in a society whose principle it is to sacrifice the less to the greater, to proceed to some kind of controlled and legalized infanticide. This will allow standards governing infant-selection to be periodically revised, and will thus lead to an improvement of the race.

Since, however, wars and the greater danger attending male pursuits are always likely to create a preponderance of females in the community, concubinage will be tolerated for the sake of the surplus women; but, instead of its being a concubinage like that of to-day, which is hidden, secret, sterile, condemned, and therefore productive of much distress and tragedy, it will be open, tolerated, recognized, and fruitful, just as it has been in the best civilizations of the past. There are other and very deep reasons why some form of concubinage is essential. I have already dealt with them elsewhere.[[12]] Suffice it to say here, however, that no shame or discomfort will necessarily attach to the life of the concubines. They will be legally recognized; they will have their social status; and they will be protected by public opinion and by law. Nor will they be encountered in every household. As in former societies which have recognized them, they will be found only where their need is felt, and where their own taste guides them to seek protection.

[12]. See Woman: A Vindication, pp. 172-3.

Women old enough for matrimony and older, therefore, will tend to be withdrawn more and more from industrial, commercial, and public life, and the old industries of the home—bread, cheese, butter, jam, and confectionery making—will be revived, and will flourish once more. Under the guidance of science, domestic medicine will gradually be transferred from the doctor’s consulting-room to the kitchen and the still-room, and there it will remain, as it always ought to have remained, and doctors and their powers will tend to disappear. Children will be much more the apprentices of their parents than they are at present; the duties of education will tend to be delegated less and less to elders who are not blood-relations; and parents will have a higher sense of their responsibilities. Education outside the home will be regarded—at least for boys and girls under fifteen—as a pis aller, more or less as we to-day regard the various arrangements that have to be made for orphans.

Meanwhile, with improved bodies and brighter wits, women will share with men the joy of the developed faculties which, as we have pointed out, it will be the object of science to realize; and a richer and more eventful intellectual and spiritual life will be led, because humanity will be able to apply itself to the pursuit of ever loftier interests. We shall have greater arts and greater religions, deeper thoughts and a mightier grasp of reality; because, having mastered our bodies and solved once more the secret of their harmonious working, we shall no longer be in the difficult dilemma of mortals who, with neglected and badly functioning physiques, try to anticipate here on earth the pastimes and pursuits of the immortal world.

THE END